New Cover Preview for 2nd Edition of Grid City Overload

GRID CITY OVERLOAD - PREVIEW # 2

- FISH -

Factory. Jesus jesus jesus save the over-automated. Twenty-five minutes on bottles, then another twenty-five on cans, then back to bottles. The clock moves in only twenty-five minute intervals. Every three intervals means one hour and an uneven number of swings on bottles and cans. Grab them off the conveyor when they are impure or riddled with defects—toss them into huge plastic boxes, still hot, waiting to be remolded and made better. Every minute there are 372 new bottles made. Every minute there are 345 new cans made. It is slightly easier to work the cans swing. They call us quality control bottling workers, and we make $16 an hour. The checks that come in the mail to my apartment have the logo of the company imprinted onto them. It’s a blacked-out figure of a pteranodon, underneath reading Pteranodon Bottling Co, and then there is even smaller print under that, which I can’t read with my naked eye. I have looked at the small print with a magnifying glass, an old one that I stole from my grandmother’s house when I was little, the one she got from Africa that has the illegal ivory handle, and the words are nightmarish. Sometimes they print the exact date when I will be terminated. Other times they mention how much money has been stolen from my paycheck that month. Every fifteen minutes Floor Supervisor Austin Ackyooclad passes behind me, and Wallace, too, my coworker. Wallace and I trade between bottles and cans every twenty-five minutes. Floor Supervisor Ackyooclad makes sure we aren’t distracted. When I first started I was trained by Wallace. He told me against the noise of the factory: “You get used to wearin them headphones after a while! Nice thing is they let us pipe in news or music through em, but I ain’t suggest doin that till you’ve got used to the work environment! Ya gotta pay so much attention, and some of the new hires get dizzy to the point of throwin up!” I never vomited, but I still get dizzy sometimes. Bottles file through the metal chute in front of me and I inspect each one quickly, having to shoot my fin out into the lolling constant tongue of fresh plastic to pick out the defected ones. So many of them, no matter how diligent I am, escape my careful monitoring—this task would be automated too, if there was yet a way to do it at a cost less than $16 an hour—and the ones that escape, that aren’t thrown into the bins to later be remolded, they make it into general distribution, first packed into suffocating palettes lifted by forklifts, then trucked across the country to be stocked and shelved, finally neglected by customers who would rather have a less idiosyncratic soda container. Down the conveyor line, past Wallace and I’s station, the bottles and cans are filled with Terradon Plus, which started out as a lighter sugarfree substitute for the original Terradon flavor, but the popularity of Terradon Plus ended up vastly exceeding its predecessor. Now people only drink the Plus. The cans and bottles have the blacked-out figure of a pteranodon against a flat orange background. The name of the soda isn’t on the label because it doesn’t need to be, people know what it is just by the logo. Behind us is the INNOCUFILL machine, the machine that makes it necessary for us to have to wear noise deletion headphones. It is contained by a giant glass cage, the mechanical creature inside undulates with thousands of proboscises that extend their tubular mouths towards the aperture where each newly-made bottle or can is sent, sucking them into its convoluted process. The INNOCUFILL is built to be much more elaborate and impressive than necessary because above, through a large square window, tour groups come to observe how Terradon Plus is made, one of the birthplaces of their favorite everyday beverage. From where the tour groups look, the many different movements of the machine, working all in conjunction, are entrancing. Ackyooclad makes twice as many rounds on the days when tour groups come through. I’m unable to hear him when he walks behind me because of the headphones, so I often worry that he’s hovering just over my back, looking on with his sweaty red face, even his eyebrows red, measuring my performance on a chart attached to a clipboard with the Pteranodon logo printed on the back of it, also printed onto his cap and shirt and belt buckle, not to mention my own shirt, my own cap, my own belt buckle. A black pteranodon against an orange background. Sometimes I convince myself he’s hovering behind me, spraying gaseous forms of Ultram or Fentanyl into my breathing space, or seeing if he can lift away my headphone and move his pen into my ear without me feeling so he can covertly puncture my eardrum, and finally I have to look, make sure he’s not there, and I know that when I do this maybe three or four defected bottles or cans make it through the chute to the filling station. He’s almost never there when I look. The way we know to switch swings is that a little beep is sounded into our headphones, signaling Wallace and I to get up from the stools where we’ve been sitting and walk past each other on our way to the other guy’s stool. When we pass sometimes we wave or shake our heads in mutual misery, or sometimes we just walk by each other like we’re both invisible, and in some ways we are. Wallace is a fairly good coworker, though there’s something about him I don’t trust. I’ve seen the conspiratorial looks he exchanges with Ackyooclad, looks that signify my exclusion from something substantial and terrifying. I can see Wallace behind me, framed and surrounded by the same machines that frame and surround me, working the can swing with impeccable skill. He invites me almost daily after work to a nearby bar, and I can make out the developing craggy skin underneath his eyes that indicates a long-time heavy drinker. I’ve never accompanied him because I know it’s the perfect place to drug or poison a person, to slip something into their drink and meanwhile toast to the future. I refuse to be tricked.

