THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF CREATIVE WRITING
All People
BRYCE THOMPSON SPRING 2021
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in Creative Writing with honors in Creative Writing
Reviewed and approved* by the following:
Thomas Noyes Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing Thesis Supervisor/ Honors Adviser
Aimee Pogson Professor of Creative Writing Faculty Reader
Craig Warren Professor of English Faculty Reader *Electronic approvals on file i
ABSTRACT This thesis is an exploration of the cumulative time spent in Behrend’s creative writing program by creating a story that actively engages in the texts and philosophies introduced within the BFA and my own experiences with art. The thesis also includes a reflective introduction that more directly discusses the writing process and how that theme developed during the writing of the story.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Chapter 1 Tears in the Rain ...... 24 Chapter 2 She Swallowed Burning Coals ...... 40 Chapter 3 A Real Hero ...... 59 Chapter 4 No Love ...... 79 Chapter 5 Hacker ...... 93 Chapter 6 Overdrive ...... 105 Chapter 7 I’ve Seen Footage ...... 117 Chapter 8 1:42 ...... 125 Chapter 9 Miles Wakes up on a Farm ...... 148 Chapter 10 Miles Helps on the Farm and Learns about History ...... 154 Chapter 11 Miles Helps on the Farm and Learns about History ...... 165 Chapter 12 Comfortably Numb ...... 173 Chapter 13 Miles Throws his Writing Away ...... 186 Chapter 14 Miles Creates a Philosophy ...... 187 Chapter 15 Miles Writes his First Stories ...... 190 Chapter 16 Miles Writes his First Poem ...... 214 Chapter 17 Goodbye to a World ...... 218 Chapter 18 Burying the Dead ...... 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 226
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am nothing if not a sponge; the sum of my parts I’ve absorbed from elsewhere. To every teacher I’ve ever had, thank you. 1
INTRODUCTION
Truth be told, this is an odd thing for me to write about. I already had the hubris to include a quote from Ezra Pound at the start of my novel, and now I have to present an introduction to myself rather simply letting the work speak for itself like a conceited pseudo- artist. Still, I understand that this novel undertaking was also influenced by research, an aspect to art that I’ll address later in the introduction, so I hope to speak to the creative process that I went through in writing my first novel length story. Now, I’m not sure if this breaks any Schreyer’s code, but I would insist that the story be read before the introduction to experience its plot the way it was intended to be read. Frankly, it’s an experience I never fully had, or could have, since
I am the writer, so I hope that you could enjoy that luxury in my place.
It was strange to go think about all the sources that influenced me during the writing process and then sort them into a bibliography even though the story directly pays respects to some of its influences. What felt strange to me, though, was thinking of this relationship between myself, my writing, and other art surrounding it as a sequential set of events from past, to present, to future. That’s thinking about it all too linearly. As I write, my story and the stories surrounding it go through my head freely, and they all seem to exist simultaneously. I’ve come to coin this term for myself as Dr. Manhattan Syndrome. For those who are unfamiliar or need a refresher, Dr. Manhattan is a character from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, where the character is essentially omnipotent to the point of experiencing all of time simultaneously, completely void of feeling time pass second by second. Instead, it’s all set out in front of him like reels of film or panels on a comic book.
This is the best way I could describe how I think of my stories. It’s not as if I know every word that will be written, or I’m never surprised by new developments in the plot, or that I never 2 change my mind on something I’d previously decided on. I wouldn’t enjoy writing if that were the case. No, for me, most if not all the primary story beats, imagery, characters, etc. are set out before me in my head before I type a letter, and it’s my job to string them all together in a way that is present to read from start to finish. I understand the big ideas, but it’s the necessary little details that allude me more easily. Like a collection of stories waiting on a shelf in thousands of pages, each of those worlds are playing out each part concurrently, it’s only the reader that has to shift through them page by page that determines their chronology. Though I may not be consciously thinking about them at all times, my mind is aware of my story and the stories that influenced it whenever I go through my writing and wonder where everything fits into place. Hence, why I named it Dr. Manhattan Syndrome. It, like many other philosophies in writing, comes with its own set of benefits and hindrances. Like the titular doctor, I always have a big picture in mind, but that can often obscure the little details in front of me, the necessary ones, like how Manhattan casually forgets that people need oxygen to breath when he takes them to see his castle on Mars. This, naturally, caused some problems for me as I went along.
A good example of my disillusionment during this way of thinking was during the scene where Miles gives the girl he just kidnapped her new name, Leda. As it is in the story, Miles sees an incomplete and damaged passage from a collection of Greek myths that includes a picture of an innocent girl of the same name. Given his fascination with the antiquated, he decides to give this name to the girl he found since she can’t provide her own from her vocal injury. The story then leaves Miles’ perspective to briefly explain that the full picture in the book would have shown Leda in her most infamous myth, being raped by the hands of Zeus while he’s disguised as a swan. This really played up the generational irony of messages being lost through time and being repurposed for a new age while also offering some metaphorical foreshadowing as to what 3
Leda’s past was. Admittedly, in the first draft, I screwed this up. Originally, Miles would have seen the first picture of a happy looking Leda, give this name to the girl he found, and then would go on to read the full passage that shows the rape painting and tells the rest of the myth. The implications for Miles understanding the full context of the painting are far different and far more insidious for what it implies about his character than it is if he only saw a fragment.
The problem was that I knew that Miles, while having plenty of issues, is the farthest thing from a sex pervert, so the implications completely flew under my radar. I knew by the end of the story that the reader would have no evidence of Miles’ actions to think of him in such a light, but my advisor didn’t know that at that point and helped me fix my egregious error. Thanks for that,
Tom.
This acknowledgment of the fluid borders in a world of creativity is what led to the story to become more of a kunstlerroman, a story about the coming of age for a writer, than I had anticipated when I started, mainly because I hadn’t thought it would be one at all when I started. I had always intended to deal with the juxtaposition of a world filled with endless data about the collective masses, yet still more isolated through the breakdown in communication á la
T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland. Even though I had only read the poem after my first couple of attempts at the story in my own time, it attached itself to my writing in a manner that seemed like it was always there. As I continued, the other themes of the inescapable cycles of human nature and civilization and the progression beyond a problematic past for a mirrored present lent themselves to allusion, and, after that, Miles’ engagement with those allusions.
I don’t like thinking of creative writing as democratic though, a fair collaboration as some people put it even with past authors. It’s a dictatorship, or at best an oligarchy, where I put together what is the best for the story itself, not for me or anyone else. The story exists separately 4 from people as its own creation. Frankly, if anything, I see the stories I make like how I imagine
I’d look at my own children. I care deeply for them, and I’m willing to put in as much time as I need to get them to where they can stand by themselves, not reliant on my intervention anymore.
Like The Wasteland, though, additions felt so natural that they might as well have been there when I first thought of Miles and Umor’s characters on a treadmill in high school. Just as
Henry Miller says that writers “leech” off the “blood of life,” a sort of universal catalogue of ideas to draw upon, so too did I draw from the themes and techniques presented to me by other writers (qtd. in Barron 27). In a way, I suppose that’s the same as Miller’s “blood of life,” but I’d tone down the fluff to call it basic human instinct. There is no concrete way to describe it as it is so fundamental to us to innately understand things when they’re presented a certain way, the best
I can compare it to are the instincts a trained athlete feels when carrying out any complex movement. They don’t think about as they do it. It’s just a natural motion they feel from many years of exposure to other people in their profession. That is how it feels to engage with the ideas from other texts, and, for me, what is life but other the other texts I surround myself with?
While Miller’s fancy blood talk is a little too airy fairy for my tastes, I do enjoy what
Italian novelist Italo Calvino says about images as his comments relate back to the story’s first inception on that treadmill. As he puts it, “When devising a story, therefore, the first thing that comes to my mind is an image that for some reason strikes me as charged with meaning, even if I cannot formulate this meaning in discursive or conceptual terms” (qtd. in Barron 102). Upon inception, the images of Miles and Umor were incredibly important, even before I knew their names. One, Umor, was the result of a little thought experiment I had where I tried to place a concrete image to what people were calling, and I think they still do, gender fluidity. There was no larger goal, no attempt to answer a problem. It was just cold, simple, fascination, and I 5 thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat if there was a person where their sex was truly unknown even on an anatomical level? Beyond genitals, what if their entire identity was in a flux, constantly?” It naturally evolved from there. For Miles, he is quite literally a man caught between the two worlds pulling at his body, and to further that, he bleeds blue blood on the left side, and red blood on the right, wink, wink. I played up this aspect to the point of nausea in my first draft of the story in freshman year, but it was a detail I decided to keep. It always felt like a seamless metaphor. Still, these were the images that motivated me to keep going with this train of thought as I went along, pushing me to do more. Eventually, I came to the image of the bird carrying Miles’ eye away from a city that looks so far away but is still so close, and that, above anything else, kept me working on the novel even when I hit a slump.
As I wrote, unintentionally like the other revelations I had, I saw more of myself in
Miles. It wasn’t always a pleasant comparison to think about. It was similar to how filmmaker
Federico Fellini recounts making all of his movies based off periods of his life (qtd. in Barron
34). This was a phenomenon I’ve wrestled with throughout my time at university. At first, I was sure that all writing was taking the personal and transforming it into understandable chunks for other people to resonate with. Most of the stories where I intentionally did this I was never proud of. Quite frankly, I was ashamed of their lack of quality. So, I tried the opposite by avoiding anything to remotely do with myself. They came off as awkward to me, unintentionally unnatural. I think most of my troubles went away when I abandoned caring about this matter entirely. I only wrote ideas I liked, paying no attention to how they did or didn’t relate to me. As
I found in my final few semesters at college, the personal finds its way into what you write regardless. I took a sympathy to Miles’ loneliness persisting regardless of his distance to other people, his dissatisfaction with dichotomies imposed by outside forces that are so easily eaten up 6 by masses, and those same masses that Miles simultaneously fears, hates, and sympathizes with.
Where I draw the line, however, in the personal, is when my own beliefs refuse to mesh with the beliefs of the story like a stubborn man with two opposing puzzle pieces. The best example of this was Seth. To get this out of the way, I am pro-transgenderism. The ways cognizant adults want to live their lives without inflicting harm on others is none of my business nor anyone else's. Where my own beliefs do deviate from the story, however, is in providing hormones to children. While I would hesitate from myself or, worse yet, the government imposing themselves on families and explaining to them the best way to raise their own children, I worry about the severity of the choice for a child to make. They are the same child we wouldn’t trust to run around with safety scissors, and who is known to be incredibly impressionable from such a young age that they can be easily coerced into admitting to crimes they hadn’t committed by authority figures. Not to mention, the topic is supposed to be so complex and nuanced that it is taught and studied at collegiate levels by professors with years of experience and qualifications, yet the kid that believes in Santa Claus should easily be able to pick up on these ideas as well. It’s either the greatest insult to those teachers to compare them to the intelligences of glue-eating children or the greatest over exaggeration of a child’s capacity for thinking at such an undeveloped and ignorant age. If they consistently insist on being transgender, fine, but hold off on the hormones until they’re legal adults.
I tell you all this because, aside from dissuading any beliefs of my position being bigoted rather than concerned, it is thought out. It could work in a mature story going into the complexities of the issue, but not in this story. All People needed this debate to be a nonissue for the characters and their world, to be, as the narration puts it, “unimportant and boring.” It needed 7 to show the progressiveness of time and culture to highlight the irony of the problems that Miles deals with. My opinion be damned. It is irrelevant to the story. In this sense, and in line with my confidence in New Criticism, I pushback on Fellini’s assertion that his art is inherently tied to his identity because mine is not. Like my kin, there is me in it, but it is not me.
…
One of the things that I quickly had to come to terms with people not picking up on was the significance of the chapter names, so I’m glad I have the opportunity of an introduction to clarify my grand plan despite the awkwardness I feel about it. In short, all the chapters from
Miles in the city, or when he’s deeply involved in the city, are named after songs. I tried to make sure that each song’s name, lyrics, or sound had something to do with either the plot or themes of said chapter. The inception for this idea wasn’t especially novel. It started when I listened to specific songs as I wrote chapters or just had the story on my mind at the time. Obviously, with how many tonal changes occur throughout a single chapter, there is no song that completely conveys everything a chapter has to offer, but they still offer an insight into the core ideas at play. Like the story’s relationship to other texts, these songs often had a symbiotic relationship where the text would remind me of a song, the song influences how I write the text, the text makes me think more about the song, and so on. Like Elliot’s The Wasteland, the metaphorical connections between the different pieces of art would, hopefully, offer greater insight into their wholes that would otherwise seem incomplete.
I was especially proud of my usage of several songs from the band Death Grips for my story. Their confusingly jarring lyrics and garage/nu metal genre blending created a sound that could convincingly play off as music that hadn’t been invented yet. It worked perfectly for the story. I will say as a disclaimer, however, that if anyone were to listen to any of their songs, even 8 if only to get a greater sense of the world’s tone I wanted to convey in the story’s world, that it be done with some discretion. Their music and images they use for their brand are...explicit.
They’re still worth a listen but are probably not the best for family dinner conversation. If I had to insist on any chapters being read with their respective songs above any others it would be chapters one, four, six, eight twelve, seventeen, and eighteen. Though, I maintain that each song has something to offer. These are just the best of them.
Chapter’s one and eighteen were probably some of the most important in conveying theme, and I liked them especially for how accidentally well they worked in conjunction. As I hope you realize now after reading the novel, Tears in the Rain is the song that plays over Roy
Batty’s famous speech of the same name at the end of Blade Runner. The song works perfectly in tandem with the speech it accompanies, so when I address the qualities of the speech, please feel free to conflate the song with it as well. So, the speech is at the end of Batty’s attempts to find a way to prolong his life while also avoiding the blade runners sent to track him down and decommission him. Similar to Miles in the story, and like most people familiar with the speech I imagine, I heard the speech before I saw the movie. And, also like Miles, I was a little shocked by how that speech misleads me into theorizing what came before it. The C-beams glittering by the Tannhauser Gates and the ships on fire by the shoulder of Orion, none of it is in the movie. Instead, we see Batty do some heinous things to try to preserve those memories, but we don’t see the memories themselves. This is how the tragedy is really amped up in the speech.
Those few words from Batty about what he’s seen, which I believe the actor even thought of himself on a whim the night before shooting, are just evocative enough to put the frameworks of those images in my own mind, but no person except Batty can ever fully know them. No one can because once Roy Batty finishes lamenting the loss of these memories with him, he dies. 9
So too does Miles experience a similar fate when the eye goes through the images of his life. The song that plays during this segment, from the final chapter name, is not from Blade Runner. It’s actually Star Wars. Not even one of the main movies, it’s from a recent spin off tv show. Still, I thought it was beautiful music, and could you imagine my surprise when I realize that not only is the song played during a burial scene in the show, but the music itself sounds like a more modern version of the Blade Runner soundtrack? It fit perfectly with the ending, adding another small element to the story to emphasize the cycles this world goes through even on a spiritual level. Just like our own.
As for why the pattern of chapters named after music momentarily stops in the novel during the set of “farm chapters” as I call them, this is also a matter of theme. Like Miles, the music is concerned with bridging together their past and their present, the latter of which is our future. It goes hand in hand with the opening quote from Ezra Pound, who I didn’t credit with the quote to play with the theme of ideas being partially lost in time since I like to think that Miles has heard of the quote but has no idea the context around it or where it came from. The city itself is also a blend of the future being unwittingly tied to the past with its simultaneous eradication of traditional prejudices for entirely new ones that have yet to be invented. It’s a constant bombardment of information on the streets yet a populace that knows very little, far more content to stay inside and talk about how much they claim to know since so much information has made knowing anything to a certainty almost impossible, yet they still enjoy the lush wiles of morality- stricken night clubs.
So, once Miles leaves, similar to an explorer braving the frontier, he finds a wilderness paradise where the only troubles are people’s innate struggle to avoid the problems of other humans but while still wanting to be around them. They can’t be with people, but they don’t 10 want to be alone. Here, the “new” part of Pound’s quote takes hold. Miles finally writes stories that the reader can infer he’s proud of. He has new experiences with people. Yes, these moments share their parallels with the first half of the novel, but on the surface, these are new experiences.
So, it makes sense that the one chapter from Miles’ time on the farm that goes back to the music naming pattern is the one where Miles goes back to watching the news and gets sucked back into the city. He, again, tries to make sense of everything and, by extension, himself, and it gets to be accompanied by one of Pink Floyd’s best songs.
…
Speaking to Miles’ fate, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s the novel’s best moment, so I’d like to go into it a bit. Firstly, it’s a cliché. His life is literally flashing before his eyes. Yet, in line with the “make it new” claim that starts the entire novel, it doesn’t read like another melodramatic account of a man looking at his childhood self as he dies. No, there are more literal and thematic complications at play. The scene offers a final moment of reflection for the reader in contemplating Miles’ character. What kind of man was he? Were the scales tipped to more sympathize or condemn him? His hands were used both to reach out and speak to an innocent child and to take life away from others. The final question, after presenting supporting evidence for either side throughout the story, finally asks the reader as directly as it can: who is
Miles? Will he be forgotten like tears in the rain by his city, and will the reader forget him as just another faceless character on a shelf?
The actual logistics of rationalizing the emotional weight of his final moments, however, were far more calculating and colder for me to figure out. I remember I once told my friend that his workshop story, which was framed as a back-and-forth interview transcript with a war veteran, could use fewer crying scenes because it cheapens the emotional impact of his final 11 outburst. If I said this about an interview with a real veteran, I’d be a bastard, but if I say it with a piece of fiction, I’m clever. That’s the similar predicament I found myself in trying to decide
Miles’ fate.
Well, it was more deciding how that fate should be presented. I never once throughout writing thought of letting Miles live. His character is self-destructive and running on fumes by the novel’s start, so the rest was merely the exploration of how that life would finally flicker away as well what led him to that point in the first place. Still, just like Miles’ body, I had to address the two-sidedness of his character that I, and presumably the reader, felt towards him. On the one hand, he’s a wishful figure that is constantly imposed upon by outside forces to do their bidding, most of which he never even sees directly. I like to think of the brief moment he spends in his neighbor’s room, staring down the camera playing riot footage before the city completely descends into chaos, as one of his few times placed right in front of those cold manipulative forces using him for their own gains to distract others from their own wrongdoings. On the other hand, he’s a murder, and he goes beyond the realms of an impulsive murderer. His final breakdown that leads to the domino effect to storm the police station encapsulates this pretty well. At first, yes, a mix of unfortunate circumstances with a man whose mind hasn’t been quite right for some time ends in death. It’s up to interpretation how much he was conscious at the first killing. What happens next, though, is what I thought of as Miles’ dark seeded catharsis. He kills whoever he sees, and the perspective shift during those scenes implies the people he kills then are not people anymore. They are bodies, and they are in his way, helpless to do anything. It’s the payoff for many pages of buildup of Miles conceptualizing the people of the city as hedonistic animals that genuinely frighten him, stemming all the way to his mysterious origin that led to his augmentations in the first place. 12
With all that said and done, along with many other aspects to his character since I think only justifying his murder is a gross simplification of his character, I had to decide what to do with him. He had to die, but how? Truthfully, it was the images of Miles’ death and “afterlife” that struck me before I could work out the logistics of how he would get there. They were so strikingly powerful just on an instinctual level to me that I wouldn’t compromise on changing
Miles’ fate once I thought of them. My justification for having Miles end up like this I thought of as the pleasant image of the carrot and the stick. Miles killed a lot of people beyond the level of what can be considered self-defense. Bad, Miles. Finger wagging bad. So, I thwacked him on the head with a stick and pushed him with his writing in a mass grave. All the while, the fate of the new riots that seems to have broken out in the city is left entirely ambiguous. Will there be anything constructive to come out of it this time or will it be another cycle of the story for some new protagonist to notice as they walk down the streets of charred buildings and broken glass like Miles did at the beginning of the novel? Does Miles even care anymore? Either way, he gets the stick.
However, he was a tortured soul. The problems that wracked his mind were hardly his fault alone, and he shows great humanity in his writing and his desire to take care of Leda, even if the latter may have been out of wish fulfillment on his part. When I finished my first rough draft, I thought of him to be very akin to Perry Smith from In Cold Blood, a broken man left to wallow in the aftermath of his own decision making and the uncaring world around him, at least from his own perception. There’s even touches of narcissism in either of them in how much of their thinking is directly or indirectly related to themselves. Then again, who wouldn’t be primarily focused on the person they’ve become if you were someone like Miles or Perry? So, he’s shown himself to have a good soul or at least the potential of one if you really weren’t fond 13 of him. So, he gets the carrot, a “heaven,” which he is ironically transported to by a type of animal that has been used in the novel as a symbol of corrupted power in disguise. Funnily enough, I didn’t realize that until I sat down to write this introduction. Do with that what you will.
I couldn’t exactly have him teleport to a set of pearly gates upon death. That would be a tad silly given the entirety of the novel up to that point, so I rooted his salvation in his eye, the only shred of him left, to be carried away from the place and people that haunted him so. An interesting observation my thesis advisor pointed out after reading the ending, one I had not considered, the thing that allows Miles to escape in the end was also part of the technology in him that he was, at best, conflicted about. It’s another piece of irony in the story that I hadn’t thought about since I just needed to have some way for this scene to take place.
…
Hopefully it came across as you were reading, but one of the biggest influences on the book, and one of the most subtle, was Elliot’s The Wasteland. There are several references throughout the book to a mysterious poem Miles is reading and is continuously perplexed by. On a literal level, I thought of this as a nice parallel for the story’s limited point of view that often mirrors our own when we try to speak to larger ideas. From the very beginning of the novel, when Miles is still a disgruntled journalist, the conspiracy he’s unraveling is one that’s missing all the little pieces of clarity that could stitch it all together. Instead, he gets a series of assurances and almost entirely empty statements from Umor. This breakdown in communication is carried on in the lives of the citizens who either spend their time watching whatever it is on their screens at home, who spend every waking moment in a hedonistic limbo above proof of something even 14 more devious being carried out under their noses, or who erupt into anger and are subsequently manipulated when riots break out on the streets.
In line with the limited point of view, the reader also feels that they have a breakdown in communication despite being fed a great deal of information. They spend nearly the entire story with Miles who is fed numerous confessions from politicians, aggravated citizens, and even firsthand evidence in the form of Leda. Yet, all this information is, in a sense, useless. It is contradictory, confusing, and incomplete. When he does finally find a piece of what one would assume to be concrete evidence, Umor’s phone, its contents aren’t ever revealed to the reader.
I’ll admit that this was a dirty trick on my part, and I’ll also admit that it was partly done to build intrigue where I didn’t think where there would be much before if I’d just shown it. Like any
McGuffin, it’s inherently more interesting when the reader is left to speculation about what it really is, provided there’s sufficient intrigue around the thing in question, which I think there is.
Just as with Miles’ backstory, there is a created necessity on the reader’s part to infer what the morality surrounding its essence is.
The other aspect of the McGuffin is to, albeit artificially, create excitement around something where it otherwise wouldn’t be. Something that many people want or would want, or something that they just don’t understand but want to learn from, will always get an eyebrow raised by the audience. And, frankly, I don’t think Umor’s phone would’ve been that interesting had I just explained what was on it. You really want to know what was on it? It’d probably just be emails, photos, or whatever else would be there to either indict or acquit Umor of suspicions for cooperating with the corrupt government that’s involved in child trafficking, potentially lying about the effectiveness of emotional dampeners, and potentially inciting riots. While those last few points about what the government might be guilty of are more up in the air to speculate 15 about, the phone is something that I assume most readers would want a yes or no answer to, and
I’m not going to give it to them. They’re just going to have to do their own part in interpreting the book. Tough luck.
Well, I won’t give them any literal answers, but I will give them something. This goes back to The Wasteland again. Literally, that poem is a mess, and it hurts my eyes. However, only through careful attention and thought can someone understand that when Elliot mentions chess, he’s talking about symbols to create meaning and how those symbols die in a wasteland without creativity and understanding to use them. So too is this the way that someone could understand Umor’s role in this. There are many images that allude to politicians being godly figures in the world Miles inhabits. The connections start with the visceral picture of Zeus and Leda that Miles doesn’t see but the narration says is part of the incomplete text. The relationship Zeus and Leda have isn’t too unlike the one brought to Miles’ attention when he finds Leda in a dress and an unusually high amount of makeup for a girl her age all the while sitting in the back of a van. Furthermore, after the vivid description of the bird that attacks
Leda, Umor just conveniently shows up to see Miles and Henry in an outfit that’s described as
“feathery.” This also occurs when Miles meets them after their rally where they descend to the masses below, like how disciples would want to just touch the cloth that Jesus wore, in a procession I could only describe in a superficial generalization as heavenly. There’s also just a lot of this imagery of Umor being projected above the masses as an ethereal figure in holograms like how Zeus descended from the clouds of Olympus. Lastly, Umor, like Zeus, is also a shapeshifter.
Does this necessarily convict Umor though? No, that’d take some of the fun out of it. It’s more fun to speculate and guess. As a novel composed of themes and images, though, this 16 is pretty damning, but if examined as a rational person in the real world, this circumstantial evidence bordering on irrelevancy. There is never any confirming piece of evidence, and I’m glad there’s not. I see this, this metaphorical spree I went on in the novel, as my contingency plan to award close readers. It’s also like a little game I get to play where I can tease readers with answers right under their noses to the questions they’re asking.
This deviation the reader can take in choosing to read the novel literally or metaphorically is what I like to think drove Miles to some level of insanity when Seth told him the truth about the heroes he’s worshipped for so long. Learning about the parallels between the two of them and himself, and their tragic fates, sends him into a downward spiral. The question becomes, like a Greek tragedy, whether this was always destined by forces outside of
Miles’ control, be that fate or the shadowy government if you’re a cynic, or if his attempts to avoid such outcomes led him to tragedy right through the front door. Again, it’s a question of pitting the literal against the metaphorical. This causes the novel to almost break apart and change into something else, which is evident by the chaos of chapter 12.
This breaking down of form is something I enjoy in stories. It’s like the writing maturing and learning how to break the rules it’s been bound by for so many pages while still telling a compelling story. The way I did this was heavily influenced by Everything is Illuminated. In it, the story has three different types of narration: memoir, personal letters, and a story. As the pages go on, so too do the forms of the story slowly break apart. The story’s events devolve into incoherent sentences and plots that become more abstract. The letters literally argue with the story and makes demands in real time for how it should progress. The memoir, originally the driving story of the novel, eventually becomes second fiddle between the conflict Alex and
Jonathan’s writing, the two protagonists, have with one another. 17
As I read along, I came to see Jonathan, the author of the fictional stories, as the embodiment of the metaphorical in his attempts to go over generations of family suffering through strange fiction. In contrast, Alex, the author of the letters and memoir, was more of a literal presence. He argued with Jonathan for simpler things the average audience member would think. He wanted the characters he’s liked to learn to be happy, but Jonathan doesn’t comply.
I saw a similar conflict occur towards the ending of my own novel.
Obviously, there is the metafictional aspect in each novel where readers see the form of the stories break apart. I’d say chapter 12 encapsulates most of the break down in how the time in which events occur and the reality of those events are no longer bound by normal understandings. At this point, the pages have fully embraced their Dr. Manhattan and
Elliot-ness. However, while that chapter is the story’s metafictional climax, I’d argue that the novel begins to break apart a little sooner than that from the moment that Miles finds himself in on the farm. The harsh juxtaposition between the two settings of the novel is jarring, intentionally so. After consciously depicting the city as nothing but oppressing, depressing, and violent, the countryside should be, and is initially, a beautiful reprieve from that reality. It was meant to be a new frontier for Miles to find himself in.
Yet, like Jo and Jaime before him, the feelings Miles has about where he came from cling onto him. The cycle that plagues Miles’ species is seemingly infinite. From the beginning of the novel with the descriptions of a neon metallic world and inhabitants that are cleaning up the shattered glass and the burnt sides of buildings comes to fruition again when Miles reenters the city. On a metaphorical level, the opening quote from Ezra Pound to “Make it new,” is echoed by
Miles’ own, “Everything changes; nothing changes.” Like Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the
Metro,” the meaning of the quote is derived almost entirely from the use of the semicolon. Is it 18 implying causation? An inherent similarity in either outcome, meaning hopelessness? Is anything new, or is the passage of time just our surroundings putting a new coat of paint around the house? How can things change as human nature stays the same? The quote is just as ambiguous, and I weighed as possibly pretentious, as Miles’ fictional exploration and mental breakdown. And as he breaks down mentally, so too do the passages of the novel shift and change in style. It’s a nice symmetry between the themes of the story and the reader’s only anchor to those themes, Miles.
…
Miles’ role as the anchor is almost entirely dependent on the point of view of the story.
While Miles’ reality of his world isn’t completely manufactured or ignorant, it is skewed like anyone’s is. This is manufactured somewhat, such as from the floating cameras that I’d say is one the biggest inciting factors that leads to the massive riots, but it’s also from his own fragile mind. Clearly, he’s experienced a deep trauma, and it gets to the point where how he perceives it is more important than what exactly happened, like any tragedy I’d argue. This conflict within
Miles is what leads him to be so secluded and so wary of masses of other people. When he sees Umor on the television associated with and maybe also inciting the masses into something that he fears, it’s what changes his perception of his once friend into a far more unfavorable position.
This goes back to my first point of the essay about Dr. Manhattan and the fluid relationship between my writing and the world around it. I’d always envisioned Miles as the protagonist of the story, and the attention would always primarily be on him or at least seen through him. However, there were outside influences that both reinforced and helped me with this idea I’d already been toying with. The primary one was the 2019 film, Joker, which itself 19 borrowed from gritty 70’s films of the same vein as Taxi Driver and King of Comedy. Whereas
I’d already figured by the time I watched the movie that Miles would be mentally unstable, and I had the glimmers of ideas about him having to deal with a traumatic past, Joker solidified those ideas in my mind as realities for Miles.
Furthermore, it helped me understand how I should understand the chronology of the story. There was an interesting essay I read in ENGL 412 about spacing out time over the course of a narrative. I did disagree with some of its claims about moments of slowed time unable to be held for too long in a story while also being interesting, and I think chapter 12 contradicts that. I did, however, agree about the basic necessity to maintain a generally consistent pattern of time passing. When I thought about what basic patten the story should follow, I went back to thinking about Joker. Since the story needed to be focused on an anchor point, following them around with the world seen through their unique perspective, it’d be a good idea to take time with a day- by-day approach. If I wanted to craft a character that readers needed to empathize with and also question their actions and morality, forcing them to live through the same lives as Miles to reach a better understanding of him was the natural choice.
Of course, the story does take momentary breaks from Miles’ perspective. Here, I mainly operated under moments of necessity for the ideas I wanted to create. The underlying rule I had was that if the idea I wanted to present was interesting enough, then I would break the rules I’d already put in place to allow that idea to take root. The moment with Leda’s picture in the book of myths can’t work if Miles understands the full context of the story. During Miles’ chase scene with the officer, when he hides in the dumpster, it switches to the cop’s perspective to add surprise and emphasize Miles’ resourcefulness in a high stake’s situation. It reminds the reader that Miles is not just an unhinged dog, though he is in part. He’s clever too. When I want the 20 reader to see Miles as a mad dog, however, I switch into the different perspectives of the people present at the police station riot.
The greatest switch from Miles’ perspective, though, would be the end of chapter 8 with the old men on the hill. I really enjoy this section, partly because it’s what a friend and I always said we’d do if a riot came to our own city. It’s also a very good transitional scene in what could otherwise have been a frustrating departure in the story at one of the most climactic and confusing moments. “Oh my god, Miles just killed a lot of people. Wait, there’s grass on the other side of the tunnel? Wait, who are these old guys? Where’s this hill? Get back to the crazy cyborg!” Still, the content of the conversation the men have with the youth, and the result of that conversation on the youth and his own friend, was compelling to think about for the implications the conversation has. It again speaks to the cyclical nature of the world as well as the different ways people have come to cope.
On a structural level, though, it prepares the reader for what’s to come. Foreshadowing I believe it’s called. The hill the conversation takes place on clues the reader in on how there may be more remnants of nature left in the world than what they may have thought before, hiding on the side of the pit no less. It also creates a new pattern the story takes with Miles’ various writings: the pattern of patterns breaking. The latter half of the novel is not concerned with conventional structure. The hill scene is the reader’s first big hint that they really need to look at things in a broader metaphorical scope when reading the rest of the novel and that they maybe should look back at what they’ve already read in the same light as well.
…
This was a bit of a late influence, but it did alter how I perceive Miles and led to me writing one of my favorite paragraphs in the novel. In Cold Blood’s Perry Smith has a strong 21 resemblance to Miles. A frightful past combined with social isolation and a mental capacity teetering on the completely unstable, is led by the hand by other outside forces to do their dirty work. They suffer from repeated dreams that seem to motivate their actions. Perry has his mystical bird to carry him away, and Miles has his pack of wild animals to instill fear in him and the mirages of Roy Batty and Achilles to give him something to strive to and, eventually, shatter his view of the world and himself when he further explores his characters. I think the greatest influence it had, which also led to my favorite passage in chapter 12, is the image of a crying, broken Miles being caringly picked up by two strangers. All of time moves in reverse as the city is brought back from disrepair and then from repair and then to not even being there at all.
Eventually, he himself slinks backwards in the flow of time until he’s nothing more than a small child, a fetus huddled for warmth in the womb, and then nothing. Perry did me a great service in getting me to think of Miles’ wounds as that of a scorned child that was never able to develop properly with the outside world because it is a world either unconcerned or unable to extend empathy as far as it needs to go. There were already the kernels of this idea in how Miles was regarded as childlike by Henry twice in the novel (once in the garage and once in Miles’ written interpretation of Henry) but that was more speaking to his immaturity and abstractly useless ideals than a sort of wound that’s haunted him. I also suspect this is what made his affinity with
Leda so strong.
…
I feel complete with this novel finished. Acting as humanity’s participant observer has been both grueling and fulfilling the way most things worth doing feel once they’re finished.
Hopefully I can still muster the strength to write a few more papers for classes before graduating. All the talk of intention and theory does come second to the basic level of enjoyment 22 when gets from a luxury like fiction. I hope that you did enjoy my story and that this prolonged self-analysis has encouraged to maybe look back on what you’ve read and have the characters stick with you a little longer.
23
All People
Make it new.
24
Chapter 1
Tears in the Rain
“There was a time when people would never have thought of deliberately replacing their bodies with metal, and now all those people are long dead,” said Umor, glistening in the spotlights on their political podium alongside the other people at the panel.
The entire stadium had been filled to the brims for this showing as Umor continued their campaign for governor.
“Augmented individuals,” they said, raising their own arm, “should all have the courage to live with their bodies as they choose. When appointed the leader of this city, I will do just that...for you,” they smiled as their arms stretched out, seemingly to embrace to entire crowd in front of them.
Regardless of the differences in their cries, the entire stadium went into an uproar. To the left, a sea of mechanically transformed individuals, the augmented, yelling and cheering for the politicians on stage, and to the right were those without such changes, yelling when the others cheered and cheering when they yelled. People held up their arms in support, and other people really held up their own arms, to have themselves be known in opposition to the other’s that clung to their original flesh. In the middle, intermixed between the dichotomies of crowds, was
Miles; a single voice unable to be heard.
Though, for now, he was content with being forgotten, unnoticed, as everyone around him gnashed their teeth and hollered at the top of their lungs. He couldn’t wait for this carnival to be over so he could have time to catch up with Umor without as many people to disturb them. It was an excuse for a good interview for news articles he was in desperate need of writing for his 25 job. After the event, waiting outside, with the only piece of shadow next to the dumpsters, Miles kept himself hidden from the outpour of people pawing their way out of the narrow exit, either returning to their compact, isolated apartment buildings, or the city’s night club that never closed. Miles peaked his head from the shadows when he saw Umor slowly walking, one of the last to leave, and they went on their walk.
“Everything looks the same, especially given how long I’ve been gone,” said Umor as they walked away from the, nearly epilepsy inducing, flashing lights from the stadium behind them. They turned to the heavy-footed man walking beside them. “I am glad to see you again though, above everything else,” they said with a photogenic smile.
Above
“I can’t see what you’re saying, Miles. It’s too dark out. Face me more- no, like this,”
Umor said as they guided Miles’ head towards them with the tips of their fingertips.
Miles inhaled and puffed out air from his nose in frustration before repeating himself.
Above
“Above? Above what- oh, I see what you mean. Yes, above everything else. Heh, get it?
See?” Umor chuckled.
Funny
“But, yes. In all seriousness, it’s good to know that you’ve been doing well here since I left,” Umor said.
A string of explosions ripped through the air above the stadium, crackling in the night as little puffs neon before simmering away, and was followed by the faint calls of hoots and jeers. 26
Miles’s body stiffened while his hand jolted down to his hip, shaking next to the holster underneath his jacket. He put his hand on Umor’s shoulder, as they had already begun to walk ahead of him. Though all the buildings had the same sleek silvery bodies jutting up to the sky, they were all coated with the same patches of ash that others tried to scrub off. Miles had to carefully navigate the bits of broken glass by his feet that slowly fell like icicles from windows up high. The only light came from the sky, which was only colored by the floating holographic advertisements projected by miniscule drones wandering the streets of the city, illuminating different sidewalks that would otherwise be barren.
