Year of Storms, Chptr. 4 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
The Muni Line 4 floated from the island that housed the Unity Detention Facility over the magnetic bridge to Unity proper, which looked like the straightest flight, an entire commuter skiff suspended in the dead center of four powerful magnetic fields. Cellie looked out the window at the iron tips of a physical bridge that succumbed to the Collapse. Thirty years and they still weren’t finished pulling bridgework out of the bay.
The commuter load was light for a Monday morning, but then again, how many people were in a rush to leave jail so early? She glanced at people in wrinkled garb stained with rancid Go, industrial grime, spots and sprays of blood and the ragged edges of residues of sweat and maybe in that context, tears. They were shiftless, release tickets grasped in hands trying to wring the ink out of them. She reassessed that maybe it was the one Line where everyone was in a rush.
They cruised through Inseledex and Beton, past towers gleaming with liquid murals imbued in the glass by artists like LuCayme and Stalls, Bridden and Wirexen. Cellie could only imagine the contracts that were given out to make the towers’ art. Not that many knew; it was a social faux pas to publicly put a price on art. But it must have been astronomical. Any one of the artists that took part probably got their own hypno reserve.
Cellie got off on Avenue 56, a few blocks from her housing cylinder. She felt the breeze from the gap in the buildings, laden with the smells of orange and cinnamon and cherry from the bakeries and fresh soaped faux leather from an artisan shop. She thought she smelled a hint of the kind of antiseptic barbers used, which wasn’t a surprise in the Craft District.
She tugged at the bottom edges of her button-down Nyraweave and took a deep breath. She spent so much time there when she was a little girl. It might have seemed odd, as most kids her age spent their days in ExP chambers and their nights crying because the dinners their parents made couldn’t touch the dinners of some chef’s memory in ExP.
Cellie’s father, her biological father, was an engineer. He was well known, both before the Collapse and after. Cellie remembered being brought up in the Arboreal District, not because they had to; they could’ve lived anywhere, but because her father appreciated the value of being in a mix of regular people. But for Cellie, it was a young life between two worlds, between crystal and steel.
He did the best he could, and part of that ‘best’ was exposing Cellie to as many real experiences as he could – even if that meant letting her get her head shaved by a straight razor in a barber’s shop on Avenue 43 when she was ten. That was shortly before he disappeared.
She weaved in and out of the Craft District, checking her meter to see when her rank would adjust to reflect her time in Detention. It wasn’t until she was on a lift to her cylinder that it did.
Down .25 points.
How is that possible? She knew she might not go up, but how did she go down? The graffiti alone should’ve brought her up a half point for being art.
She tapped her meter, which did absolutely nothing. She turned it off and on again, which also did absolutely nothing. She thought or breaking it and ordering a new one, but there wasn’t anything hard in the lift.
“We’re here,” the driver said. “That’ll be seven minutes hypno.”
The driver tapped the receiver panel on the front of the lift. She tapped the top button on her implant jack. One beep, and she was ten minutes lighter with the tip.
“Yeah, thanks.” The driver tapped the door panel, letting her out.
She glanced up at her cylinder, which, unlike the towers in Inseledex, bore no art. The windows were coated with a tinted film to collect energy, which made the apartments dreary. The tops of trees poked up over the edge of the roof railing, put in for the rooftop park. It was pleasant feature of the cylinder, though kids used it to fight with each other and build their ExP. Or they’d do whatever concentration of Go they could get their hands on and make noise.
“Hey Cellie,” called out the Ancient, an eighty-year-old man that sat on the front stoop every day it didn’t rain and shared stories. And at the end of the stories, he would offer to sell them off. Everybody knew he sold off all the usable runs of any memories worth buying. Memories degraded with each selling unless you had a rig like Cellie’s, and selling them too much “off the brain” was illegal, similar to fraud. But cops tended to leave people alone who were old enough to live through the Collapse, which the Ancient had.
“Hey old man.”
“Did I ever tell you about how I raided a slaughterhouse with a hatchet?
“No, but I have to go in. Raincheck?”
“Oh, I don’t come out when it rains. Gets in my bones,” he said.
“Oh yeah, okay. Suncheck?”
The Ancient took hold of his cane from its resting place on the bench and tapped it on the ground like he was summoning something through the concrete.
“Ayup, ayup.”
Cellie took the middle tube to get up to her floor, it being the cleanest. It opened to the vestibule, which was oddly empty. Usually, the Floor Watch was drinking hot Go and chatting away, stopping occasionally to check out all comings and goings.
Cellie wandered down the hall, tired and in need of solid food. She followed the curvature of the cylinder until, just near her door, she saw a man towing a tired, eight-year-old boy. She knew he was eight, just like she knew the man had nothing good to say to her.
He was her husband once. And judging by the look in his eyes, they were about to have a problem.
“We need to talk,” he said.
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