The Year of Storms, Chptr. 6 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
Cinnamon dusted the sugar powder that dusted the twisted pastry that Cellie had to admonish Podre not to eat so fast. She could remember eating the twistie’s closest cousin, fried dough. It was one of her first memories, at a county fair when she was four years-old. It was the last county fair in Washington County before the water restrictions choked the Capital District of New York into strict necessity, before Unity, before the Year of Storms by a couple of years. Twisties were most closely compared to fried dough because Cellie had to compare them to something, because they weren’t anywhere near as good.
Twisties, like most other food stuffs in the Post, were full of flavor but light on substance. Nothing was made from animal products, not animals raised on a farm; there wasn’t enough land in the city’s free zone for livestock farming, not enough for a city of twenty-six million. The very first thing that Unity, and all the cities, had to figure out was how to produce food for the masses with little land, and they did, but it lacked. Cellie’s consolation was that Podre didn’t know anything better.
“Hey Podie, be sparing. I can’t get you another one for at least a week.”
Podre put his twistie down, his face splotchy with sugar powder.
“I thought we could have as many as we wanted.”
“That was before I knew they were going to redo the hypno,” Cellie said. “Now I have to wait and see what’s worth what. If I don’t get hurt too bad on the Exchange, we’ll get more. I just need to see, okay, honey?”
Podre shook his head, then pulled a small piece off of what remained of his twistie. “Mommy,” he said. “Why do you tickle yourself on the blue feeds?”
“Podie, you shouldn’t be watching those feeds. And you won’t be watching them with me.”
“Daddy says that you shouldn’t tickle yourself.”
“Daddy doesn’t understand what I do. It’s because he doesn’t want to. Your daddy is a good man, but he doesn’t really have an open mind about things.”
“He said an open mind lets evil things in.”
Cellie scoffed. Siran originally joined the New Cross when he was fighting for Podre, to network his way into a good advocate for the custody fight. But they got their hooks in him. Cellie had resigned herself to the fact that Podre would grow up New Cross, and hoped that one day he’d grow to question what they taught.
“Honey, all I do is make myself laugh and feel good in creative ways, so that I can share that with people. There’s nothing wrong with it. I don’t do anything I would regret. I’m an artist.”
“Daddy said artists are going to hell because they steal God’s power to create and they don’t use it for good.”
“Do you think I’m going to hell?” Cellie said.
“I don’t think so,” Podre said. “I hope not. Mommy, do you have to be an artist? I don’t want you to go to hell, cause then I’ll have to go to the Child Center.”
“At your age, you shouldn’t worry about the Child Center,” Cellie said. “You shouldn’t even know about it.”
Cellie sipped her citrus water. She grew up with lemon water in the house. Citrus water was close, but not quite. Then again, anything cold in the sun was welcome.
“Podie, your father got mixed up in that church for all the wrong reasons,” she said. “I don’t know who’s going to heaven or hell, or if those things even exist, but I do know that no church has any clue where anybody is going when they die, and neither does your father. They’re all guessing.”
Podre chewed with his mouth shut. A crumpled last-run napkin sat next to the twistie remains, and Podre’s face was free of sugar powder. He had good table manners, she’d give that to Siran.
A woman with blue-gray hair and liver spots forking wrinkles across her face walked over to Podre and gasps.
“Such a cute child,” the woman said. “Can I just pinch his cheeks?”
“I’d rather you not,” Cellie said. “He’s just getting over chicken pox. He’s still contagious. And it’s not the form we all got vaccinated for.”
“Oh, my,” the woman said as she stepped back. “Maybe I’ll just get going then.”
Podre squinted at Cellie when the woman was walking away.
“You lied, Mommy,” he said. “You lied to that woman. Why did you lie?”
“I didn’t want her to touch your cheeks,” Cellie said. “And I didn’t want to be rude.”
“Isn’t it rude to lie to someone?” Podre said.
Cellie took a sip of her citrus water. “It’s rude to get caught,” she said. “Sometimes a lie is best for people. They’re called white lies. They protect people when the truth would hurt them and there’s no good reason to tell them the truth.”
Podre picked at the crumbs of his twistie and wiped his mouth again.
“Okay, mommy,” he said.
“Speaking of lying,” Cellie said. “I have to take you to work with me. I am going to have to lie about it. If I don’t, I won’t have anyone to watch you, and someone in the cylinder will stick their nose in and say something.”
“What lie are you going to tell? A white lie?”
“The whitest lie,” she said.
They walked down the street on their way back to the cylinder. They could’ve taken a mass transit vehicle, as they were a free service, but Cellie preferred to walk when she could. As it was, she had to take a bullet and a lift to the hotel every night. The air was crisp, as it always was with the environmental buffer that ringed the city and separated it from the free zone.
Cellie and Podre were near the essentials store by the cylinder when a panel on the wall of the store illuminated with an announcement by the city leadership; the new exchange list was out. Cellie rushed herself and Podre home as she read the new hypno exchange rates that were as she read them, being updated in her ExP jack.
Sensory experience, which was the kind of ExP she created on her feed, was down five percent on the hypno. It was bad, but not that bad. Skill experience was also down, by twelve percent. Siran wouldn’t be too happy, since most of the ExP he produced was skill ExP. But the base hypno rate, which was the currency of the realm, was down three percent. Base hypno was the currency by which rent and bills were paid and jobs, if you had one, paid for wages. Base hypno rarely went down. It was the basis for the new economy.
Cellie hoped it was a ripple and not the start of a wave.
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