Explosions
“You sure you weren’t just getting worked up from the rally? These things can get pretty intense,” Umor said proudly.
Still stationary, Miles’ hand twitched, his fingers curled as they snapped at the knuckles.
He had to use the extra weight of his left arm to hold himself steady until the twitching stopped.
Looking at Umor, Miles saw their skin reflected the phosphorous glow from the holograms back into the sky, creating their own spotlight in the night, like no one else could.
“Look! There I am. They’re talking about the campaign!” Umor exclaimed, pointing to the box of television news in the sky as a video of a middle-aged man stuffed into a suit and tie conducted the crowd from behind a podium. The traditional, political man was then juxtaposed by a string of changing faces on an adjacent screen with the caption: Who is Umor?
Miles looked back at Umor, and noticed the shifting movement along their body underneath the black, crisp, cotton suit they were still wearing from the broadcast. Then, like a mirror shattering and coming together to form a new shape, pieces of Umor’s face began to pull 27 apart, revealing under each of them a chrome sheen. Each piece glided along Umor’s face with the delicacy of a porcelain plate but still malleable enough to fold in on themselves. In only a few seconds, Umor had shrunk into a fair young woman that was just a little too small for her suit. Umor looked at the ground, blushing, as they rolled up their sleeves.
“It’s not good for PR to change in public, except for a few demonstrations,” said Umor.
“It’s good to keep people aware about the background we come from, but some of it has to be sacrificed to keep people...comfortable. I don’t feel like myself though.”
Miles gently touched his face the way people mournfully stroke a casket.
I know
“You know, if I win, I could pull a few strings and see about getting you a voice box you could afford. Maybe...some other attachments,” Umor said as they put their hands on his chest.
Maybe
Miles scooped up Umor’s hands and gently lowered them to their sides.
“Why maybe?” Umor asked.
Not fair
Umor scoffed under their breath. “You know, you don’t have to be so noble just because other people might have it worse. What else could I do to help?”
Legislation
“Legislation for what?” 28
His eyes lighting up, Miles began to contort his hands in a procession of unfamiliar symbols ending by throwing his hands up in self amusement as he waited for Umor’s reply.
Umor stared at him.
Sign
Umor sat there, squinting their eyes. “O-oh. I think I remember you mentioning this. The one for people that couldn’t hear,” they said, nodding their head. “Miles I’m sorry but I think you’re the only one that still knows what that is.”
Miles’ eyebrows sulked in unison with his hands.
“People don’t need to commit it to memory. Ear implants aren’t hard to come by. It outlived its usefulness.”
The sound of heavy footsteps continued as Miles walked down the street.
Yes
But the response had fallen on deaf ears, as Umor had now overtaken Miles’ pace, leaving Miles behind. Umor greeted him with another smile.
“Sorry. Last minute complications with tomorrow’s plans. Someone had to cancel a meeting.” She looked at Miles’ outline, at least two feet taller despite his bowed head, and yet he still looked small to them, in his torn leather jacket, framed against the negative space of the city.
“You could come to my hotel with me for the night. Must be better than wherever you’re staying here.”
Can’t 29
Miles struggled to meet Umor’s gaze. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a well kept polaroid camera.
Work
“I understand,” they said nodding solemnly, “but I still don’t understand why you keep a museum exhibit in your jacket.”
With a raised eyebrow and a twinkle in his eye, Miles took a picture of Umor before putting both it and the camera back in his jacket.
Private
“Huh, guess so,” they said with a chuckle. Umor laughed for the both of them.
“Have you considered my offer about working for me? We could have you as a bodyguard, liaison, anything you’d be comfortable with. A little nepotism never hurt anyone,”
Umor chuckled.
Miles knew they couldn’t, but he hoped Umor would somehow be able to see the scoffing smirk he made at Umor’s comment.
Democratic
“Well,” Umor stopped themselves to shrug in friendly defeat. “Imperfect people, imperfect system, one begets the other. You deserve the help. I’ll let you get to work now-”
Just as Umor was about to leave, another crackling set of lights broke out in the sky with the echoing murmurs of people’s laughter accompanying them. It made Miles jolt, and he ran up to Umor before they could leave. After running his hand through his jacket’s deep pockets, Miles pulled out his spare pistol, placed it in Umor’s hand, and closed held their palm around it. 30
Protection
Umor was noticeably uncomfortable. They tried to recoil their hand, but Miles’ grip was too tight.
Please?
Gulping down whatever emotion was rising up through their throat, Umor nodded and hid the gun away in their clothing for safe keeping. They stretched their expression to look more comforting and pleasant the way they did when speaking to the public.
Umor headed off with a slowly shrinking smile. “Don’t be a stranger.”
Miles watched Umor go down the sidewalk and wondered how many times they had gone down these streets before as if they alone had contributed to each worn down slab of pavement and crack in the road. His eyes fixated more on the architecture of the city ever since
Umor pointed out its permanency. Rows upon rows of towering pillars overlapping each other on either side of the street, a gaping mouth ready to cave in. Lines of pulsing electricity flowed through sidewalks all the way up to the tops of ever-present, see-through people, dancing around in the sky as the rich man’s constellations. They had the same human shapes as Miles or Umor or anyone else, but they always followed you, and they could change how they looked after a single flash to be whatever you wanted to see.
Out of the visible bending waves of white noise that hung in the air, formed the bloated talking heads from before and were now creating ripples of pulsing electricity through the air that Miles could smell as they dispersed after hitting his nose.
We’re not talking about the augmented right now, Tori. 31
Would you deny an entire ethnicity the right to be acknowledged?
The augmented are not an ethnicity. You’re digging it up outdated terms for the sake of your argument.
Miles covered his ears at the sound, how horrible it was to have these hovering voices follow him, seemingly narrating his life. All the while, he stumbled around the holograms that roamed the streets like people. They all wore brands on their flickering clothing and chatted amongst themselves about the debates at the rally, all the different ideas banging against Miles’ head.
An especially bright light manifested and beamed against Miles, stopping him in his tracks. Above, he saw colorful display of Umor’s changing face, smiling, hanging over his head.
A separate soda bottle cut itself in half trying to fit through Umor’s face. The resulting image was an indecisive glitch of a picture that jolted side to side in fragments. Miles kicked up a can on the ground into his hand and chucked it through the glitch, but it just passed through the empty space in Umor and the soda bottle before landing on the other side as the images made a low electronic hum before zapping away, leaving Miles alone in the dark as he headed for the poorer side of the city.
The city looked far blunter here, lacking the spectacle of the earlier monoliths and holograms. In their place were abandoned buildings and clear night skies. The walls on the streets still had a metallic color palette, but rust had built up from neglect and an indifference to neglect from its inhabitants. Underneath the peeling metal were clenched fists atop of peace symbols atop of hammers and sickles atop of a brick-and-mortar wall. As Miles stroked his hand over the rough images before him, he created a smear with his fingers. The paint of the fists and 32 strange tools broke apart into dust and drifted to the ground. Recoiling his hands, Miles looked on mournfully at the crack of brick wall, sad about what he had defaced, but more ashamed that he did not know what it was in the first place. After jotting down what he remembered seeing in his notepad, Miles continued to move forward. His two contacts would already be waiting for him by now.
Miles eventually reached the dilapidated house he was set to meet at. Unlike the neighboring houses though, the dust here was unsettled as if it had recently been disturbed.
Miles’ hand again crept down to his side like it had before. The splinters on the wooden door nearly pierced Mile’s skin as he hugged the door to the house. When he pulled his hand back up, it was holding the pistol he kept in the holster on his hip. He kept his pointer finger away from the trigger because he knew how much his hand shook when he held it. Opening the door just a crack and peaking in, Miles couldn’t see anything from his vantage point. It was all dark; he would have to go in blind.
Thumbing the pistol, Miles missed the trigger for the safety repeatedly, and each subsequent attempt became more and more inaccurate as they sound of metal scraping against itself became louder and louder until Miles stopped himself and took a breath. He clicked the safety off. The door swung open and Miles waved the gun rapidly side to side like a ready turret.
No one was there in the room with him. The gun lowered and Miles sulked against the wall, wiping the sweat from his head with his shaking hand. It was only when Miles raised his hand during a sigh of relief that he saw the body tucked away in the adjacent room.
The shifting moonlight told the passing of time along the foot of the body Miles found like a morbid sun dial. He continued to cover his eyes intermittently, hoping that the foot would leave once he had shielded himself enough. The foot never left. At the rate he was moving, it 33 would be daylight before Miles picked himself up. A certain feeling of stagnation and paralysis must have been carried over from his time in the lights on the streets even in the private darkness of this home. When Miles stood up his legs were still shaking beneath him as the gun twitched in his hand. Without the same caution as before, he staggered into room. Although they were face down, the couple had augmentations that fit the description Miles had been given. He was not eager to see the exit wounds between their eyes.
In one of their hands, a damp folder soaked up the blood from the floor. The longer it sat there, the more its pages would break apart in the red puddle, and the longer Miles did nothing, the more the indecision weighed on his conscience. He snapped three photographs of the bodies from three separate angles and he checked each of the photographs three times to ensure that they were clear. Nine minutes had passed from when he first looked at the folder. Eventually, he took out one of the many small flip phones from his coat pocket and dialed for the police.
“911, what is your emergency?” the operator asked.
…
“Do you need help? Can you hear me?” the operator asked again in the same muted tone.
Miles puffed out his chest in a brief chuckle.
Yeah
After enough time for them to trace the call, he snapped the phone in half, put it back in his pocket, and walked to the door. When he turned around, Miles saw the folder drowning in the dark. He remembered the pictures underneath the metal walls and how they had been lost so easily by neglect, but each step he took forward pushed his heart further into his chest. Weighing 34 the options in his head, Miles had to choose between tampering or neglect, and the scales dangled to either side.
He ran to pick up the folder and sprinted out of the house.
It started to rain. The added heaviness of Miles’ left leg made for larger splashes in the sidewalk’s puddles, forcing him to move from a run to an uneven skip to avoid covering himself in water. At the end of the street, a couple illuminated by fluorescent billboards got off their bench and walked to the waiting bus. Miles waved his hands widely to call their attention, causing the spotlighted couple to see a silhouetted, massive Quasimodo-like figure stumbling towards them. They said something to the driver as the bus sped off in a hurry.
Wait
Miles arrived at the door to his building and immediately checked the integrity of the folder. The glaze of water atop his jacket was beginning to seep in. Miles took the folder out and gave it a shake every few steps he took up the stairs. The two different vibrations of his feet against the stairs echoed through the vacant hallways. Reaching his room, he began to fidget with the lock.
“Did ya have a good night, Miles?” a voice called from the room behind him.
His neighbor had his door opened just a crack, leaving enough room for Miles to glance at the hairy, pinkish folds that slumped over the chair in the darkened room. The floors and walls had a thick coating of rust. Miles knocked on the side of an adjacent wall twice.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I’d say I had a pretty good night. I’d say the favorite part of my night was when I had over these two girls, a blonde and a brunette, and they were really into 35 each other. So, I had them just rolling on top of me I watched, and they get dethatching their heads and swapping em with each other. Crazy stuff. And I’d say my least favorite part was when I woke up,” his neighbor said before he pushed the rest of air out of his chest in a hoarse laugh. “Kinda kinky all that techno shit. Not that I’d do it.”
Miles’ hand sprung into a thumbs up while he continued to fiddle with the lock even though he doubted it could be seen, but he also doubted anyone cared if it was.
“You been watching the news? It’s been really-” he stopped himself as he put something in his mouth, “good. It’s been really good. Really entertaining this season. Ya seen it?”
Miles slowly rested his head against the door as his hand alternated between rotating and punching the door handle. Curiosity getting the better of him, Miles peaked his head back to look through the crack in his neighbor’s door. The television was grimy from never being so much as wiped before, but a fluorescent bottle was spinning in the air outside the window, casting a narrow pink light over the man’s body through the small gap. Miles knocked on the wall twice again.
“I don’t know what kind of pseudo-journalist could get away with that. Ya need to watch it. Everything important in the world is handed to you on a silver platter right in front of you.”
The resonant hum of the bottle was only interrupted by rhythmic chewing and long forceful gulps. “Always stay informed. A happy brain is a happy body. Ya just gotta wait through the commercials.”
The bottle continued to spin. Miles began to slowly bang his head against the door, taking solace in how the thumps briefly deafened his ears. Another thump came from the floor above them as dust fell from the ceiling. 36
“Would any of you gentlemen kindly consider to shut the fuck up. It’s four goddamn
AM.” the third party cried from upstairs.
“Bite me.” Miles’ neighbor said plainly between bites.
“You’re not on my diet you fucking slime.”
“Hey, I’m not slime. I’m big boned.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I ate some guy, and he had big fuckin’ bones, so now I got em in me,” the neighbor said before bursting into a second fit of laughter that soon devolved into stretched, dry coughs.
With a single downward swipe with his left hand, Miles knocked the doorknob to the floor and shoved his way into his room.
“Have a nice night, Miles,” his neighbor’s gleeful voice echoed through the new hole in
Miles’ door.
His apartment was the only one in the entire complex that had yet to have its rotting, wooden and concrete foundations stripped in favor of a sleeker metal replacement. Miles remembered when he used to speak in this room, and despite having so many thoughts on his mind at the time, the only thing he remembered saying was, “Please let me sleep.” His wooden floor, the only room left in the building that still had wood, but it bothered him less than the clanging that followed him up the newer stairs. On his desk was a smattered wrinkling of papers with scratchy writing scrawled over them. They all had leads and ideas for articles that were as enmeshed and disorganized as the physical papers were themselves. They were all spread around 37 an older computer that still needed a physical monitor to pull up a screen. Once Miles checked it, he saw all the pings pop like miniature fires demanding his attention. Each of them demanded more articles be submitted electronically for risk of Miles losing a paycheck. He looked down the other side of his apartment to his tiny kitchen. There was enough food for a while. He crumpled the papers between his hands and let them fall to the wayside on the floor. In a neater corner of the desk, tucked away, were more personal writings, stories. They sat there, never changing. Somehow, Miles disliked them more despite his hatred for reporting.
Miles thought of how long these things had been like this as he counted the disjointed rings of wood in his floor. They were preserved in a sensual memory, or the recreation of a memory, which Miles figured all memories were anyway. He looked at the red drying on the folder he found and chuckled at his irrelevant silliness of counting rings in the floor given his situation. Brushing off the crusted blood, the folder was in stable condition. Skimming through it, its contents were a series of names and addresses. They would still be there in the morning but his willingness to get up and read them may not be if he did not get enough sleep. Miles began to crawl into bed but realized that he was still clinging to the pistol beneath his jacket. He jumped at the sound of a kicked can outside. Taking off his jacket, he slipped into his nightly routine.
Running his fingers along the plastic ridges of the cassettes in his cupboard, he found his favorite one to play. After turning on the VCR, the video started. A nearly naked man, sculpture like figure and skin like pure light but covered in blood and shadow, stood triumphantly in the pouring rain as another man, grimy, sniveling, and clinging to life, hung from a metal girder. The sporadic splashing sounds of water provided an ambience that the encased humming of plasma signs couldn’t. Miles listened to the film as he walked into the bathroom to change. He had to remember to put the gun down by the sink. 38
Quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it?
Miles shrunk down in stature as he peeled off layers of clothing, avoiding the battered reflection from the cracked mirror.
That’s what it is to be a slave.
He scowled at the television’s malicious timing of cosmic belittlement. Now naked,
Miles saw the rough figure in the dirtied mirror. His body, a tall thing nearly too big to be seen fully in the mirror, covered in bumps and ridges and long strained veins that pushed against his skin. Miles remembered the striking man from the film he had put on, puffed out his chest and locked his arms into place. Nothing to be done. Deflating himself, Miles began the nightly process of cleaning and self-maintenance.
First, Miles took off his left arm, releasing a steam pressured hiss and hot vapor into the air. A thick, watery phlegm of blood and artificial gunk stretched out in webbed lines from the angular tip of the prosthetic pulled out from his shoulder. He tossed it into the shower’s rusted tub, making a splash in the thin layer of water that began to swallow and spread the gunk. Next, the left calf, same process as the arm, but it left behind a hallowed, gimp foot that sagged to the side like used rubbers. His body was hunched now and had to adjust to the heavy shift in weight.
Hesitant and avoiding looking directly at it, as always, he tossed the plate that covered where his genitals used to be into the tub as well. Then, his mouth. It was a visor, long and sleek thing that elicited no sound, only showing text for people to look at at their leisure, and it covered everything below Mile’s face. Plastic string pierced through grafted metal, that pushed against his dried flesh down his throat that had little juice to excrete anymore, hung limply from the vacant space beneath his nose down to his neck. He leaned his right arm against the towel rack, 39 starring back at the dismembered boy in the cracked mirror, wondering where the time went. He thought of his body, about moving it, how his bones clicked together against stretching muscle, and he still saw the shriveling, dismembered boy clutching a rail in the mirror. He would shower tomorrow.
Fitting the crutch he kept in the bathroom under his right arm, Miles hobbled into the rest of his apartment, just in time to finish watching Roy Batty.
All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain.
Miles out the window at the plated buildings. Umor’s projected face fluttered in distant skies, always smiling, looking down on flutters of light in the streets below.
Time to
The video switched off at where the tape ended. Miles knew that the tape was damaged, incomplete, but he did not know how much. Still, he often thought about the kind words spoken by this hero he knew so little about. He shivered in his bed as he held the pistol against his chest.
He thought of the two bodies he had seen and wondered if they had mouths or if that even mattered. He looked out his window as his distorted body was draped in the changing neon light, looking for something he wanted to write. He couldn’t find anything and curled himself in a ball under his covers. He dreamed of Roy Batty, looking at him as Miles slipped from the girder and fell towards a mob of animals that ate him alive.
40
Chapter 2
She Swallowed Burning Coals
He woke up to his pistol pressed against his cheek and a spastic banging noise coming from his nightstand. Miles rubbed his eyelids and looked at the clock. 1:00 PM. After putting himself together, Miles looked at the folder on his desk again. As he waited for the fuzziness of oversleeping to fade away as he flipped back and forth from page to page, there were still only names and addresses. Not even in a coherent way, each name had at least five addresses attached to it alongside nearly illegible scribbling. There was the town hall, the night club, and other places Miles could only assume were from different districts. He sat back in his chair, thinking.
Three emails from Henry that talked, amidst the obscenities, about a planned tune up this morning at nine o’clock. Leaving the folder at his desk, Miles left the apartment, figuring the walk to Henry’s would clear his mind. The crowds moved straight ahead, unphased, as giant hands holding the most popular food of the day dissolved through them. As usual, Miles wasn’t able to distinguish the real from the projected hallow people around him. Though, he suspected, from how they all happily glided through him, that they were all hallow.
On the way to Henry’s, he saw the house he had visited last night. There were two officers stationed in front of the house, blankly looking ahead, never compromising their stature as two small lights blinked in tandem with each other on the back of their necks. They rotated their heads like sentries. Miles passed by with his head to the ground.
Beyond the house and the officers, Miles made a detour to the pit, hoping he could catch them before they threw everything in for today. A portly woman with chained glasses stood atop a hill that nearly eclipsed the sun, pushing carts of junk down below a horizon so deep that there 41 was no sound of impact from the falling objects. Although patchy and unkept, this was the only spot in the city with grass, scraggly as it was poking out of the mud. The woman went back inside the adjacent building, only one sleek glass structure part of the larger university. Miles tagged the cart with a rusted can he dug up from the ground. The woman turned around in a huff.
“Who threw-” she demanded before seeing the limply waving man beneath her outside the gates at the base of the hill. “Oh, Miles. I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there. Good afternoon!” she exclaimed.
Miles chuckled.
Morning
“Long night out again? Well, I’m glad you stopped by anyways. I had a few things saved this morning for when you’d stop by, so if you’ll just wait a moment,” she said as her voice trailed off as she walked into the building.
Thank you
Miles gazed through the gaps in the fence that separated the metal coated streets with the dirt and gravel that had been unearthed. The pit truly was endless. Regardless of the quality of its contents, whatever had been thrown down there has, in every sense of the expression, ceased to exist, nothing left to mourn. The woman came out again with a tub of scraps that she handed him overtop the fence. Inside were a pile of electronics he couldn’t recognize intermingled with even more books. His heart jumped in excitement at the books on Greek literature, hoping that they would be more complete than the damaged fragments he’d gotten so far. 42
“I put written instructions on how to use the lights and things in case you need them,” she said.
Phones?
“No, none in there today, sorry.” she said.
Miles looked up at her, making sure that he still had her attention.
Thank you
“You’re welcome. I always assume you’re grateful, or else you wouldn’t keep coming back. Have a nice day, Miles,” she said, paying attention to reading Miles’ visor. She slogged back up the hill to empty the school of more useless junk.
One of the phones in Miles’ jacket buzzed against the other ones in his jacket pocket and, after shifting through them to figure out which one it was, saw a message from Umor.
Hey, Miles. It’s Umor. I just wanted to check in with you after I heard about the shooting from last night. It was close to where you were investigating, right? Are you ok? What happened?
He furrowed his eyebrows and messaged back.
Yes, I’m ok. I thought I forgot to give you one of my numbers. Do you know anything about what happened?
Placing the phone down in a separate pocket by itself, Miles eventually arrived at
Henry’s shop. The old shop was allegedly an old pizza parlor as one of Henry’s excuses for him never being able to get the smell of grease out of the air like an oily fog. The oil that had crusted from foods coagulated on the ground with the kind used for machinery, creating an extra stick 43 against Miles’ shoes as he walked in. Miles sat himself down as he waited for Henry to finish with the person at the counter and looked across at a stranger tucked away in a corner of the store. The stranger leaned back in his chair far enough to keep out of view of the store’s front window, but still enough to stare at the people outside as he repeatedly took his eye out to roll it between his knuckles and put it back in. After a prolonged eyebrow raise, Miles looked back to
Henry who was about to speak with the waiting customer at his desk.
A young person with a metallic head and a plastic smile knocked on the countertop. They held an armful of fliers in a neat pile in the crook of their elbow, complimenting their erect posture.
“Hello, sir. Are the owner of this shop?” they asked like a playback of stock audio.
Henry removed the deformed piece of chewing tobacco from his mouth and flicked it out of sight before shoving in a new one from a tin next to him. "I am,” he said.
“Great, nice to meet you. You have a wonderful establishment,” they said with lips that continued to stretch upwards beyond what is needed to convey a smile.
Henry continued to mash the tobacco between the grooves of his teeth. “No, it isn’t.”
They stared at Henry as their stiff body teetered on the edge of cracking. “We’re going around the city trying to help garner support for Umor in the upcoming election.”
Henry nodded. “That’s nice. Would you like to buy some parts?” he asked plainly.
Miles couldn’t help but cover his shaking face with his hands as he watched the stooge try to converse with a stone wall. 44
“If you have the time, we’d like to talk to you about how this party can help you and your business in the future. Your common interest in the lives of augmented individuals would surely be mutually beneficial.”
“I’ll say. Would you like to buy some parts?”
Finally, the smile began to twitch and crumble. “No, we don’t need any parts right now.
Thank you.”
He spat the tobacco out. “Then why the fuck are ya still here?” Henry grimaced.
The solicitor, after stumbling with what to say, hung their head as they made for a speedy exit, not noticing the fliers they dropped to the ground. They were stopped by a heavy hand on the shoulder and an open palm holding the dropped papers. The solicitor put one in Miles’ hand and showed the hint of a genuine smile beneath their shell of formal training.
“Thank you,” they whispered before quickly pacing through the door.
Miles looked at Henry, who was still staring down the small person leaving his building.
“What a prick.” He turned to Miles. “Fuck you.”
Afternoon
“Afternoon my ass. You were supposed to be here this morning. I opened up early for you!”
Miles lumped the tub of goodies onto the counter, immediately drawing Henry’s eyes to the electronics inside. 45
“You know I could never stay mad at you, right boobala?” he said with a pair of pats against Miles’ cheek. “Let’s see what ya got ‘ere.”
After reciprocating with an eye roll, Miles rummaged through the trove of forgotten trinkets and sorted out piles for the two of them. For Henry, a mound of disembodied computers, prosthetics, and metal plating. The other, two stacks of books and a couple new flip phones.
“Did ya get those from the library, or is it a museum? I fuckin’ forget,” Henry said.
Same thing
“Heh, I guess that’s true,” he chuckled.
As Miles aligned each individual book into the box, Henry clicked his remote and the entire back wall flashed to life with well-dressed anchors behind juxtaposed with a set of corpses on a separate monitor.
“Police are still investigating the downtown tragedy of what has been ruled as two more victims of increasing gang violence. Our condolences go out to the Whitman and Elliot families.
Coming up next, how the increase in crime could be affecting your paycheck without you even knowing it. Stay tuned.” The newswomen spoke well, both polite and efficient, and her inviting tone led perfectly into the full view of a commercial ocean liner taking passengers into calm waters.
Miles was still looking at the holographic screen and had to register the appearance of tanned sculpture like people flailing on the cruise ship. One of Miles’ phones vibrated. He saw a text from Umor in his pocket.
You know people can look up these things about people, right? 46
He shrugged and put the phone away.
“Alright,” Henry said clapping his hands as the commercials turned away from the sensual beach goers. “You ready to get started now?”
Miles nodded, and they went into the backroom. As they did, Miles heard the beginning of another advertisement play on the screen. It was promoting new top of the line augmentations: visual implants, complete alloy skin replacements, and now the full fluid body-shifting operation. The latter was sponsored by Umor, naturally, and the proceeds would funnel back into their campaign to help make these operations more affordable in the future. Though never wanting to get any of them for himself, Miles was never able to afford these elaborate operations.
He was grateful for Henry’s chargeless help with the checkups for the parts he already had.
Annoyed from the noise, Henry turned off the screen as they went into the garage.
Through the shop’s backdoor to the garage, the one window let in a blanket of light.
When Miles stuck his right arm into the warm sheet, he could feel the warmth pass through his skin and glide through each of the veins throughout his whole body. Henry backed into the light ass first as he pulled a rusted operating chair and stool for himself onto the illuminated floor. His jeans sagged a little more with each tug, and he nearly tripped over an emptied pack of beer he’d discarded on the floor.
“Excuse me, my liege,” Henry said as he scooted past Miles and dropped the clunky slab of metal on the floor. “You can sit down whenever you’re done fawning over yourself.”
Miles scowled at Henry as he did.
I wasn’t 47
“What? Why not? Good lookin’ shmuck like yourself? You’re basically a sculpture I built from the ground-” he said before stopping himself. Henry lowered his head as he wrapped the worn leather braces around Miles’ limbs. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean it…like that. You know what I meant. In all fairness though, I was being genuine. You look fine. Girls should be crawling all over you. Or guys. I don’t fucking care. Preferably not animals, though.”
With a deadpan look on his face, Miles knocked on his crotch, making two dull metallic thuds.
Henry scrunched his face and shrugged. “Eh, get creative. Maybe write down some tips in a book you’re working on, huh?” he smirked.
The joints of the chair rattled as Miles’ chest jostled in and out and his eyes softened after an eye roll. Cleaning off the syringe with a rag, Henry then injected it into Miles’ arm.
“You know the drill. Should just take a few minutes to go under,” Henry said as he picked up an empty beer bottle from the tool stand and dripped what was left inside into his mouth. Noticing the concern on Miles’ face, Henry made a guilty smile and tossed the bottle over his shoulder.
“Ya know, I can still give ya a lil’ attachment down there if ya want. I won’t even charge ya,” Henry said.
Miles shook his head as he shrunk in his seat and eyed his left arm. Henry looked at the arm as well and how many other ones he had lining the wall of his shop, each one a processed replacement for something so personal.
“Doesn’t feel like yours, does it?” he asked. 48
Miles continued to look forward dully.
Henry looked around uncomfortably at the prolonged echo of his own voice in the room.
“Well, how’s your journalism shtick going? Any, uh-”
Someone dropped the pile of shards they were holding on the ground outside, creating a loud shatter as a few thin sparkles slid through a small opening in the window. Miles jumped.
“...any things to write about?” Henry shrugged.
Miles lightly shook his head. His eyes shirked to the ground.
“Miles, what is it you want?” Henry asked.
Something
Henry waited.
To happen
Henry looked out the window of his garage and homed in on the sound of glass nonchalantly shuffled into a bin.
“Ya know, maybe some gratefulness for what you already have would go a long way, eh?” Henry said as he dinged his handiwork on Miles’ arm with a wrench. “Not like you’re a slave. You have your own shit to do. State of mind helps.”
Without even realizing he was doing it at first, Miles noticed that his left hand was rubbing its thumb along the tips of its knuckles.
Henry sighed. “What do want, Miles? What do you actually want to do that you don’t already have?” he asked, frustrated. 49
Hero
“Who? You?”
Miles nodded.
“Am I gonna get child services called in here for working on minors because that is the most childish bullshit excuse I’ve ever hear in my-”
Miles’ visor began to flash erratically, as a new word would begin to form before breaking apart into static gibberish and repeating the cycle again. Droplets of water formed around his shirt. The shadow above Miles shrunk as Henry lowered his stature and in an awkward stretch, dabbed Miles’ eyes with the cleanest rag he had. Henry unhinged the visor from Miles’s jaw and began to probe the remaining damp chasm with pliers and brushes.
“I still think your problem is you haven’t been flossing,” Henry said.
From within the empty hole came the unnatural sound of gurgling, blue blood around clicking gears as the little bit of air that escaped Miles’ mouth tried its best to mimic the softness of laughter. For Miles, the room became darker after each heartbeat. He felt Henry’s hand pat his shoulder.
“You shouldn’t want to put yourself in front of people out there. People only get to being problems when they start clumping together round something else-”
The scraping sound of broken glass along jagged pavement scratched in from outside.
Both of them winced at the sound.
“Best to keep your distance from them. You’re too good for them anyway,” Henry finished. “Don’t worry, I’ll drive ya home after. Goodnight, princess.” 50
And with that, Miles fell asleep and woke up in his apartment with a sticky note on his forehead and the adhesive dripping onto his eyes. It read:
Your insides are all good, but your door handle could use some work. Take a night off, bud.
- H
Miles looked to the blank television, but he could still hear Roy Batty talk in his head. He pretended he could see glimmering c-beams and burning ships in the night as they glided along the gaseous oceans of stars. His vibrating phone dragged him back to his sticky wooden floor. It was Umor, again. A call this time. Miles waited for it to go to voicemail.
“Miles, hi. I-” Their voice cut off as the clomps of a stomping crowd in an echoed hall went by. “I think you should check, or...I dunno.” Umor’s inflection shook as they searched for the right words to convince Miles. “God, I hope this is going on voicemail. I think you need to check out the place those two people got killed last night. People around me- Oh, shit.”
Umor’s voice trailed off away from the mic as they spoke with unfamiliar voices. They murmured in hushed affirmations only the way that businessmen do. Miles crept to his window to hear the faint hum of sirens in the distance. His hands began to shake from thinking about approaching ambulances and the dead they cart. He felt around his jacket for his gun in a panic until he found it on his counter and pressed it against his chest. The hum, like an oncoming storm drew closer as the light flashed through Miles’ eyes and his sweat loosened the grip his fingers had on the pistol.
“You need to leave,” Umor blurted out, scaring Miles into putting his left hand through the wall, “and see what is happening down by that house because I’ve been hearing rumors from 51 congressmen around me and if you don’t see what’s going to happen, I don’t know if anyone will. Message me back. Bye, Miles.”
The ringer hung in the air as Miles hoped his phone would spontaneously start talking again, occupying his time so he wouldn’t have to go outside. He felt the bile from his stomach push up through his throat before being stopped by the visor’s filter, and slowly funneling back down his body.
Quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.
Step by step, gasping breath by subdued pant, Miles walked out of his room and before he knew it, he was already outside in the rain, another face in the blurring crowd. The water cleaned his face.
Taking a detour through the alleys, Miles kept himself hidden from the main street, worried. Once he reached the house’s street, Miles peeked his head out from behind a dumpster to look at the building’s outline across the street, barely visible through the liquid curtains splashing down. Dashing through the street like a phantom in the night, Miles got to the side of the building with a renewed confidence in his eyes in how his pseudo-espionage skills had improved. His pride was cut short once he saw the lady in front of the house staring straight at him. Like a child in front of his parents, Miles slowly shrank down into the shadows hoping she would forget about him once he had left her view.
Embracing the melancholy of the weather, the woman sighed and placed a wreath in front of the door, trying her best to keep it out of the rain. It had already stripped away a few petals and were now floating down the street. She stood solemnly, paying no attention to Miles, as she bowed her head in silence against the battering storm. A minute passed. 52
Cracking out in the night, disrupting the steady ambience of the weather, the rev of an engine and a hurdling wave of water came barreled in, signaling the arrival of a large van pulling up along the street. The side door flew open as two police officers surrounded the woman.
“You need to leave immediately,” said one of them mutely.
The woman twisted and shouted as the two men raised her by her arms and escorted her down the street before safely setting her down. During the commotion, Miles jotted to the side of the house facing away from the officers.
“G-get off me! I have a right to mourn! You can’t take that away!” she screamed as she smacked one of the officer’s faces completely to the side. The officer slowly turned his head back to face the woman, unblinking, gripped her hand in his own, and slowly lowered it to her side.
“This is an active crime scene. I will escort you to your home. What is your address?” he asked calmly.
“Fuck you! I don’t want to go home! Don’t you understand what I’m saying? I don’t want to!”
“Then I will escort you to the nearest public area. Please, come with me,” the officer said as he walked away tightly holding the woman by the arm.
On the back of his neck, the same light as before continued to flash to a steady rhythm.
Just as the one officer exited, their partner went to the back the van and came out leading a smaller figure by the arm as they went through the house’s the front door.
“Do you recognize these men?” the officer asked while they were inside. 53
There was silence. Unable to see what was happening inside, Miles crept over to the parked van to see if there was anything there. Aside from a bench bolted to the floor in between the cold steel walls and a set of handcuffs attached to a metal pole, the back was empty.
“Have you ever been to this house before? Do you know anyone that has?” the officer asked patiently.
Silence again.
Miles could hear the front door opening. He hid behind the far side of the van.
“I will take you to your guardians momentarily. Please, wait in the car until I am finished.”
Peaking his eye through the hinge on the backdoor, Miles saw someone cast a faint, ghostly shadow that was approaching the van. The color from the petals had dissolved into the water, and the rippling puddles now had faint circles of red swirling by the figure’s feet. The officer went back inside the house without closing the door and whoever the other person was had just entered the backdoor and sat down inside the van, barely even shifting the weight of the vehicle as they got in.
He could just as easily sneak away, but without access to the house and Umor’s message lingering in his head, Miles could feel his hand sliding along the door to peak at who just walked inside the van. His right hand still maintained a hesitated shake as it instinctively went towards his holster, but the left one slid along the backdoor with a confidence that Miles lacked when he crept up to the bodies the night before. Once he had a firm grip around the edge of the door,
Miles swung it open leaving himself bare but his weapon at the ready at a moment’s notice. 54
And the girl inside did see him. She turned her head with the same apathetic indifference the officers spoke with. She did not speak, but Miles instantly rushed her to put his hand over her mouth, making sure to use his left hand to discourage her from biting him. Oddly, she did not struggle, nor yelp, nor even so much as flinch. Now closer to her than before, Miles could see she couldn’t be older than 10, if that. Her hair was curled into little brown waves that hung over her calm eyes and soft face, which had been modified with some rouge, blush, and lipstick, all carefully applied without error. Aside from the makeup, she was dressed plainly in a colorless one-piece dress with a zipper on the back for easy dressing and removal.
Sorry
Miles slowly uncovered her mouth, put both his hands up, and took a careful step back.
His eyes darted back to the house for any sign of the officer. He looked back to the girl and pointed his finger at her to get her attention.
Safe?
He continued to run through a charade of hand gestures and one-word questions, each answered by the girl with a blank stare. Miles lulled over the implications of what this all meant, and then sped through how many of those ideas stemmed from his own paranoia and adrenaline.
The words flashed to new ones in faster increments and his hands shook as they grabbed his own hair and clawed down his face. He looked to the house and heard the encroaching knocks of footsteps.
When the officer returned, he looked inside the van to see where the girl had gone as
Miles ran through an alleyway tugging her by the arm. The only sign of agitation from the girl was her heavier breathing as they ran from block to block. Other than that, she was still placid 55 spare for an occasional confused glance. Going up the stairs of his building, Miles heard the wail of a siren echo outside, calling out to the city. They reached Miles’ door, which he barricaded closed with the chair by his desk once they got inside. He stuck his eye through the hole left from his broken doorknob, scanning the hallway to see if anyone had followed them.
The hallway was empty, but once Miles turned around, he saw the little creature no higher than his waistline, gumming one of his cassettes in the middle of the floor. Miles jumped to her in a panic and took the tape out of her mouth. He recoiled at as he wiped it down with the edge of his shirt. He patted his chest to get the girl’s attention.