I’ve been working bottles for nearly ten minutes. There are sixteen more swings left in the workday, plus lunch. I’m listening to a public address by Randy Mobyle being piped into my headphones that’s just starting over the howl of the INNOCUFILL. Tiny claps and cheers, along with networks of echoes, create an audible space I can somehow picture very clearly as Randy Mobyle begins speaking—

“Good evening, good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you. Please, sit. Thank you very much. I’d like to pay welcome and respects to the Grid city council joining us here today. Also to the governor of our great state, Governor Brackett, just recently back from Washington. Finally Senator Warlick and House Representative Vidal joining us via satellite. Gentlemen, I’m honored to have you all in attendance.

“[Meaningful sigh as device for transition:] Citizens of Grid. Last night a water protest took place in the shopping district, specifically along Notation Street in the 9000 block between Axiom and Finite. At around roughly ten-thirty pm the protest broke into a riot. The GPD, a contingent of which had been dispatched there to oversee the protest, was able to quickly get the mob under control. A local restaurant was destroyed during the incident, and rioters rushed to loot the business. Luckily they were deterred. However several officers were injured in the struggle, and upwards of ten rioters had to be forcefully subdued. We know the protest was meant to be peaceful, and that it was the irresponsible and dangerous actions of a select few from a radical group who caused such destruction and violence to occur.”

I’m struck by the fear Ackyooclad is behind me, monitoring my work and reaching out to grab me by the mouth. I spin around in my stool for half a second—nothing is there. When I turn to face the metal chute again, I catch a glimpse of two defected bottles passing through my station, now on their way to be filled and distributed.

“Every avenue will be pursued in order to prevent such unnecessary atrocities from occurring again, and I have been promised support by Governor Brackett, Senator Warlick and Representative Vidal in combating riot violence here in Grid.

“Now it simply must be stated that the city has taken strategic steps to ensure all citizens living within the city limits are being provided with suitable resources to live. Before the Dispersal Act passed in ’19 there were over two thousand families living in the hardware tract unable to get enough water, and now, five years later, we’ve solved a significant piece of that problem through government-initiative living programs which enable these suffering individuals to live healthy lives.

“Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen, we are nearing a dire situation that violence will neither prevent nor alleviate. In fact, those who believe violent measures will help achieve their goals are not only incorrect, but are in fact falling into the same ineffective behaviors that we’ve observed for countless years. It’s my belief that the citizens of Grid deserve something new from their fellow man, something better. Namely: understanding and camaraderie. Solidarity. Empathy, ladies and gentlemen. Those of us in positions to help must do so. Some of us will have to accept that the road will be hard for the time being, that some of the ways of life we’ve come to love must be altered, tinkered with, and made more sustainable.”

