The Year of Storms, Chptr. 1 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
Paint, cold and slick, its acrylic base tortured in pigment until it cried crimson rivulets and gleamed in the pale light of the streetlamp. Concrete bathed in that same light, bare, smooth over yards and rough over inches, porous and thirsty for the decoration of an eager and unsophisticated hand.
Cellie glanced down the street, ear cocked to listen for the subtle hum of the magnetic guides that came stock-standard under Municipal Authority vehicles. She could pick out that sound over those of other vehicles in the same way she could tell that the lamp overhead wasn’t cleaned that year, the same way she could feel the humidity in the air and know that the dewpoint was sixty-seven degrees. Cellie wasn’t a detective, more a detector, and if she didn’t finish her art project soon, she’d be gauging the density of her wrist restraints.
She paused and opened a slick black thermos, newly acquired, for Go, the drink that was described to her once as “coffee in three dimensions”. A flip of the dial produced a shot of the thick amber liquid, and she continued on to the finishing touches of her vandalism.
It took three hours to paint if she didn’t count the time it took to throw a coat of liquid poly on it and hide from the regular Authority drive-bys every forty-five minutes. No one who had ever seen her work would consider it a passion project, but it was. It was angular and sketchy and raw, a feat with liquid paint, and she didn’t show that side of herself on her feed. Her feed let people experience the latest bubble bath, or boutique delicacy down the street. This piece was nothing short of bloodletting.
She held a pen torch in her hand. Little more than a stick with a hot tip. Her signature was known, distinguished. She would be held for justice. And that, most decidedly, was the point.
She burned her signature into the concrete, mindful that it would be one of her most viewed signatures, and the only thing the Municipal Authority couldn’t scrub off. People would look and it would feel like a charge for whatever rebellion her fans were in the mood for. And that mattered. She slugged another shot of Go and spun around to take a selfie before packing her bag and heading to Hadley’s.
Hadley’s was the dead intersection of being both Craig Hadley’s home, and self-named place of business. It was a storefront with windows slathered in newsprint from before the Collapse, when they had the luxury to decide that trees were worth chopping down for pulp. Cellie wasn’t a connoisseur of newsprint, but she’d had chances through pure boredom to scan the window, and the world before. The cheap electronics, the expensive-looking bags, the amazing deals over what looked to be nothing special – it painted crystal clear the world that had cannibalized itself.
She knocked on the front door and felt paint flecks give under her knuckles. She hiked up the strap on her bag and hoped he wouldn’t sleepwalk. She’d hear the sirens soon. She was going to Unity Detention Facility either way, but she had to offload her scavenged Go container. Graffiti was one thing, grade D contraband was another.
The door creaked. Hadley had on a striped, stained bathrobe and a faded yellow T-shirt. He was rough-shaven and his glasses were in bland plastic frames he must have picked up from a noner. They collected all the good analog stuff like gravity.
“Early for you.”
“You gonna let me in?” Cellie tucked her thumb under the strap of her sack and wiggled it. Hadley turned around and left the door open.
“All the good ExP’s coming in later,” he said.
Cellie followed Hadley down a narrow hallway that widened to accommodate a wooden spiral staircase, the base of which bore a built-in bookshelf. There were large volumes, varying widths, and notebooks. Cellie wasn’t unfamiliar with books and paper; no one was. But actually seeing them, and even more, smelling them, was a trip.
They found their way to the main room, which held a cornucopia of gadgets and trinkets on wire racks and baskets, all facing a counter that held back a further cornucopia of silver and brass contraptions housed in a lattice of mahogany shelving.
Hadley took his place behind the counter and Cellie took her place in front of it. She emptied the sack, which amounted to the Go container and not much else. Hadley picked it up and looked it over before dipping it below the counter. The hiss told Cellie he was filling it with Go. When it was full, he placed a bucket on the counter and emptied a shot in a glass that changed color, green to yellow. He emptied the glass into the bucket and did it again after adjusting a knob on the thermos, creating a different color spectrum after a second pour.
“Not bad,” he said. “I wonder how concentrated you could make the Go with this thing. Have you tested it?”
“Not that brave,” Cellie said. “Don’t want to end up, you know …”
“Yeah.” Hadley closed the spout. “Where’d you get your hands on one of these?”
“A fan thought he was impressing me.”
“Did he?”
“Not by leaving it on my doorstep, no,” Cellie said.
“Yeah,” Hadley said. “We got stuff for fans like that if you’re looking to trade that way.”
“I’m good.” Cellie tapped on the counter glass. “All good in the hood. That was in a movie I saw. 2D.”
“You get it from me?” Hadley said. “I don’t remember hearing that. But I don’t watch them like you do. I don’t think anyone does.”
Hadley braced himself against the showcase as he held the Go container up to his face to inspect it.
“I can’t give you what one of these is worth,” he said. “All I got is two hours of a mother after her kid was born, a teenager’s skateboarding competition, third place win, and the piece de resistance – the whole life of a Unity Complex bureaucrat, who was in the office for thirty years.”
“You have someone’s whole life?”
“He traded it for a first-edition Huckleberry Finn,” Hadley said. “Just wanted to unburden himself, go to a park and read. A couple of hours of his memories might help you figure out something about your father, if you knew where to look.”
Cellie nodded. “This thermos worth his whole life?”
“Yeah, but you know I can’t give it all to you. You’re not a Mover, unless you hit top rank last month and kept it and didn’t tell me?”
“No, not yet,” Cellie said. “But you could look the other way.”
“Not worth the jail time, kid. Besides, you’d need the Mover’s upgrade to take in that many memories. Thirty years we’re talking. You’d end up coming off the mountain with white hair.”
Cellie sighed. “Too bad,” she said. “White’s in this year.”
“Sorry.”
Cellie glanced around at Hadley’s offerings, shelving her ideas about the bureaucrat. “The mother,” she said. “Right after she gave birth?”
“Nah, I think the day after she took him home.”
“Who the hell wants to experience that?”
“You’d be surprised,” Hadley said. “How many women can’t get a birth permit? If it was her experience from right after childbirth, I could sell it anywhere and retire.”
Cellie caught the pulse of Authority lights in the papered windows.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll take the kid’s skateboarding win. I’m just going to burn something over it. I don’t want to use any of my own units. Would that make us square?”
“If you don’t mind getting ripped off, sure.”
Hadley punched in a combination behind the counter, and he pulled out a black velvet pouch with an ExP storage unit. It was an industrial stock and didn’t have an ID. She knew she could transfer it into her wallet without any trace of its origin.
Cellie packed up to leave and face her fate when Hadley stopped her.
“I can still help you with your dad,” Hadley said. “I found a new reserve manifest. I don’t know if he’s anywhere in this one, but if you’re willing to pour through a couple thousand scenes, it’s an avenue for you.”
“When I get out of jail, I’ll come back and pick up a copy.”
“Jail?”
“Long story,” she said. “Resume builder. I didn’t kill anybody.”
“I’m going to tell the Authority I don’t know you.”
“You don’t know me.” Cellie said.
“Great. Then our story checks out. Don’t start a riot in there.”
More from Liam Sweeny…