Friend
He opened the girl’s hands and gently closed them around the cassette.
Not food
She blinked at him.
Hungry?
Miles fetched her an apple from the kitchen and cut it into slices. He handed them to her one at a time.
Eat
Her body was thin and tight, not starving but too neglected for a growing child. She eyed the pieces of fruit in her hands, furrowing her brow and looking up to him with worried eyes.
Please 56
Wedging the apple in her mouth and chewing excessively, she stretched her neck as a lump crawled down until stopping in a bulge in her throat. She began to cough and gag excessively as she fell to the floor and flailed her arms and legs. Miles rushed to her, raising her up by her shirt with one arm, and frantically smacked her back until she coughed up the chewed goo of the apple. Cupping the back of her head with his hand, Miles examined her closer.
Sorry
She elongated her neck again as she struggled with a smaller chunk left over that she was able to force down. As she did, Miles noticed a blemish along her neck, a deep scar that had been carefully sewn up. There were no scabs, nor fresh red spot of skin and muscle. It was all very dry, an old wound. Miles slowly moved her chin up to inspect it further, but the girl recoiled and ran to a corner of the room, cowering in a ball.
He approached her with a glass of water, but every step he took towards her made the girl’s body more tense as she hugged herself tight enough for her veins to rise to surface of her skin. With his head hung low and his hand rubbing the bridge of his nose, Miles put the glass on the floor and went through his nightly routine again of dismantling himself in the bathroom until he was left as the shambling corpse he was used to. As he limped back to his bed, Miles caught a glimpse of his reflection. His eyes widened and his head turned to the girl when he realized how he must look tom her. Miles froze in place and raised his hand as an attempt to convey to her that the naked, dismembered man was not a threat. The balance on his crutch shifted and Miles fell to the ground like a wet towel. Using his one arm as a paddle, he scrambled to his bed, away from the girl. Though, she remained still. Not only had she picked up the water and already finished it, but the sight of a nude, incomplete jigsaw of a man did not startle her. She remained still, staring at him, blinking occasionally. 57
Miles tossed his pillow and blanket towards her, giving her something more than the floor to sleep on, and pulled out another burner phone from his jacket hanging off the edge of the bed. A faint glow irradiated off the little rectangle as Miles sent out two messages.
I found something at the house. We need to meet up tomorrow.
I need to use your shop tomorrow. I’ll be bringing someone.
With the sputtering of lighted signs coming from his window, Miles grabbed the copy of
Mythologia Collectionis 1,000 Fabulae Graecae he had gotten from the pit earlier that day. The book was organized by each god; Miles turned to the one for Zeus for the momentary power fantasy. Henry had already messaged him back.
Who’re ya bringin
Miles began to type back.
Umor. A friend.
What's this about?
A girl.
Well, you work quickly. What’s her name?
It occurred to him that the second person joining him was still anonymous, and Henry could hardly take, “I don’t know,” for an answer. Miles looked to check on the girl, and his eyes softened when he saw the wooly blanket wrapped around her petite body and her arms squeezing the pillow close. He could still see the trench of a scar lining her neck. He winced, turning away from her and back to his book. There was a hand drawn picture in the introduction of a girl, beautifully free as they wandered a field in drapes but still somehow innocent looking as they 58 twirled in the sparkling rows of wheat. There was another picture next to it, but, like the rest of its story, the pages were smudged with dirt beyond recognition or just torn out entirely.
Disappointed, flipped back to the original picture and looked at its title for who he assumed was for the girl in the picture. He messaged Henry.
Leda. We’ll talk about her tomorrow.
Haplessly, Miles went on to read a different myth with more complete pages, settling for
Achilles’ rampage during The Iliad.
But, if he had the book in its entirety, he would’ve seen the meticulously drawing of Leda and a swan.
A gust of wind reached down from the golden, heavenly clouds, gradually solidifying into a swan with feathers of silk. The swan loomed over a soft skinned woman, unblemished, that carried a certain innocence in how she spread her body along a flat rock that reflected the light seeping from the clouds onto the fresh dew of the surrounding garden. Cast in the ethereal shine, the swan wrapped its arms around the woman, mounting her, and gripped her neck with its beak, causing her torso to writhe and her back to arch. Its vulturous claws broke the skin of her thighs and joined the blood dripping from the beak in a crimson smear along the side of the rock.
59
Chapter 3
A Real Hero
Miles never slept that night, always looking back and forth between the story, the notes, and the girl he had named in the back corner until he lacked the mental strength to see what he was looking at, but still refused to let himself drift off. That is, he never slept at night. He slept in the morning for a resounding thirty minutes of rest before the alarm he set went off. When he awoke, Miles put his visor on and looked to see that Leda was missing and began to look around frantically.
Leda?
He reached for his arm and leg by his bedstand to get up and find her, but also to his surprise, he couldn’t find them either. Then, bumbling out from the kitchen, Leda was barely clutching onto his arm and doing circles as she ran with it towards his leg sitting upright in the middle of the room, eventually coming to a cataclysmic collision once she made a labored swing with the arm at the leg, knocking it down. Completely satisfied with herself, Leda bounced up and down with a triumphant smile on her face. Once she saw Miles staring back at her, her smile quickly departed, leaving her with the familiar look of a blank slate. Miles meekly raised his hand and lightly waved at her.
Hi
Without a moment to waste, Leda immediately grabbed the limbs and dragged them into the bathroom.
Wait 60
Then, she closed the door behind her.
Leg...
It was too late though. The door was already closed, so after rubbing his forehead with his palm, Miles hobbled over to the bathroom only to find that Leda was currently trying her best to flush them down the toilet, frantically, like she were trying to hide them. For a moment, Miles was motionless, his eyes darting between Leda and his arm that bounced like a surprisingly good buoy in the murky, diluted water. Seizing back his prosthetics, Miles dried them with his shirt, realized his mistake, and then stood them in his sink where they caught a soft dribbling of water over half of their surface area while the other half was jutting outside of the bowl. After heaving his chest, he looked at Leda who was backing up as she partially hid her head in her hands and winced a little more each time Miles got closer to her.
It’s ok
Miles petted her head just enough to tussle her hair.
Not mad
She lowered her hands, still not smiling, but had upgraded her expression from blankness to curiosity. Then, a low grumble pushed against Miles’ empty stomach, and he remembered he hadn’t had any food in over a day. Miles extended an open hand to Leda.
Breakfast
Then, fitting Leda’s entire hand in his palm, Miles led the child into the kitchen. Both their meals were prepared by blender, Miles making sure to only put soluble fruits in Leda’s so that she could drink it (And because he remembered how he’d only willingly eat fruits as child). 61
For himself, Miles included enough vegetables and eggs to give him the strength his prosthetics sucked the life out of so easily. The mashed blend was then mixed with a special fluid that broke down the food into a thin liquid that Miles injected into his arms with an IV. Miles gave her the few plates and glasses her had so that she had something to play with as he finished the extensive meal by injection process.
Coordinating times over text, Miles set up a plan to meet Umor and Henry at the garage later in the evening. For now, Miles simply watched the girl run circles around the kitchen table before jumping onto the bed with the broken springs and being absorbed by enclosing mattress.
With a heartbeat Miles could feel pound a little more warmness into his chest, he went to the bathroom to attach his limbs and chase Leda around the apartment. Her giggles and pet-like behavior gave Miles some assurance that this was how they should interact. Once she tuckered out, they spent the rest of their time watching Miles’ collection of incomplete tapes. The strange one-sided conversation regarding her newfound name was unceremonious if anything. Like with everything except for juvenile play, she had no visible reaction. Though, she was able to register that Miles was using the name to address her, which Miles assumed from her gradual nods.
Despite that, this gift was seemingly inconsequential to her as if there was no understood importance.
Eventually, though, it was time to leave, and after an awkward negotiation, convinced
Leda to travel with him inside an over the shoulder bag to avoid being spotted. He looked at her tiny body snuggle into the bag, looking at him with an implicit trust that widened as her pupils did. He briefly thought if he could ever have one of his own but blew the thought off when he reminded himself he wasn’t good for making papers let alone a child. Then, Miles felt the gap between his legs, the one piece he had neglected to put on in the morning. 62
Wait
And with that, Miles’ posture shrunk as he went back to the bathroom to attach the cap by his groin. He could imagine the voices of others in his head drown his own thoughts out, laughing at him, and what was he to do? He acknowledged the self-mockery with a begrudging glance in the mirror as the sulking man with his pants down. Gulping his pride down, Miles dressed back up, took the folder he found with the list of names, and walked out the door with
Leda in his bag.
“Miles,” someone called out once he closed the broken door behind him. His joints stiffened and his eyes darted around the hallway to see who called out, to see if he had already been found. Then, he saw the fat neighbor through the opening in his door across the hall, still staring forward as the grease puddle on his shirt widened by the day. “There’s an amber alert in town.” Miles remained still, but now eyed the stairs as he anticipated a trap. “You be careful out there. I need you for my nightly intermissions from everything on tv,” the man said as his laugh devolved into a whooping cough. And with that, Miles slowly raised a thumbs up and continued down the stairs and to the outside with his bagged companion.
They crossed the city streets just as the especially intricate holograms and lights were coming on for the nightlife. He could feel the insides of his bag rumble and shift its weight and eventually the flap of the bag would slightly graze the back of Miles’ head. He could see the top of her head barely peeking out from the bag, which he thought was fine. Whatever people were actually on the street just kept looking forward, trying to navigate between the digital and the physical. Occasionally, someone would gasp or let out a pitiful, “Oh no” when they saw the amber alert, but most of them stayed silent amongst the buzzing chatter of the super models and the same talking heads that teleported to you after every five or so steps. 63
When they got to Henry’s Umor had yet to arrive. Miles could hear Henry cursing in the back of the shop, and the one man from yesterday that played with his eye was currently sucking on it as he stared straight ahead. The crowds outside, whether real or not, were still there either way, so Miles walked to the windowless backroom before setting the bag down gently.
Henry was still rummaging through a pile of scraps, haphazardly tossing slabs of metal and handfuls of bolts and wire onto the floor.
“Miles, Miles!” Henry exclaimed still laughing, “You’ll guess this, so a customer from last week, the one with the arm replacement and the problem down under? Well, he came in yesterday after you left, and granted I was a little tipsy. For him not for you. I’m always professional with you, but he told me again about what he needed to get changed. So, we do the operation, his friend picks him up, then I get a message in the morning that says, ‘Doc, I gotta thank you. My arm does feel a little smaller than it was before, granted, but my-”
Henry paused mid-motion once he turned around to see a tiny girl blowing raspberries in her mouth as she ran around Miles seated on the operating chair.
“Ah,” Henry said with the elevated pitch of shock in his voice, his pupils contracting as his face was still frozen mid-punchline. “Miles, can I speak with ya for a moment?”
Before Miles could respond, Henry had already grabbed his ear and began to drag Miles to the corner of the room while he was still in the chair and had tossed Leda the lint and bag of chips from his pocket to keep her too distracted to run around, which to his surprise, they did.
“Hi, if I don’t get arrested by the end of the week, I’ll be your Uncle Henry. We’ll be back in just a second,” he said sarcastically to Leda as he continued to drag Miles across the room. 64
Grabbing the sides of the chair and pinning it against the corner of the garage and placing himself in between Miles and the rest of the room, Henry’s lips forced themselves into a fake, stretched smile as he short bursts of breath escaped through the gaps in his teeth.
“Miles, and uh, forgive me if I sound...insensitive, but where do you get the balls?”
Henry demanded.
Trouble
“Yeah, ya will be when I attach your mouth to your ass, so people’ll know what to expect when you start talkin’ out of it!”
Miles shook his head and pointed to Leda, trying to convey that she was the one in trouble, while she was testing the stretchability of Henry’s pocket lint before it broke apart.
“She was in trouble, or is she in trouble now? Because there have been amber alerts all around the city, so people gotta be looking for her, and now you’ve had the epiphany of the century by dragging her into my garage and-”
Henry stopped as the entrance’s rusty bell chime clicked against the door, and the slow beating of footsteps entered the main hall of Henry’s shop.
“Excuse me, do you know if anyone else is here?” the voice asked.
The man that liked to play with his eye by the front grumbled and spat something onto the floor, causing him to hack up phlegm onto the ground as well. The sound of crisp bills being pulled out a wallet and placed in the man’s hand traveled through the hallway.
“Yeah, over there,” the man spat out.
“Thank you,” the other voice said graciously. 65
Then came Umor, walking into the room draped in a white suit both silky yet firm that reflected the light like washed feathers in the sun. They carried themselves with a proud posture, head and shoulders above everyone else in the room, so Umor did not see Leda when the sitting girl only came up to their shins. What they did see was Henry standing before them, sizing Umor up. Umor extended a hand to Henry, who after looking at the grime on his own hand, rubbed his palm along the already stained fabrics of his thinning work shirt. Umor looked at the stains on
Henry’s shirt that had become dark and crusted. Their hand retracted slightly.
“Oh, haha, it’s not what you think,” said in a friendly voice.
They shook hands. “Oh, of course-”
“It’s semen,” Henry said, still shaking.
Umor pulled their hand back, their face scrunched up from disgust. “Figures.”
“Oh, you did think it was that. I’m sorry. I was trying to be courteous. Would you like a fruit drink?”
Umor stood their ground. “Sure, thank you,” they said with a cordial pleasantness voice that had been infiltrated with the undertones of bitterness and contempt.
“We don’t have any.” After a brief pause, Henry gestured into the room. “Please, come in.”
As Umor walked past Henry to enter the room, they felt the light push of something soft against the sole of their shoe and looked up to see a little girl they’d inadvertently bumped into.
“Ah. So, this must be Leda?” Umor calmly asked Miles. “It’s nice to meet you, Leda,”
Umor said, still looking at the two men. Umor joined them in the corner. “Hi, Miles,” Umor said, which Miles then reciprocated with a light wave in between Henry’s two arms that were still 66 gripping either side of his seat. “I’m Umor. Pleasure to meet you,” they send extending their hand to Henry and their face breaking apart and forming a new one, just to seem more authentic.
“Ok. That’s new,” Henry said as his pupils shrunk, his eyebrow raised, and his lips pursed, “and, uh,” Henry muttered as he lightly gripped one of Umor’s fingers between his thumb and forefinger in a shaking motion, “don’t take this the wrong way, but considering we just met, I don’t really know where your hands have been.”
“I-I,” Umor began, slowly retracting their hand, “I’m running for senator...in this state...in your state.”
“Oh. Well yeah, I knew that, but uh, good luck with that whole shindig there,” Henry said in an empty tone.
“Do you,” Umor cocked their eyebrows while still forcing a now wavering smile, “do you just not pay attention to important decisions in your life?” they asked.
“No, no, don’t put words in my mouth,” Henry started, “I think very hard about what underwear I’m gonna put on in ta mornin’.”
Move please
Miles wedged himself between Henry’s two hands and placed a friendly hand on each of their shoulders, as the smile on Umor’s face shrunk, fell off, and slowly began to crawl onto
Henry’s. The trio got up and walked to the center of the room as Miles pulled up a table and three chairs from one of Henry’s scrap piles.
“They’re blue, by the way, in case you were wondering,” Henry mused.
“Great,” Umor replied. 67
“With a hint of mustard.”
“I’m so happy for you,” Umor said, still walking forward.
Each of them sat down by the table, which occasionally bumped and shifted from Leda knocking the legs of it until Miles gently pulled her up by the collar of her shirt and gave her the cleanest spring he could find from the same junkpile as the table and chairs. Sitting in between them, Miles looked at Henry and Umor who were still staring one another down.
Leda
They looked at Miles.
Trouble
Helped
Um
He looked at Henry.
Paper?
“By the front. In the drawer. Should be a pen on the desk too,” Henry said as Miles went to get the utensils to tell his story. Upon returning, Miles began to scribble intensely, sheet after sheet.
In the silence, Umor’s shoulders broadened as their chest stiffened, creating a frame that dwarfed Henry’s plump body. A smirk crept along their face.
“Oo-more?” Henry sounded out. “Your parents come up with that when they fucked?” 68
Umor’s smirk inverted itself while their body shrunk, pushing the skin together to make new wrinkles on their face. “It’s Latin,” they said.
“Oh, a scholar,” Henry smiled. “Did a librarian come up with that for ya?”
Umor bowed their head, while their eyes turned to Miles begging for him to intervene, which Miles reciprocated with a scowl directed at Henry.
“Makes for good dinner conversation I suppose,” Henry shrugged off, “Speaking of which, how is it exactly you know Miles?” Henry asked, lightly pushing Leda away from climbing up the tabletop.
Umor’s body began to reshape, shrinking into a smaller woman with a head of hair that rolled over her shoulders. “We’re old friends. I knew him before I went to the capital for work.”
“So, I take it that was before...” Henry said as he held his own arm and gestured towards
Miles. Miles raised his eyes before nodding slightly, then returned to his writing, but now at a slower pace. “You don’t know what happened to him do ya?”
Miles’ left side began to shake.
Umor’s frame rose again. The hair on their shoulder was replaced with the stubble on their chin. They looked forward, unblinking. “No. It was just after I left,” they answered sternly.
Miles dropped the pen and right arm uncurled slowly like a bending branch towards his coat pocket, which it almost entered but instead rested atop, still shaking. His left arm grabbed the bench and made indents in the table until the pressure was too much and snapped a piece off with a crack that shot into the air. At the sound, Umor’s head snapped to where Miles’ right hand had gone. 69
“No!” Umor cried as they lunged to push Miles’ hand away from his pocket. Henry jumped out of his seat from the sudden jerk of the table. Leda ran to the junk pile and made a makeshift shield from the sheets of tinfoil she found.
“For fuck’s sake!” Henry yelled, pushing Umor back into their seat with a single pop from his open hand against Umor’s collarbone. “What the hell are you doing?” Henry put both of his hands on Miles’ shoulders. “It’s ok. You’re ok. Calm down. Just write. Just keep writing.”
The bellowing palpitations of Miles’ chest and twitching fingers He turned to Umor again.
“Why?” he asked
“He was reaching for his gun!” Umor yelped.
“Lower,” Henry lowly growled as he patted Miles’ shoulder, “your voice. He’s sensitive bout that shit is all. He wasn’t gonna do anything he never does, and what are you fuckin’ psychic? You know he has a gun in there?” Henry asked but walked back a shake of his head and rub of his neck as he admitted in his own head that it was a gun that was in Miles’ pocket. “Ya said ya were his friend. You never seen em do that before?”
Umor’s face and body were still shifting around separate forms, mimicking the heavy breathing Miles has made a second ago. Their eyes trained on Miles as their mind completed the picture of him pulling out his gun and unloading several rounds with stiff arms and a quivering lip. “No,” they answered, “He must have picked it up...afterwards.”
“Hm,” Henry let out under his breath, sitting back down. “He never told ya what happened to em either, did he? He just tells me he doesn’t remember.”
Miles saw Leda staring at him from on the ground, confused and frightened. He reeled himself in, tensing his body until the shakes in his muscles wore out and dissipated. All he felt 70 was guilt from the uneasy looks from all his friends trying to maintain their composure with a ticking bomb sitting with them at the table. What hurt Miles the most was that it wasn’t even anger that fueled him in those moments, it was just his natural reaction to thinking about those things.
“No.” Umor looked at the damp, metal plated walls and rusted junk decor in the room around them. “I guess you fixed him up?”
“Yeah,” Henry nodded
Miles continued to put pen to paper, but his writing devolved into random scribbling once he dropped his head and pushed it against the edge of the table, his hands gripping his hair and dug his nails into his scalp. Henry rubbed the back of Miles’ shoulder, giving him more positive affirmations, which after a moment of observation, Umor followed suit with. Eventually, Leda waddled over to the table and cocked her head at the odd touching ritual in front of her, which she joined in by balancing a screwdriver on Miles’ head. Once Miles shifted his weight, the screwdriver slipped off and bounced off Miles’ knee, startling him enough to tip his chair back almost to the point of falling, but Henry grabbed one of its legs and got the balance back. Henry and Umor started chuckling, and Miles pulled Leda to his side with arm wrapped around her back and extending up to her head, which he proceeded to rub until she smiled. They all sat still for a moment in the room, watching the tiny clouds of dust lazily fall through the one beam of light from the only window.
“So,” Umor finally breaking up the silence, “let’s see what you got here,” they said, sliding what Miles had written over to their side of the table. 71
Umor began reading, occasionally asking Miles what word a scribble was supposed to say. They were eventually joined by Henry who had crossed from the mediating barrier Miles had made between the three of them and sat himself next to Umor so he could read the story as well.
“What are the blinking lights you’re talking bout? The ones on the guys with Leda?”
Henry asked a few pages in, which Miles answered with a shrug.
“Emotional dampeners,” Umor murmured to Henry.
“Oh, the ED’s,” Henry said. Raising an eyebrow, he looked at Miles. “Those are just for cops though, right?”
“It sounds like that’s what he was describing, and it explains why they were behaving so strangely,” Umor said.
Shaking his head, Miles furrowed his brow and leaned in closer to demand an explanation.
“You don’t know what those are?” asked Henry. “You’re a journalist, and you don’t know what those are?”
Miles shook his head again. He actively avoided any news involving the police with extreme prejudice. It wasn’t pleasant for him to think about.
“Well, they’re augmentations, but not like the tooth and nail stuff I work with. It’s more eh-”
“They do what the name says, dampen emotions,” Umor interrupted. “I’ve had to be briefed on them throughout my campaigning. They’re newer, made as a response to the uptick in 72 shootings against augmented,” Umor said, lowering their voice and shrinking their frame ever so slightly in the last sentence. “They’re implants that hook into the back of a person’s head and send painless shocks that turn off some the nerve receptors to the amygdala, where emotions come from, essentially.”
“So, cops don’t care if they take shit cause it don’t bother them. Don’t get scared or angry. They just do as they’re told-”
“It doesn’t inhibit critical thinking at all. They’re not drones, and the dampeners get taken out when they’re off duty,” Umor spoke up again in a higher pitch.
“So, what do you do about ones that still act up?” Henry asked.
Umor winced and looked to see how Miles had reacted to that. Luckily, he’d already wandered off occupied with Leda as she tried to show him a piece of scrap she found in a strange shape.
“That’s what the dampeners are for. It cuts out irrational fear and excitement-”
“What makes em human?”
Umor was taken aback with wide eyes and a smile in disbelief. “There is a stark difference between thinking rationally and being human, and if you did your research on modern police behavior before you said anything, you’d probably have things worth listening to, and I don’t appreciate the idea that an augmentation would make them less human,” Umor sneered in their rising voice as they body shimmered into a new form. 73
Henry snorted out a chuckle. “You really don’t realize who my clientele is, do you? I get my information from other people that say they know what they’re talking about. Where do you get it from?”
Umor waved a dismissive hand, frustrated. “From people who know what they’re talking about. Cases with police have gone down drastically.”
“But not entirely?”
The two of them jumped, startled by the clattering of Miles accidentally dropping a bin of old computers for him and Leda to look at. Leda, blushing, skittered behind Miles’ leg to hide, barely peeking her head out to see if the two strange people at the table were still looking at her.
Everyone smirked at the silly reprieve and went back to what they were doing.
“There are always exceptions. No solution is perfect,” Umor said in a calmer voice.
“What happens with them?”
“I-I don’t know really-”
“Oh, so this part you don’t know?”
“I can’t know everything. I’m only human. I can assure you, though, that where we are now is better than the kinds of things we dealt with in the past.”
Henry looked at them, puzzled. “What kinds of problems have we ever had in the past about this? This ED shit is all newer stuff to me.”
Umor grimaced and sighed deeply. “Sometimes it’s more productive to have people forget past troubles to move on than to dwell on them.” 74
“Mm, cryptic. Very appreciated.” He looked over at Miles and whistled at him to get his attention. “...see why I don’t talk to these people. It’s pulling teeth when I don’t have any cavities until I open my mouth. I thought ya did journalist shit on the side. Ya don’t keep up with what the cops are doing? Even I noticed this.”
Miles felt around his neck where he saw the ED’s on the cops from the night before and wondered how cold, sharp metal would feel in between the folds of moist tissue in his brain.
“I guess he doesn’t, and even if he did it doesn’t explain why they weren’t in uniform.”
Umor said. “So, this is it, huh?” they asked as the fingered through the pages Miles had written.
“In ten words or less...just for clarity’s sake...why?”
Miles put down the computer he was taking apart with Leda and wandered back to his seat unenthusiastically. Leda stayed where she was with the scraps, fiddling with them. He flipped through the pages he’d written and pointed at a single sentence.
She looked like she needed help.
Umor sighed but still softened their eyes like their pet was begging to them. “Is that it?”
Scowling, Miles pointed at the same sentence.
Umor threw up their hands. “Alright. It’s a reason. Anything else you want to tell us?”
At that comment, Miles’ eyes lit up as he dove his hand once more into his jacket, still causing Umor’s body to stiffen slightly, and pulled out the envelope from the murder house. It was now beginning to brown and crust from the dust and rain. Henry quickly shrugged off the names, but Umor’s eyes went over the names line by line like words appearing on the papers of a typewriter. Their face didn’t stray away from the page for a moment. 75
“I recognize some of these names,” they said. “I don’t know them as much as I know of them, but...” Umor trailed off as they finally looked away from the paper and stared out into the open air. “I don’t see the correlation between them. Some are repeat lobbyists, senators, just people that push money around.” They continued to look over the pages of the folder and the story, eyes snapping from one to the other. “I’ll take this back with me to see what I can find,”
Umor said, about to grab the folder before Miles grabbed it as well, shooting them a concerned look. “I’ll be discrete given that we don’t even know what we’re getting into yet...premature whistleblowing maybe.”
Miles loosened his grip, but still held on for a few more seconds before letting go completely.
“It’s probably about time I go anyways,” Umor said with a smile. “I’ll message you whenever I have something.” Umor began to walk out of the room but stopped themselves in the doorway. “It was nice meeting you...Leda?” they asked, which Miles nodded at, and after observing him, Leda nodded at too. “And I know I can count on your vote in a week, Henry,”
Umor smiled as they left room.
“Heh, heh. Don’t push it, sweetheart,” Henry grimaced.
The store’s door clinked shut behind Umor, leaving Miles and Henry scratching their heads as they looked at Leda, who was beginning to invent jacks for herself with a box of nails and a coagulated ball of grime. Henry bounced up to put back what Leda had disorganized from his pile of junk while Miles wiped her hands with his shirt and experimented to see if she reacted to peekaboo. She laughed depending on how hard he made his eyes bulge. 76
“Are ya sure she was in trouble? I know ya didn’t know what the ED’s were, but still...”
Henry said.
Miles nodded his head confidently.
Henry chuckled. “Even if ya didn’t it’s not like I have any alternatives. I’m still shaky about your glass friend, but they seem to be on your side just as much too,” he kidded as he elbowed Miles’ arm. Henry’s face stretched into a lecturing scowl. “Do ya know that trouble could’ve been in if they weren’t?’ he asked.
Miles stopped nodding, but lightly tickled Leda’s face with his finger so that she raised her head, revealing the long ravine of a scar on her neck. He looked to Henry with pleading eyes.
“Look, buddy. I know it may have felt right, but we don’t know what this is. Has she tried to explain where her home is? What she was doing?”
Miles shook quickly and met Henry with the same gaze.
Honest
Henry sighed. “Option A, there was nothin’ wrong, and you just kidnapped her, which is no good, but what’s worse is option B, where there is somethin’ wrong, and now we got a fucked up kid, that you still kidnapped that’s part of something big and bad enough that they didn’t care they were taking a fucked up kid to a murder house, and now we’re in on it one way or another-
What are you doing?”
Miles was covering Leda’s ears with both his palms.
Swearing 77
“What does it matter...if she can’t say them after I do?” Henry explained with flippant hand motions at each syllable.
Miles squinted his eyes and leaned his head closer to Henry, while still shielding Leda’s ears.
Swearing
Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose and smoothed out his hair. “May you please escort the princess out of my presence, so I don’t have to think about her before I go upstairs and make my bald man cry before bed from some good literature, please?”
Miles snorted an amused puff of air through his nose, took Leda’s hand and tried to escort her out of the room, but she was intent on standing in front of Henry a moment longer.
“Whadya want? A parting gift?” Henry asked.
Leda did not move.
“Um, uh,” Henry muttered as he rummaged his hands through the random pile of scraps he just reorganized. “Here’s a fork. Happy birthday,” Henry said as he handed her the one thing he could bare to part with, which after a gleeful smile, she used to poke Miles’ leg, chasing him around the room as he tried to weave out her way. Henry chuckled to himself as he watched
Miles use his nimble footwork to evade the terror of a cracked child with a utensil.
After a few circles around the room, Miles scooped Leda up and cradled her out of the room.
Bye 78
“Take care of yourselves, and lemme know if Umami has anything to say,” Henry snickered as he shut the garage door behind them.
Miles scooped Leda up, had her hop in the bag (much faster this time) and walked her home as she watched the sparkling people dance in the sky. When they got home, Leda chased
Miles around his apartment until they passed fell onto the chair from exhaustion where they slept until morning. Once he woke up, Miles checked to see which of his burner phones was vibrating.
He took the call.
“It’s Umor. This is big. We’ll meet tonight. I’ll send the time and address to one of your other phones later.”
Miles felt the warmness in his chest sink as the dial tone played and Leda woke up next to him with a smile.
79
Chapter 4
No Love
Miles did not play as enthusiastically with Leda throughout that day. Though he still ran with her for the three seconds it took to cover the length of his apartment, there was hardly as much vigor in Miles as the day before.
Carrying over from the night before, Miles began to add to the thoughts he jotted down for Henry and Umor. He took some solace in the notes he was writing, which gradually evolved into an improvised story. Granted, it still wasn’t very good and much of it consisted of whatever childishly fulfilling adventures Miles imagined Roy Batty had with his friends, but the moments of contemplation created a sort of solace.
But time still passed. Miles went through the motions of visiting the pit and Henry’s shop but now with Leda in the barrel bag slung over his shoulder. Whenever Miles was completely sure that all they were passing by was only holographic people, he let Leda pop her head out to look out at the world around them. Occasionally, Miles would stand in the middle of the sidewalk, waiting for the buzzing, light people to approach him. Leda covered her eyes and winced once the collision of people seemed inevitable but then quivering mouth stretched into a wide smile and bulbous eyes when the person in front of them flickered against Miles. For a moment, they broke apart at what seemed to be at the atomic level, reshaping into a flurry of spinning lines of color like a galaxy forming before readjusting itself into another avid shopper on the same path it was before. He chuckled every time at her insatiable amusement at the most mundane things. Each of the buzzing, luminous people on their set tracks would reenact the same 80 basic motions throughout the day: staring at the ground, groups of small talk, and walking in and out of stores, all a mutually agreed upon constant illusion of togetherness.
Whenever Miles looked up at the stacks of blocked housing, he could see flickering lights buzz from the separated windows, which also gave him the idea to show Leda a distanced light show of the local club, Earthly Delights. “Distanced,” was the operative word. He had no intent of letting Leda have the slightest idea of the aimless, stimulus driven insanity that occurred in there. Oddly enough, though, when Miles was barely within eyeshot of the club, Leda’s sporadic bouncing ceased, and her head sulked in the same demeanor it had when he first met her. He quickly turned tale to avoid her seeing it further. He wasn’t sure what it was about the building that made Leda behave so, but Miles was still glad enough to have someone else so instinctually repulsed by that place as he was.
A shake within his jacket pocket signaled the end of the fun when Miles saw the message from Umor.
Midnight tonight by the outskirts of town near the gate. Best to leave Leda with Henry for this.
Perpetuating insomnia aside, the hour of the meeting and specifications on Leda’s exclusion only served to make Miles’ heartbeat heavier. After messaging Henry once they had gotten back to the apartment, and a brief but colorful exchange of texts, Miles knew that Henry would be unable to take Leda. Henry would be wrapping up his last tune up for the day with a client that would likely have some questions about the jarring inclusion of a bouncing girl from the news in a shop of disembodied scraps. By ten o’clock, Miles was glued to his chair, his hands clasped together and thumbs continuously overlapping one another, as his mind rolled around 81 trying to figure out where to do with Leda in his absence. She was occupied enough when he was around, often tugging at a tiny handful of his hear to goad him into moving around with her, but
Miles wasn’t sure how she’d handle herself in isolation. He attempted a few pseudo experiments by leaving the main room and peeking through a slight opening in the bathroom door. Leda responded by lasting a whole three minutes before she tried to climb onto the elevated countertop and use the curved edge as a tightrope. Immediately scooping her up and sitting her on the plushy bed that subsequently caved in around her like a cocoon, Miles paced the room, searching his mind for anyone else that would keep her somewhere safe enough for a night.
Miles knocked three times on his neighbor’s door across the hall, resting his forehead on the door as he made a deep sigh.
“Come in?” his neighbor answered, perplexed.
The bubbling blob was still wedged between the two armrests of his sofa, and the browning stains that covered his shirt permeated throughout the rest of the room, covering the walls and floor. Amidst the darkened room, the television put a spotlight on his wobbling face that was in the middle of sucking down the meat from a piece of chicken.
“Um,” he said, stopping himself to gulp down some skin, “can I help you, Miles?”
Scratching his head and trying to charade with his hands, Miles gave up with a shrug after a few gestures and reached behind him, picking up Leda from underneath both her arms and holding her in front of himself like a ragdoll toy.
Cousin
Miles set Leda down and pointed at his neighbor who chewed inquisitively. 82
Babysitter?
“Well, I don’t wanna miss my program...” he said looking back forth between his screen and Leda.
Searching the back pocket of his pants, Miles pulled out a meager bunched handful of one's and held them in front of the neighbor.
Please
Met with continued silence, the wad of money limped in Miles’ hands until he noticed the stack of menus on the stand next to the sofa. He picked a few up and began to fan them in his hand like a deck of cards in the hands of a bluffing dealer.
My treat
“You’ll order?” the neighbor questioned optimistically but still stroking the folds of his chin at the extensive implications of this transaction. He looked back at Leda. “Is she house trained?” he jokingly asked.
It took Miles a few moments of contemplative silence, staring into space, before he realized he should probably answer the question.
Yes
“Well, uh, alright. For how long?”
The night 83
The neighbor looked at Leda again and tried to meet her stature by getting out of the sofa to greet her, but after the friction from the leather burned the sides of his rolls, he sat back down again.
“Make yourself comfortable, tike,” he moped.
Leda was looking back and forth between Miles and the neighbor in a frenzy. She began to walk to the exit and tug at Miles’ pant legs in the direction of their apartment. Dropping to a knee, Miles brushed away some of her hair that had fallen over her eyes and put his arms on her shoulders.
I’ll be
Leda cocked her head.
Back
I’ll be
Back
Her eyes still shook with unease. After a brief rodeo of placing Leda back in the neighbor’s apartment after she followed Miles out the door and Miles placing her back inside each time, Leda stood still as Miles slowly shut the door, waving to her as he did. As he walked down the hallway, Miles could hear his neighbor talk about all the news on the television and how important it was to take in as much as you could to understand what was happening outside and respond responsibly and appropriately. Realizing his situation, Miles understood that if his neighbor ever saw something about Leda on the television, he would probably call the police. 84
When Miles was on the streets alone, they no longer twinkled and danced as they had when Leda was with him. The flashes of swirling, imploding lights that rolled over his body had now become uglier static that obscured his vision in a chorus line of white noise obscuring his vision so much he didn’t know it was raining until he felt the goosebumps on his neck shiver. He reached the city’s perimeter, and he waited another thirty minutes next to the same stadium he had first met Umor by, which they were currently in the throes of another rally.
Waiting, waiting, and waiting still for Umor to finish their speech, Miles surveyed his surroundings as he never usually came this way. He never needed to. The city walls, let alone the fact that there even were city walls, looked gated, enclosed. There was only one exit he could see, a long tunnel in the middle of the high stacked walls that lost their metal sheen to give way to more crusted graffiti the closer it was to the exit. The exit, a gaping hole much like that of the pit, but with the kernel of a speck of light at the epicenter piercing through what could’ve been miles of tunnel. The exit was constantly guarded by armed officers. Of course, Miles always wanted to leave through the tunnel, but there were parameters put in place by city officials to discourage wealthier citizens from shirking away from social responsibilities and leaving worse off citizens in the rut with no ladder to climb. Unofficially, there was a great deal of social shaming involved by shouting down people that wanted to leave with accusations of cowardice, selfishness, and weak moral fiber, but what kept most people away was the fine. Anyone who weathered the social death would have to pay a heavy fee to the city as compensation for them severing ties with the city and insulting the city’s belief of cultural unity. Miles was never able to afford the fine. The shrill cheering disrupted his train of thought.
Miles turned to the stadium to the sound of roaring crowds and saw the faces behind those sounds on the massive screen floating above the modern colosseum. Cheers and jeers alike, 85 everyone he saw moved in animalistic harmony with each other, the screen capturing slow motion crawls of their gaping, slobbering mouths dousing the writhing bodies around them as they threw their hands up in surrender to the moment of collective ecstasy and their cracked red, bloodshot eyes not looking away from the people on stage even for a second. The packed bodies carried the energy of the room from one vessel to the next; as one body stiffened with excitement it brushed against the people next to them, causing them to also straighten their bodies, and the feeling spread until everyone else in the audience shared the same intensity. They were erratic, stimulus driven, like prodding a desperate child in a cage. It made Miles wince, and he hoped his neighbor wasn’t forcing Leda to watch this.
