The Year of Storms, Chptr. 3 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

The steady hum of electricity through the walls floated up to the light panels and the sound washed over itself. They were trying to rob her of the sounds of degenerate humanity, but she had to wonder if near-perfect silence was worse. She stood in her doorway staring down the hallway toward the common area. Maybe she could get into a fight and salvage some of the weekend. Too bad she didn’t know one lick about giving lickings.

She entertained the notion that, should she ever pull a similar stunt, which she wouldn’t, she would sneak in an entertainment pod. The one she had was small, and would likely have fit up her rectum, though ergonomics would not be on her side. But it had movies; it had endless 2D movies, celluloid, as they would’ve called it before ExP changed the landscape of entertainment.

She had movies and she had television shows, Star Wars and Star Trek and ET and Taxi, M.A.S.H. and Hill Street Blues and countless other cinematic treats that Unity had no knowledge of or use for. She would watch them over and over again until she knew every line by heart. And then she would watch them again until she could figure every stage cue and knew every name in the credits by memory. She would pore through the culture of the end of the twentieth century, a golden age before the aftermath of that age made itself impossible to ignore or explain away.

The pads of the soles of her jumpsuit were unsurprisingly comfortable as she walked down the hall on the balls of her feet. It really was the lukewarm porridge of a facility.

She opened a pneumatic door to the shrill sound of a girl yelling.

“So you all are going to sit there all day? Huh?”

She was animated, flipping her shoulder-length pink hair around her head and tipping her glasses. Cellie hadn’t seen glasses on a person except Hadley, and the Farmers when she went on her discovery outside of Unity. Outsiders seemed to gravitate to the antiques. More likely, it was all they had.

Along the wall were seven glossed-over gazes, seeming to ponder what the woman was yelling at them.

“They’re noners,” Cellie said. “I think they’re going to sit there all day.”

“I know that.” The woman sighed. “Fucking noners.”

“Why bother yelling at them?”

The girl walked over to the head of the row, took a sip of her drink and flicked her wrist, sending the liquid into the faces of three of them. They wiped it off with their hands, appearing to ponder that too.

“One time I was in a transport stop, and it was just noners sitting on the benches.” She took broad steps over to the Go dispenser. “I was pissy that day, and I just let one have it. I mean, full vent, ‘cause who are they gonna tell, right? And out of nowhere, and God to fuckin’ Christ nowhere, this one starts screaming. Full blast; thought she was gonna break the glass, that loud. Fully animated.”

“A noner? Sure it wasn’t just a normal person having a bad day? Maybe they were medicated and they just looked… noner-ish.”

“You don’t know me but believe I can pick a noner from a norm,” she said.

“So what was it, then? What had that one spun?”

The girl took a sip of her Go and walked over to empty it in one of the noner’s laps.

“I think they don’t just experience nothing,” she said. “They want to. They think they do, but there’s something missing from that emptiness. They’re still in there. Repressed desires and urges, maybe. Buried, but not wiped. Cause when it comes out, it’s scary shit.”

Cellie picked a cup out of the cupboard and filled it. She wondered how many cups of Go her de facto companion had emptied on the noners. She didn’t look forward to running out of Go in such a boring place.

“So you’re trying to get them to freak out,” Cellie said.

“Yup.”

“How long have you been trying?”

“What time is it?” She asked.

“No clue.”

“Same answer, then. I know it was light when I woke up, and they were in here then.”

Chellie tried to feel bad for the noners, but she knew you could light one on fire and throw it a birthday party and it would feel the same about either.

“I’m Cellie.”

“Alandra.”

“That’s a weird name. What’s it mean?”

“How would I know? Your name mean something?”

“My dad’s favorite dog, what he told me. But I think the dog was a year younger than me, so he was probably just screwing with me.”

Alandra let out a laugh.

“That sucks. Sorry I asked.”

“I liked Cellie… the dog. I mostly know her from pictures, though. Don’t much remember my childhood.”

“So you ain’t from Unity, ‘cause I know dogs are frowned upon in the snoot snoot.”

“Frowned upon,” Cellie said. “Not forbidden. And I’m from CenterLock, so we could’ve kept sewer monsters as long as we licensed them.”

Cellie sat down on a long polymer table with recesses for cups. A faux-wooden basket of nutrition bars occupied the center, and she grabbed two. They couldn’t have been more generic, but in the absence of choice they were the top shelf. Alandra walked along the wall of noners, pretending to go on the attack in the hopes of releasing a dragon. Eventually, she made her way to the table.

“How’d they get in here, anyway?”

Alandra aimed her thumb to point. “Them?”

“Yeah. What crimes do noners commit?”

Alandra adjusted her glasses. “Good question.” She craned her neck. “First one of you tells me why you’re in here gets…” She felt the space where her pockets would be. “Got nothing to give them.”

Cellie grabbed a controller of the bench and turned the lumen panel on. It was a history teacher’s show, fairly popular given that the most sought-after history in Unity was usually the last New Year’s celebration.

“Hypnocurrency and ExP run our lives,” the teacher said. “That is obvious. But did you know they started with this needle in my hand?”

“Oh, no,” Alandra said. “This stuff?”

Cellie shrugged. “C’mon, I like this guy.”

“The earliest experiments on human memory involved stimulating tiny areas of the brain with electrical shocks, and seeing what happened. Say, for example, I opened up your skull and poked your brain here,” he pulled out a poly brain model and tapped it with his needle. “You might smell muffins. Or see a traffic light. Or hear a piano key.”

“Hey, got any needles?” Alandra said. “Let’s make the noners remember stuff.”

Cellie shushed her, which he hoped wasn’t a mistake.

“Turns out, if you shock the brain just a little bit, in the right places, you can make people experience anything, even things they’ve never experienced before. The brain just gets stimulated a certain way and interprets it all as an experience. And if you can copy a real experience, get all those little electrical synapses firing in just the right way, just the right combination, and you program that pattern onto something physical, like a chip that can be replayed over a different brain, you’ve just created ExP. Or hypno, which is just the economic version of ExP, and is another lesson on my feed. That ExP can then be shared with another person, who takes the chip and connects it into their own brain through this lovely interface we all have.” He pointed to the small, round, titanium jack on his neck. “Right here.”

“Can’t believe you watch this crap?” Alandra said.

“I am this crap. Feed 432.”

Alandra grabbed her own nutrition bar and opened the wrapper with one hand before dipping the bar in the remains of her Go.

“I don’t even have a lumen panel,” she said.

“Are you a Farmer?”

Alandra adjusted her glasses. “These, right?”

“Well, yeah.” Chellie ran her index finger along her brow to scratch at her nervousness. “Also, you’re pretty gruff. No offense.”

“I was underground,” Alandra said. “I escaped up to Unity three years ago.”

“Escaped? I didn’t know you had to escape being underground.”

Alandra cleared her throat. “You do when you kill someone.”

Cellie didn’t ask Alandra anything else in the common room. She didn’t stay in there much after that. It was one thing to pass the time with another day tripper and have fun with noners. It was another thing to risk even associating with a killer.

As she sat in her room, she realized that associating with killers was going to happen if they’d thrown her in the real jail. Something about spending even a few minutes with Alandra was odious if she couldn’t use it to up her rank.

She didn’t know what time it was, only that it was dark, and it was the second set of meals. She’d be let out the next day. She’d be back to her life, back to her show, and she’d paint her graffiti enterprise as a success by some imaginative storytelling.

She went to sleep wondering what the noners did to get arrested.

***

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.

More from Liam Sweeny…