My phone receives a text, but I won’t be able to check it until my swing is over, and even then it will be difficult to read, much less make a response in the short time it takes for me to pass Wallace on my way to the cans station. The message is from Camillia, my girlfriend, who found my number through a set of alternative art message boards. We’ve known each other a year, but have never seen each other or spoken over the phone. I agreed with her early on that it would be best to maintain contact through text and email until the time was right to meet so we could properly encode ourselves and throw off whatever monitoring systems were likely tracking our phone activity. Especially mine, considering the inflammatory nature of my artistic work, which more than a few corporate and government entities have vested interest in never allowing to get released to the public. In fact, I’ve been under extensive surveillance for a little over five years now. This was revealed to me when I found a microcam hidden in the ceiling of my old apartment, directly over the area I had cleared out to draw and paint. I had been detaching some of the more suspiciously-placed light fixtures with just such a fear in mind, and sure enough, there tangled among the wires in the narrow cobwebbed orifice had been a miniscule black camera attached to ultrathin optical fiber. Instead of destroying the camera, I allowed it to remain there, keeping vigil over a decoy group of still-life drawings and watercolors innocuous in their content. My new apartment has been bugged in more sophisticated ways because I’ve yet to uncover any devices.

“Which of course brings me back to the point I’ve been campaigning for for almost two years now, three depending on who you ask”—there’s a short pause in the audio feed, but why? does it have something to do with what I was just thinking, is it relaying my thoughts?—“and it’s a simple point, one I’ll continue to make, that information in Grid is not sufficiently organized. And what we’re left with instead of order is confusion and indecision. That’s why I’m pleased to announce that InfoZebra, a company synonymous with its groundbreaking ZChase info-adaptation software, has chosen Grid to be the home for its new corporate headquarters. The effort to attract InfoZebra to Grid was headed up by myself, the mayor, the city manager of Grid, and of course none of it would have been possible without the vision and cooperation of the city council. [Long applause.] So before I go on for too long up here, rambling away and making you all stampede the coffee machine [laughter] I’d like to introduce Mr. Flint Vedge, CEO of InfoZebra.”

Bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle…

“Thanks very much Councilman Mobyle for the warm introduction, and again, I welcome the esteemed guests joining us here today, in-person and otherwise. I’d like to say some brief words about our company and what we can offer the citizens of Grid.”

The clock is perched over the INNOCUFILL’s glass cage, huge and digital, and I look up just as the minute display changes from 25 to 26, the single-digit change both silent and totally profound. A beep—somewhat delayed—is sounded in my headphones. I get up from the stool and take my phone from my pocket, deciding to ignore Wallace on my way past so I can read Camillia’s message instead. I feel him looking at me, maybe even trying to get my attention to make some short commentary on how the workday feels, but I keep my eyes trained downward at my phone, disregarding him. Camillia’s message says, I hate it when you’re at work and we can’t talk. I miss you during the day. I want to reply, doing a quick scan for Ackyooclad who happens to be walking around the corner from the nearest Supervisor’s Station and so I have to repocket my phone and accept the fact that I’ll have to wait until lunch. The cans begin to avalanche through the chute.

“We here at InfoZebra have been dedicated to the places we’ve called home in the past, and we plan to bring that same philosophy with us to Grid when we officially move into our largest corporate headquarters to date. Mr. Mobyle has been very outspoken on behalf of the citizens of Grid and their need for better information organization. As CEO of InfoZebra, we want to be a part of that project, which is why we’ve put together the idea for InfoStructure, a city-wide functioning info-adaptation system. Public works has always been an aspect of government we’ve rallied behind, and I assure you that factor will remain a constant here in this fine city as well.”