There were a few stragglers outside the stadium separated from the building by a line of unflinching officers, each of them with the blinking light on the back of their heads Miles had seen before. The stragglers were mainly non-augmented, cut off from the rest of the herd inside, wandering around like strays. They’d yell things like “turncoat” and throw enough glass and discarded brick the officers’ way. The officers did not move, nor wince, nor talk amongst themselves.
As one of the stragglers was snapping a piece of glass to give it a sharper edge, he felt a heavy splash of water from a puddle behind him wet the back of pants and turned around to see
Miles towering above him. The straggler pushed Miles’ chest only to knock himself further away, and after hearing his friends laugh at his uselessness, he struck at Miles’ chest with the glass. At least, he tried to. He was unable to push through the grip Miles had on it with his right hand. After a failed battle of using the entirety of his body weight to barely move the glass, the straggler backed down only to realize that he had cut his own hands from forcing the glass 86 against his skin so hard. Seeing this, Miles made a point of showing the deep cut on his own hand, that he still bled red too.
As the stragglers’ shoulders shrunk and their knees buckled, they dispersed from Miles’ line of sight. Miles noticed that one of the officers had been watching but still maintained the same dethatched gaze and posture. Miles approached him. He thought of what he could say to any of them, if anything, with as few characters he had to work with and finally decided that there wasn’t anything he could say of value. Instead, he spoke by extending a hand with an open palm. The officers’ eyes glazed over with a sheen like glass, unblinking, even their breathing not a step out of line, and did not return the gesture. His fingers lightly shaking as he retracted them,
Miles eased away, almost losing his footing as backed away onto the dip by the curbside. He nervously waved to the officer he approached with his left hand before balling it into a fist and jamming it into his pocket.
The speech ended with an ambivalent roar, and then the attendees all spilled out of their pen and rolled out onto the descending stairs. The flock separated themselves into two groups along the stairwell: on the right, the non-augmented bared their teeth at the line of augmented opposite them, who themselves hissed and beat their chests in retaliation. Each pack clawed at air in each other’s direction, only separated by the unyielding walls of officers one either side.
Up high, just below the clouds, Miles could see a zeppelin casting down a glittering wave, with faint rainbow hues lightly blended along the surface, that widened at the bottom into a hanging picture of Umor’s changing faces above the two crowds. Miles thought about how it looked like a painting he had seen in a book, but then a large sequence of words campaign slogans were smeared across the ethereal sky painting. Umor’s face hung above it all as the two dirtied packs below continued to embolden one another. 87
Then, a miraculous gust of wind blew through the scene, and once everyone had adjusted themselves, their eyes were nearly blinded by the piercing, golden light that was shining through the blanket of rainbow. By the time anyone knew what was happening, a few silhouettes of the rally’s politicians eclipsed the center of the yellow beams. They began to descend to the profane ground of their followers while floating on their hexagonal discs just above the surface of the stairs. It looked like the light had begun to manifest itself into these heavenly figures. Both in captivated awe and a violent desire for conflict, the swarms of grounded people outstretched their arms, hoping just to have the floating specters’ clothing even so much as graze their fingers.
Some of the figures extended their hands to their respective followers as well. The children and younger people were the most caught up in the excitement, enjoying the feeling of their parents being as mindlessly gleeful as they were accustomed to being. One child was lucky enough to have one of the rounder figures meet the grasp of their hand and follow it with a firm pump. As the hands departed, the figure let his fingers linger on the skin of the child’s palm, gently brushing its surface, until they were completely separated.
The hexagonal platforms guided the people on top to their nearby drop points where their vehicles and guards waited for them, safely above the stragglers that chased them with discarded cans and metal tiles before surrendering into a halfhearted gallop. At the forefront of these discs, still moving straight towards him, was Umor. Their dress was made of trillions of microscopic marbles that could remold themselves and shift around into new positions, making new outfits that complimented the shape that Umor had at the time. It was currently a flowing gown with checkered gaps along the arms and legs, revealing their unblemished skin. The dress reflected all the light that was leaking out from the stadium, allowing Umor to bask in all its glory. The only spots that didn’t were their shoulders and upper back because of the small, white feathery jacket 88 that they had on. They took it off and lightly tossed it to the augmented that were now piling over one another to grab the coat first, the same way a drowning man pulls down everyone else around him. One of them yelped about how Umor had given them their coat, and the rest of them around the lucky one cried about how they wanted coats too.
Umor’s disc lowered to the ground and sped away back into the stadium once they stepped off their platform to meet Miles’ eye level. A small band of stragglers that had yet to disperse lurked towards Umor, spitting out slurs as they went, which made the color in Umor’s skin flush out and shrivel.
“We should go,” they whispered to Miles as they grabbed his wrist and tugged it away in a sprint.
The two ran away from the stragglers, who themselves became disinterested along with their shortness of breath after passing only a few buildings. Miles and Umor found a spot to talk near the exit from the city. Umor smiled once they had their privacy and took Miles’ hand, placing it on the arm of their outfit. Between his thumb and forefinger, he gently rubbed at its strange material until it dissolved like cotton candy and reformed along Umor’s skin.
“You like it?”
Pretty
Umor blushed as their skin began to soften and become pinker, and their voice changed from gargling rocks to a sweet song. “You think so?” they asked, grabbing Miles’ shaking hands, and he burrowed his head to the side of one of his shoulders, avoiding eye contact. 89
At the sound of fast feet running through the street, though, Miles grabbed Umor and pulled them closer and away from the direction of the sound. More stragglers were getting themselves into trouble as their shadows disappeared behind the corners of buildings as police lights chased them. He felt the side of his gun pushed against between the two of them, causing
Umor to try to separate them and get some space, which made Miles remember.
Gun
Umor looked confused. Miles held out his jacket and pointed at where his weapon was stashed.
Yours?
Where?
“The one you gave me?” Umor asked, reluctantly.
Miles nodded.
“I got rid of it.”
Why?
Miles gestured towards the direction of people that had chased them.
“I don’t need it. I have people with me on the inside…and out,” they said, warming back up to Miles and approaching him again.
You do
“Miles, I wouldn’t lie to you. Can we just move on, please?”
Conflicted, Miles eventually gave in and shrugged it off. Umor would be fine. 90
Folder?
Umor’s comforting face went away and was replaced with the coldness of stern professionalism. “Miles, everything I’m about to say is with the implication of mutual trust. If we follow through on this, there’s not going to be a turnaround. OK?”
Go on
They pulled out the folder Miles had found but now cleaned of the stains and dust that had accumulated, almost looking brand new. “Despite everyone’s best efforts,” Umor started with an exhausted tone, “I looked for whatever names on the list that were local and searched around our financial books to look for any patterns of a paper trail.” They pulled Miles closer as they flipped through pages until they reached a series of photographs. “Every name from our district had moved public funding into joint accounts with each other and then moved the money again into the same few places. I know you or anyone else wouldn’t know or care, but I would know about this and...I didn’t, and the one spot that got a lot of money from one local official...was here,” they said as they pulled out the picture of a large, carnival tent shaped building with beams of light shooting out of it.
Delights
“Yeah, the club. You been there before?”
Never
“Well, this is where local money is going by the guy I found on this list,” they said flipping to a photograph of one of the figure Miles had spotted giving the handshake to the child at the end of the rally, a portly man wearing fine clothes never meant to hold in his amount of 91 girth. “Zachary U. Sullivan.” Umor grimaced. “Part of my party. Now, I can’t get any sort of investigation underway for this. Whatever concerns I have is going to be feather ruffling for everyone else. I’d be squashed out of any loop I need to get, but even if I were to get some investigators to look into this, it could take months upwards of years, and that doesn’t even guarantee results considering this seems to be an internal affair. And I know we’ve seen the same feeds whether you have a phone made in this century or not. Leda’s a ticking clock that’ll get you into trouble that I can’t get you out of no matter what your intentions were, so this is something we act on now. Besides, I imagine you’d like to get her out of your hair.”
Miles thought of his room, how still it was. Even with his collection of ancient memorabilia, there was still so much empty space.
Yes
“Good,” they smiled. “I need you to go to the Earthly Delights and scope things out.
Look for Zachary and see what he’s doing. I know he’s a good guy, but I need some security to believe that. Just...don’t rough him up or anything, alright? Can you do that?”
He thought of Roy Batty coughing up mounds of dust, buried in an endless desert wasteland.
Yes
“Thank you, Miles. You’re the only one that could help me on this,” Umor said, loosening their grip on Miles’ sleeves and brushing their hand across his cheek. “Well,” they said with a bit of a chuckle, “You and Henry.”
Henry? 92
“Yes,” Umor’s voice wavered, trailing off as they searched for the best possible words.
“If you want to help, I need to know that you’re going to have a calm head.”
Then, delicately pulling it out of the folder almost as if not to startle him, Umor was holding a blinking ED in their hand.
93
Chapter 5
Hacker
As Umor explained, they had already contacted Henry about the ED and had given him the all the tools to implant it safely into Miles the next morning. When he returned to his building, Miles picked Leda up at his neighbors who had fallen asleep on a pile of the man’s food she had taken from his fridge and made into a smeared bed on the floor. Frustrated threw the remains of a sandwich on the floor at the neighbor’s head on his way out. Dirty but unharmed, Miles dusted the excess crumbs off Leda’s clothes and gave her a long bath, hoping it would instill the importance of basic cleanliness in her. Afterwards, they stayed up watching
Pinocchio. He made sure to turn it off before they got to Pleasure Island.
Come the morning, Miles picked Leda up, limply hanging in his arms as he tried to cradle her bobbing head pulling at her neck, and went to put her back in neighbor’s room. At first
Miles thought his neighbor was asleep from how he barely moved from his own door being budged open, but his eyes were indeed open, and he managed to speak a few mumbled words before turning all of his attention back to his screen again. People had assaulted each other at the rally from last night resulting in a murder. Unmoved, Miles lightly smacked his neighbor’s face a few times to get him to a state of consciousness. After a brief exchange, Miles figured that his neighbor’s grunts and nods to his questions were enough for him to keep Leda here again. He wrapped her in new clean sheets from his house and put her in the cleanest space on the room’s rug. Afterwards, he set out for Henry’s. 94
“Now,” Henry said as Miles woke up on the operating chair to the feel of the tiny, smoothed, metal gap in the back of his head, “If you start to see flashes of bikini girls in the
Caribbean, it means I may have plugged in the wrong USB.”
Miles was still staring at the ground and gingerly rubbing his hairy scalp but recoiling once he felt the dip his finger made into the cold ditch in his head.
“You ok?” Henry asked.
Nervous
“Well,” he chuckled, “If nothing else, it’ll take care of that.”
Permanent?
“No, no. Don’t worry. It just takes a while to kick in and wear off, a bit of lag time there.
Can’t really say how much. It's a little inconsistent with that sometimes.”
Good
As Henry was about to insert the ED into Miles’ head, he hesitated. “What is this for again? Umor sent me a note with the dampener, but it was uh, ya know, not helpful with an explanation, but that could just come with the job.”
Pen?
“What-” started to ask, stopping himself once he saw Miles take out a damp notepad and place it on the armrest. “Oh, uh, yeah. Lemme get some. Guess it’ll be easier to explain that way,” Henry said as he went to get a stray pen from the miscellaneous pile on his desk. “You sure been writing a lot in that, haven’t ya?” Henry mused, picking the booklet up and trying to find new pages without manic scribbling over them. 95
Miles yanked the journal back and shielded it with his free hand as he continued to write.
After a couple minutes, he showed Henry what he had jotted down.
“So, private eye shit? I guess? Why the hell are you doing this, though? Can Uruguay not solve their own problems so they gotta rope ya into them too? Christ, you have some shitty friends,” Henry said with two friendly pats against Miles’ head, which he reciprocated with an eyeroll and his own pat on Henry’s wrist. Henry tossed and turned the ED with his fingers, observing the tiny, intricate grooves of gold rectangles in the device’s port. “You sure you want to do this?”
Miles wished Henry had saved his reservations for before he dug out a hole in the back of his head.
Yes
“Hm,” Henry said as he walked around front and pulled up a stool to sit on in front of
Miles. “You’d think more people would be against this sort of thing, but you’re your own man.
It’s your call to decide what’s good for you.”
Miles felt the light from the window beaming down on him, pretending just for a moment that it was heaven’s glow down on Achilles as he looked at the gift he had received from gods above. It made the decision easier. Taking the small rectangle out of Henry’s hand, Miles slipped it effortlessly into the jigsaw in the back of his head, and after a light clicking sound, it was locked in. Miles sat there.
Henry looked over his friend uneasily, trying to read his face. His palm slicked the water beads on his head back into the patchy forest of folded hair on his head. Henry waved his hand in 96 front of Miles as if he were waking an unconscious man. “Uh, heh, buddy? You still with us?
Feel ok?”
Miles looked around. The light was in his way. It was harder to see Henry. Standing up and moving to the side, Miles gave Henry a thumbs up.
“Do you feel...different?” Henry asked.
Miles began to grasp different parts of his right arm like testing for a pulse.
No
“Well, good. Good,” he said as he patted Miles’ arm. Miles looked at what Henry was doing. “Remember, it comes out just as easy too. Whenever you want no harm done. I guess if ya gonna use it for a prolonged project, maybe it’s best ya get used to switching in between with and without now, so you’ll be used to later. Like a car. Just break it in.” Miles nodded, and his eyes relaxed and softened, assuring Henry that everything was alright. Miles departed, leaving
Henry alone in the room with only one patch of light coming through.
The journey home was uneventful, and he returned to find Leda standing by his neighbor’s door. She pouted as they returned to their home and angrily thrusting the television remote towards him when they arrived. It was lunchtime. Setting the remote aside, Miles scooped Leda up with one arm and placed her on the chair by the kitchen table while the other searched the opened refrigerator for food. There was some milk, fruit, and vegetables that were nearly browning. They were running out food. Miles pushed that out of his mind. After blending what hadn’t expired, they drank. The couch broke the silence in the room with the sound of air flying between the cracks of the cushions once he sat down. Umor had told him it was best to sneak around the Delights during the night since that was when the more discrete customers 97 would be skulking around. The normal clientele rarely left. Until then, Miles would sit still and maybe rest if he got tired. He didn’t feel any desire to do anything else.
Sitting down next to him on the couch, Leda would occasionally tug his arm or poke his side. He turned to face her with a furrowed brow, squinted eyes, and a curiously cocked head.
Hungry?
Leda shook her head and bounced in place, wanting to let out held in childish energy.
Bathroom?
Leda shook her head and this time gripped a few of his fingers with her hand and pulled him in her direction off the couch. She continued to tug against Miles, who himself was offering little in the way of resistance and slumped forward, revealing the blinking ED on the back of his head. His fingers slipping out of her grasp. Leda took several delicate steps backwards and looked at the man before her with shrunken pupils inside a gaunt face. She scurried into the bathroom and closed the door. After a series of unsuccessful attempts at coercing her to open the door, Miles dug his shoulder into the middle of it and popped it off its hinges, sending it crashing forward before he caught the door in midair and set it aside. Curled in a ball in the farthest corner of the bathtub, Leda was shaking, and she covered her head with her arms. He ejected the ED out of his head and sat it on the edge of the sink.
He saw a crying child in front of him. Reaching inside himself, he found nothing to help inform him on what to do. There wasn’t anything inherently important about how she was behaving. For a while, he just stood there. Over time, as Miles continued to look, he saw Leda whimpering in a ball in the cold bath. Peering down into the uncleaned, nearly serrated empty shell of metal where Leda, the girl he had tasked himself with caring for, was turning red in the 98 face as the pings from her flowing tears hitting the tub echoed in the small room. The sound from her throat struggled let out more than a crackling wheeze. Miles rushed to Leda, cradling her in his arms like a swaddled child in a manger. He held her close to his chest and bounced her in place, hoping the rhythm would calm her down.
Hi
It’s ok
Don’t cry
It’s ok
Leda’s rush of tears slowed down and dried up, and her shortened bursts of breath relaxed. Once they got up, with Leda scooped up by one of Miles’ arms and her head resting against his chest, Miles reached for the ED on the counter with his free hand. Suddenly, Leda immediately whimpered and ducked her head into the crux of her elbow. Putting his hand back into his pocket, Miles carried Leda back to the couch and put on another movie.
As they watched, Miles kept fiddling with the ED between his fingers, thinking about it.
Once Leda fell asleep, Miles scooped her up and carried her over to his neighbor’s again.
He opened the door and looked at the neighbor with Leda slowly shifting her weight closer to
Miles’ chest. With great effort, the man turned to Miles with bloodshot eyes that were being pulled back to the screen with invisible hooks on tight fishing line. Miles found a clean spot on the floor for Leda to rest on while he looked for anything that resembled bedding or a pillow.
“People are mad outside,” the fat man droned on as Miles searched around the house.
“People are mad, but they’re always mad, so I don’t know if that means they’re never actually 99 mad. You don’t see them on the streets now, but they’re there. They’re always there on every channel.” The fat man thumbed the remote every second and flashy outlines of people clumped together in herds that grew as a competition against one another like two building waves in a churning ocean, waiting to see which wave would give and be overlapped by the stronger force of nature. Miles couldn’t find anything, so he left the room to look for blankets and a pillow in his own apartment. “Maybe they can’t be mad all the time. If they were, then no one would ever be happy because there’s too much to be upset about. Too much has happened. Are eruptions justifications or excuses? Are those the same thing?” His voice was no longer speaking to anyone. It was barely a mumble that he calmly chanted in his tired manner. Talking heads flashed in the storm of static and kept feeding the fat man his words. “Would we be mad if they didn’t tell us about it? Didn’t tell us to be mad? Is that better? Are we worse now?” The veins on the fat man’s staring eyes dried up into cracks atop the white, shriveled raisins that were now pushing little drips of water out the tear ducts. Miles returned with a heavy blanket and two pillows that he cocooned Leda in on the floor. “It’s bad good not gonna happen yet but it will and it needs to but it’s gonna hurt but no more than usual. Unavoidable.” With only her head sticking out of a cozy rabbit hole in swathing warmth, Miles could see Leda smile. He looked at the drooling idiot that only looked at the screen, gripped a wad of his shirt, and pulled hard enough to have the fat man floating slightly above the seat.
No messes
The fat man nodded. Miles wiped the browning, sticky, lubricant like liquid on his hand over the thigh of his pants. Taking one last look at Leda, Miles headed to the Earthly Delights.
It startled Miles how long he was able to walk down the middle of the sidewalk, passing straight through endless crowds of holograms like a dense fog. Many of them were talking about 100
Umor’s upcoming election and wore campaign sponsored clothing. They kept talking to Miles about the violence committed to augmented individuals. Miles hated them. He still saw the dim lights from window to window across the high-rise apartments, but this could hardly account for everyone in the city. Miles felt his chest tighten and his heart pound when he realized where they would all have to be.
Approaching the Earthly Delights made Miles’ ears throb when he was within eyeshot a block away of the tent-shaped structure. He could feel the beating bass of the music inside pound against the thin, metallic, curtain-like structures that made up the casing of the building. A spectrum of every color shot out through the windows and changed pigment to the beat of the music at a spontaneous, breakneck speed. There were no bouncers, no charge for admission either. Anyone could enter. All that stood before Miles was a door. He tightened the grip on the
ED in his pocket and promised himself he wouldn’t use it unless he felt he had to.
After the small, modest door opened, Miles was hit with an intense vertigo as if he were falling towards the ground at incredible speeds. Uncountable numbers of lights flew past his face every second while giant beams swept around the massive, unending crowd like search lights stuck in infinite limbo. Two cages hung by chains on a trolley attached to the ceiling flew through their respective tracks on either side of the room before they crashed into each other over top of the crowds; the ones inside them didn’t seem to mind, not even the one that fell out head first and bent their neck out to the side. It changed nothing; either no one noticed, or they didn’t care. The screaming music flooded in from every direction, never lowering nor ceasing no matter where Miles moved through the mob of bodies. The harsh yelling from the music was still only second to the constant moaning beating Miles’ ears from every direction. It was impossible for him to decipher whether the wails were from pain or pleasure. His eyes adjusting to the blinding 101 flashes, he could now see the piles of bodies surrounding each other, groping one another, leaving no surface uncovered as they were piled together in wet, gyrating clumps like freshly caught fish in a net. Their mountains of silhouetted, convulsing bodies were stacked with augmented and non-augmented alike, though even if they secretly detested the assimilation, they could hardly be blamed for not noticing. No matter where Miles stepped, he felt like his feet were pushing against someone’s soft flesh. The floor was barely visible. The mobs secreted waves of ooze and gunk of varying colors and textures that mixed and coagulated and eventually dried on smeared stains on the floor that were stepped on indiscriminately by those that were on their feet. It couldn’t be real, Miles thought. On the floor, a man with his augmented limbs detached writhed on the amongst the stomping feet, unable to get up as he was continually doused. In front of him, someone on an elevated surface pierced their torso with dozens of syringes in a mad dash with their hands constantly picking needles and injecting the parts of his body that had yet to turn a blackish purple. Some of the needles broke in their skin as they tried to inject the bubbling liquid inside. They collapsed, lying still except for their one leg that shook in a blur. None of this could be real. It had to be some sort of hellish painting he was thrust into.
It never stopped. Miles whipped the ED out and immediately stuck it into his head. He stood still and closed his eyes until he calmed down, shrinking away any embrace or slithering fingers that he felt paw at his skin. His burning heart cooled down, his twitching fingers stilled, and Miles opened his eyes. He continued to walk through the narrow gaps in between the gyrating hips and continued to step over the bodies on the floor. To the side, a woman tripped over her own legs as she clung to the bar counter to keep her balance. She fell and hit her head on a stool on the way down. Two men shouldered her and moved into the crowd. Miles walked forward; the mob danced. Far out of Miles’ reach, in a jarringly well-lit room, another woman 102 was pressed against the wall by another man behind her and his hand tucked inside. She was crying. The door to the room was closed, cutting off all the light by it and enveloping it in darkness. Miles kept walking forward; the mob kept dancing. Floating through the air, barely visible, were the same projecting cameras used for holograms on the street. Synonymous with the strobes, the camera drones shot out waves that scanned bodies in the crowd and shined their translucent holograms in the middle of the entire building, tall enough to reach the circus top ceiling. To Miles, though, all the cameras in the air seemed to slow down around and turn their lenses with him as he moved. This could’ve just been paranoia. In the center as Miles walked was an augmented person swaying their body from side to side to the slow heavy beat of the music. As they did, they grabbed hold of their own face and pulled it apart into splintering metal tiles that flowed down their body and rejoined their torso as more skin. Each time they did, another person was revealed under the shed skin with the same panting expression that was ripped off just as easily. They kept dancing. It didn’t mean anything, but they kept doing it. It had been going on for so long that they didn’t feel anything anymore, but it continued.
The number of cameras Miles saw increased and seemed to form a line leading to the side of a wall, their shutters blinking each time he got closer. After tracing the direction of the line,
Miles found an odd-looking door. It was on the perimeter of the room, almost like a beacon with the jarring softness of the hallway light seeping out through the door’s cracked opening. It was stiff and heavy with an opened locked hanging off the end of the opened bolt, like a beckoning gate. Inside, there was a staircase. The walls were dingy gray and there were no windows. No one around him seemed interested enough to inspect it, but at least that meant they wouldn’t follow him inside. When Miles shut the door behind him, it instantly cut off all sound from behind him after a loud bang and a pressurized sealing sound. Peering over the crimson, rusted 103 railing, Miles couldn’t tell anything about the drop to the bottom floor other than he couldn’t see where it was. On each floor there was a single door much like the one he had entered from. He could count eight floors and eight doors before they trailed off into nothing, but only the next one down was opened as well. He crept down, trying to soften his steps only for them to echo down anyways. The lights gradually tinged into a deeper red as Miles approached the next level down until everywhere he looked was drenched in dried blood. The heat from the lights grew heavier the lower he got, creating pools of sweat along the right side of Miles’ body and the metal on his left burnt the edges of his skin it touched.
Inside the new door, the room was unassuming with empty floors and walls and only a single bed, unadorned except for pillows and plain blankets. To the side, a bathroom door. There was a skittering sound coming from inside. It was locked, but Miles popped off the knob.
Walking inside, it was just as clean and bare as the main hall. Surprising him felt something bump against his legs. Looking down, he could see a girl, who couldn’t be any older than Leda, taking a doll made of out toilet paper and desperately jamming it into the bowl and trying to flush while giving Miles a quivering lip and panicked eyes like someone hiding evidence. She had a scar along her neck and struggled to make any noise above a low, hoarse yelp, which was likely exasperated by the tight corset sucking in her waist. Even in the monochrome redness of the room’s light, Miles could see the bright rogue on her cheeks, the precisely applied mascara on her curved eyelashes, and her frilly, pink dress that stopped in the middle of her thighs. Then, from the entrance, Zachary U. Sullivan walked in with his hand fiddling in the crotch of his pants and lips that he moistened with the tip of his tongue. His suit shimmered with the same glow it had when Miles first saw him at the rally like Zachary carried a light with them in the suit’s layered feathery design. As Miles looked closer, the suit looked more like it was covered in sleek 104 scales on a serpent. Zachary’s jaw gaped open when he saw Miles staring back with unblinking eyes. He whipped a gun out and shot Miles in the head before sprinting back up the stairs.
105
Chapter 6
Overdrive
If it weren’t for Miles covering his face at the last second with his prosthetic, dampening the impact of the bullet, it would be much farther back in his head. And if it weren’t for him immediately hip firing back with his own pistol, Zachary wouldn’t have retreated so quickly and may have finished Miles off. He fell backwards into the bath, taking the shower curtains with him and making whole in the tiled wall with the back of his head. His brain was on fire and the air pressure in his eye socket was in a constant cycle of expanding and exploding out with globs of blood. The bullet was pushed far enough back in his head to where Miles couldn’t reach it with his fingers. His right arm slammed against the wall as he pulled himself up, making an indent with his fist as cracks rippled around it. The girl he’d found had already run out the door and sprinted down the steps. Buzzing jolts stemmed from the back of his head and scratched their way across his lines of nerves. Almost dropped to a knee, he picked himself up and ran upstairs at the crossroads to give chase. Getting to the main floor, Miles could see a rapid parting of bodies in a fast line to the exit quickly putting a greater distance between itself and Miles with each second. He ripped his own pistol out of his jacket and fired several rounds into the air to disperse the mob, but they did not move, perhaps numb to the noise and sparking light, so Miles pushed through the bodies in front of him. He was no longer under the blood tinted lights, but his vision was covered in a near blinding red.
Charging out of the exit, Miles looked around to where the politician could have run to.
He saw his portly mass stumbling half a block away, about to enter an unmarked car with a waiting driver. It was late into the night, so there were fewer holograms out. The glass on the windshield shattered once Miles shot through it until his gun let out a series of empty clicks. The 106 car sped off, leaving the politician stranded with Miles still sprinting after him. As he ran, Miles checked his jacket. There was one clip left with seven bullets in it. He could hear the politician’s screaming as the space between them shortened.
“Send the police! Give me some cover! Something! He’s going to fucking kill me-” The politician’s crying was cut off along with fingers from another round ripping through his hand and decimating his phone. His next shot missed and struck against one of the street projectors.
Ripples of static took the shape of colored jolts of electricity shaping into loose images of people teleporting over the sidewalk and street. Everything had the tint of excited, neon rainbows but
Miles still saw it all in red, and he was now beginning to lose the politician in the technicolored ocean.
They ran through three blocks nonstop, Miles only feeling the bile churn in his stomach that bounced as he ran, and his lungs become hot and scratchy as his legs pushed harder off the ground with every lunging step. After taking a detour to cut him off, Miles erupted from a darkened alley, reaching out for the target. Falling on his ass, the politician pulled out his gun and plugged a shot in the middle of Miles’ gut, before screaming and dropping the weapon on the ground from the recoil against his wounded hand. Miles bent over and grabbed the side of a building as thick bile worked its way up through his stomach, funneled through his throat, and leaking out in thin streams where his screen bordered his skin. In front of the politician, the already crowded streets of glitches suddenly came to life with thousands of packed people, banners, and flying foods lighting up the night, a great beacon that the politician ran into until
Miles couldn’t see him.
A police car, speeding along the street behind Mile, drifted to an abrupt stop, and kicked a cloud of obscuring smoke into the air from the hot tires. Two gunshots blew blindly through 107 the cloud, pegging Miles in either shoulder. He could see the two officers that fired through the expanding circles of open air in the smoke. Their eyes scanning through the openings, searching for their target, found nothing but two trails of blood, blue and red, that led into a dark, vacant supermarket with a shattered glass door.
Inside, Miles laid back against a wall of clothes on stalled conveyer belt hooks three aisles in as the blue fluid from his prosthetics laid against his blood in a growing puddle like oil and water. His vision was fading. Everything blurred into several copies of itself and swayed back and forth. His eyes were heavy. His left hand, heavy to raise, slumped up to his right shoulder as its thumb pushed metal shards, rusting away in a pocket of his tissue, further inward into his muscle. The jolt of pain seized his entire body, and his vision raced by until the burning sensation tightened his body to attention, losing its drowsiness. Miles was glad he was unable to scream.
A pair of footsteps steadily walked along the hard floor, echoing throughout the market.
They would slowly approach for a few seconds, stop, then approach again getting louder with each interval. Miles knew they would keep point while creeping forward, checking every aisle they passed for any potential third party, and follow the blood trail until they reached Miles and shoot him until he was dead. He knew because that’s what he would do. If he were to run now, they would catch up to him by chasing after his blue and red trails and shoot him. If he crawled, he wouldn’t be able to get out fast enough to outrun the officers on his leaking trail. He needed to dress the wounds before the steps got to his aisle, and they were already on their second stop.
Slowly taking off his jacket with one hand and reaching for a hung shirt with the other, Miles strained his fingers to move with absolute silence. 108
Suddenly, something skidded out onto the floor. One of Miles’ burner phones that had slipped out of the pocket and slipped out in front of the officers’ line of sight. Wrapping his arm around the corner, Miles fired two shots at the officers and ran down his aisle, shielded with merchandise, with a shirt in his hand and his pistol in the other. One shot had imploded one of the officer’s kneecaps, sending him careening face first to the floor as his leg bent at a right angle. The other officer took one second to confirm that his partner was alive and immediately went back to chasing Miles. The officer shot a flurry of bullets through the barrier separating him from Miles, barely missing. Miles reached the end of the display first and shoulder it over onto the cop. His head bounced off the display and his vision abruptly cut out like a television turning off. Then, everything went black. Not closing one’s eyes black but a genuine darkness that cannot be described without any sense of physical or emotional feeling to ground one’s self in any space or any way to think of the lack of space. It was nothing, and there was nothing to say about nothing. It was only the pulsing pain that exploded in Miles’ head, rippling down his spine and branching out through the exploding nerves that convinced him that he was alive, and he needed to stop leaning against the display that the officer was pushing against as it fell on him.
Miles busted through the back door before the cop could unwedge himself from the bottom of the display.
Hiding in the shadows of the valleys of buildings, Miles ripped the shirt from the supermarket into a series of wraps that he tightly braced around his shoulders and abdomen which had begun to dry up around the entry wound. He plugged his eye with a tight swab of fabric. Miles’ pace was completely dictated by how quickly he heard the officer approaching him in a pattern of slow-downs and sprints. Eventually, he slowed down enough to catch his breath in an alleyway when he could barely hear the officer. Looking back behind him as he hung his body 109 over an open dumpster covered in darkness from a balcony up high, Miles squeezed his stomach to get some blood to leak out. When that wasn’t enough, Miles pried apart the wound and dug his fingers inside the infected orifice until he had a hand painted a color that kept changing the longer he looked at it.
The sound of smashing glass was followed by a scuffling of shoes along concrete and one loud, metallic bang. The officer ran down the thinning trail of blood, down the alleyway, briefly taking a dumpster as cover and stretched his arms over the closed top, pointing his gun towards the blood smears that had turned the corner to the left. It was in far larger splatters across the ground, and once he turned the corner, the officer saw the blood painting a shop’s broken glass window that had been pushed in from the outside and was now scattered into tiny, orange crystals. It was hard to see where the trail continued in the unlit shop since it was so dark, so the officer stepped over the shards and crouched through the window with the utmost of caution.
Slowly opening the top of the dumpster, Miles slinked out through the tight gap he made as he held the covering up with one arm. Once he slipped out, Miles rubbed the blood still on his hand onto his shirt, and slowly crept up to the broken window he had broken. The officer was inside the shop and already checking each aisle as he had when he was in the supermarket. Miles heard the officer’s breath whistle in the empty shop in short but powerful exhales. Rows of accessories formed a labyrinth the officer was lost in, but Miles kept his eyes trained on him from the blinking light in the back of the officer’s head. For a moment, the officer stopped to take one shaking hand off his gun and wipe away the sweat that was dripping onto his eyes. He began to turn around. Miles felt his eye bulge out as he forced his eyelid to stay open as he raised his right arm and fired through the officer’s kneecap. The recoil sent a ripple of kinetic energy through Miles’ arm that spewed out both the entry and exit wound in his shoulder and loosened 110 the band of clothing that fell to the ground with a squish from the blood it had sponged up. The officer fired several shots out into the air from inside the store. Miles heard the screaming as he walked away, a silhouette against the flashing billboard lights that floated in the sky.
One shot left. Miles repeated that in his head as he walked down the empty street so as not to forget where he was and why, a task that became harder by the second. Physically, Miles no longer felt anything. He was glad that the ED was able to block out how he might feel about this. This was nothing. He had felt worse. He had felt so much worse. He didn’t feel anything now.
Around the corner of an upcoming building, Miles could hear muttering. There was a ringing in his ears that shook his eyes and blurred his vision. The back of Miles’ head felt slightly charred from where the shocks had been shooting through his head. When Miles turned the corner, and extended his gun, it was pointed right at a woman’s head with a child in her arms.
He heard the gun go off as the bullet passed through her.
The woman smiled, held up her child, and walked through Miles in a blurring buzz while talking about how her latest deal on diapers saves her a lot of headache. Miles’ heart jumped further inside his chest, and he thought about how much empty space could exist in someone that looked so calm and happy. A jolt passed through his brain, like a needle being inserted and ripped out in a single sensation. He heard the distant sound of sirens by where Miles had left the first officer in the supermarket. Right now, he was in front of a street densely packed full of holograms, and there was a trail of blood in front of him that crossed the street, and it was not his own. Following the trail, Miles raised his gun out in front of him, pointing at whatever person, hallow or not, walked in front of the red train tracks he was following. Each time the gun was 111 pointed he heard it fire. It got a little easier each time. The act became familiar and rhythmic. His head buzzed again.
Two men ran atop the buildings, one chasing the other. One of them, Roy Batty, looked so bright, naturally bright, a ray of pearl encrusted sun that hopped from balcony to balcony, a dancing sprite atop the dark, grease colored buildings. His body was carved, chiseled like the forgotten sculptures in the forgotten pictures on dusty, brittle pages Miles got from the pit, but
Roy Batty was no longer in the pit because Miles could see him, and he thought of him like
Achilles. Achilles, who had gotten his gift of shield and strength from the gods above, the same gods that looked down at Miles from moving news screens of towering people. But Miles thought if this was the best thing to do. One day of heroics had already painted divided attains of blood on his body. There was a conflict. What was he doing? What was he doing it for? What motivated him to run out into the night with his gun-toting-self in search of something...something? What was it? Compulsory? Was he even thinking as he had done these things tonight and in the past?
His head sparked. There was no one on the buildings. They were dark. The pit is dark.
Miles kept his head to the ground to follow the trail. This made sense. There was nothing confusing about this course of action. It was straightforward, so it made sense. It sparked again.
Every time it sparked, he could see Roy Batty running through the night, chasing someone else down, and every other time it sparked it was just dark because there was no one there. It flipped back and forth. Sirens were getting closer. Finding the end of the blood, Miles found Zachary huddled in an alleyway. It would be best to get information out of him. He reached towards his jacket to record him with his phone. His jacket wasn’t there. He had taken it off in the 112 supermarket. He had an empty gun. The sirens were closer. Still, he pointed the weapon at
Zachary for intimidation.
Talk
The politician held his hand. It twitched with a mind of its own it continued to leak over his hefty stomach that was now heaving in deep gasps like he was worried the air around him would escape if he didn’t catch it all up now. He looked down the alley towards the sound of police cars. He began to speak.
“What do you want to know?”
Everything
The politician looked down the alley again. He was sweating.
“Don’t you have a good idea of what you saw?”
Miles’ vision focused and unfocused, blurred and straightened, as his head continued to spark.
More
Zachary was shrinking in the corner, quivering like a bird with a broken wing. “L-look. I-
I don’t know what you want to hear but-”
Truth
The hammer was clicked back.
“I can be your whistleblower,” Zachary quickly said as he held up a hand to talk Miles down. “I am aware that there may be- well, there may be other p-people that partake in those 113 things...a-an underground system for people that pay and keep their mouths shut, and I can help you with that.” Even with the stammers and gulps in his speech, the politician spoke intentionally with a casualness to guide the dialogue with a disarming rhetoric. “Ok? It’s not that complicated. There’s a list that goes around to keep people honest, so if one person comes forward it brings everyone else down directly or through association, so, naturally, no one comes forward. I can get it for you...if you let me go. I could testify and keep you safe.”
Miles had yet to blink since he held up the gun.
Zach chuckled out of fear. “Well, now what? What happens now? You saw plenty of people in there worse off than I am, but you’ll pick me off cause I’m the figurehead? Then what?
What’s your plan? You can’t just stop with me. That wouldn’t accomplish anything. You’d have to get all of them too!”
Miles shirked his head away from Zachary’s gaze, thinking to himself.
“Or,” Zachary spoke hesitantly, “we could just stop with the violence now and not even go down that path. We could help each other-”
At the suggestion, Miles lunged forward and whipped the animal with the side of his gun, bending its nose out to the side. Zachary was now blubbering, almost incoherently, in short wavering bursts of breath each word he spoke.
“So, you’re just a killer! You know nothing about me! I’m not just a face from street projections! I’m a human being! The last conversation I had with my daughter was an argument about wanting her to apply to more schools!” He pitched up his voice, hoping to sound more sympathetic. “And later, I talked to my wife about how I’d have to miss our anniversary dinner so I could put more time in at the office, but instead I just came here…” His voice trailed off to 114 succumb to more blubbering, and his face tinged into a distressing red. “I’m not just a face for you to project whatever you want onto. Who are you to judge me on my worst day like I only exist when you’re looking at me!”
A god had fallen from Olympus and was cowering in the corner against a mortal that tightened the coil of his life in his hands; Zachary was crying.
Miles lowered the gun. He tried to think about what Zachary had said. He noticed the glow again, up high, on the rooftops, where Achilles looked down on the man he had chased for so long who was now hanging off the edge of a girder by his fingertips.
“Just put the gun away. Just please put the damn thing away, please…”
Miles looked back at the target. His head buzzed. He remembered the feeling of his mouth. It buzzed again.
“You’ll be safe, I promise,” it said with a smile as the sirens grew a little louder.
The man on the girder was gone, and the glow was dimming.
Miles started fingering the trigger to the sound of empty clicks, and when Zachary noticed what he was doing, he began to chuckle from the disconnect of his surrendering mind and fearful body. Feeling his options dwindling, Zachary broke his professional façade by loosening his tie and roughing up his hair to be the everyman he always wanted to be. He looked at Miles with a desperate but earnest smile.
“Would you believe me if I said it feels good?” he asked halfway between laughter and more sobbing.
115
At that, Miles walked closer, put his hand on the man’s face, and covered his mouth and nose. Miles never looked away, nor did his body move beyond the gently shifting hand he had firmly clasped around the man’s face. Despite his inner coldness, as he continued to suffocate
Zachary, Miles saw flashes of the man’s family tearfully confirming his body at the coroner’s and then holding each other as they saw his casket pushed into a furnace for cremation. These involuntary visions were simultaneously disheartening and cathartic. All the while, all Zachary could see was the corner of Miles’ face not shrouded in shadow: his darkened, unmoving eye with blood trickling out of the socket. He struggled, but eventually Zachary’s eyes slacked and rolled to the back of his head while his lids folded forward while his body lost its tension and gave up.
Miles slowly eased off. The roof was empty, there was no one on the girder, and no matter how hard Miles looked, he couldn’t find anything there. He felt the confusion in his stomach spin into something much more enflamed that spread throughout the rest of his body.
Just as Miles turned away, the faint breathing of Zachary came back, and his tone changed to a frightened, begging child’s.
“It was so dark-”
In a single swift motion, Miles drove his fist through the man’s head, pushing it up against the wall, higher it went as he pushed, as it caved in further, opened wider, and spilled a thick pink liquid out on either side of Miles’s shaking, clenched hand while the man’s own hands were desperately grabbing at Miles’ arm in claws and flails until they were just moving without trying to grab anything at all. Miles still shook once he removed his fist and the man flopped down ungracefully amongst the heaps of discarded trash. Miles looked at what he had done and walked away. The path to his home was cut off by patrolling cars, and his muscles were starting 116 to expand and stiffen until he could no longer bend his joints. He spent another hour evading the police, and when he was sure that he was no longer being followed, he went to Henry’s. When he got inside, Miles collapsed.
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Chapter 7
I’ve Seen Footage
Miles dreamed. He dreamed of the world around him in an abstract fire, something he could imagine and understand, but he could not see it when he looked around him, but he knew it was there. This was the dream he was stuck in, and it took what he felt inside him and gave it a vehicle to chase him in his mind. He was in the city, hobbling around without his arm or leg, naked like a child, while smoke seeped in through the cavities in his crotch and his mouth and burnt the raw muscle within them. As he wandered, he looked at the people of the Earthly
Delights. They were no longer held within the confines of their club or their homes but were now strewn about the streets, their silhouettes dancing in the fire. The sleek silvery surface of the smooth skyscrapers around him hissed as the heat in the air set them to burn at the touch as they charred more than they ever have been. Above, untouched, was a sea of ethereal waves in the shape of the telecasts for the evening showing their view of the worst things from the world below in floating cameras that recorded everything they saw. This gave the people on the ground something to aspire to since everything looked so much bigger on the gigantic screens, so they watched the screens in awe, which made the flames below grow bigger which gave the projectors more things to show in the sky which made the flames grow bigger. The fumes peppered the soft neon hues in the sky, each interception creating sparks of blue and magenta that further colored the smoke, and Miles could see Umor among the talking heads. They talked much, often overlapping, and became hard to understand. Back on the ground, he saw Henry beating a man that had slapped his own son’s ear repeatedly as they walked down the street, and the son stumbled over his own feet as he scampered away. The last thing he saw of his father was Henry bringing his fists down on his head so hard his legs jerk in a growing pool of blood that reflected 118 the distorted smoke and the fire and heads laughing at them from above. In this world of binaries, telecasts and crowds, light and shadow, Henry acted solely, recklessly, as an individual, and Miles admired that as he crept away. Miles and the son walked in parallel on opposite sides of the street, always walking forward, always progressing, nearing the most explosive of the crowds, a singular mass of shadow that was densely packed together to the point of being inseparable, but when examined closer was a mesh of constant infighting. Miles kept looking between the boy and the crowd until the boy was Leda and the crowd was very close. They were each sucked in, and once they were, they were forgotten about because they were just another part of the crowd. Leda was gone. Miles felt himself tugged on either side of the crowd. They saw what they wanted to see on either side of his body, human or augmented, and they pulled him apart to try to claim him for themselves. Miles did nothing. He caught a glimpse of Henry before being completely swallowed up by the bodies around him, and he saw Henry continue to beat the man that put himself in his way, and Miles wished he could do something.
When Miles woke up, he saw Henry slouched in a stool across from him, a beer nearly falling out of the loose grip in his hand, and his stomach layered in sluggish creases that were collecting sweat. He tried to reach out to Henry but was caught up in the sensation of phantom limb when his right arm didn’t move forward as he had commanded it to. Shaking a few times,
Miles began to feel the taut straps keeping his body against the upright operating table. In a rusted bucket pushed off to the corner of the room, as if Henry had already forgotten about them, were Miles’ limbs and his gun carelessly and unceremoniously rubbing shoulders with one another.
Henry slowly raised his head to the noise of Miles’ struggling and brushed away his disheveled hair in a greasy mess over his sunken eyes. Miles struggled against his restraints to no 119 avail. Henry put his hand on Miles’ shoulder, firm but not forceful, and kept his nearly lifeless eyes trained of Miles’ face. Miles heard some faint sounds of warning coming from Henry but couldn’t pay attention to them. Now, he was distracted by the wires and tubing pushing through his butchered stomach. He shook in his seat, nearly knocking over the machines he was plugged into, all the while trying to speak through the blood in his scratchy throat. When Miles eventually calmed down, Henry mustered a weak smile, forcing whatever light was still tucked in the corner of his eye to flicker a little brighter to reassure his friend.
Miles was facing away from the singular window in his strapped chair. The pane ordinarily cast a single sweep of light into the room, but now it was congested with shadow that Miles saw play out like a puppet show in the floor beside him. The warmth on the back of Miles’ neck was blocked in erratic beats and was accompanied by the crashes of clanging metal and a chorus of shrill indecipherable yells. Miles tried to turn his head around, but he couldn’t, and he was stuck in a cave with the entire world happening outside. The fingers on his right hand stretched out towards a stray table with some paper and pencils sparsely strew on top with the other junk.
Henry, cautiously, loosened the strap around his wrist and slid the pencil and paper underneath his hand.
What is happening?
Henry sighed and nodded slowly. “It’s been a few days,” he said. He got up and rolled a television stand over for Miles to see.
“I recorded the best parts for you,” Henry said with a grimace as he turned on the screen.
It was in front of town hall, all of this. There were people in the streets divided as before by a thin but unyielding rows of police officers creating unbreachable barricades with the walls of 120 translucent energy from their riot shields. Right down the center, through the narrow gap the shields made to split the sea of people, was Umor, and they were shouting like a prophet. From their podium, they shot their arms out and screamed for some quiet so they could address everything that has happened. Henry began to fast forward, causing Miles to look up in confusion. He scribbled down on the paper too quick for it to remain steady, and it fell off the table. Henry picked up the page and read it to himself.
“No,” he said. “No, they know what you did. It’s worse than you think though. Umor was defending you.”
Miles furrowed his brows as Henry explained what had happened, and all the while the world outside unfurled more and more with only able to judge it my its shadows. Henry sat the pencil and paper aside on a different table as he talked. He explained Umor had gone on to defend what Miles had done, citing self-defense and possible mental illness, since he was the victim of systemic violence done against augmented peoples. They did not know what Zachary had done, at least not the public, so they grieved for him, and some did not take kindly to the immediate sympathy to the killer.
“And then with Alice...” Henry trailed off, lost in his own head.
Miles looked back and forth between Henry and the television with pleading confused eyes.
“Oh, right. You wouldn’t- I’m sorry. It’s felt like a while,” Henry said barely over a whisper as he rubbed his eyes and smoothed back his hair, already forgetting about the pencil and paper as he picked up a bottle to drink from. “That was the name people gave to the other girl you rescued.” 121
Miles looked at Henry in confusion until the television was sped up again, and Miles saw the girl that had ran further downstairs when he chased Zachary. She was surrounded by people in crisp suits and other formal clothing while she showed herself on the clean steps of town hall to show that she was alright. She clung to a little doll made of toilet paper and avoided the eye contact of the cameras and flashing lights that popped into her face and scared her behind an adult’s leg. The people giggled at her innocence to these things and continued to take pictures, and eventually one of the pictures of her behind someone’s leg was expanded to fill the screen.
The caption read “Plans to give statement,” and then the screen changed to videos of Alice walking more upright and her doll gripped a little less tightly around her chest, but her head still avoided everyone’s eyes.
Another caption popped up as Alice went over to faintly shake Umor’s hand in a crowd.
Henry turned his whole body away from facing the television. The caption read, “Plans for vocal replacement surgery.” She looked just like Leda.
“I can just explain this next part. You don’t have to-” Henry said as he went flip off the television but was stopped by Miles’ shaking of his operating chair so violently that the jostling stopped Henry in his tracks. The yelling outside was getting louder, and Miles could see glints of flickering orange in the light from the window cast on the floor. A smell seeped in that singed his nostrils. The television cut to a scene at the hospital with a single massive crowd looking eagerly at the entrance doors, and they all held their breath as the doctor walked out with the small pitter patter of a young girl’s steps behind them.
She came out, Alice, out from the hospital doors to greet the public with a soft, almost hanging smile and tired eyes. The crowd started their applause but soon died down into murmurs of confusion and then into silence when they saw her shaven head with the darkly stitched scar 122 that ran down her scalp. The doctors alongside her guided her by her arms as her feet were unable to keep a straight pace without them. The doll of toilet paper, already loose in her hand, slipped through her fingers and was unknowingly crushed by the doctor’s feet next to her. When the doctors stopped and took to the podium, Alice was left to the side staring at one of the floodlights until easy tears slipped from her eyes, curving around her smile, because she did not realize she needed to blink.
“There was an error in the procedure,” one of the doctors said solemnly.
All eyes fell on Umor to the side of the stage. All that anyone knew was that the girl that was going to speak up against one of Umor’s peers had silenced, and Umor was the one that recommended the surgery. The crowd assumed their positions and turned on each other as Umor was shuffled off to the right side of the venue by guards with dampeners in their heads. Miles kept trying to look at Umor’s face as they were rushed away, trying to read their facial expression amidst its flux of changes into a new face every second. It was indecipherable. He made another bang with the chair and motioned for the pencil and paper.
Did Umor do this?
“Of course they did,” Henry said. “It’s just self-interest. They never even came by the shop or called me or…” He put his head in his hands. “What the hell did we do,” he whimpered.
Miles sat still and stared at Alice while she stared at nothing, nearly tripping over herself in the process. Leda had been without him for three days. All he could do was sit by and watch people he’d never met shout his name and beat each other about if they should hang him or
Umor first. 123
Miles finally knew what the streets looked like to be filled with something besides just him and hallow people, and he truly realized how alone he had been all this time. The dancers from the Earthly Delights were writhing against each other on the streets, and with each movement,
Miles felt the back of his head spark a little more. He grew especially unhinged when he saw them fighting with the police. He felt the crackling orange warmth from the window grazing his neck seep down inside him and start to burn his insides, and he tried to push this awful feeling down farther to keep it away, but it just condensed in a corner of his body and grew in intensity the more that Miles had tried to push it away. His arm rest was denting from his grip.
Seeing how tense Miles had become, Henry walked over to the discarded, rusted bucket, full of pieces of Miles, and pulled out the emotional dampener to give to him. Miles didn’t move at. It sparked in Henry’s hands, and the intricately patterned outlet looked burnt out. He looked back at Miles while still talking mostly to himself in a gruff, almost trembling, whisper. “I don’t even know if this thing worked.” He tossed it in the bucket haphazardly with the rest of Miles and gently shook Miles’ shoulder to get his attention. After waiting several minutes for a response, Henry rubbed the side of Miles’ head. “I’m sorry,” Henry said as he walked out the room for the night.
When Henry walked back in, he saw Miles standing tall, his shadow still eclipsing the seat he was in the night before as the cords and wires, stretched and taught, plucked off one by one as
Miles trudged forward, each limb struggling to push ahead until it all broke off from his arm, legs, and torso in a mesh of puppet strings slowly falling to the floor. Miles did not waver once free. He limped to the bucket with his parts and, tucked in between them, took out his gun to inspect it. A small pistol, factory design with removable, interchangeable parts, uncleaned and growing in rust and grime, still slid in the same reliably mechanical patterns each time Miles 124 cocked the slide and plugged in the magazine, the empty magazine. No blood was came out.
After a few swift run-throughs of breaking it apart and resembling the piece, Miles turned to
Henry who himself was cowering in his hunched posture and shaking hands trying to ease him down.
Miles did not know all of what was happening, and in that confusion the memory of his dream became worse with each remembrance.
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Chapter 8
1:42
By the end of the night, at 1:42, Miles would have killed twenty-eight people in total throughout his entire life. The twenty-six from tonight and the senator from a few days ago would have been his most recent, but he will have killed twenty-eight people in total by the end of tonight. It took just under two hours for Miles to begin killing from the time he broke out of his restraints. They were not remembered.
…
Putting himself back together, Miles inspected his gun, still without ammunition, while
Henry stared at him from across the room, shaking. Miles took a wad of gauze, balled it up, and stuck it in the empty, dried out socket where his left eye used to be. He jotted something down on the paper he had been using and stuck it on Henry’s chest as he walked out the door. He made sure to take the ED with him.
I’m going to bring Leda back with me. Stay here unless I tell you otherwise.
Miles didn’t check to see how Henry had reacted.
On the streets, he bumped into many people on the route home, almost knocking some of them over. He wasn’t used to so many real people walking and standing beside him. It would’ve been confusing enough with everything going on if the holograms weren’t still operating at maximum capacity, people walking through other people. Though, less of the holograms were as chipper. They stood solemnly in suits reading off a hundred different things, some of them contradicting each other, and everyone played games of telephone with what they heard. 126
“Did you hear there were records of Miles and Umor together before? What were they doing?”
“Miles and Umor recorded themselves together? Were they a couple? Where’s the tape?”
“Miles has a record? Where can we find the rap sheet?”
Every spoken word singed Miles’ chest just a little more.
The screens floating around the sky were constantly in a flux of mirroring the more excitable parts of the city like people yelling from above about what was happening. All the real people around them had to yell louder to be heard amongst themselves. It ripped through Mile’s eardrums. He stopped trying to listen to any one voice, and he kept bumping into people. They often scowled him and gave their own push back along with some harsh words. No one recognized him amongst the crowds from the occasional shots of his face hung in the sky.
Nothing was being broken, but the crowds were getting too large to have room to walk along the street. Every few blocks there was a car fire. The shaky filter the smoke made in the air around it had a sharper yellow tint to it, and they never seemed to shrink. Miles remembered seeing these in riots. They were from molotovs laced with chemicals to keep the fires from going out naturally. Crowds of people would chuckle amongst themselves from the outlines their bodies made in front of the flames; the shadows rose up the walls of buildings and danced in the night. On his way home, Miles saw the Earthly Delights. The lights weren’t on, and it appeared to be completely empty from the inside.
At the front of his building, Miles had to squeeze through a circle of dancers around a dumpster fire. It was hard to get by them. There was some pushback between Miles and one of the people in the circle. Miles didn’t remember who had started antagonizing him by the time he 127 was through the mob, but he felt one last forceful push once his back was turned to them. His right hand instantly went to the holster on his hip. It froze and tensed up, though, and his left hand gripped his wrist and slowly pulled it away, breathing heavily as he did and squeezing his eye shut from more bad memories. He looked at the people he had walked through. None of them looked within the range to have hit him, but they shouted things he couldn’t hear, or rather, things he couldn’t understand. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t have any paper to write anything extensive with.
Stop
The dim flicker from the monitor around his mouth wasn’t seen by anyone, and the people continued to yell. His vision was still slightly blurred, and it made the people he looked at shimmer and flicker in place. He felt the sparking in the back of his head, and his vision went out of focus until a few deep breaths set his blurring it back into place. He turned away without saying another word. As Miles was walking up the stairs, he jammed the ED into his, intentionally forcing it further in than he had before. His building was empty too with only the ambience from outside’s yelling and marching to accompany his slow, heavy footsteps. As he approached his floor, the heaviness let up, and his pace quickened. He couldn’t imagine how
Leda was feeling with the hellish landscape and screaming outside. He’d get Leda, and they’d go inside his room and wait everything out. It was worse outside than Miles had imagined, and he had no intention of subjecting her, or himself, to watching it. He’d tell Henry not to wait for him, and then they’d rest in his apartment.
His neighbor’s door was opened just a crack, and the knob seemed to have been ripped off in a hand fist sized chunk. It creaked like a violin string as Miles slowly pushed the door open into the dark room, and the torn debris from the knob cracked under his feet. His neighbor was 128 absolutely still and only illuminated by the faint buzzing of the television broadcasting the protests outside. The neighbor’s pupils didn’t dilate, and his eyes were wide open on his tilted back head making a crook in his thick neck. His greasy napkins and hand wipes were bundled up in a fat ball sticking out his mouth that reached down the middle of his throat, leaving an unmoving lump of fatty skin jutting out as stained lines of drool gathered in a pool under his chin. Miles checked the pulse in his arm and dropped it to hang off the side of the sofa. It was then that Miles realized that no one else had made a sound in the room besides him this entire time.
He checked the bathroom to see if Leda had been hiding. She was not there. He checked the kitchen to see if somehow she had fit herself into a cupboard. All the drawers were left open the way they were whenever Leda would go looking for food, but she was not there. He went to the swad of blankets he had tucked her in before he had left. They were tossed around the room in random directions, left to wrinkle in shriveled clumps. He ran to his room across the hall and ripped apart his own drawers, overturned the bed, and flipped over the little furniture he had that was too small for her to hide under anyway. Leda was nowhere to be found.
Miles walked back into his neighbor’s room enveloped in a darkness only lit by the yelling people on television. He spent the next few minutes deciding whether he should just lie down on the ground where he was. His knees buckled the willpower draining out of his body.
Being left alone in the dark, Miles wandered aimlessly about the room. He’d massage his head with his hands whenever an image of Leda or Alice or Zachary’s broken head involuntarily flashed into his consciousness. It made him wince and stagger in his steps. He thought of all the people that were dancing above him when he was shot at the Earthly Delights, and now they were pushing him on the streets that used to be his when he was trying to get home. His fingers 129 bent crookedly, and they pulled on his hair some while he banged his palms against the side of his head.
When his grip loosened and he opened his eyes, Miles looked up and saw the closed blinds in front of him. He heard unfamiliar sounds without images he could put them to. He couldn’t help his curiosity, and, against his better judgement, he opened them to see how everything looked from this better vantage point, but he was surprised. The streets were packed, but they were still, nothing like the pushes and murky yellow fires from earlier had instilled in his head. There was some shouting from one mass of people to the other, but Henry and Umor didn’t chop each other into bits when they had gotten heated. Some of them were even...laughing, hand in hand and arm in arm some of them were. They had a comradery, even if it was tribal. Out in the distance, Miles could see the lines of officer manning their posts in unmoving barricades. They were always there, fencing everyone together within just a few blocks, but they too stood still. Just as Miles’ breathing was beginning to become regular again, a flash of light bursted in front of the window, making Miles jump back in shock.
The buzzing lines and distorted sound shrieked for a few seconds before they settled into a cohesive picture of more rioting. It was being narrated by a frightened voice that was terrified of everything it was seeing while speaking in a very intentional manner that drove these feelings out of people that listened. Words like “beat,” “shattered,” and, “fled” cut through videos of people caving in on each other and pulling at themselves like chew toys to be discarded on the ground. Fires kept getting bigger as people kept lighting more building on fire, and the people that threw them were run off by police. The colors of the fire and the tear gas looked the same, so in their confusion people ran into fires that burnt against their faces and around their clothing when they realized it wasn’t tear gas. The police were chasing anything that moved that wasn’t 130 in their uniform, so they unwittingly ran circles around the holograms dancing about the damaged projectors. People blipped in and out of existence as they ran amongst the swirling clouds of yellow as spotlights from news screens pierced through the burning fog. As the light pulsing smoke dissolved upward, it seeped into a hologram of one of Umor’s campaign advertisements, and the smoke and flames, intertwined, rolled out of the holes in Umor’s smiling faces looking down at thw world beneath them. It cut to footage of Umor being led into the local police station for their security. Their mouth quivered and their body shivered between different hunched bodies while they were escorted by two guards twice their size to their car while keeping away anyone else that got remotely close with shouting and mace.
The screen that had appeared in front of the window disappeared, and the little drone that projected it hovered a moment and stared straight ahead. Its black lens reflected a small fearful image of Miles inside it, like it recognized him, until it spun its tiny propellers around and flew off into the crowds outside the window and played out the same scene it had just shown. Soon, other tiny drones joined the same crowd and played the same types of footage, ensuring that everyone was able to see what was happening. A fit of murmurs came over the crowd. Miles shut the blinds, and his body began to tense up until his arm shot forward into the wall and dented the cold metal plating. His heart was racing again and his head was having trouble keeping up. He had to find Leda. He had to find Leda because he didn’t know what was about to happen next, so everything that could happen to this city played through his head on repeat all at the same time.
If she was anywhere in the city unprotected as this happened, it would take her with it.
Everything was overturned in the two neighboring rooms, even to the point of Miles tearing apart the walls to see if somehow something had been hiding in there. He bumped into his desk where he his old stories and articles had been collecting dust, and he threw them across 131 the air. Several messages popped on the screen of his computer from his old work, demanding more articles of the protests. Miles smashed the monitor flat with his hand. When he ran back into his neighbor’s room to check their again, he slipped on the doorknob and slid into the wall next to him. After punching another hole, Miles picked up the knob and nearly threw it across the room, but he hesitated. As he had put his foot down to throw, he felt his foot pressed against something hard and sharp that didn’t immediately crack and crumble like the door debris he had stepped on before. It broke through his shoe and rubbed against the hard skin of his foot.
Plucking it out, Miles held a flattened piece of golden metal in his hand. Examining it, Miles made out the faint markings of a bullet casing, the kind he recognized the police used. Miles bent it again between his fingers, slid it in his hip pocket, and went back into his room.
He slid as much pistol ammunition into his jacket pockets as he could. As he was about to leave, Miles looked at the scattered papers he had thrown and saw that he had mistakenly tossed some of his books as well. Amidst the sparks of anger in his sunken body, he felt a quick tinge of guilt at what he had done to them. He looked at one thick collection of poetry he was still reading through before he had killed Zachary. He was stuck on a very long passage about a wasteland.
He didn’t understand it, as it often dived into incongruent tangents he couldn’t make sense of, which is why he never finished it. There was still a stray pocket in his jacket Miles could jam the book in since he didn’t know when he’d be back. He decided to leave it because there was nothing it could do to help him now. Outside his window, he saw a someone spray painting a quote he didn’t recognize, but the citation at the end appeared to be biblical. Overtop, nearly eclipsing the message, were massive sputtering lights forming Umor’s smiling face.
He used a burner phone from his desk to tell Henry to meet him at the police station. It was 1:22 AM. It was twenty minutes before Miles would start killing. 132
…
Miles continued to knock people away as he walked to the police station, but he it didn’t startle him anymore. It was more deliberate even. All the sounds and sights, even the warmth from breath and fire, slid right off him like the harsh wind against the metal buildings. His hands were shaking in his pockets, and his eye would twitch involuntarily from tiny jolts coming from the ED. Soon, he had the station in his sights. All he had to do was walk down the street. He would show them the bullet casing from his neighbor’s apartment, explain that he was Leda’s guardian, and leave. He just had to walk down the street.
As he approached closer, the station was harder to see than it had been on the horizon. A growing wall of people was accumulating along the line of officers guarding the perimeter. They wanted Umor to be brought out, they wanted the medical establishment held responsible for what happened to Alice, and some of them still wanted to know where the lone gunman to punish him, and others to reward him. They wanted all of this and none of this at the same time. The crowd was a single mouth carrying a dozen voices all at once, but Miles didn’t care. People were in his way, and he didn’t trust them to be so docile forever. He got to the very front of the mass and poked one officer on the shoulder to get his attention and got a heave from the officer’s plasma shield into his chest as a response. Miles barely slid back from where he was hit, but he went into a harsh coughing fit as he felt his gasps for air push heavily on the stomach and chest with wet spots soaking his shirt where he had been shot before.
Miles held the bullet up to the officers and began to explain himself, but he didn’t. He couldn’t because he hadn’t brought anything for writing with him, and his eye boggled at his mistake. 133
Evidence
Leda
Please
Miles kept contorting his hands into gestures to try to explain what he meant, hoping the stress in his eye and the few blips of words he could make on his screen could convey what he meant, but the officers looked through him with blank eyes as their lights continued to blink. He was pushed back again. Miles tried to move closer to get through the narrow gaps between the barricade but was struck in the collarbone. Again, he barely filched. He tried to raise his right arm in protest, but he felt a heaviness from his swollen muscle pulling down on weakened bone.
Miles collapsed, not out of physical exhaustion, but from the final bit of life inside him puttering out. He couldn’t get through that wall.
He caught glimpses of people around the officers, through his blinking eyelid, yelling things at the officers that seemed to travel through watery air before their muffled sounds reached his ears. The crowd around the wall became denser and grew as they threw bottles and shoes and rocks. All the officers lit their shields that pulsed blue sparking electricity and slowly pushed back the crowd, and then the crowd pushed harder back. They almost engulfed the neon wall of blue like a wave, almost going over top, but the best either side had was a standstill.
Miles’ body was tugged away and eventually laid flat against the ground while hazy faces loomed over him. He felt their hands peel open his jacket and cut through his shirt with a piece of glass to look at his torso. They pawed at Miles’ wounds; the scars that managed to seal already opened by the pushing. They dabbed them with torn fabric from shirts, until one hand waved away the others and cupped around Miles’ chin to inspect his face. 134
“It’s him,” they said.
Miles’ eye shot open. The muttering around him was urgently fast and accompanied by flailing hand gestures pointing at Miles and back at the police. Looking at his opened jacket, they slowly pulled something out, and Miles was too hazy to stop them before he realized it was his gun. He snapped up to grab it back, but they were too far out of reach for Miles to get it. They staggered back at the sight of Miles reaching for his weapon. Someone yelled that Miles was secretly a cop and pushed him back down.
Miles felt himself being propped up on his feet from behind and taken back towards the barricade while others tried to push them off him. There had been enough pushing and soon the figures over Miles were cracking each other’s heads with their fists, and some of them kept pulling on Miles as he tried to pry their hands off. His heart rate was rising again, and his hand again instinctively went for his holster, but there was nothing there. He saw the person with his gun and grappled them to wrestle it out of their hands. Then, a shot was fired, and the person in front of Miles fell to the ground.
Miles saw the shaking eyes of everyone around him wherever he looked. No space to move. Every muscle in his body twitched with an impulsive sense of fear. People were getting closer. The fire in his chest sprung to life. He just let go.
Miles could never recall the next few seconds of what he did, but a moment of clarity came into his head when he refocused and wondered why he couldn’t move his left arm. It felt stuck, but Miles understood why when he saw it disappear into the man’s chest in front of him.
He saw his clenched fist shaking on the other side, and it slid out as limply as the man’s body hit the ground. There wasn’t any more thinking after that. Any time Miles tried to stop he’d get 135 struck by something during his hesitation, and it’d send him into an even stronger burst of anger he’d lose himself in.
After a two more gunshots in quick succession, two officers snapped their necks to the side to see a massive man, with blood leaking out the cracks in his body, throttling the life out of someone’s neck till their eyes rolled back and their chin was painted in red streams from their limp mouth. Before they could do more than shout out to their brothers in arms, their vision went dark after the man had swung his body around and plugged a bullet into each of their heads. All the force of the mob that had been growing against the barricade spilled through the floodgates.
Another officer broke through the chain to wade through the crowds and get a clearer shot of the man with bloodshot eyes that smeared someone’s head along the ground with his foot, but the officer was knocked to the ground by someone from the crowd. The tight spring in his head snapped like a gun, and he haphazardly put two bullets through the air, not knowing where they were headed. One by one, the chain broke apart for the links to preserve themselves amongst everyone else. The last thing the officer saw was the man he had tried to stop slamming a body against the main door of the building, kicking it open, and shooting several rounds into the hall.
The mob stormed in from every broken window looking for Umor, setting the building on fire, attacking officers. Miles crashed from wall to wall, each time with a new body in his hands to mangle. They all fell. It didn’t matter how many bullets he took because when Miles looked inside, he couldn’t find any man left to kill, so all they were shooting was a body acting on instinct. Eventually, he ran out of ammunition. He made his way to the building’s armory through the labyrinthine hallways. 136
The body he threw against the door to break it open slumped over, barely alive, as the different weapons above him fell off their hooks onto him. The body watched as this man streaking red and blue blood walked in, unphased by it, pulled gauze out of his eye to reveal a hallow darkness encircled by raw muscle and chipped bone. He inspected the grenades, the guns, the medical supplies and took what he could carry of each. He seemed to know what he was doing with all the needles he jabbed into his arm and the automatic bandages that lit up firmly wrapped themselves around his loosely held together body. He pulled out a metal eye that sparked at a rounded tip extending off the main sphere. After drawing it closer to his face, the tip burst into tentacles of electric energy radiating off it and was sucked into his socket with a magnetic-like pull. He picked out an object that fit in the palm of his hand like a thick but still small rectangle until it unfolded and extended into a thinner variation of a normal rifle. The last thing the body saw was the man loading the rifle, pumping the lever, and shooting the person through the chest and leaving them to bleed out with the other body.
The killing became less rabid than before as Miles walked through the halls calmly taking out everyone that walked in front, leaving the anger for the lever of the gun with his shaking hand after each shot. People that had gotten hold of the tear gas from the armory Miles broke open used the cover of the smoke in the halls to defend themselves from people that already had guns trained on them. The smoke lit his right eye on fire to the point of near blindness, but his left eye automatically switched to thermal vision when normal visibility was impossible. All the vague shapes were painted the same, and they all fell the same too. Their figures twitched after each shot blew out the psychedelic mixture of reds, yellows, and greens out from their silhouettes and onto the dark blue tinted walls around them. All they could see was a steady figure, wrapped in the smoke and gun calmly moving in his hand, slowly approaching. The last 137 thing they saw was his thermal eye’s piercing red light cut through the smoke before their own vision cut out and they dropped dead.
After checking nearly every room, he kicked his way into one with stacked chairs blocking the door on the other side. After breaking through, he saw Umor and their colleagues in suits huddling together in the far corner of the room in a pool of urine, and on the adjacent corner was Leda with her head tucked between her legs and her arms wrapped tight around them. Each slow, heavy step Miles made towards Umor elicited a new disturbed yelp from the shaking mass sending ripples through their brownish yellow puddle. When Miles was directly standing over them, Umor tried to scream even though they were hyperventilating too much to breath, but they just winced and closed their eyes when Miles pulled them up by the collar of their jacket. They gasped for air when Miles dropped them to the ground, and they saw him with their phone.
With it, Miles texted Henry.
It’s Miles. I’m hurt by the stores behind the police station. I have Leda. Just take her at least and go. Hurry.
Once he sent the message, Miles paused a second and pulled up other applications on the phone to see what Umor had kept hidden on it. After some scrolling through of their emails and personal notes about Zachary, Leda, and himself, Miles nodded slowly in understanding, but it was an empty gesture because, truly, he didn’t care about how he got here anymore. After scrolling through and turning off any applications that could track him, Miles tucked the phone in the nearly shredded pockets of his pants. The last Umor saw of Miles that night was him walking out the door with Leda resting against his chest, not even struggling. 138
They waited in the shadows between a dumpster and a wall of the police building with trash bags piled in front of them that Miles put out to conceal them. He looked out for Henry through the little gaps in the gate against his back. He saw the hell he had started by the front of the building spread out to the rest of the city like the one he had seen on the television. Through the gunshots and screaming erupting over the constant crackling of fire, Miles never stopped delicately stroking Leda’s head as she stood still against him, breathing in a light shaky rhythm.
He made sure her head was tucked down so she couldn’t see any of this. As he did, he looked back to see someone with a changing body like Umor get dragged out of a looted store and have their head opened with a bat while two people held them down. They held the body up and shook it like a trash bin to see what would come out as the toxic tinted flames spewed out of the mouths of the building behind them. Miles turned his head away and rested it against Leda’s. He didn’t care to see more. He had seen enough.
Time didn’t seem to exist anymore, but it was still dark when Henry’s shoddy rusted car rattled up to the street as he barely peaked his head out with his quivering lip and darting eyes stinging from the sweat pouring out of him. Just as Henry had timidly stepped out of his car, the color drained out of his face when he saw a shambling, bloodied Miles limping towards him with a rifle hanging on his fingers in one hand and Leda, her hair soaked in Miles’ blood, cradled in the other. Unable to speak, unable to shake, Henry stood perfectly still as he accepted Leda into his arms. Miles stumbled when he tried to take a few steps to move to the other side of the car with his blurring vision, but he heard the hammer click behind him, and the shotgun slug peppered his back before he could turn around. The last that Leda ever saw of Miles was him shoving her and Henry into the car while he shielded them with his body as Henry drove off in the car, and the last that Henry ever saw of Miles was his reflection in the rearview mirror 139 beating someone to death with his rifle until it shattered. He didn’t know how it could’ve been possible, but Henry swore that he heard Miles scream like an animal, echoing as they drove further away.
Miles tried to reach down to pick up the shotgun, but that little twist in his body shot out splatters of blood like a wrung towel. Around the corner, people were running towards him with blunt weapons, so Miles took off in the other direction as fast as he could. He pathetically tried to throw a grenade at the people coming towards them, barely getting distance, but it was enough to catch some of them off guard. Their bodies died as they flung wildly in the air.
Hobbling with buckled legs and loose arms, Miles still ran as far as he could to the only place he could think wanting to go to. All the while, a sobbing guttural wail followed the corpse of a man as he ran to the outskirts of the city. With only two high yield grenades left, Miles fumbled to get them out and hold them in one hand as he approached the long tunnel that led to whatever was outside of the city. Another mob had grown here as more officers were positioned there than before and were now making sure that everyone be kept within the city perimeter.
Miles pushed the activation button for the first grenade against his thigh and mustered as much strength as he could to throw it towards the barricade to clear a path. It sent more people flying, and in that gap, Miles ran through the mob and entered the tunnel. He heard the rapid stomping of footsteps running after him, and he let his last activated grenade roll behind him in the tunnel.