Ackyooclad is behind me, this time for real, and my focus becomes fanatical, almost angry in its seriousness. This is how he wants me to act, so I do. The equation is simple. Floor Supervisors only trust you when they can monitor your every movement and account for every mistake that transpires. Instantly I feel him lean down behind me, approaching slow, his neck and head disembodied in my mind’s eye, and the headphone on my right ear is lifted away so I can hear him whisper to me: “Lunch after this swing, Kleene.”

I nod slightly. Yessir, whatever you say.

Terradon Plus cans fly past me for twenty-five minutes, and the swing is so easy I could probably read a book at the same time and never screw up once, but my back feels withered, trellised with unique and repetitive pains. There are no backrests on our stools. I yawn all-day, every-day at work.

Finally there’s the beep so I raise both my hands in the air for ten seconds so the Manager of Production can see me from his station above the INNOCUFILL, then I press two buttons directly underneath the metal chute so the cans will stop shivering across the conveyor. Everything, including the INNOCUFILL, comes to a halt with a bone-rattling whine. Once it’s over I take the headphones off and make my way towards the break room at the far end of the factory along with everyone else who’s working the floor, which is actually not many except for me, Wallace, and a handful of Floor Supervisors. Most of them monitor machines all day. Wallace falls in stride beside me and starts in with the usual routine.

“Nother long day, Fish?”

“Yeah.” He’s the only one here who calls me by that name.

“What’s the plan after work?” He’s looking at me sheepish, like a little kid who wants their friend to come play. It’s an act, though. I don’t trust him any more than I’d trust a shark.

“Same as always. Home. Long day again tomorrow.”

“Right,” he says, accepting it, pretending his spirit has fallen.

We enter the break room and I grab my lunch from my locker. We sit at our normal table, away from the supervisors. I’ve eaten the same thing for lunch every day this week. It’s Saturday. Now I can text Camillia, so I type, I miss you too. How is your day going?

Wallace is staring into space, biting at a sandwich. I notice his water ration is low. Mine is too. “Was at the bar last night,” he pronounces, still staring into space. “Pretty good time.”

“Uh-huh.”

It’s going all right. Just the usual stuff, nothing interesting. I’m attempting not to steal money out of the register and make a break for it. She works as a cashier at some store, like a convenience store. We’re careful with specifics.

“You should come by tonight if you can. I always tell Nicole’s friend Jasmine about you. Tell her that you never got the energy to come out and do anything.” He’s just chewing, and I look at him. He looks well on his way to becoming old, the youth in the eyes and cheeks fraying, eyebrows growing shaggier, lips starting to suck into his face like a tiny vacuum within his mouth has been turned on at 1/1000000000^th the normal speed. The rings underneath his eyes are sallow from not having enough water to cleanse his system of the unceasing stream of alcohol he feeds into it. I look back at my phone.

Do it. Just steal it all and get out of there. No other course of action is sensible.

“And you know what she says to me? She says, ‘Why he ain’t ever got any energy to come out?’ And I’m like, ‘Got me. Dude’s just like that, y’know? Some people are.’ And you know what she says then?”

I will. Then I could come get you and we could afford to move to San Diego and not die of thirst. You know what I read in the news?

“She says to me, ‘That’s sad.’ ”

What?

I say to Wallace through a mouthful of food in a deliberate and measured tone, “I would come out, really, but I’ve got some things I honestly have to finish tonight. Otherwise I’d be right there with you.” Nice try, Wallace, but I’m not biting. Cast the line out as many times as you want, but I won’t be fooled. You can count on that.

“Your choice.” We eat in silence.

I heard the desalinization plant down there got bombed. The whole thing was destroyed.

A small sweat breaks on my forehead. It’s not safe to discuss these kinds of things, not even on the secure numbers we use.

A whole bunch of workers were killed.

I type, Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this. For purposes of security.

After a while: I’m sorry.

It’s not your fault, I’m just not comfortable. If it happened recently they’re probably doing a lot of active scans. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.

Maybe you’re right. There’s no use in compromising this number. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.

“Will you do me a favor, Fish?” Wallace stops chewing his sandwich and looks at me.