The explosion broke apart the infrastructure around it, and the pile of rubble that fell down blocked the only way out behind Miles.
His right eye was still burnt beyond the point of use, and his left eye had been covered in too much blood to look past, so he crookedly ran without knowing where he was going down a possibly eternal tunnel, all the while listening to the perpetual echo of his own violent sobbing. 140
He could still feel the burning from the city prodding him forward, forbidding him from stopping for a moment while running in darkness. Once the flames disappeared in the void behind him,
Miles was left with an endless chill, until...eventually, a gently embracing warmth wrapped itself around his breaking body through an expanding peak of light in front of him, and Miles dropped forward into the soft curling touch of leaves of grass.
…
During Miles’ rampage, a young person was carrying his injured friend up to a hillside on the opposite side of town. They had both seen what had been happening in the city, but the injured fellow had been bruised and electrocuted and was barely able to balance himself on his hobbling leg. His other one, his prosthetic one, had been pulled off by an officer as they were trying to drag him away from a larger group. He managed to escape, and his non-augmented friend met him later to help after watching all the destruction from the news. They both figured that here on this hill, the only fragment of greenery within the city limits, would be a good place to rest.
The one friend’s stump leg buzzed lightly as the blood from his torn ligaments turned to brittle crust over the intricate pattern of electronic squares buried within the flesh. The standing one knelt over and tried to wrap the wound with a torn piece of his shirt but stopped when he saw two figures looking down on them from the top of the hill. The standing friend jumped in front of the one on the ground and threw up his arms to either side, showing that he was willing to use his body as a shield for those that need to be protected. The two figures waved back.
“Hey there!” one of them called. “You look like you’re in a tough spot. Sit a while, and have a beer!” 141
There wasn’t any more bleeding, and the one on the ground was glad to rest a moment, and he motioned for his friend to go up and see what they were on about. Once he had gotten closer, the burning from the city illuminated more of the hill as he climbed it, and the non- augmented friend saw that the two figures were in lawn chairs and were sharing a cooler of beer between them.
“Feels like a campfire from this distance,” said the one on the left as he extended his arms and open palms out to the city’s rippling light. He was very old looking with the yellow fading away in his straw hair, but his broad shoulders, jovial tone, and cheeks with still enough rose between the wrinkles was enough to suggest that he had been young once too.
“Gah! You're gonna boil the can if you keep holding it out like that!” said the one to the right as he pulled the beer out of the blonde one’s hand. This one was leaner, gruffer with a leathery face overtop a strong jaw, but his wispy hair still had some rust color in them.
“Sorry, sorry,” the blonde one apologized. “I’ll get you a new one.”
“Ah,” the ginger one said, satisfied with the cooler can now in his hand. “It’s fine.” He looked at the younger fella down below. “We don’t have another chair.”
“We do have the ground though,” said the blonde.
“We do,” replied the ginger after a sip.
The young person stared up with boggled eyes and a hanging mouth. “What are...you doing here?”
“Mostly drinking.”
“Entirely drinking.” 142
“Well, not entirely. We like talking too.”
“Only when we’re drinking.”
They both laughed.
The young man pointed back to the city in flames. “Do you live here?”
“We do,” the ginger said. “Where else would we live?”
“We try to leave whenever we can,” the blonde said.
“Then, you know what’s been happening to the augmented, right?” asked the young man.
The two elders looked at each other with raised eyebrows.
“Who?” the ginger asked.
Frustration in his eyes, the younger one pointed down to his friend.
“Oooh,” they both let out with slow head nods.
“That’s what they’re calling them now,” the ginger said.
“Seems that way. I don’t like this one. Too cold,” the blonde pitched in.
“Then you know about how they’re being abused?” the young man asked, beginning to raise his voice.
“Yes,” the blonde said.
“Of course,” the ginger repeated. “It’s a genuine shame. Would your friend like a beer?”
“Are you that apathetic that you don’t care about any of the people being hurt down there?” the young man shouted. 143
“Apathetic?” the ginger asked his friend.
“Oh, it means—” the blonde started.
“I know what it means, jackass. That’s not what I meant,” the ginger interrupted.
The blonde giggled. He bit his lip and furrowed his brows as he thought to himself. “Oh!” he suddenly shouted as he rummaged through a sack of things he had with him behind his chair until he pulled out a dusty notepad and a pencil.
“Oh, you’re such a prick,” the ginger smirked.
“C’mon, you love it when I do this.”
The young man stared at them, confused.
“I’m sorry just ignore me. Keep going with whatever you were doing,” said the blonde one as he scribbled down a series of notes.
“Are you drawing something-”
“Wait, wait. Don’t talk yet,” he said as he dabbed the pen against the page. “This thing always runs out of ink.” A few shakes and the blonde was writing again. He wrote in short lines and quickly filled up the page. “Ok, now you’re good to speak. Apologies.”
The young man scoffed. “It must feel so good up on that hill, being able to look down on everyone else.”
“We did offer for you and your friend to join us,” the ginger retorted.
“And it’s not like we have much to boast about,” the blonde said while he put the pen aside and scanned his writing. 144
“What do you mean? Of course, you do!” he shouted. “You get to be blind to everything that’s happening around you, and for what? So it’s not your problem to deal with?”
A spark from an exploding firecracker whistled through the air and landed on the base of the grassy hill, but the dew was just wet enough for it to keep the spark from spreading on a drier spot.
“I’d say we’ve got a good view of things,” the ginger said.
“Mm,” the blonde nodded, still looking at his notes.
“So, you know how you’re unaffected, how the status quo keeps people like you and I safe while everyone like my friend has to fight for themselves?”
“You sure you don’t wanna check on him right now?” the ginger asked, trying to peak around to look at the youngster still by the bottom of the hill.
“You just...you just,” the young person said trying to speak but beginning to get out of breath from their own frustration. “You’d rather sit on this hill watching everything happen while everyone else has to deal with the problems you’re perpetuating? My friend was dragged across the ground for walking too close to a barricade. I saw someone’s head get bashed in and left on the sidewalk while everyone walked right over them, and there’s been a maniac ripping through people, and police aren’t doing anything to stop him!”
“Easy, easy. There’s no point in getting yourself worked up over this right now. It’s just needless pain you’re causing yourself. If you gotta talk about it, just relax a little,” the ginger said a little louder but still speaking in an easing tone to talk the boy down. 145
“Needless pain? That’s all that’s happening outside, and you choose to ignore it, and you don’t care! The police don’t work. The government doesn’t work. The protesting doesn’t work.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing works, and whose fault do you think that is?”
“Probably the people you never see,” the ginger said. He looked to his friend to see how he was doing, and the blonde was nodding to himself as his eyes scanned through the paper.
“Oh, yeah. It could never be your fault. It’s the boogeymen out to get you. You can’t be bothered to be held accountable and do something for others.”
The ginger squinted his eyes while keeping his head sturdy, unflinching as he leaned closer and stared down the boy in front of them that was shaking against the backdrop of the burning flames climbing through the low clouds of murky tear gas up to the black sky. “What are you doing about it?” he asked.
The boy smirked. “Wasting my time.” And he made his way back down the hill. “Change is coming,” he muttered to himself. He turned back to look at them with an ugly smile. “You’re on your way out.”
The old ginger man raised his eyebrows and looked to the ground, unamused, until his friend besides him tapped his shoulder and showed him what he had written down in his notepad at the very start of the conversation.
You’re privileged. I can tell because you own lawn chairs.
You don’t know what’s happening.
You’re trying to profit off this even though you somehow don’t know what it is you’re profiting off of. 146
It’s hopeless out there.
You need to care even though I just said it was hopeless.
I’m helping right now even though I’m standing on a hill with a thumb up my ass while my friend is hurt on the ground.
This time, things will be different.
They erupted into laughter, nearly falling out of their chairs as they grabbed each other’s shoulders to keep each other steady as they pointed at the kid. Soon the ugly smile on the boy’s face just turned to ugly, and he made his way back to his friend, but not before one of the old men tossed a beer can his way and yelled, “You forgot your beer!” It landed right next to the boy, and he felt the sticky foam get in his hair. He got to his friend and told him that they were leaving, and that he’d help him get to a hospital so they could get back on the streets to help another day. Looking out at the city, the young man, still sprawled out on the ground a leg short, felt the sweat pouring down his face and didn’t know whether it came from the blazing fire in front of him or something else on his mind.
“I wanaa stay here for now. I’ll find my own way back,” the young man said with heavy breaths.
His friend grew red in the face and spat something cruel so quickly to his friend that he forgot what it was just a few moments after he walked away, only remembering his vile intent behind whatever he said. The young man, left on the ground, watching his city burn, listened behind him and heard the older men getting back to their business, unphased by the altercation that just occurred. He saw the beer can on the ground, foam dripping out of it, and picked it up for a long sip. 147
On the other side of the large hill, unbeknownst to any of the men on the field, was the pit. It had become more organized, more professional, with the people around it emptying cases of old things into the ground below. The cold foam of beer had never felt so good on their lips.
148
Chapter 9
Miles Wakes up on a Farm
He felt the blades of grass caress his body, softly, like little embraces from thousands of the smallest creatures. They wrapped around him tightly enough to hold him close but still so loose that he could get up if he wanted to and roam the land free, untethered by their affection.
As he came to, Miles felt the dewy grass furl in on themselves and harden, slightly, until he realized he was resting on the itchy furs of a sofa.
When he raised his head to look around him, Miles felt the glimmer of warm sunlight waft against his face and irritate his unfocussed eyes. Through the fingerprint smudged window the light came from, Miles saw a pasture. Gated in through an expansive outline of fencing were herds of cattle, their slabs of fat melting off as sweat in the sun, meandering around acres of flat green land. Behind them was a great sturdy barn, whose windchimes gently swayed in the soft breeze that carried a flutter of different bird calls through the air. Opening the panes, Miles slowly stuck his head out to look at it all more intensely to see if it was real, and he saw that overlooking the aimless cows in the warm sun, barely two miles away, was the city. The obsidian tinted clouds from the city’s fires were pierced by the jagged teeth of ashy skyscrapers.
The sun was blocked from below, and the only light to shine through toxic fog were the hazy flickers of yellow from explosives and more burning. It wasn’t even that close. It was just that massive of a structure. His mind began to slip away from the pastures back to the hell he had made. If he listened closely, Miles could hear them cry out. The cows were complaining about the lack of water in their troth. 149
Out of the corner of his eye, approaching the livestock, Miles saw someone, a child, perhaps a girl, walking with a pale of water in hand. He felt the momentary swell of air and muscle in his lungs as he instinctively tried to call out “Leda,” but that slight movement was impossible for him. It wasn’t pain, he didn’t feel any pain now, but every part of his body felt constricted. It was then that Miles realized that every part of his person was covered head to toe in secure medical wraps. If he tried to, he could force himself out of his cast, breaking it, but the care the soft wraps took to hold him tightly, kindly, made him hesitate against doing so. Every push with his muscle to get up was met with a stronger wave of calm around his body like he was being rocked to sleep. He slowly slinked back against his pillow, feeling it wrap around his head, and he nestled into a comfortable position. Even the IV drip coming out of his right arm, as the pouch laid on the table, seemed insignificant despite how the needle wriggling under his skin.
A woman walked up to the bed. She was tall, toned, and wearing modest but well-kept clothes. They were looked like the rural worker he had only heard about in the little scraps of stories he had rescued from the pit, with wrinkled pants hung up with suspenders and a little dirt around his otherwise clean shoes. Yet, there was an amalgamation of styles that blended together with the woman’s watch that projected holograms for her to swipe through and her thin, sleek glasses that folded in on themselves into a tiny square for her to put into a shirt pocket as she drew closer. Miles felt how his body tipped to either side more than he’d like from trying to balance his prosthetics with slight movements along the bed.
“It’s ok. You’re injured. Try not to move,” the woman said, quick and succinct but still gentle sounding. “I’m Jo. We found you passed out by the fields, and your...blood trails led back to the city. You looked like you need help than we ever did when we left.” She half smirked but 150 was met by Miles’ unblinking eyes and smudged visor peeking through his bandages. She stared at Miles a moment with a calm expression of concern. “Can you talk?”
His visor struggled to buzz only a couple characters.
No
Jo sat patiently, attentive with a good bed manner, but her eyes betrayed the awkwardness she felt from communicating with a screen.
“Wha- oh. Oh, I see. That’s what you mean,” she said as she licked her thumb and rubbed away some of the dirt off his screen. “I wasn’t sure what the significance of that was. Are you feeling alright? Do you have any questions?”
Miles continued to stare.
No
She nodded gently, still a little uncertain in her eyes. “What’s your name?”
The beating of Miles’ heart changed into a pounding throb, worried about being cast out after she’d learn who he was. But, he thought, she didn’t recognize how he looked, and she must have examined his body extensively while dressing him.
Miles
“It’s nice to meet you, Miles,” she smiled while putting her hand on his shoulder, making sure not to add any pressure. “I live here with my husband and our son. They’re working outside now. They should be coming in soon, though, but don’t be scared. They’re friendly. Um, I’m sorry, but...how do you eat? The IV drip has been keeping you hydrated, but you need some food.” 151
Blended
She nodded again, but her question still clearly wasn’t answered as she looked down at the visor.
Take off
With hesitating hands, Jo slowly gripped either side of Miles’ face, wiggling her fingers under his bandages, and pulled off the visor. Once she did, after the slight squeal of pressurized steam from it being removed, Jo had to gulp down an involuntary gasp from seeing Miles’ violently distorted mouth. Without allowing their eyes to meet, Jo quickly took a clothe out of her pocket and wrapped it around his mouth like a bandana. He expected her to say that this was to prevent infection, but all Jo could muster to say was, “I’m sorry,” before she ran to the kitchen to get something for Miles to drink.
In the meantime, Miles sat there, his breathing coarse and uneven. He saw how the room had been caught in a limbo of design; the wood and leather furnishings bled in from the outdoor pastoral aesthetic and were caught in the gentle sunlight that melted through the windows.
Though, there was still technology. The television wasn’t just a plain screen like it had always been for him and Henry. Miles had recognized it from the ones hung out in store windows. Like
Jo’s watch, it was small and compact and could unfold to project detailed holographic models that would animate in the middle of the room atop the polished boarded floor.
Then, through the door at the end of the hall, Miles saw a tall man with jeans and a shirt with cutoff sleeves walk in with the child that he had seen outside earlier. After a brief pause at seeing Miles awake, the father looked down at his child and sent them away to their mother. As they passed Miles, the child stopped a moment to look at him. They were short and had a soft 152 rounded face but with the beginning of some unkept stubble around their chin and cheeks that was too scrappy to connect to their shortly cut head of hair. They managed a hesitant wave and went to the kitchen with their mother. The father approached, as if he were about to extend his hand, but they settled comfortably into his pant pockets with just his thumbs sticking out.
“Jaime. Nice to meet you,” he said with a polite nod. “Seth is a little shy.” He pointed to the child who was now plucking little pieces of fruit out of the pile Jo had made while she wasn’t looking and giggling when she caught him. “We’ll keep you here as long as you need to recover.”
Before he left, Jaime made a slight glance at Miles’ prosthetics. He seemed to almost wince a second before forcing his lips into a conventional smile and walking to the rest of his family.
Later, Jo returned with the blended fruit drink and Seth by her side.
“Full of sugar,” she smiled as she lifted Miles’ bandana up slightly and fed the straw into his mouth. “So, it should give you plenty of energy. Right, Seth?” she smirked to her son.
Seth giggled again and tried to offer the strawberry he had nibbled to Miles only for his mother to slowly palm it away with hushed tones, hoping Miles hadn’t noticed the transgression.
A cow chorus wailed outside.
“They ran out of water already?” she muttered to herself, slightly frustrated. “Do you know where dad is?” she asked Seth.
“I think he’s reading upstairs,” said Seth. 153
“Of course,” Jo grumbled. She got to the door where the family’s gloves and smaller yard supplies sat in loosely organized piles next to their dirtied work shoes. “I’ll be back in a little bit.
Could you try to get the bear out of his cave by asking him what we’re doing for dinner?” she asked, motioning up the stairs. “Then maybe keep Miles some company when you’re done?”
“Ok,” Seth said as he scampered to the base of the stairs.
“And remember to take your hormones before we eat. We don’t need your appetite to come back when we’re doing the dishes,” Jo called out from outside right before she closed the door to the house.
“Ok, mom!” Seth called back from the second floor of the house.
When everyone reconvened for their meal, Jo had tried to put in some makeshift seating that would allow Miles to sit with them at the table, but she couldn’t find anything that would keep Miles comfortable. The conversations were as normal as Miles imagined conversations between families were, only interrupted by the occasional question asked by Jaime about Miles to which Jo always uncomfortably replied, “I don’t know.”
Afterwards, Jo examined Miles further and freed up some of the bandages around his arm to give him some sense of mobility. She tried to make conversation by giving him something to write with, but she couldn’t find anything despite her protests to Jaime to help her look in his study as he shuffled Seth up the stairs with him for bedtime.
Miles was left to sleep on the couch, alone and in the dark, but he still couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes. From upstairs, he heard the faint echoes of an argument rising and falling between Jo and Jaime. Words like “safety,” “isolation,” and “family,” came from Jaime and “compassion,” “leaving,” and “regret,” came from Jo. He knew they were talking about him, 154 but it didn’t upset him. In fact, Miles had yet to feel anything beyond the physical since he had woken up. He felt sparking. It was then that Miles remembered that he hadn’t taken the ED out since he had gone to get Leda, so he did. He hadn’t noticed any difference. He spent the rest of the night slouched against the couch as he looked up at the ceiling like a limp doll, never falling asleep.
Chapter 10
Miles Helps on the Farm and Learns about History
By the time the morning came, which truly was welcomed by the crow of roosters and a slowly warming sun, Miles had forced his right arm to move and promptly took the ED out of his head. Still, he kept it in the palm of his hand, and eventually let it fall between his fingers, so it wouldn’t jolt his eyes open when they were beginning to rest. He his arm was still too heavy for him to move. Even though he had broken out of his cast, his arm now burned a pulsing heat, and any attempt to shift his arm around further shot more searing pain through his cracked bones.
When Jo found him with his arm hanging off the side of the bed, twitching involuntarily, she hurried to his side to dress the wound again and insist that he not take it off again or else she wouldn’t be able to help.
“He could just get it replaced,” Jaime said, looking at the arm as he walked by to get his coffee.
Jo made no efforts to hide her scolding face from Miles. Even with her head turned, she didn’t miss a beat with wrapping Miles’ arm back up. The next few days were spent stagnant as well, but Jo made an effort to talk to Miles more, even going as far as to momentarily push most of her farmly duties to Seth and Jaime. She told Miles all about the past lives that got them where 155 they were as pleasant memories. Her and Jaime had met at college ten or so years ago during a biology lecture, and they’d often skip it to spend more time together during the day. They usually just talked for as long as they could about things they wanted but never had for themselves in the airy unhelpful sort of way that young people always did. Jaime was an all-around academic but was majoring in agriculture, and he always talked about how many flowers he’d put into her braided hair if he ever find any outside of a lab. He’d give her a rose he made from construction paper and careful cuts with a scissor. She’d never seen one before, so she was instantly enamored with the gesture if nothing for its uniqueness, so much so that she immediately questioned how many other girls he had tried this on before. “So, you like it then?” he chuckled to her with a bashful shrug. She was on track to get a nursing degree and help as many patients as she could. It was that simple for her, an intrinsic joy from being involved in other people’s lives when they needed it the most. There was a purity in that which swept Jaime’s heart up in Jo’s hands for her to do whatever she wanted with. Jo said that he had told her once. Jaime joked about her never needing to worry about finding work in the city. She became a nurse like she had set out to do, and Jaime ended up becoming a professor of agriculture they had graduated at, and two years after that they were married, and two years after that they were pregnant. The events felt just as fast in her memory as they did to say them out loud. When Seth was too young to remember, they decided to move out of the city to see what else there was, and they decided to pitch new tents here, in nature. They’ve lived here ever since.
“It’s nice,” Jo said. “It’s nice.”
Miles listened to all of Jo’s stories she shared incrementally whenever she came to treat him. Sometimes she’d stop by just to talk to him, to pour her stories into Miles for him to hold on to, while her husband led their son on chores and activities outside in the fields with the city 156 bearing over them all in the distance. She insisted it was fine; Seth wanted to become more of a man like his father anyways.
A few more days passed and Jo said that Miles was good enough to move, albeit just barely. He was reserved to a slow, galloping, limp. He went around their house and took in the smooth, cleaned wooden furnishings that made his own home look like its funhouse mirror reflection. Whenever he looked outside, his heart filled with a joy he had never experienced before: a sense of the unknown that was for once not coupled with fear but with excitement.
Whenever he looked inside, he found rows of books on shelves like layered brick, but he was told that the biggest collections were stashed away in Jaime’s study upstairs. After Jo eventually found some paper for him, Miles wrote Jaime a note asking if he could see it.
“I’d hardly think of them as books anymore. It’s mostly for posterity. I don’t let anyone touch them, not even myself. There’s plenty of fiction on the wall’s down here if you’re interested,” he told Miles.
It came as a surprise to Jo when Miles asked much quicker than expected if he was healthy enough to go outside, maybe even help Jaime and Seth on one of their jobs too.
“I suppose it’d be good for you to get some light exercise. Nothing too strenuous though, and just let me know if you need anything,” Jo said, and she waited behind the smudged window as she looked out at Miles joining the rest of her family while she waited inside, alone.
With a pen and folded pieces of paper in his pants pocket, Miles went out with Jaime and
Seth to chop down some wood for the livestock’s new fencing. Now with enough strength to lift his prosthetics, Miles could chop harder and lift more weight with his left arm than anyone could 157 with an arm they were born with. He dragged an entire tree by the upturned roots of its stump, leaving trails of carved out dirt behind him as he did. Seth ran over to Miles in amazement.
“How did you get this strong? Are there other people as strong as you? Where do they come from? Where do you come from? You’re like people I’ve heard stories about in books. Are you from a story?” he asked with barely a breath between each question.
Miles dropped the tree by his side, the thud scaring away flocks of birds nesting in the branches around them and fidgeted around in his pocket for his paper and pen.
I’m not, but I’ve written stories.
“Really? You can do that? What were they about?” he asked excitedly.
They weren’t good.
“Oh,” Seth said with a sullen expression, disappointed.
The awkward glum between the two quickly dissipated once Miles picked up the tree again with his prosthetic. Seth gawked at the plates of muscle that shifted like scales or armor overtop tiny lines of wires and pumps that stretched like veins. He walked over to inspect Miles’ arm, then his leg, and then his eye, lightly prodding what was within his reach. Jaime looked on from behind them with the two arm sized logs tucked under his armpit. They reached the wood pile by the farm. Miles made another great thud by dropping the tree on the ground.
“You think I could get an arm like that, dad?” he asked Jaime, still behind them.
Jaime heaved his logs into the pile, creating a minor explosion of splinters upon impact.
“Seth, go see if your mother needs help with her work,” Jaime projected. 158
“But dad-”
“Now.”
After only a glance and a whimper, Seth walked inside the house with his head hung down.
“Let’s talk,” Jaime said. He motioned with his finger towards Miles to join him in the woods.
This outburst disrupted Miles’ perpetual melancholy he had wrapped himself in since he had arrived at the farm. It angered him.
Miles jotted something down and shoved it into Jaime’s chest, giving him a little nudge.
What’s your problem?
Jaime read the note, crumpled it together in a fist, and stomped off to the forest.
“I don’t like you around my family,” Jaime said plainly.
Miles hobbled after him, having no time to scribble anything as he tried to catch up as he’d have to let Jaime keep talking.
“We moved out here for a reason, if you couldn’t tell, so forgive me if I’m not too thrilled by having the world I tried to leave come back to me, covered in bullets! You know, usually, when someone is shot at it’s because someone thought they had a reason to shoot them, so I wonder why so many people wanted to shoot you, Miles? Who exactly are you, Miles? What were you running from? What are you bringing towards the family I have tried to keep as far away from the danger that is what you are?” Jaime shouted as he dug his finger into Miles’ chest. 159
Jaime began to turn away, but Miles pulled his shoulder back to face him again.
“Get that thing off me!” he yelled as he pushed away Miles’ prosthetic hand.
Jotting something down, Miles held up a question with dark and jagged lettering.
What’s wrong with my arm?
Jaime gripped his hair with his hands, running them down his face, and making a deep sigh.
“It’s not you, per se. It’s...it’s everything that you come from. I had a decent job as a professor. I hated it, but it was a good job. I had access to an immaculate library, huge like you wouldn’t believe, so I read a lot. As I did, I didn’t like how some fucking insane kids were coming along, looking around at their pretty metallic world and telling mommy and daddy, ‘Hey, why don’t you slap that on my arm?’ Aside from me finding it morally reprehensible for people calling this morbid fad of body replacement a social movement, and then piggybacking itself on the shoulders of historically genuinely oppressed people that didn’t need to be invented, it’s just inherently disturbing! They even called me a troublemaker for bringing up what people went through in the past, can you imagine? And have you seen what people can do now? I saw a couple swap their heads when they were walking down the street! It was completely normal to them. And people wondered why I wouldn’t impressionable children, my own child, to do those things to themselves? To literally strip away parts of their humanity? Like what do you call that thing around your mouth? And don’t give me that crap about most augmentations being out of medical necessity. I’ve read the literature, and I don’t buy it. They’re all almost entirely voluntary. And all these people did was create another divisive group in the public eye. There didn’t need to be...more conflict. They could’ve just shut up and kept to themselves.” Jaime was 160 sniveling a little now, and he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. “And of course, I choose to speak out, and it costs me my job. It wasn’t important work anyways. They probably did me a favor. They even closed the library afterwards too. Too out of date and not enough customers. Threw away most of the crap anyways. No one cared,” he chuckled. He wiped away snot from his nose and brushed it off on his pants.
Miles looked at him with softer eyes. He wrote something down again but slower this time, leaving the caws of birds and rushing sounds of water over rocks to set the ambience between them.
Agriculture is important. Look at everything you built.
Miles pointed at the barn house, how its outline glimmered against the sunlight over the glistening grass.
Jaime shook his head. “It wasn’t in agriculture, my major. It was agricultural theory as in,
‘Nothing you’re studying exists here anymore, so we’ll throw you a bone and give you a degree to teach other people about things they’ll never see.’ I’d never held more than a few patches of grass in my hand until I’d moved out here.”
So, where does the food come from?
Jaime shrugged. “They ship it in. Labs. Don’t need farmers for that. Don’t believe everything the marketing tells you.” He finally composed himself after wiping away his measly tears. “At least it tasted good. They laughed at me because I wanted to work in nature.” He grimaced. “They called me a weed, so I did them a favor and left.”
Miles slowly pushed his loose paper back into his pocket, unsure of what to say next. 161
“I'm sorry. You’ve done nothing wrong. I don’t know you.” He looked over the horizon at the ash burnt tips of skyscrapers as waves of fire swirled around them. “I just hate everything from the city.”
The sincerity with which Jaime had said that sent a chill down Miles’ spine, but he pushed that feeling away for now, not knowing how to address it. Gingerly, Miles wrote something down and handed the paper to Jaime like a delicate gift between his fingers.
Me too.
Jaime held the note with both hands, looking down at it solemnly. Miles thought of all the books he had rescued from the pit, now rotting away in his tomb of a home. He handed Jaime another paper.
Did you take any of the books with you before you left?
Jaime’s lips slid out an involuntary smile out of the corner of his mouth. “Come with me.”
They walked into the house together and passed the television in the living room, next to the sofa Miles had rested on. He gave a note to Jaime.
You ever watch the news?
Jaime snorted. “I don’t live long enough to waste it doing that.”
As Miles was still removing his work boots, Jaime went over to Seth, who was checking under his shirt if his body hair had begun to grow at all. His father tussled his hair to coerce a light smile out of him. He went over to his wife by the kitchen table and kissed her on the cheek and whispered something in her ear that Miles couldn’t hear. She held his hand, squeezed it 162 once, and then let go. Jaime went back to Miles and noticed the poor condition of his arm, covered in dirt and other stains that were harder to make out.
“Put that in the bathroom upstairs first. I’ll take a crack at cleaning it off. When you’re done, meet me in my study,” Jaime said.
Miles did as he was told and, after leaving his dirtied arm in the pristine sink, immediately staining it, he walked into the once forbidden room.
There were no walls to be seen. Everything was books, and it was a large room.
“So,” Jaime began as he walked down the rows, grazing his fingers over the bumps of the hardbacks, “Fiction or history? And when I say ‘fiction,’ that includes poetry. It’s really just resized prose-”
Everything else that Jaime said in the next few seconds didn’t register to Miles. He was taken aback by the care that had been placed into so many miniature worlds whereas he could barely maintain average upkeep of just a handful of them. He didn’t know where to start. Then, he heard the faintest sound of popping, like little fireworks. Tracing the sound, Miles turned to the only window in the room, towards the ceiling. Realizing the direction he was facing relative to the house, Miles now knew that these were distant gunshots. He handed Jaime a note.
History.
“Personally, I’d suggest fiction, but I won’t shy you away from masochism if it’s what you’re searching for.”
He pulled out a thick text and put it in Miles’ hand. It felt heavy. 163
“I’ll take care of your arm for whenever you want to pick it up. Probably an hour or so.
Dinner should be ready around then too if you’d like to join us at the table.” Jaime smiled a little as he pulled the door closed behind him. “Happy reading.”
Before Miles could sit down, the empty gap in the shelves from where the book had been taken gave way to a couple more falling to the ground in heavy thuds.
“Be careful in there!” Jaime yelled from across the hall.
As quick as he could, Miles went over to the fallen pile to pick them back up. He glimpsed at the titles. They had words about race, gender, economics, and they were all clad in ancient print covers. Not that print itself wasn’t already ancient, but these ones were old even by those standards. Finally, Miles looked at the book he had been given and sat down. It was about race, apparently.
Miles wasn’t even entirely sure if he knew how that word, ‘race,’ was meant to be used.
The book was strange. While he could understand the language, all the ideas were bizarre to the point of comedy. Miles opened a chapter at random. It made sense at first; people sacrificed morality for land and labor, nothing unexpected. Then, it kept going. The stuff here made Miles chuckle. It made no sense. He had never heard these ideas from others nor thought of them himself. Every pencil drawn sketch laid out in print, depicting the brutality inflicted on one another over something as unimportant as pigment, was comedically foreign to Miles. He took a second to look at the color on his own arm, and he chuckled some more. Later, in the bathroom,
Miles saw his prosthetic that Jaime had left for him after cleaning it. It was still covered in rust and grime, and Miles had to wonder whether it had been left on out of willful negligence or ignorance. He spent an hour in the bathroom, skipping dinner, scraping the gunk off his arm, 164 until it looked pristine enough for him to want to put it on. He thought more about the book he read. As he did, the phone he’d taken from Umor was waiting idly in the loose pocket of his torn pants, hung limply on the side of the couch, and the battery was slowly dying.
165
Chapter 11
Miles Helps on the Farm and Learns about History
Miles spent the entire night reading. He went through the same chapter over and over, and by the time it was morning, he realized he’d really gone through the entire book, covering centuries. By the time he finished, despite feeling fulfilled from having learned, Miles was horribly exhausted, similar to how he felt in the city.
He came down for breakfast and saw the rest of the family already at the table. Jaime was warmer to his wife and son than he had seen before as they passed around the scrambled eggs, the milk, and the biscuits. Jaime scooted his chair over and pulled up a seat for Miles. Jo smiled to herself, and Seth has preoccupied with getting enough protein for a growing boy’s muscle from nearly picking apart half the table’s supply of eggs but still leaving nibbled scraps the way a child does.
“Good morning, Miles,” Jo said as she snuck of Seth’s eggs to blend for Miles.
“Did you sleep at all?” Jaime asked plainly but still less apathetic than before.
Not really. I got up in reading.
Miles placed the hefty textbook on the table which shook the plates and silverware.
“How far did you get?” Jaime asked as he was eating.
I finished it.
Jaime choked on his food for a moment when he read that comment, and he looked at
Miles, dumbfounded. 166
“The entire thing?” Jaime sputtered.
Yeah.
“You must’ve really liked reading it then, huh?” Jo asked pleasantly. She handed Miles his blended meal.
Miles sat still for a moment, then nodded politely at Jo giving him his breakfast.
“Well,” Jaime started. “What did you think?”
The augmented were the next logical step in people trying to achieve cultural identity in a world they’re increasingly associated with technology.
Jaime raised his eyebrows at Miles’ audacity, and Jo shrunk in her chair and partly cover her face with her hand in anticipation of the ensuing words Jaime and Miles would throw at each other. Jaime took a deep breath.
“Why do you say that?” he asked, still composed.
Every cultural division is constructed.
“Yes, but not in factories. They were derived from how human beings interacted with one another, not literally rebuilding themselves from the ground up.”
Jo and Seth were looking back and forth between the, from they could physically hear, one-sided conversation, but it was less demeaning now, less goal oriented. It was just a conversation.
It wasn’t from people interacting each other. It was from groups interacting with each other. 167
Jaime furrowed his brow. “The distinction being...?”
If everyone had been by themselves, isolated, these ideas wouldn’t have grown, and they wouldn’t have garnered enough attention to have clashed.
“Hm,” Jaime chuckled, amused by the suggestion. “Not technically wrong, if a bit idealistic as if everyone would just be able to get up and leave, but I like the thinking.”
It doesn’t feel good to think about.
Jaime smirked and put his hand on Miles’ shoulder. “It never is. It shouldn’t be at least...maybe for sadists it is.”
Miles looked down with a dead expression and lightly pushed away his cup, having lost his appetite.
“But,” Jaime cut in. “That’s not to say there isn’t anything that can make us feel better.
Finish your drink. Then, meet me upstairs.” Jaime, finishing his plate, kissed Jo on the cheek again, and slid his half-eaten biscuit to a thankful Seth.
“Are we still on for later today?” Jo asked, grabbing the end of Jaime’s shirt as he walked by, not wanting to let go.
Jaime nodded reassuringly and placed her hand back on her lap before leaving for the upstairs.
So, Miles once again met Jaime in his study where he was met with the father placing a large stack of books on the table in his study.
“Pick your poison. Science fiction, epics, action-thrillers, espionage, any preferences?”
Jaime asked as he spread the array of different colored covers on the countertop. 168
As he did this, Miles’ eyes were immediately drawn to the book that Jaime had pushed off to the corner like it was the most inconsequential of the bunch. Miles picked it up.
“Achilles? I never cared for him. He always seemed cowardly to me. Good imagery in it though, especially for the weapons he gets, almost too much so. It’s gratuitous considering what he uses them for if you ask me,” Jaime said.
I’ve never read all of it. I never found any story in perfect condition with all the pages intact.
“What parts have you read before?”
Miles stood still a moment.
Battle scenes.
“Ah, figures. Although, I think you’ll get a soft spot for his heel if you aren’t familiar already,” Jaime chuckled to himself. He started handing the book to Miles but recoiled when his watch made a set of electronic blips. After pulling up a large screen stemming out of the tiny pigeonhole light on his watch, Jaime handed the book to Miles and went to the door.
“I’m sorry, but I promised Jo we’d have some private time today. Making up and all that.
I can’t skip out. I’ll be indisposed for a while. If you need something, Seth should be out on watering duty outside. Alright?”
That’s fine with me.
“Good. I’ll leave you to it then,” Jaime said as he left.
The book was hard to read for Miles. The lexicon here was far more droning and arduous here than in the simpler battles scenes he had read before. Every few sentences had a number 169 attached to it, and those numbers led to more confusing references at the bottom of the page. The further he read into the story, the more it reminded him about the poem of the wasteland he had read before, and it made just as little sense. Frustrated, he went outside to see if Seth had ever read through his father’s books before.
“Oh, yeah. I have,” Seth said, eagerly dropping his bucket to go and talk to Miles again.
“Dad makes me read a lot for homeschooling. Which one are you reading now?”
The Illiad. I’ve never read a story to completion or finished a movie before.
“Really? But you still got to see some of them? That’s so weird. Why?” Seth asked without a care in the world.
I just never found anything that was complete before.
“Well, couldn’t you buy one?” Seth asked.
No. No one sells any.
“Oh, well, I’ve seen a lot of stuff from dad. I might be able to help. What do you want to know about?” Seth asked, eager to please.
Out of everything in the catalogue in his head, Miles could only think about two characters that he felt compelled to know more about.
Roy Batty and Achilles. Tell me about them.
“Roy...who? Oh, wait. Isn’t he from Blade Runner? Why do you want to know about him too?”
I always liked stories about heroes. 170
Seth looked wishfully at the skies. “Yeah, me too. They just...it’s like they gave me something to aspire to. Like they were everything I was, but they were better at it than me than...me? Does that make sense? Like...like you! They’re always so strong and-”
And as Seth said that he flexed his arms together like the man with ironclad, invulnerable muscle he imagined Miles to be, but as did, the lumps on his chest were pushed up to the top of his shirt, momentarily revealing their curvature. Horribly embarrassed, Seth tucked the top of his shirt over them to try to have him and Miles forget about he saw entirely. Though, unbeknownst to Seth, Miles didn’t care in the slightest about this. Like the rest of the world he was brought up in, Miles was from a time when such features of a person were considered unimportant and boring. Seth paused a moment to think of what to say next.
“I guess I liked how they saved people too...I guess. I always liked thinking of saving a girl from a tower or something. I…I don’t know. Makes me happy to think about. Have you ever done that?” he asked while pulling on Miles’ robotic arm.
Not from a tower.
“Wait you actually did, though? Guess you must’ve got a lot of kisses,” Seth said as his voice trailed off and looked bashfully at the ground.
No, nothing like that. It was different.
“O-oh, ok. Still, that’s so cool! What did you do? How did you do it? Why did you do it?”
On the paper, Miles wrote, ‘Because she needed help,’ but in his head he thought,
‘Because I wanted to.’ This discrepancy lingered in his head for the rest of the conversation. 171
“That’s a good answer,” Seth smiled. “Yeah, heroes are pretty cool like Achilles and...wait. You said Roy Batty, right?”
Yes. Why?
“Well, I mean, he really wasn’t a hero.”
A feeling of pride inside Miles immediately dropped to the base of his stomach and shattered as if Seth had directly insulted him instead of a fictional character.
What do you mean?
“Well, Roy Batty was a combat replicant, an android, and he goes rogue for the whole movie and kills people, and the government had to send someone to try and track him down. I get why he did it cause he was only designed to live a for a very short time, and he wanted to contact his creator to try and extend it, but he only did a really good thing right before he died.”
Feeling limp, Miles stared straight ahead at the horizon.
“He is kinda like Achilles though because they both kill people, but they think why they do it. Achilles was a soldier in a war though at least, but he didn’t want to be. It’s actually kinda funny how much of the war he spends just complaining about everything that he’s not fighting about. I guess, I dunno, I guess it’s sad too cause when he does show up to fight he dies too.”
His eye twitched. Miles barely moved and could barely think, but he assumed he nodded eventually because Seth said, “Well, I’m glad that helped. Let me know if you need anything...ok?” And after some time waiting for a response, Seth got up to leave but stopped himself to try to reach out to Miles one last time. 172
“I do like their stories, but they can feel a little too unreal, which I guess is on purpose, but it’s like I keep thinking about how they’re just characters in a story, and they could never do the things they do in real life. It’s like they’re not...um, applicable? I dunno, did that help?”
At the realization of what Seth had said, Miles threw his head up to look at the sky and began to chuckle as he watched the wisps of clouds in the air dangle down like marionette strings. His chuckle grew into a laugh, but without the use of a normal mouth, the harsh sound of gurgling of blood against a scraped throat clawed its way out of Miles’ mouth. He coughed up some blood onto the inside of his bandana, and after laughing for so long, he felt lightheaded and began to imagine looking down on himself from a higher unseen vantage point. He continued to laugh. He stayed out for some time, and his vision blurred as his body called for rest.
When he looked out on the horizon, he could see the distant crumbling remnants of other houses, overgrowth of grass and dirt swallowing them up, that other frontiersmen must had lived in and, he assumed, died in with no one to do anything with the rubble or the bodies inside.
173
Chapter 12
Comfortably Numb
It was nighttime. Miles eased into the leather chair that molded its cool material against his body. He got out his paper and pen, quickly checked to see if anyone had come down the stairs yet, and then turned on the tv. He sat there for some time, but most of it was spent writing.
He tried to copy down what he saw, but, eventually, he was so wrapped up in the text of what he was writing that he barely saw what was happening on the news at all. The fire crackled in the distance in real time with what he saw on the screen. His handwriting was scribbly, shaken, out of order, and often overlapped each other to the point of obscuring the words that were originally on the page. This is what he wrote.
…
Miles imagined the garage. Umor walked in to meet Henry who was sitting by his table and chair. His face was rigid and firm with his grey, mowed stubble lining his folding, basset hound skin. Umor, their face constantly in flux, reshaped itself the same way the fire outside did. The changes features were too hard to envision. Umor’s face was blank, an ambiguous slab of skin.
The room faded away as they talked until they were in a space that was neither present nor absent. It lacked all the objective characteristics of a room but was still close to one in its isolation from the rest of the city, the world. They went to new positions throughout the room in the blink of an eye, sometimes they walked in place, sometimes they repeated what they said a few times in different voices. Miles watched it all happen both as an influencer and an observer, an abstraction. 174
Simultaneously, he was watching the television. Unlike at Henry’s, though, his cushioned seat tucked him in snuggly as he sunk deeper into the couch and the family around him was busy preparing dinner, a fine steam of carrots, potatoes, and hearty roast floating up in a light vapor that let Miles already taste the flavored juice. They were talking amongst themselves, a firmly joint unit, about the tightly planned week ahead of growing crops, a cow’s imminent birth, the child’s tests on agriculture and biology, what movie they would watch in the evening, all the while interjecting with instructions about the meal at hand. Then, deep in thought, Miles crawled into the television and into the rioting streets where his shambling corpse hobbled along the pavement. With his mind’s eye, he watched himself walking in the streets as he continued to write, and he continued to peer into Umor and Henry’s conversation, and and and and and and and and and and and
“I think most of the protestors are idiots,” Henry said, tossing another empty beer onto the shrinking/growing pile on the floor.
“Because of where they come from. The disadvantaged, the other.”
“No. Think about it. You have done that before, right? Where do they come from?
“The city?”
“No. The womb.”
“They’re stupid because they stem from women?”
“No. My god you’re dense.”
Two more ticks went by, and the camera had panned over some to the right, showing the center of a street with no end, illuminated by burning obelisks. In a speck, in the distance and off 175 to the side, was the slightest glimmer of another gathering of people. Though, this crowd was still, attentive as they sat in rings around the center speaker.
“You hate me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. It’s not just you.”
“Who is it then?”
“Just...in general. I’ve grown weary of them. I hate them.”
“So why not children?”
“They ain’t done nothing wrong yet.”
“And you’re so sure they will as they age?”
“Sure. It’s part of growing up.”
“Yet you like Miles.”
“That man’s a child.”
“Huh, perhaps we can agree. We can decide who Miles is. We can decide who anyone is.”
“Who is Miles?”
“We can decide that?”
“Yes.”
The crowd sat side by side, but not as a corral of flesh, in a shared space where they listened long and spoke concisely. The person in the middle gestured in a slow spin with broad, outreaching arms at the burning city around him. Others with weapons slowed their pace and 176 arced around those that had sat down, making discrete glances and perking their ears at the rotating cast of center speakers. The fires were less violent there, and when the police marched in their direction they walked farther away and set up again.
It was impossible to hear them at the distance the camera was at over the rippling flames, stomping boots, and manic cries. The interpreters that narrated everything the camera saw had nothing to say, and Miles had to do more influencing in his mind to have them say anything, but the sound of a rustic, dancing jingle set to harmonica dragged the camera to a building off the street. A street performing did tricks with his shop’s sign to the soothing, steady beat of the song as people passed through him and rushed into the stores to get what they could out of the collapsing building. The sign read: everything must go. The interpreters perked up.
“Everyone decides your identity except for you. You just take it.”
“I guess it becomes a matter of decency in other as to whether they accept it.”
“Sure, if you can find anyone decent. I tell a joke. No one laughs. I say I’m funny. I’m an idiot. I tell people to calm down, to empathize, to stop antagonizing. They yell at me. Tell me to shut up. I’m an idiot. I yell at everyone else.”
“You’re drunk.”
“On power? Or it that you? I can’t tell. Probably because I’m drunk.”
“You drink too much.”
“Doesn’t change anything. I just like how it makes me feel. I’m drunk, so I can’t be blamed for not doing anything. I’m an idiot. What else would you expect me to do?”
“People can decide their own identity for themselves.” 177
There is a red pen on the table.
“Why’s the pen red?”
“What?”
“Why’s the goddamn pen red?”
“Because...it is. It was made that way.”
“It’s red because we agree that it is. Everyone saw its shade and agreed we’d call it red. If we come up with a new shade between yellow and orange, it’s not red anymore. The pen doesn’t get to decide.”
“But it can decide.”
“But you said it was made that way.”
“People aren’t pens.”
“And neither are you,” said Jaime.
“And neither are you,” said Jo. “Wait, what happened to Henry?”
“Nothing, I never left,” said Henry.
“Oh, ok. I was worried something happened without me realizing it,” said Umor.
As fiery bottles were thrown against the inconspicuous, floating projectors and speakers in the crossfire, they went on the fritz as they played clips on loop and others out of order.
“Miles is a killer.” 178
Withering away, Miles limped to town square where everyone in the city had gathered for Umor’s hanging. None of the floating cameras were on him, and his shouting drew no attention. He threw his writing at them when they walked by, and they always through it back unsatisfied. All the people walked by to where the cameras were pointed. Miles held Umor’s phone in his hand and then looked eagerly ahead at the execution. From where Miles was standing, they looked just like Zachary.
“Why is he a killer?”
“Because we decided he’s a killer. He wasn’t born that way. We decided he was.”
“That’s right. Would it have been worse if he was born that way?”
“I don’t know.”
“He couldn’t have been born a killer though.”
“No, he did that before I left to start my life.”
“What did he do?”
“Miles shot someone. The man’s friends watched him die in an instant.”
“Why did he have a gun?”
“He was an officer.”
“Why’d he shoot?”
“He thought they were threatening us when we were walking home.”
“Were they?”
“No.” 179
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“What happened next?”
“Miles put down his gun and raised his hands.”
“And then?”
“They kicked his jaw out. Among other things.”
He saw his own pupil as dark and empty as the cold lenses that floated around the city to broadcast his frightened face, reflecting the silhouettes grinning at him from afar. They showed his twisted body clinging to itself, cowering from the faceless eyes around him, reaching out to him from behind a curtain of darkness he couldn’t see past. When he looked up, his own dark lens in his eyes shrunk as violent cracks of red spread through around them. As he pulled back to look at his entire face, he saw the slight glimmer of a tear roll down his cheek before he waved the barrel of his gun out in front him, wildly shooting into the night, until the weapon disappeared When it did, he felt naked and clung to himself again, shivering from the cold rain.
“What was the last thing he said?”
“I’m sorry.”
“To whom?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was on the body camera footage?”
“They destroyed the footage when they beat him. He was discharged.” 180
“This isn’t satisfying.”
“It’s about a killing. Were you looking for satisfaction in it?”
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t. You’ll never stop searching. Just look forward. How did you meet him?”
“Some lady got him here before running away herself because he wouldn’t have been good press.”
“What did they say to you?”
Umor’s limp body was dropped off a ledge, and their body shattered into glass when the noose around their neck tightened at the end of the rope. Slowly, hanging in the air, all the shards scattered along the ground, illuminating the dark pavement like stars twinkling in the night sky, and the people looked into each of the shards and only saw reflections of themselves.
“’Fix him,’ like he was a broken toy. Then, they ran away.”
He was a broken toy.
There is a bat. There wasn’t a bat before, but now there had always been a bat, and Henry struck Umor down with it, splitting their head open in a scattering of glass. Henry stomped out the lump in the calf on their leg while striking down in the motion of a heavy pendulum that whittled away their arm and chunks of their face as they continued to crawl for the exit. Henry, grabbing them by the collar of their shirt and pinning them against the wall, looked at the gaping holes left in Umor’s blank face, and inside that face was nothing. Another darkness that hung in the sky and waited in the pit. There were a few flickers of light, a dimly sparking bulb, that went out with a passing breeze inside their hallow body that ran out the door into the streets. When 181
Henry returned to his seat, he saw Umor sitting across from with a drooping face of remorse and eyes that asked for forgiveness.
Miles jumped up, ecstatic. All the people roared their terrible roars, whatever they were, and raised their hands in victory until they saw Miles, giddy in hysterics as he held Umor’s phone up like trophy. Soon, the cameras were finally looking at Miles, and the people were demanding him to turn his prize over as they encroached towards him. Suddenly, he threw the phone down and stomped it to bits with his heel, laughing as he did. He pointed mockingly at everyone staring at him in disbelief as he continued to crush the evidence in the faces of the people that only listened to him now that he had something they wanted. His humor fit sent painful cramps through his body, and he collapsed while holding his sides. No one was able to discern whether Miles’ distorted gasps was laughter or crying. Out of his fragile body, flames spewed forth from his empty eye and mouth. The orange aura against the black backdrop behind him, as bright as it was, soon flickered away. Too weak to stand once the fire left him,
Miles’ husk crumpled to the ground.
I’m sorry.
I forgive you.
This conversation wouldn’t happen in real life.
Even if it did, we wouldn’t be talking like this. Maybe not talking at all.
Maybe talking but not understanding.
That’s not talking. 182
On the couch, Miles pulled over the book of poetry he had taken with him to the house. It started with burying the dead in April, which was the cruelest month because the ground was still too cold and hard to grow anything like the pavement he walked, but it was still close enough summer’s warm soil to think it was within reach. The footnotes alone for the poem were longer than the pages of verse themselves. It spoke gibberish but used emotive language to try to convey pain in a wasteland where nothing could communicate. Nothing could communicate. He thought of it as useless. He was useless.
He looked back at the television, but his mind was still on the page.
You value facts.
You value truths.
Are they the same thing?
Sometimes.
What if we showed more truths about people?
It’d be manipulative. All of this is manipulative. Truths are made up to control feelings.
What if we focused on facts?
Those are easily contradictory. All it takes is an assumption on authority. Nothing is real anymore.
How should I do this?
You can’t do the impossible.
But I still have to do it anyways. 183
Yes, it’s an impossible job. It’s admirable to take it, or selfish. Hubris. I don’t know.
Is it possible to do both?
No, smart people are too young for wisdom, and wise people are so old they haven’t had to learn anything new in quite some time, and they’re about to leave so they don’t even need to.
You are wise.
You are smart.
We’re still in the rut though, aren’t we?
Cause we’re not both.
I’d like to do more. To be better and grow for everyone.
You’d listen to people? They don’t know anything. You’re the one they listen too. I’d know. I’m one of them.
I can grow. I can better than before.
You’re too dense for that.
Miles has grown.
His dreams are gone.
You’re right. All we’ll do is just keep going around and round and round and round and round and round and round and round round round round round round
Were he himself a catalyst To set forth a game of chess, A finite attrition 184
Of linear movement, Or a branch thrown in The spoke of a cycling wheel made Out of pawns and rooks, A temporary snag, That travelled along the dead Ground paved for kings and queens Spurring the horses of the checkered Carriage towards the pit? This wasn’t part of the poem he was reading, but it could’ve been, Miles thought. He liked that he thought of it. No one else heard him think. Miles dropped the book on the streets to be trampled on. By the time he looked up to the world from the poem he was reading over in his head, Umor was being dragged out of the garage. They were kicking and screaming and trying to cling to the walls, all in vain, as Henry waved them goodbye from inside.
“Huh, not dense at all,” Henry chuckled, waving them out.
I looked up what Miles and Umor meant in Latin. Did you know that Miles in Latin means soldier and Umor means fluid? Did you know Achilles was a soldier? Hahahahaha I’m so clever.
It’s almost like it was always going to happen like this hahahahahaha. It never mattered what I did. Did you know that Henry in Latin means Henry because what you see is what you get because he’s so simple and doesn’t care and keeps to himself hahahahahahah? I wish I was like
Henry. Remember when this was about Leda? I wonder what she’d have to say about this oohhhhohohhhohohaaaahahaa? I’m not a hero. I’m a red pen hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa.
Then, as Miles laughed on the ground, all the people circled around him and slowly approached, and they began to pry off all the metal on his body and gently put back all the pieces 185 and limbs he had lost until he was whole again. A couple picked Miles up and carried him with them off the streets. One by one, they all waved the smoke back into the fires and the fires back in their bottles and carried them with and went back in their houses to sleep. In the couple’s arms, Miles’ cuts sealed, and his bruises returned to being soft plushy skin. All buildings were stripped layer by layer, from the metal to the brick to the wood, and they descended from the clouds down to ground until they disappeared entirely into soft plains of grass. It was harder for
Miles to open his eyes, and his body wriggled in the coddling hands of the couple until one of them eased him into their stomach where he nestled himself around in a soft, warm cubby as he continued to shrink until, he too, disappeared and couldn’t feel anything at all.
It’s going to end soon. I don’t want it to end because I think I know how it will, and I’m scared. I’m scared, and I want to go home, but I don’t know where home is.
…
Later, at the crack of dawn, Seth woke up before his parents and looked out the window when he heard an erratic thumping sound. After peeling back his window curtains, he saw Miles jumping up and down in place outside like a wild animal as he held his prosthetic arm in his right hand and swung it like a club against the ground, kicking up clouds of dirt in the air. He was frightened. Seth closed the curtains and never told his parents what he saw.
186
Chapter 13
Miles Throws his Writing Away
The next day, Miles looked at what he had written. It didn’t make sense to him anymore.
Frustrated, he threw the papers in a nearby pond where they dissolved and were never read by anyone.
When he returned inside, Jo called him from the kitchen. “Oh, Miles. I found your phone when I was gathering up the clothing around the house for laundry. Did you leave your charger somewhere else?” she asked while taking a moment to slide the little rectangle in front of her before returning to chopping up carrots for the night’s stew.
I don’t have a charger.
“Oh, oh. Well, we don’t have any phones with us, so we don’t have chargers either. It’s not anything important on there you need right away, is it?”
Miles approached the counter and inspected the phone.
“I guess, it should be fine when you go back, whenever that is.”
He slipped the empty block in his pants and went back outside to sit by himself.
187
Chapter 14
Miles Creates a Philosophy
Over the next few days, but what could’ve been an eternity for Miles, he became more reclusive, having little to communicate to Jo, Jaime, or Seth. He developed a habit of chuckling to himself which Seth caught him doing more than once. When Seth would try to speak to him,
Miles would continue to write completely unaffected by how long Seth spoke or what he said.
He began to write again, the first thing he wrote being a philosophy he’d live by for the rest of his life. This is what he wrote.
…
• Objectivity no longer exists. Humans were never made to house the vast amount of
information that is now both available to and forced upon them. There is no way to
catalogue reality, and if there was, individuals would still be unable to house it all for
themselves and would be dependent on others to dispense truth to them. This, naturally,
lends itself to unchecked manipulation. To circumvent this, people must insist on living
where there is as little information as possible so that reality is tangible on the surface
level alone.
• All evils are derived from humanity’s innate desire to be social creatures. The worlds that
have been built for the sake of bettering the species have also provided the means to
inflict far more pain than any individual could have done to others themselves.
Economic, sexual, racial, or any kind of injustice, cannot exist if there is no collective to
enact it or perpetuate it. The greatest tragedy to ever befall man was when the first ape
walked out of its cave to join someone else. 188
• Even without an external objective reality, all people are hidden within themselves and
can never truly understand one another. Any act of interpersonal understanding is an act
of faith and is, consequently, not an accurate measure. It is dependent on the institution of
language, which is unreliable, and the assumption that said language is being used
sincerely. In isolation, a person can come to learn the only reality that could exist,
themselves. People must resist their baser urges to advance together and subsequently
live isolated for the sake of better lives.
• Live cultureless. Every attempt of human unification is one part cohesiveness and two
parts isolating. Every formed group must, by its nature, be exclusive in some way to
those not a part of it or else they wouldn’t be able to distinguish themselves as a part of a
larger humanitarian whole. Division is in human nature and must be circumvented to
avoid catastrophe. Augmentations, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on,
are all irrelevant to this truth. These are superficial differences and are thusly easier to
distinguish between, but history has proven people sharing these traits is inconsequential
in dictating their behavior amongst themselves. Group belonging must be sacrificed to
prevent the damage of the masses in exchange for the lesser pain of the few or the one.
• The act of revolting against the world humanity has invented for itself is both implausible
to succeed and, even if it were plausible, morally wrong. There is no moral way to
overturn the evil that is inherent in humanity’s nature just as a tree would be cut down for
growing too many branches. The only acceptable path to take is pilgrimage and
establishing new grounds by oneself. If leaving is not possible, suicide is an acceptable
form of escape. Do not confuse it with revolt. Death, like any symbol, only has as much 189
meaning in as the actions behind it that imbue the image with purpose, and there can be
no purpose left with a life that no longer exists.
• Too many people have tried to stay and help, and they have all failed. This is the path of
least resistance. These, like any other philosophy, are ideals and will be contradicted and
carried out half-heartedly. To minimize the pain from this conflict, never think about the
others. Stay away from them before they dilute you with and draw you back in. When all
is said and done, just leave. Just go as far away as you can, and don’t come back to
everyone else.
…
Miles read over what he had put down, dwelling on the last bullet point, and chuckled more to himself. Later that night, Miles dreamed that he could hear the screaming from the city fighting to be heard amongst the barn animals. When he looked behind his curtains it was actually the cows that were crying for help outside his window, looking at him with deep black eyes with rotting flesh on their hides. He listened closely, and the city groaned like livestock.
Waking up in a cold sweat, Miles wasn’t sure where he was.
190
Chapter 15
Miles Writes his First Stories
Seth, curious about Miles’ new behavior but too frightened to confront him directly about it, developed a short-lived hobby of spying on him. One day while vacuuming upstairs, Seth heard the dripping sounds of the running shower. Knowing that mom and dad were out working the farm outside, Seth realized it had to be Miles in there. He’d never seen Miles without his attachments on. Unable to contain his curiosity, Seth opened the door just enough for him to look through a sliver just big enough for his eye.
The shower curtains had been pulled down on one side, like they’d been tugged too hard from someone nearly slipping and trying to keep their balance. Standing on the shower floor, slumped against the wall, was Miles, naked. His body had become gaunt like it was being hallowed out from the inside, and his skin was caving in on itself. His left leg was folded over itself like a mass of towels, and his left arm was missing, leaving his shoulder to be the only thing for him to lean on. Slowly turning his head around to the opened door, Miles looked back at Seth with only one glazed eye, indifferent to the jagged, uneven markings covering his skin.
There didn’t even seem to be anything between Miles’ legs, only a cold metal plating outlining a gap where there’d been something before, a far cry from the classical heroes Seth had read about.
Out of everything, though, Seth fixated on the empty spaces where his mouth and left eye should be, exposing an emptiness that seemed to permeate the rest of Miles’ body, even though Seth couldn’t see it.
Seth rushed out, nearly tripping down the steps as he did, only stopping to catch his breath and sit down hunched against the side of the house outside. A few minutes later, Miles 191 stumbled outside too, barely clothed and missing his arm, looking for Seth. When he found the boy huddled together, recoiling slightly when Miles tried to approach, Miles sat down in the dirt a generous distance away from Seth.
“What...happened to you?” He looked back and forth between Miles’ shattered body and the smoldering city. “What made you leave?” Seth asked, his voice quivering.
No paper to use, Miles picked up a stray stick and scrawled something into the dirt in between them.
Hard to say.
“Could you try writing it?” he asked.
Holding the meager stick in his hand, Miles felt a warmth inside him grow at the suggestion.
I will.
With a gentle, albeit shaky, nod, Miles went back inside, leaving Seth outside to stare at the burning world that Miles had come from.
Inside, Miles wrote stories for the first time since he had been in the city. Even though he’d been tasked to do this by Seth, for Seth, Miles hardly thought of him. He was unconcerned with what the boy would think of the stories, or anyone. If anything, he wrote for himself.
This is what he wrote.
…
192
Children Building Houses
In the wasteland there was nothing but empty, barren space and a group of small, doughy children of an unknown but unanimous shade. Their home was at best an indifferent one, and at worst violently cruel; beating rays from the sun burnt the sand beneath their feet enough that their skin peeled at the touch until each child had giant welding calluses atop their soft skin, and cold nights made them beg for it to be hot again after freezing their tears to their cheeks. They did, however, find some solace in the companionship of each other as they traveled the sandy dunes, hoping to find something that wasn’t even more sandy dunes, as they joined hands and found an unbreakable bond in their collective suffering.
Until, one day, some of the children spotted a house on the horizon, specifically only some of the children. Now, it may have been because of chance glances that this disparity occurred, or perhaps they had keener eyes, or some of the children that noticed just assumed that everyone else had as well, or maybe because only one child noticed at first and only told the other children he liked the most of what he had seen. The actual causation of how only some of the children noticed the house is not fully understood by anyone aside from self-righteous fools that prop themselves up as pompous sages that had long last solved all of life’s mysteries, but the fact that only some of the children noticed the house at first is indisputable. And frankly, as it occurred so long ago, to debate the causes of why this happened would be entirely frivolous relative to what the consequences were and still are. If it weren’t frivolous, then there would be no more children building houses to this day, so the people that are discovering why this happened are either redundant or incompetent at their jobs. 193
Naturally, as anyone would, and as you would too unless you’re fool enough to think that you would do any differently under such harsh circumstances, the children that saw the house immediately waddled to it to shield themselves from the sun. By the time the first group was already halfway to the house, the remaining children, who were still dragging along the beaten path, had just seen the house too, and to their surprise, the rest of their friends already walking to it.
Once the two parties had conjoined, the first group of children was already under the roof of the small house, but it was also just that small size that created a problem. There was only so much space, and that space didn’t allot for the second group of children. They were so crammed in as it was, that even if two or three children managed to squeeze out of the compressed mass of bodies, it would still be too cramped to allow them or anyone else back inside, so no one left.
Their friends waited in the heat that shriveled their skin, with smiles mostly, as they had not yet realized that they would not receive their turn in the house, and do not be a complete and utter idiot that would claim that oh virtuous you would gladly give up your space just out of principle, as you would just be admitting your own ignorance as to what true suffering in the wasteland is.
Soon though, the second group of children’s smiles melted away and they began to cry, cry at how their friends that had just a minute ago been so close to them, could now stand idly by as they withered away in front of them. Much time passed like this with nothing changing.
Eventually, two attitudes grew among each coalition of children, although with contextually different implications.
The first attitude was that there was a conceptual, unavoidable difference between the two groups of children that had once been so close to one another. There were the children with a house and the children without a house. These were two undoubtedly different kinds of people 194 and there were no two ways about it. How this difference occurred or if it was even always there was irrelevant as it was certainly there now. The differences were both celebrated as diverse but equal identities and condemned as proof of some great evil that had been present in the children all this time and only needed the presence of a house to draw it out. This, both from constructive and malicious beliefs, created a separation between the groups as there was obviously a difference between them which grew larger and larger the longer they were apart.
The second attitude was that there was, in fact, no difference between the two groups of children aside from circumstance which was in no way grounds for unequal treatments of one another. The issue then arose as to how this problem would or even could be reconciled. So, imagine the bright, plucky looks on their faces when they saw that in a corner of the house, tucked away out of their sight, were the tools and materials to construct a new house. Now, not everyone joined in the effort as some had resigned themselves to the inherent and unavoidable differences between them, but some of the kids began to “Yipee!” and “Wahoo!” as they took all the supplies outside with them to help their friends, which I’m sure those of you that earlier claimed you would freely give up your spot are now also priding yourselves on how you would do this kind action as well.
At this point, a few of the without-a-house-children meekly wandered over to the house to see if they could enter upon the absence of the children that had gone to build new houses for them. The without-a-house-children could feel their bellies expanding and relished the feeling of saliva run down their throat so it could mimic the sensation of water, so of course they hoped they could come in. At first, there was no way they could budge in, even if they tried. There was and always would be a finite amount of space, but over time more children joined the efforts of constructing new houses, so there was eventually enough space for the without-a-house-children 195 to move in, but the division was already too steep. Suspicions were too high among the with-a- house-children for how they felt about the without-a-house-children. What would they do to the house? They have never lived in one before; would they know how? Would they destroy it for everyone? It’s not their fault they might’ve thought this way, but it was still a possibility nonetheless agreed upon among the with-a-house-children. What if they refused to give up their space for the other with-a-house-children that were currently trying to make more houses out of the goodness of their hearts? It was at that last point that the with a house children made up their minds to refuse entry to new prospective citizens of the house, as they had already formed an unbreakable bond among the purest of their friends that wanted to help the without-a-house- children.
Constructing a house took time though. It was not as if the wasteland was filled with eager teachers of architecture ready to reveal their trade secrets, nor were there even other houses to base a crude estimation on. No, the children would have to make the houses by themselves, and with that came trials and tribulations that lasted even more time than the original group of children had been separated at this point, at least it felt that long. Animosity makes the hands of clocks move slower, but it still strikes twelve every new day, marking the start of a new cycle of time. By the time they had set the bottom, foundation for the new house, they had become very, very old children. Their cheeks began to shrink, their eyes began to melt, and they hacked and wheezed as they coughed up dust, clutching their sides. Still though, they worked until the house was suitable to live in, often repeating the mantra, “We have to fix the mess we made. We have to fix the mess we made. We have to fix the mess we made.”
Seeing the clock soon to strike twelve, the very, very old children, both with and without a house, had new children among themselves so that they could pass down the lessons each 196 prospective group learned amongst themselves. For the two groups of children still in the standoff by the original house, the division remained, but the aesthetic changed. They no longer acted like they came from the same group. The with-a-house-children taught each of their offspring about the house, how glorious and virtuous it was, how it had always shielded their skin from the harsh sun and the frigid winds. In time, their offspring took what was already around them and improved upon it, making the house greater and more accommodating than it had ever been originally. Consequently, the without-a-house-children’s animosity only grew in congruity with the success of the house they were still bared from. Their skin tanned and eventually burnt against the sun while the with-a-house-children became light as clouds without the heat, further creating a divide, although now far more superficial. They learned to hone their rhetoric against the with-a-house-children out of hope that they could convince them for more room or more help with constructing the new house, and because their words were all they had to their name. As for the newest third group of children, they simply had their descendants help them with the task of building the new house and had little to say about exactly how to build it as they had yet to fully understand it themselves, but they were sure to teach them the all-important mantra, “We have to fix the mess we made. We have to fix the mess we made. We have to fix the mess we made.”
By then, as all things do, and I can assure you, you will too, the now very, very, very old children, the original children, started to die. They felt their bones soften and their skulls cave in as they pushed into the malleable backs of their heads like they had when they were first born.
Not much of consequence occurred in the two groups by the original house outside of the further increasing of their division, but the third group of building children had one last contribution to pass on. Their skin, then their muscle, then their organs and bones turned to ash, but before they 197 died, they looked at the children, the newest children that had the longest time left to finish the house, and they told them, “You have to fix the mess we made. You have to fix the mess we made. You have to-” and then, as everything does in the wasteland, the very, very, very old children finished their decomposition and faded into ash along the indistinguishable sand, taking with them every experience and memory they carried with them, never to be shared again, not even in heaven. Heaven could never exist in the wasteland. Why else would they be so scared to die?
The new builder-children mourned the people that had taught everything they knew, but not for too long, for they could see that the without-a-house-children were mourning just as they were but had been suffering far longer than their people had and subsequently deserved to be helped first above themselves. There was just one problem. All they had was a fraction of a house. It wasn’t suitable to even pretend to live in and could do nothing to shield anyone from the elements, but they didn’t know how to continue to build a house. All their ancestors had shown them was how to build the beginning of a house and there was no one they could ask to help them finish aside from themselves who didn’t know how. So, gathering new materials, they sought out to do what they knew they could do to help, they began to build a new house right next to the incomplete one, and it took just as long as it did before.
The new builder-children carried on, always reaching the state of an incomplete house before dying and having their children start another house because that was all they knew how to do. The two groups of children by the original house continued their animosity until it boiled over into hatred that was occasionally tempered into distaste. The with-a-house-children would sometimes take a without-a-house-child into their ranks to show that they too were decent people, but still made sure not to let in too many people that could offset their mood, or even 198 worse, destroy the house for everyone. The without-a-house-children’s frustrations compounded with each generation, and the with-a-house-children became frustrated at their frustration.
Violence occasionally broke out on both sides for different reasons and to different effects, but just as with the question as to how only some of the original children saw the then empty house, to break down each individual case and somehow isolate a select few to prove one’s own point on the matter would be frivolous and unforgivably selfish and moronic. Eventually the violence changed from occasional to common, and then common to constant, and then it all stopped, or rather its proclivity became normalized, so in that sense there wasn’t any more violence. It was only life. The distaste changed again into melancholy when the magnitude of the effort put forward to solve the problem did nothing to stifle the pain, and then the melancholy changed into indifference when the two opposing groups of children realized that self-deprecation does nothing to change one’s predicament, allowing for the two original groups of children to laugh amongst themselves at the tragedy of what had happened.
As the number of incomplete houses grew, so too did some of the without-a-house- children start to move into them.
“What are you doing?” the builder-children asked. “This is not a house. You should not be living in it.”
“Sure, it is,” the without-a-house-children answered. “It has enough to live once we work around the kinks. It’s more than we’ve ever had.”
“No, no, no,” they others answered as they were busy hammering and sawing away at the base of a new house next to occupied, incomplete one. “This is not a suitable house. It doesn’t have everything you need, and it certainly doesn’t have everything the with-a-house children 199 have. You deserve better houses. You have been through years and years of pain. You deserve better restitution.”
“We haven’t been through years of pain. We were born yesterday,” the without-a-house children answered. “Our lives have been hard, but we just got here, so we only have a day’s worth of complaining to do, not the years upon years' worth as you’re insinuating. It was our ancestors that were in pain, but luckily they no longer have to worry about that because they are long dead.”
“How did they die?” the builder-children asked, stopping with their tools for a moment so they could hear the answer.
“In pain.”
The builder children worker even harder and faster than they had before, ignoring the hot metal on their tools’ handles that rubbed their skin down to burning calluses in the sun. The without-a-house-children settled into their incomplete homes and found some happiness, not as much as the with-a-house-children, but some. The without-a-house-children approached their kin that had already moved into all the incomplete houses.
“Our numbers are growing from generation to generation, larger each time, and faster than the builder-children can make a house for us, so you can imagine our happiness to see that you are already living comfortably in all the unfinished ones. Seeing as there are none left, and the new ones will only hold a fraction of us, will you please move over some to allow more of us to come in?”
The incomplete houses were smaller and blocked less of the sun’s rays than the complete houses. There was room for the without-a-house children to move back, but they had just moved, 200 and would give up a great deal of comfort to only help a handful of their brethren. You can imagine how the rest of it played out.
The point is that it happened, and it shouldn’t have to happen, but it does, and it is no one’s fault no because the children that caused this are long dead, but there still needs to be some restitution for the masses of children that are suffering because they are without blame, but so are the children in the house because that is all they have been taught, and you wouldn’t have done any better because better children have tried and failed to build another house, and none of them can be expected to find a solution because they’re all only stupid, ignorant children that can only live so long before they die and are no longer able to help.
The builder children made a new almost complete house every generation, and soon some of them became just as tanned and burnt as the without-a-house-children, subsequently losing their ties to the original house themselves. New shades were created as the builder-children intermingled with the without-a-house-children. They then experimented with their own bodies hoping that that could bring some happiness in an individual identity that at least made misery more comfortable. Men went with men, women with women, sometimes both, sometimes neither, women became men and vice versa, and eventually they even began to disembody themselves, replacing their themselves with lifeless metal that no longer felt the horrible sun and cold. And the builder-children wailed so loud because the builder-children knew that they descended from the awful, inexcusable with-a-house-children that had forsaken them into this predicament in the first place and had no right to ever complain about their own condition because their people had success before their own time, and the longer the without-a-house- children were cast into the elements, the greater the builder-children wailed for the suffering they needed to atone for only grew larger because all they had was an every growing line of 201 unfinished houses that no one could live in. Each of the groups of children remained intertwined but isolated in the wasteland, but the builder-children never forget their mantra. 202
“We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made.
We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made.
We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We’re so sorry. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made.
We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made.
We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made. We have to fix the mess they made.
We have to
203
…
Three Wise Men Walk Down the Street
Coming out of the shattered window of a looted convenience store, three old men carried whatever light trinkets their shattered backs still permitted them to hold as they walked towards the west to see if they could catch a glimpse of the sun through the smothering, black clouds before it set on this day. Between their three sets of hands was a forearm’s worth of gold watches
(three for different time zones and four more as spares), a twelve pack of frozen frankfurters that could be eaten in two sittings, and a hand and cupped elbow’s worth of perfume worth of perfume that the one hoped could make his wife forget that he hadn’t paid the water bill. They walked their trot in a confident line that took up the entirety of the sidewalk, not letting their limps hunches they had accrued over a long youth of mischief stop them from enjoying the spoils of living long enough.
Though, when the vandals and looters and generally reprehensible ne'er-do-wells began to flood the streets, the line of three men compacted into two (one when someone else got especially close) as the held on to their wares. From behind them came the approach of a trio of stomping feet that had the strong passion of youth in the skidding their heels made on the concrete. As the steps got closer so too did the three men walk faster. They heard jeers from behind them, “Where are you going?” and “We just wanna talk,” and “What? Why are you afraid of us?” but the three old men knew about such tricks to slow them down that they themselves employed when they were of a peppier step.