I’m slow to answer, unnerved by Camillia’s message. “What is it?”

“Would you mind stayin on cans one more swing? I’m tireder’n hell and bottles tends to wake me up. Just the stimulation is all.”

I can’t tell whether the sincerity in his voice is real or not.

I have an idea that will maximize our security.

“That okay with you, Fish?”

“Um…”

“I mean, if it ain’t too much trouble. If you ain’t gotten enough bottles yet today.”

The sweat on my forehead isn’t receding. I check to see if he notices; I can’t tell if he does or not.

“Fish?”

“Sure, you can have bottles this swing. I don’t mind cans at all.” I have to convince myself there’s nothing ulterior going on here.

“Well I appreciate it. You all right, man?”

“Fine. Just wrapped up in conversation.” I hold up my phone and shake it.

“You got some kinda girlfriend I don’t know nothin about?” he smiles.

“No.”

The smile eventually drops, and when I’m satisfied he’s no longer paying attention, I respond, What is it?

Time passes and I get no response from Camillia. This happens sometimes—she’ll get busy with work and be unable to talk. But I want to know what her idea is, and so the longer I have to wait the more distressed I get. There’s another beep to indicate the end of the lunch break, Ackyooclad appearing from nowhere, standing over our table saying, “Back to work, boys.”

I look up and see his stare—it’s hollow, zealous, not weary in the least.

“Me and Kleene are switchin swings, sir,” Wallace tells Ackyooclad while I pack up my lunch and put the containers back in my locker. “He’s on cans and I’m on bottles.”

Ackyooclad agrees, not really caring an ounce, hurrying us out to the floor. Just before we part ways, Wallace tells me, “Don’t worry bout them bottles, Fish. I’ll keep an eye on em for ya.” He heads towards his stool, and I reapply the noise deletion headphones just as the INNOCUFILL vents a high-pitched complaint and thunders back to life.

In the car after work I check the news radio for any interesting updates, but the only thing going on is a full replay of Mobyle’s address earlier today. I wait to see if I can hear the same break in the audio feed I heard through the noise deletion headphones at work, and my eyes grow wide when I discover that the break is still there. I slide the volume graphic to mute with a fin. My head reels with implications while I wait for a stoplight to turn green, then after a while it does turn green and I push the gas pedal. Something is happening here. I don’t know what yet, but something is definitely—

And then a hot red bullet of silence plows through my right ear, then my brain, then my left ear, and I feel the side of my face impact with the glass of the driver’s side window and my fin smashes against the steering wheel and then there’s a sickening inertia that when it finally stops I’m hanging halfway out the door of my car, suspended above the asphalt by the seatbelt strap pulled across my chest, breathing hard with my eyes closed. A few strands of bloody spit drip slow from my mouth. I stay like this. A few minutes pass and now there are the sounds of people getting closer, a few of them crowding around me and the car, gasping, and I don’t want them here, I don’t want them looking into my car or having the chance to steal anything. I try to do a quick run-through in my head of important items in the glovebox and on my person so I can take inventory later, make sure nothing’s missing, but it’s impossible to remember right now. In the corner of my vision, through the glassless passenger side window of my car, I can see the hulking face of a bus, its eyes lit up in the darkness, beaming across the length of my front seat, causing me to squint. Even more people crowd around. I can’t help but wonder if they’re making those sounds because of my injuries or because I’m a fish.

GRID CITY OVERLOAD - PREVIEW # 1

[Here's a preview of the first few pages of GRID CITY OVERLOAD / Enjoy.] 

- GERNEY -

Then I was lookin at this obviously terrorized copy of an A-F encyclopedia splayed across the flame-tiled floor behind the toilet, all broken-spined with aged grainy pages spilling from its middle like gore spilling from the belly of a gutted fish. Most of the pages were full of smudged type speckled with wet spots of urine fallout, but peeking at a sideways angle from beneath the top cover was a hint of a dual-colored map of the Americas, and just above that, bent and torn but still monstrously vivid, were the creeping whiskery legs of an arachnid fanning out over the continents.

            Nick Ibyoo’s shoes, wet and muddy from being outside in the snow, suffocated some of the loose pages while he straddled the toilet backwards, dividing up the gonine in the mutating light of the LED above the plastic tank. Nick sorta fuckin tempted me into grappling with the jet, and I agreed to embark with him for a couple reasons. First) wasn’t this what we were all here for? to erupt into euphorigenic lava flows, smiling while melting underneath the inching heat? I mean, weren’t we all supposed to be having one of those kinds of times? One of those good times? Fuck it—sure. And then second) there was the pesky realization that Ms. Yardblast, owner of Archelaos Chevrolet, had given me an ultimatum earlier in the day, in no uncertain terms, that I’d better goddamn well learn to use the DealEase platform by the end of the month lest I be kicked out into the job market on my incompetent ass.

This was not negotiable.

Then of course Nick Ibyoo had presented an appealing option at the end of the workday, much like he always did the reliable bastard, and so instead of being at home learning the software, I was in a stall at Zeal, underneath the sprawling high-def nebular formations and distant conglomerate galaxies of a ceiling screen, pulsing green and pink in time with the music.

The LED over the toilet shot chrome glow across the three lines of gonine Nick had insofar separated out. The images on the screen were of various people on the sides of freeways next to entrenched cars in what looked to be the middle of an absolutely dishearteningly bad snowstorm, uninterested traffic shooting by them, not helping. There was a short parade of similar scenarios, punctuated by hypothermic hands and noses, then finally a disturbing shot of a dead man collapsed in a snowdrift built up on the edge of a five-lane overpass, cars bulleting by, kicking up brown slush onto his corpse. The point of the ad was to buy snow tires, and I ended up having to ask Nick what he’d said because I’d been preoccupied with the commercial.

“I said she asked me to come to Aria’s place after you left.”

I nodded recognition. He was telling me a story about last weekend, something I hadn’t been present for since I got too drunk too early and had had to get driven back to my apartment by Ronstadt, who I was pretty sure had been too far on the scale of drunkenness to really be trustworthy himself.

Nick had to shout over the music. “Aria’s place is huge, by the way.”

I was starting to assume I wasn’t going to want to hear about what I’d missed out on, considering I had a thing for Aria. Though what can you really do? This is what you sign up for when you spend your whole life pretending nothing bothers you when in fact there’s hardly an instance in history that couldn’t inspire breakdown.

“This place was goddamn large, is what I mean,” he said, separating out another few lines, “and we were all hangin out in her kitchen drinking whatever this tequila stuff she owned was, some really crass little drink of fucked-upness that I’m determined to ask about so don’t let me forget. And after like thirty minutes me and Ronstadt start noticing that all the girls were disappearing somewhere. And suddenly all of em were gone.”

“How did it take you thirty minutes to notice that was happening?”

“What do you mean? We were all drunk and I was grappling like hell with the jet, which, I don’t know, I’m assuming you know a thing or two about that. It just happened. Gradually.”

“Still, being drunk is hardly an excuse for failing to notice that whole people were turning up missing. How many girls were there? Six, seven?”

“Look, are you gonna shut up and listen to this story or not?”

“No, seriously, how many? Because I can’t honestly comprehend how you and Ronstadt could not notice six or seven girls just up and—”

“Gerney. Jesus.”

“—just up and disappearing without, and I’m not Jesus—”

“Will you just shut your mouth and listen to the fuckin story?” This came out as a snarl. Anxiety zoomed into view, speech uncontrollable, the ceiling screen switching to a shot of four escalators crammed with people gushing upward, unending heads, welding sparks falling down on them (or up on them, from where I was standing), and it was only then I noticed my fingers were twitching so I stopped talking.