Each of the old men were pulled back and spun around by a strong grip on their shoulder, and they were face to face with three younger men that lurched down just as the old men did but 204 was done to lower themselves to the same eye level, showing how much height they had to spare. The older generation was frozen by how quickly their younger counterparts had snuck up on them as well as the boldness of their approach. Had they been so bold? Was this new? The older men had lived long lives and couldn’t remember as much they used to both because of the decay of their memories but because they also had more to remember, so they were not sure how novel this kind of interaction truly was.
The old man holding the perfumes made a delicate strut up to the younger party with a smile on his face, offering a fraction of his acquired scented glass bottles as a treaty for their safe departure. His teeth were knocked in and his hold on the perfumes loosened, shattering on the ground. The man with the frankfurters was too slow on the draw to block his face, so he too was knocked to the ground by a punch to his eye, causing it to swell and further push apart the cracked bone in his eye socket, which he clutched in pain before a boot to the pultruding stomach shot his last meal through his mouth and onto the sidewalk that he then fell onto. The man with the watches was still fiddling with their straps in an attempt to remove and hide them in his pocket, but he too was dropped with a popping knee to the groin and an elbow to the ear.
The three young men scrounged up the newfound gifts the heavy breathing and limb twitching men had for them on the sidewalk. With smiles all around, the three young men continued heading west until the clicking hammer of a gun made their heads snap around and then promptly whiplash backwards as one of the old men put a round into each of the side of their bellies. After missing the rest of his shots, the young men stopped shielding their faces, and one of them threw a brick through the soft, frontal lobe of the old man’s head. Wounded but not yet dying, the three men collected themselves and hobbled down the street westward. One of them limped as quick as he could to pick up the gun to defend himself and his friends from 205 future attacks before returning to the others. They had no one to give the things they had stolen, so they continued to meander towards where the sun may be.
206
Knight in Teargas
A knight with crude Kevlar armor taped around his waist, pots and pans strapped with leather belts over his limbs, and a battered hockey mask covering his face, ran into the open streets lined with car fires and people’s shadows cast flying in stretched ripples across the fronts of buildings. The sky was no longer a sky; a single abyssal cloud, the amalgamation of all the fumes, was slowly descending closer to the ground. With the electric grid cut out, the only light were the growing forests of fire and the indiscriminate cracks of sparks going both ways down the street. The sun hadn’t been seen for three days.
Armed with a rusted bat and the lid of a trash can, the knight rushed to the middle of a four-way street and declared a state of emergency with his shouts and the bang of his shield. It was difficult for him to seek out his enemies on the battlefield because of how quickly they could slink back into the cover of darkness. Time was short; the lines of city guard were approaching from the North and the knight had nowhere to move South, East, or West, so he would have to search for his foes before being forced to retreat.
Running up to a congregation that was filing in and out of a small food market, the knight belched a booming yell to get their attention. People were fitting weeks' worth of chips and soda pop into their baskets. Someone was sprawling his arms along the edges of a flatscreen television he had repurposed from two buildings down on the way to his home. No one looked at the knight. The television screen scattered along the floor once the knight struck it down with his bat, and he sneered and cursed at the cowardice at everyone around him that lacked the force of will to try to strike first. Three hooligans dropped the food in their hands and approached the knight as the crowd made an open path for them. 207
The brave knight ran away. He ran far away until he lost the men that were chasing him by weaving in and out of buildings, leaving them stranded in the maze of streets. The oncoming barricade of officers was getting closer. The knight still had much to give but little time to do so.
When the barricade was near only five minutes away, he saw her, a tiny ballet dancer, upright in pirouettes, tiptoeing effortlessly around the thrown glasses that shattered at her feet and erupted into more flames over oily pools on the concrete streets. She irradiated a faint, light blue aura as if a burning sapphire was passing through the soft pours of her skin. Burning. She was going to burn. The knight had to help her. If he didn’t, his life had been built to nothing.
Mobs were forming in the streets, obscuring the knight's vision of the ballet dancer, and every time he pushed through the herds, the herds pushed. He struck a few down with swift blows that caved their heads in on the way down. He was in the clearing, past the stampede of commoners, and the girl was just within his reach. A stray dog with a glass eye, frothing at the mouth and sagging from side to side with an erratic gallop, jumped up to the man and dug into the exposed, fleshy underbelly of his neck between his helmet and armor and dug out a chunk of his airways before running out into the darkness.
The knight fell as they always do. Unable to move, he watched in horror as the ballet dancer was surrounded by a ring of fire and seemingly unphased by it as she continued to leap towards the border. His cries and protests coughed up more blood through his open wounds as he watched in horror was the girl was engulfed in flames, burning through every portion of her body as she twitched and buzzed with confusion. She stepped out of the fire, passing through the flames completely, no better and no worse than she had gone in. Flying cans streaked across the sky with tails of green vapor. The crowds ran away as the cans began to explode into more gas 208 and the rhythmic, clockwork steps of the barricade had finally come to them and had stepped over the knight.
The gas seeped through the open wound on his neck and leaked out through the holes in his mask, but he did not cry. He did not whimper. There is no point in whimpering with no one to hear you. He looked on as the dancer twirled in the swirling of storm of gas and fire. The knight died that night, but the armor stood up and walked home with him inside.
209
Glutton
Across the hall is a very fat man. He had a perpetual habit of sitting still. Every hour of everyday he furthered his symbiotic relationship with the couch as he was unable to stand and the couch would lack a purpose outside of that. The shutters were always closed, and ordinarily the door was shut and locked. The only light, day or night, that came through were the warming rays of the television. It was cyclical that way. Every minute of every day the stories of world were spoon-fed to him, and if it was from a good source, on a cleaned silver platter.
A morning always started soft, light, and fluffy, as the fat man watched the local pet store go above and beyond in their local fundraiser. No dumb dogs would have to be led by the collar to be destroyed. This starter made the fat man feel good. He was ready for the rest of the day.
Then, in the afternoon, the rising political scandals were tougher to chew on. Allegations, allegations, allegations everywhere but by their own nature they had yet to be confirmed... sometimes, depending on where you looked and at whom was saying it and why they were saying it at that specific moment in time. Tricky business, but sorting through the different flavored perspectives was still fulfilling. But at night, disaster strikes, and a man has been caught dead with his jaw shot through the back of his head, slumped over in the corner of a dead-end alleyway, and the killer was on the loose. Potential motives were flying across the airwaves as experts explained to eager viewers that wanted to help, like the fat man, what they should be on the lookout for. This was a lot for the fat man to ponder. He pondered. He pondered long and deep. He pondered so long he became unaware of the trivial things of life like the slipping drool that moistened his chin. He literally did nothing except ponder. After all, there was much to ponder about. 210
The gun used was a legal firearm, but was it not regulated? Was it issued? Police issued?
The chief of police assured everyone in a press conference that they offered no one fitting the description that sort of weapon. Of course, they would have to say that. Their bias is unavoidable to the point of their statement being frivolous. But who is everyone? It’s certainly not the economically disparaged members of the community that had limited access to the news and were thusly able to spread disinformation amongst themselves like wildfire. Therefore, you had to donate to local programs that raised the poor out of poverty otherwise your inaction was a part of the problem, however those programs also accepted money from conglomerates of corporations for press reasons but who also permitted thousands of abused child workers overseas to make the products that gave the companies they donated with in the first place, and that’s not even to mention the money they put in the pockets of politicians that give them tax breaks and free up their regulations allowing them to abuse the people they are donating to, but it is still important to donate because these people are suffering, and you will be solving a larger problem, and any hesitation to give is just a sign of your implicit bias against people of different cultures.
However, this might be too much to take in at once. It was best for the fat man to cleanse his pallet with art because art is important. The comedy stations were nice because they played the same clips as the news but had the decency to have the studio audience laugh at the end. This too become old though because it was still so similar to the news. So, the fat man put on more inconsequential television to escape this circus. It was time for silly things, like videos of an elephant ejecting diarrhea onto a man in a wheelchair. But, after long periods of silliness, they looked at the screen and said, “We hope we all enjoy watching the handicapped covered in stool 211 as much as you do at home, but remember to watch your local news networks during this ongoing crisis. They do good work, but they need your support.”
This was all very important because he never left his home. How else was he supposed to know what was happening? How else was he supposed to know what to do with the contradictions and juxtapositions that plagued man? As the fat man’s viewing increased so did his girth as it absorbed more information. The buttons on his shirt popped like the ends of a cap gun, and the piles of knowledge he amassed obstructed his heart, clogging and sealing it off from the rest of the world. The holes in his ears leaked the overflow of greasy, yellow intellect.
Unfortunately, a problem arose. In an attempt to vary the diet of his viewing, the fat man expanded where he looked for information. It was the responsible thing. However, in his efforts to widen his perspective, he confused it as well. Everything contradicted itself. Not even in terms of irony or even differing interpretations of reality, but reality itself was malleable. When, who, and why created new flavors of facts that did not blend cohesively, but if everyone was biased and self-interested as the fat man had long been told, who does he believe? Facts meant little in the search of truth, and in this revelation came the fat man’s downfall. The flavors disagreed with themselves and subsequently him. His skin green like a rotting gourd, the cyst of a fat man split open and spilled layers of coagulated, bubbling, orange skin that made a slimy pool on the floor.
The television continued to speak into the fat man, and his stomach continued to leak out as it did.
…
By the time he was done writing, Miles was in a fit of laughter. He managed to calm himself enough to approach Seth calmly and hand him the papers he had written. 212
“Is this...the truth?” Seth asked, innocently.
Seth could tell from Miles’ eyes that he’d be smiling now if he could but not because he was happy. It was like he was imagining he was somewhere else.
It’s my truth.
“You think you’ll ever share this with people? You think that’d, maybe…make you feel better?” Seth asked, cautiously friendly.
Miles nodded his head repeatedly, bobbing up and down seemingly without a consciousness behind the movement anymore. He turned his head back to what he was writing on his paper and continued to nod his head.
“Is...is this supposed to help anyone? Is it for you?”
Miles shrugged with glee in his eyes and kicked up his legs like a child. Nothing else
Seth said registered to him. Seth, worried from this behavior but unsure of what to do, left Miles to his own devices and walked away.
Even after having written these stories, Miles still felt a masochistic compulsion to turn on the television at night and watch news of the city. The city was returning to normal and Umor was making more public appearances to quell the masses, insisting that Miles had been dealt with. There was a mass town hall meeting set for the next day. Zachary was set to have a memorial hologram to be shone in the sky twenty-four hours a day along with all of the victims they could confirm Miles had killed. The ash was being left to stain the buildings.
During the night, with all of his writings spread out in a mess and the television buzzing behind him, Miles started writing a memoir of everything that had happened to him since Umor 213 had come back into town. He wondered how accurately he could recall everything or account for things he was still unsure about, but he continued writing. He even went so far as to write two copies of the same stories. He kept Umor’s dead phone with him too for safe keeping. The calls from the livestock and the city kept pulling at his mind even when he tried to forget about going back entirely.
Whenever he reached a stopping point with his memoirs or his stories, Miles would look at the tenants for Isolationism he had written. He eyed the one about how to escape for long stretches of time whenever he thought about the city.
214
Chapter 16
Miles Writes his First Poem
Alongside the memoir, Miles wrote his last creative piece, a poem, a culmination of everything he had written and read before. This is what he wrote.
…
Fire Dancing
I am Foresight
I came before all
The prophets and the tarot cards they swindled with
In deserts that seared their flesh,
And nights that sealed frozen wounds.
What deity would I be to lounge
On Mount Olympus, where the sun blinds us through golden clouds,
While they try to mend together a separated puzzle
For a final image they were never shown.
I have decided, in all my wisdom, to spare them from the world.
I will give man fire.
I am Hindsight
Oh brother, I know you are a god. All of us within your family knows 215
You are a god, but if I could drink from your hubris,
I’d be as fat as the sky is wide. True, I know very little
When compared to you. Like the rest of our kin, I enjoy suckling on the dew
From our ambrosial plants that sprout out of the marble ground.
Though, unlike them, but still unlike you, I know what could’ve been.
The only taste I’ve ever known is ambrosia, so now I taste nothing,
And the ground reflects the discontent on my face. To the others,
You are a frustration, an old fisherman that is always hungry,
And though I think you are wrong too, I understand you.
I do not know how, but you will know regret as everything does.
So, please, enjoy our fruits, and leave those squirming things alone in the dark.
Envy the Wasteland
Descending the steps of Olympus, the air feels heavier here.
I have never held faith before. I never needed to. I already knew
What was in Pandora’s box. Is what plagues humanity now
Reconcilable? I know this future, burning in my hands, will enlighten
Their world. It will give way to
Flowing grasses that itch the skin, crushing waterfalls that deafen the ears,
Beautiful islands of snow that dance in the sky and freeze to the bone. 216
It’s flawed, all permanently flawed, but it’s real.
Only so much can be done with perfection, the abstract. I envy you, brother,
You who sits idly by as you’re draped in love and passion.
I wish I’d permit myself with contentment, it’d be easier, but it’d stay the same.
The wasteland is not below, where the ground breaks and moves,
But in the heavens, where our tradition is eternally rigid.
Above, there is no meaning to make.
I have given them fire. I will guide them as man unveils his world.
Inferno
It burnt. We watched from Olympus
As the sparks became flames became a firestorm became a blazing holocaust,
The fumes broke apart our paradise into fleeting vapors
Until there was no proof it was ever there. We were the same,
But now I see your shadow mold in the flames:
A bird, a cat, a jackal, you are worshipped in the desert.
Each image stood in the fire, so bright it turned the sand to glass, reflecting
The same as our marble, where you walked
As you carved your new paradise.
They won’t appreciate it, ever, not even you. It’s in their nature now, 217
After all, they learned it from you. All the other gods have gone; they are ash now, and soon I will be too.
But before I go, I’ll leave you with one final belittlement, brother.
Everything changes; nothing changes.
Make it New
I am Abraham, the son, and Muhammed.
I am Foresight; I may never know regret.
I will push forward until I am all that’s left. The new
Generations will relearn what had died with
The old. People create the myths, the myths control the people,
And I am the myths. The grass, the water, the snow,
It exists, but it is separated like everything else, only observed by others. Maybe,
One day, my form will make sense of it all.
…
As Miles was writing, he decided he’d return to the city. His nature had gotten the better of him.
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Chapter 17
Goodbye to a World
The morning of the town hall meeting, Miles finished his memoir. He felt satisfied. Not happy but satisfied. He tucked the pages into two envelopes from Jaime’s study along with the stories and poem he had written. Finding them around the house scattered on coat racks and in piles in the laundry room, Miles gathered his clothes and the phone, the only things he came to farm with. His ED alluded him, but he didn’t try too hard to look for it. The envelopes and phone were put in his jacket pocket, and he spent an hour or so sitting on the porch by himself, taking in the blend of warming sun carried by a cool wind. He got up and walked to the cattle’s fence since he had never spent much time with them as he’d been on the farm. Though, when he tried to extend his hand to pet some of their heads, they turned away to go eat, indifferent to his attempt to interact. He walked back to the house, slow but steady, to say his goodbyes to the family. He attached his visor to his mouth on the way out. He took a hooded jacket for himself to help hide his face.
Jo was shocked by the news and asked many questions about why, most of which Miles brushed off by him needing to return home and that he had no reason not to since the riots were stopping. She was sad but still made sure to send him off with some small provisions and light medical supplies should he need it. He left them on the counter by the front door out of her view.
Miles couldn’t find Seth to say goodbye.
As he was walking down the dirt path that led from the house and faded away into high rows of unkept grass, Miles stopped at the sound of Jaime calling out after him.
“Why?” he called out. “Why go back?” 219
Miles rubbed the side of his leg, where he felt the envelope and phone shift in his pocket.
“You came out on the verge of death, and you’re going back?” Jaime yelled in disbelief.
“We can teach you how to build your own place...here!”
Miles stood still. His visor barely flickered from being neglected for so long during his stay.
Help.
“Help? What do you mean? You think you’re helping? You can’t! Take it from me after reading all this...crap!” Jaime wrestled through his pant pockets and pulled out a small academic book that he was planning on showing to Miles later today. “It doesn’t do anything. It never has!
And out here it doesn’t have to mean anything,” he yelled, red in the face, as he threw the book to the ground, lifeless with its pages crumpled and stained from the dirt. “It’s useless, but you don’t have to be,” he said, extending a hand.
Miles looked back at Jaime with sad eyes and shook his head at Jaime not understanding who he was saying needed help. He turned back the city and continued walking as Jaime continued to yell at him.
“Stay a while!” he yelled as he threw the book by Miles’ feet, tearing slightly from having to return to the confines of his isolated plot of land, forever.
As he approached the wall to enter the city limits, Miles dethatched his visor for the last time and tossed it to the wayside into the grass where the foliage would grow around it and, eventually, bury it. He wrapped the bandana back around his mouth. His prosthetic arm and leg helped him to scale the wall by digging imprints into the smooth surface. When he peaked his 220 head over the top and saw the city, he felt at peace knowing that he’d never have to see it on fire again. The streets were full of hallow people again, easy for Miles to walk through on his way to town hall. The heavy black clouds still hung overhead.
When he got there, Miles squeezed through the crowds on the way inside. The entire building was a firm marble that had been too hard to break through the riots and shined perfect reflections of all the real people, the augmented and non-augmented alike, under the glossy surface. He didn’t pay attention anymore to how much they were blended together or isolated from one another, he just kept walking forward. Looming above them all, showered in golden lights from the ceiling, were more shining figures in their best dressed clothes, each paired with their own batch of security guards standing by them. At the center of them all, smiling as they talked about things Miles no longer listened to, was Umor, moving their hands and speaking their mind like a pastor in full force. They were all separated from the rest of the public by electric gates and large podiums that elevated them far above the ground.
Miles made his way to the front of the crowd, rolled down his hood, and looked directly at his friend. After a sharp gasp from Umor, the entire room traced the source to Miles and immediately cleared away, creating two large crowds on either side of him. Some tried to flee, but the guards had already closed off the exits and shouted down anyone trying to leave or get in front of their line of sight. Every guard pulled out their weapons in a single synchronized motion and trained all their guns on Miles, and as their guns were trained on him, the crowds’ eyes were also trained on them, waiting to see what they would do. Many of the officers still had the memories of the past few weeks burned into their heads, some their skin, not unlike the people below both surrounding and greatly outnumbering them. None of them were eager to use a bullet in front of the masses who had finally calmed down, not so soon after peace had been brokered. 221
Two guards made their way from up high, and they slowly approached Miles while trying to talk him down. He noticed the slight shaking in their hands, despite their cold eyes, and he pitied them. Umor was pleading with Miles, shriveling away to the side of their new guard as they did, but Miles wasn’t listening to any of them. He hummed a song in his head.
But before Miles had walked through the crowds of town, he had made one final stop to
Henry’s shop. Inside, he placed Umor’s dead phone with a second envelope labeled “M.” He had hoped to see Henry or Leda one last time, but they weren’t there. The place looked ransacked, like someone had left in a hurry, with more metal parts and upturned tables left scattered over the floor. On the counter, Miles noticed a pack of beer with a broken handle that wasn’t there before.
Henry would never leave beer unattended, yet there were only a few bottles missing, just enough to hold in one’s hand without slowing themselves down too much. It was Henry’s favorite. Still, he had no one else, so Miles left the phone and his stories in the empty garage for someone to find.
In a complete calm, Miles slowly slinked his right hand to his hip, where he always kept his holster. Umor continued to yell at him, tears and snot sliding down their face. His fingers still trembled slightly, but it was only instinct, and after a deep breath, he knew he was ready. In a swift motion, Miles’ hand immediately dove into pocket and shot right out again.
After the bang and flash of light pierced through the air, all eyes in the room moved back to the smoking gun in Umor’s hand, the gun that Miles had given them so long ago when they came back to town. Their jaw shook uncontrollably, and their chest heaved in bursts as they lowered the weapon and took several steps back in shock. The crowd shifted their eyes again, gliding across the reflective surface of the marble floor to the delicate streams of blood that stretched into their own paths away from the main pool. As the blood grew thicker towards the 222 source, they traced the man’s legs, limp on the floor, up through the rest of his wilting body.
There, at the top, was Miles, shot in the head as the flicker in his left eye slowly dimmed, and in his right hand was a single bloodied envelope labeled “proof.” The song in Miles was humming slipped out of his mind as his mechanical eye went to black.
…
Suddenly, after a buzz of static, the eye turned on again, though its signal was faint and would not last long. It saw the same outstretched hand it did before it had shut off, though now with the envelope between its fingers. It laid atop a dirtied conveyer belt that shook as it moved.
Something, barely out of sight, was flung into a hole to the side where the belt was moving.
Out in the distance, it could see the city and the courthouse as it shined especially bright against the backdrop of the other charred buildings. It seemed to even illuminate more over time as crackling lights broke out in the air, bouncing off its surface, like stars glittering in the darkness as people spilled outside the doors. It was impossible to tell which of these people were hallow or not, and it was impossible for the eye to see what benefit, if any, this scuffle in the distance would have, but it continued. Out of the same corner as before, the eye saw a body thrown into the same hole. The belt moved again.
Now overlooking the pit, the eye’s vision jostled as the body it was attached was picked up by masked men and carelessly pushed down the hill, finally landing at a depth so low that barely any sunlight reached. In the pit were books, papers, and other old junk that had been discarded just as easy as the people that lay sprawled upon them, indiscriminate to augmented and non-augmented alike. Some with bullet wounds, some deep cuts, some no discernable 223 wounds at all, they all shared the same glazed stare as more bodies fell on top of them, now joined as the same dirt family. 224
Chapter 18
Burying the Dead
The eye continued to behave inconsistently, flicking to images of a set of hands collapsing someone’s screaming head one moment and writing a message in the mud for a boy the next. Between the static filled jumps, the white noise blurred together into the shape of a bird, almost like a dove, landing over the eye. Inspecting it, the bird tapped the eye several times, rotating its vision, until it opened its beak, pulled the eye out, and began to take flight with the eye in its claws.
The eye could see the bodies below it and moved far enough away that they looked like the earth that was coddling them, all of them naked infants holding each other together. It flew further, so that it could see the city with new bright hues floating between the shimmering pillars caught in the fire light beaming from below. These colors, so powerful, pushed their way up through the dark fog and gave way to prisms of light to shine down from the sky. The structures below that were losing their rigid shape from the curtains of smoke, and the all the colors from below blended together at the borders like oil underneath all this light.
And it was this light that the eye was flying towards. It went beyond the city, and then it went beyond the fields with the small house waiting cozily in the grass, and it flew up, up to the gentle white clouds that gently caressed the eye like stroking hands. The city looked so far away by now, but the eye had just been there, so it couldn’t take long to go back in that direction if the eye was dropped, but the dove held on to the eye. Visions of hands jotting down word after word on so many pages floated through the eye’s vision up through the rest of the clouds as it broke through even those heights as a new light basked down on the eye in a layer even above the 225 clouds. All the while, a single message from the eye’s memory blended together what it had once seen with the new warmth of clouds surrounding it.
Everything changes; nothing changes.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barron, Frank, et al. Creators on Creating: Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004.
While the rest of the sources in this bibliography speak to the creation of the body of the thesis, the story, this text helped me with my introduction, the analytical side of my presented work. The essays from creatives like Henry Miller and Italo Calvino helped me to articulate and reflect on my own process of making the novel.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. Penguin, 2016.
This book was a relatively recent influence from the beginning of this year. It’s a literary nonfiction novel about the crime spree, sentencing, and hanging of two murderous criminals. One of the characters, Perry Smith, is a deeply tortured soul that walks the line between dangerous self-obsessed narcissist and frightened child in need of help. When I finished, I saw striking resemblances between him and Miles. They both suffer from mental illness that is provoked into violence from outside stressors, and they share pitiful pasts that, while not justifying their actions, do offer explanations. This enhanced perspective of Miles helped guide me through editing, and it led to one of my favorite paragraphs of the novel, when Miles is shrunk down to the size of a child and carried away by strangers in the mess of chapter 12. Oddly enough, the final scene with Miles’ eye getting carried away by the dove was written before I’d read In Cold Blood. The commonality of the important bird symbols in either story was actually coincidence.
College & Electric Youth. “A Real Hero.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHgYtKkSEDA. Aside from the obvious connection between the song’s title and Miles’ inner desires that are becoming more and more evident throughout this chapter and the rest of the novel, the song also has deeper thematic connections imbedded in the lyrics. The lyrics describe a person down on their luck in a situation where they’re trying to be heroic during a tragedy. There are also references to the idea that trying to be heroic is what qualifies someone as being a real human being, which is definitely echoed in Miles’ view of the public and the hallow, holographic, people specifically. Lastly, the song is a prevalent one in a movie called Drive, a criminal driver with similar aspirations about improving his character and morality. A neat detail. Danger. “1:42.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBon00jon10. Seeing as how this song is purely instrumental, it’s a little difficult for me to commentate on it besides speaking in abstraction. The sound is electronic, which is fitting for the setting as is the rest of the electronic music incorporated into the novel. The song in particular is also incredibly imposing and works incredibly well with Miles’ spree of destruction in chapter 8. The title also lent me a way to introduce an inevitable ticking clock component by referencing time. 227
Death Grips. “Hacker.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoZgZT4DGSY. Death Grips is an interesting band. I didn’t like them at first, and I’m still partially convinced I only do now out of Stockholm syndrome. Still, this song adds a lot of context on the surface level and thematically. Firstly, on the surface, the lyrics and “instruments” used are chaotic, confusing, and uncomfortable. It’s a natural choice to pair alongside the club scene in the Earthly Delights. The band is also known for embedding elements of BDSM culture in their aesthetic and lyrics, which the Earthly Delights feels right at home at with its exaggerated risqué nature. The lyrics also have imbedded biblical references with the center of three (the trinity), the snake (Satan), and the apple store (Eden) which work with the chapters’ allusions to Christian hell with the nine total levels of the building once the secret passage opens up akin to the nine circles. The top layer is an unnatural blend of pleasure and pain that I thought appropriate to make the limbo of my world’s hell that its people never really leave nor want to. Lastly, the “hacking” element is also a reference to Miles’ hacking of his own mind with the ED along with the idea of someone “hacking” cameras to see what Miles is doing and guiding his actions, possibly explaining the spontaneousness of the floating camera drones and the hidden door. Death Grips. “I’ve Seen Footage.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_V_2BFWahc. Granted, the fast tempo of the song doesn’t fit the slow oppressive crawl of chapter 7, but the lyrics worked too well, and I just liked the song too much to not include it somewhere. The song title obviously fits with Miles’ actions during the chapter, but the lyrics directly speak to desensitization and paranoia in the face of overwhelming footage. This contemporary influence blends well with the scene’s allusions to Plato’s cave with Miles only understanding the outside world with the warped shadows playing out from behind him and the real of news footage that Henry has prepared for him. Death Grips. “No Love.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnSfYfwDOjk. The song’s title might seem to not have as much of a clear link to the events of the chapter, but it does speak to aspects of the relationships of the characters that interact with each other, mainly, Miles with Umor and Umor with their followers. There is “no love” there. This falls in line with more metaphors that damn Umor’s character without there being any physical evidence to condemn them, so it’s again up to the reader to decide how much blame to cast. The lyrics here mainly serve as a prelude for what’s to come in the following chapter at the Earthly Delights with its sexual references and a “staircase winding to hell.”
Elliot, T.S. The Wasteland. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 2004.
The mere inception of the song/chapter title connection I had I owe in part to The Wasteland. Even before that, though, the poem’s themes of the breakdown of communication fit into a perfect irony in a world I wanted to create where information was not only more readily available to the public, but there was far more of it as it intruded on their daily lives, but it only served to create more confusion. The only sort of safe haven 228
was the part of the world where there was no one to even share information with in mass. While the majority of the poem’s impact was largely thematic, as I didn’t feel the need to mime Elliot’s lexicon, the poem Miles writes, Fire Dancing, is modeled after The Wasteland with similar allusions to prophets and, well…the actual wasteland. Granted, I was also fine with making Miles’ poem far more streamlined than its confounding source.
El Tigre. “She Swallowed Burning Coals.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZKVuOYg6DY. Another instrumental piece, the electronic music is more fitting for Miles’ walking down the street each day then describing the mood of his meeting with Leda. The title does become more ominous when Leda is introduced with her suspicious neck injury, implicating that she does come from a violent past in one way or another. While I don’t believe that Leda would ever actually be forced to swallow burning coals, since the novel goes on to show that she comes from a colder and far more controlled environment than something that over the top, I did intend to imply from the beginning that violence had been done to her. When Miles and the reader first meet her, though, she is unable to discern the pain away from a normal life for herself as it’s all she’s known. She doesn’t have the maybe luxury, maybe curse, to know what it was like to speak only for that voice to be choked out like it was with Miles. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated: a Novel. Penguin Books, 2016. As I mentioned in my introduction, this book was primarily an influence on style with the form of the novel breaking apart. Just as within my own novel, the form of Everything is Illuminated comes undone in parallel with the decreasing mental states of the characters. New revelations are had, and their relationships with each other become strained.
Homerus, et al. Iliad. Harvard University Press, 2001.
Both directly mentioned and more subtly shown through his actions, Miles shares the qualities of a classical hero archetype. On the surface, he is a great warrior shown through inhuman levels of strength, endurance, and durability, he receives several “gifts” from higher powers, and he falls into the trope of saving…well, maybe not a damsel since that’s too glamorous of a description, but he does like saving to an extent. Similar to Achilles being another pawn in a war, who is an even smaller pawn to the gods, Miles is the product of an individualist imposed in a world of forceful collectives. Like the many archaic artifacts he collects, he does not belong, a man out of time and maybe even out of reality with him being almost fable-like. And like Achilles, who forgoes the battle of Troy for the longest time, hopeless, so too does Miles come to the same depressing realization about his own efforts. This realization about his helplessness to his own nature is what finally breaks him. I always thought of his laughter while he stares at the clouds that look like marionette strings, after Seth explains the characters of Achilles and Roy Batty, as Miles almost breaking the fourth wall. It’s Miles thinking, “Oh, I never had a choice. I was a character too. I was just a puppet of my environment, of other people, and of my own nature.” In a way, he is, like any character. I never gave Miles a say in the matter. 229
Hurston, Zora Neal. The Complete Stories. HarperCollins, 2008.
While Miles’ character is a twist on a traditional fable character, I’d say that the way he is written, the language used, isn’t. I have a hard time describing my own narrative voice, but I’d say it’s too cold to be conflated with fables. However, Miles’ stories, which he is tasked to write by Seth but ends up doing it more for himself anyways, do read like complicated versions of traditional moralistic writing. Similarly, Hurston wrote many of her short stories in the way, imbuing stereotypes and tradition with a modern analytical irony that, in a very simplified explanation, is carried throughout Miles’ stories as tales of people making problems worse that they are either trying solve, or just live through. Hurston’s stories helped instill in me the duality of simple premises with maddeningly complex implications.
Kiner, Kevin. “Burying the Dead.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJrEkTEkE4Q.
If you listened to this song back-to-back with “Tears in Rain,” you might be fooled into thinking they’re from the same movie. They’re not. This one is the ending song for a burial scene in an offshoot spinoff Star Wars show, decades apart from the original Blade Runner. Just as these two songs seem to work in tandem across time, so too does this novel, hopefully, with its influences. It is an attempt at creation while also falling back into the same cycles as before. The novel starts with a quote from Ezra Pound, “Make it new,” and it ends with one of Miles’ most profound quotes, the culmination of his life, “Everything changes; nothing changes.” I’d say the songs that open and close the novel share the same relationship. It also helped that “Burial of the Dead” is the name of a section in The Wasteland. I can’t believe I did the literary equivalent of playing the Wikipedia game from Star Wars to Elliot.
Lazerhawk. “Overdrive.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1NAhlVRaZ4. This is the most up-tempo song included in the novel, and it coincides with the most up- tempo moment, Miles’ fast pursuit of Zachary from the Earthly Delights out onto the streets. The song, and the video that accompanies it on YouTube, is reminiscent of 80’s high octane action scenes, Miles’ fantasy. Here, he gets to live that fantasy out, briefly, before it becomes increasingly desperate and grim the longer it continues, not unlike Miles’ later more impactful attempts at “heroism.” Pink Floyd. “Comfortably Numb.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-xTttimcNk. I know my audience, so I assume I don’t need to explain who Pink Floyd is here. How it relates to Miles, however, is probably the best example in the novel of the song lyrics synching up with the thoughts and feelings of the characters at hand. Whereas other chapters follow dynamic changes in tone with the passing of time, this chapter is completely removed from time and reality itself as Miles is left to dwell on everything that has happened to, and because of, him. In fact, the lyric, “The child is grown. The dream is gone,” almost word for word in the chapter itself towards the ending. The idea of being 230
“comfortably numb” also applies to Miles in a unique way that calls back to the events of chapter seven. While going through mental torment, Miles is, in a sense, comfortable in his sofa on a secluded farm. Yet, he is combatting a great sense of depression that is eroding any life still in his body, reducing him to a husk that’s become numb to pain, a child growing up in response to the world around them. In his attempts to interact with the world, he has become another hallow person like the holograms that walk the streets of the city, completely empty. This is the sensation that plagues him in chapter 12 and for the rest of his time on earth. Robinson, Porter. “Goodbye to a World. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2TE0DjdNqI. By the time the reader reaches this point in the novel, a title with “goodbye” in it isn’t a good sign. No, as the prelude to the final chapter, this is both Miles’ and the readers’ goodbye to a world, one of many worlds like the ones Miles has created for himself, and the other worlds that have influenced Miles and myself. Though, despite Miles’ suicidal nature in his final actions, the lyrics in this song are imbued with a sense of hope, of perhaps bringing life to a new world. It coincides with Miles’ handing off of Umor’s phone and his writing to Henry and showing his own writing to the crowd that watched him die. Was it a final attempt to unite people with something “new”, or was it Miles’ last laugh to finally have the world he’s grown to hate finally see him as he instigates them into another flurry of destruction? Either way, the sound of the singer’s voice here was always very striking to me. I think I told my friend once that it sounded like a computer dying akin to HAL 9000 singing “Daisy” in his final moments. It’s with this voice that I imagine Miles’ mouth visor would make if it could speak, and the final electronic voice that struggles to let out its last words at the song’s end goes in parallel with Miles getting carelessly thrown in a mass grave to join the rest of his “dirt family.”
Scott, Ridley, director. Blade Runner. Warner Bros., 1982.
I had a similar experience to Miles with this film. At first, I saw it in snippets, incomplete, and I imagined Roy Batty as a far more romantic figure than he really was. Well, in spirit he still is, but in execution I missed the grit and grime that made him, and the rest of Ridley Scott’s world, come to life. I owe this film a great deal to my own novel’s aesthetic. I did everything in my power to make the city as oppressing, dark, dingey, and absolutely horrible as I possibly could while still imbuing it with this sense of scope and fantasy that made it intriguing enough to the reader to want to stay a little longer. When I was in doubt about how to craft the scenery, I let it rain over the bright perky holograms below that embodied my own, and Miles’, cynicism.
Vangelis. “Tears in Rain.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7RWTaGezc. The sound of rain pattering along the rooftops of dingey metal buildings lit up along their sides by roaming holograms telling you things you don’t want to hear in lieu of streetlamps or natural light, this is the song that establishes Miles’ melancholy in the face of it all. It 231
establishes the pattern of music in the chapter titles, and it establishes Miles’ natural pull to Roy Batty’s life of space adventures that he can only wish to imagine, a world outside the city that may as well be an entire mechanical world. Wew lad. “RUN THE SPIKES.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyEvZw1rtYs. This is another song, the last song, but it isn’t one of the chapter titles. One, I couldn’t ever fit this in as a chapter title naturally, and two, this isn’t technically a “real” song. It’s a remix of two artist’s music. Either way, while I couldn’t find a place to directly put this song in, it always felt to be one of the most natural song choices to describe the world I’ve created as a whole. If there were ever to be a trailer for this book, it would have this song in it. I also felt that, since it’s a remix by a small independent creator, the novel had some inherent kinship with it since the novel too is a remix of different pieces of fiction from a nobody creator. If you brought yourself to listen to any of the other songs I’ve recommended, and you could stomach them, I’d highly recommend giving this one a try as well to truly understand the tone of Miles’ world.
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ACADEMIC VITA
Bryce William Thompson [email protected] ------EDUCATION May 2021 Penn State Erie – The Behrend College Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing The Pennsylvania State Schreyer Honors College EXPERIENCE
Lake Effect Literary Journal August 2018-Present
• Served as Fiction Editor for Behrend’s literary journal • Helped select fiction pieces for publication Penn State Learning Resource Center August 2019-August 2020 • Peer tutor for all grades and disciplines involving written reports and/or analysis • PLET tutor for plastics engineering students’ senior project reports Mercyhurst Kickstarter Team October 2018-August 2019 • Part of a local student led program • Conducted market research and draft up reports for local startup companies AWARDS Smith Fiction Contest, First Place Fall 2020 Sonnenberg Poetry Contest, Third Place Fall 2020 Archie Loss, Outstanding Thesis Award Spring 2021 Outstanding Creative Writing Major Award Spring 2021 ACTIVITIES Lambda Sigma Fall 2019-Spring 2020 • Penn State Honors Fraternity • Helped organized and participated in multiple student led volunteer projects