Going back to producing lines on the top of the toilet tank, he said, “So me and Ronstadt look at each other and we’re both like, ‘Where’d the girls go?’ So we start walkin around Aria’s apartment, y’know, searchin em out. And we come to this door that’s locked, it was down a hallway that branched off the TV room, and we can hear em in there doing something, so I start bangin on the door shouting, ‘Goddammit, ladies, this is Nick Ibyoo, the fleet manager I might remind you, of Archelaos Chevrolet, which is an establishment that happened to win some quite prestigious business awards from the Grid Chamber of Commerce only last year, and I demand you allow us entrance!’ But so after a few—oh, hold on a sec.”

He interrupted himself to take his phone from his pocket. Apparently he’d felt it buzz. He was tapping a message onto the screen, his spindly fingers reminding me of the torn picture of arachnid legs on the floor that now had a gritty wet footprint on it from his shoes. There was never any break in the music at Zeal, all songs running into one another and piling up in freeway-accident fashion, but I imagined I could identify the infinitesimal gap of half-silence that occurred when a switch was imminent, the flow of all audial currents taking sharp ballistic dives into a compressed pool before charging back up, only stronger this time. In the song now playing were injected soundbites of a speech made by Randy Mobyle, given only four days ago.

The ceiling screen caught aflame with a dense collection of comets. Once they dissipated there was a looming foreshortened globe, quickly rushing closer, bigger, becoming gargantuan with oscillating details of what looked to be a hostile multichromatic atmosphere slowly turning in its orbit, a projection appearing on the planet’s surface caused by a silver flying device hovering near its outer reaches. It was a close-up of a delicious burger, overstuffed with crisp lettuce and veggies. A price was listed, and in the final moments of the pan around the sandwich there was a small but brilliant sliver of sun rising over the peak of the planet that blinded me with realistic rays.

Randy Mobyle’s voice, aggrandized by slowly uplifting digital percussion and showers of sustained notes, declared, “It’s not the—not the—not the—not the time for inaction!” before the flow of the song picked up once again in full. A wave of goosebumps ran from the top of my neck to my lower back. It was true: it didn’t seem like the time for inaction at all.

The LED above the toilet transitioned to a live shot of us, Nick and I, in the stall. There must have been a camera installed into the screen because the view was mirror-like, showing us what the wall was seeing only backwards. The lines on the tank were clearly visible in the picture. I called to Nick over the music.

“What?”

I pointed to the LED, giving him a concerned look with my eyebrows.

“You got a problem?” He looked at himself in the LED while he said this.

“Should we get out of here? The gonine’s exposed.”

“Not an issue,” he stated, waving me off and returning to the message he was typing. He’d already deleted one attempt, rethinking his wording and tone, I guessed.

The planet that had appeared on the ceiling was now receding back into the void of high-def space from where it had come at the same rate it had approached. When it became just a speck in the distance there was a jarring, immediate rendering of an explosion, the whole ceiling sliced through with an icy fulmination that made me wince, even causing Nick to react though he wasn’t looking. Some of the faraway stars rearranged themselves to read BURGER KING in the company’s branded font.

“God that ceiling screen is badass,” Nick mentioned, still wrapped up with his phone and not having seen any of what happened.

The rising percussion returned again. “It’s not a question, we will—we will—we will—we will act!”

“Okay, sorry.” Nick returned the phone to his pocket. “Millie keeps asking how long we’re gonna be in here. I told her as long as it damn well takes.”

At the bottom of the LED was a display of the time, saying 9:15 pm.

“So anyway, me and Ronstadt are bangin on the door, givin em hell to make em open up for us, and—” He put down his ID, reaching into his pocket for the phone again. “Dammit! One more second, all right?” He began tapping out another message.

I took out my own phone. When it came alive the camera initiated, prompting: AUGMTD REALITY MODE? I pointed it at the toilet, a red autocursor honing in on a single line of gonine, outlining it perfectly, bringing up various statistics. The molecular structure of the substance was like a wheel with a flailing serpent attached, and I hovered my finger over it, causing the whole image to rotate, taking in its genius. The scan alerted me to extensive cutting. Mannitol, baking soda, and a small amount of meth. This was gonna be one of those nights where we’d go hopping on the back of every fifteen minute interval with carnal ferocity, tearing it apart, only to be laid out on the floor at the end, needing another dose.

I clicked away from AR mode and sent a message of my own, this one to Aria Forum, who was out in the main part of Zeal with Ronstadt and Millie and Quentin and Veronika Sine and whoever else was there. I asked if I could buy her a drink, like a tequila or an absinthe or basically anything with a motor in it, but I got no response and quickly tried to forget I’d messaged her at all. I managed to get a few seconds into looking for a tutorial on DealEase before Nick finished up his business, continuing his story without warning or transition.

“So we keep bangin on the door, and I swear to God you wouldn’t have believed what was goin on in there. I barely believe it.”

I gave him the so fucking tell me already then face.

“They were having an orgy. The girls. Can you believe that? And, yeah, your earlier estimate was right, there were like six or seven of em.”

“Who?”

“Millie, Aria, these two girls we met up with at Q/V—you weren’t there for that, though—Veronika, some others who I think Aria invited. I don’t know their names.”

“What did you and Ronstadt do?”

He tapped the side of his head in response, forming the sixth and final line on the toilet tank, his motions mimicked by the LED in front of him with frightening exactness, and who knew what bunker-dwelling employee might watch the recording later or even be watching at that precise moment? I didn’t pursue a concrete answer, feeling something inside me drop. There were contradictory impulses of wanting to extricate myself from Zeal, the stall, the whole situation, while also wanting to dive even deeper into the night and its details. The important thing, I knew, was to ignore whatever feeling I was experiencing entirely, remove it from the front of my head, place it in the back, let it rest there until it could come out during a moment of less stimulation, likely during work hours, when I could understand the full extent of its effect. For now, just ignore it.

Finishing the careful architecture of the final line and pocketing his ID, Nick said, “But I’ll tell you what the craziest thing is.”

I waited, taking a bill from my wallet, handing it to Nick.

“The craziest thing is I tried to mention it to Millie and Aria when I got here, and they just gave me blank stares. They don’t remember a single thing from what I can tell. Unless they’re faking it. Mutually agreed to strike it from the record or something. Bizarre, right?”

I agreed, knowing I wasn’t showing the proper interest given the magnitude of the information, but remaining calm was all I could do not to lash out and send Nick’s face into the edge of the toilet seat. Instead I was quite pleasant.

“How can we believe in—believe in—believe in—believe in anything anymore?” and then the ceiling screen showed a fast-forwarded elapse of a year in the universe, everything expanding slightly and seeming disproportionately intimidating.

Nick put the back of a hard hand into my chest. “This is a match night. We match each other, agreed?”

I said, “Just don’t go too nuts. I have stuff to do tomorrow.” I was thinking rather hopefully I might try to get started on DealEase.

“On the contrary, I’d advise you to do as much as you can because I’m planning on drinking a shitload tonight. Massive insufflation is just about the only thing standing between you and a splitting hangover tomorrow morning. Trust me.”

There were three lines for each of us: this was the beginning. Nick went first, then when he handed the bill to me I made sure to watch my reflection in the LED, the video me, bent over at an awkward angle, face round and obtrusive within the screen’s parameters, the gonine disappearing up the bottom of the bill in one efficient movement.

“Not great stuff,” he said with shallow disappointment.

“I checked it out on AR,” I let him know. “It’s cut.”

“Wonderful.” He divebombed his second line, erasing it off the toilet tank.

The bill was handed to me again and I asked him, “Listen, do you think you could teach me DealEase? Like not the whole program or anything, but maybe just the basics? Maybe just enough to show Tamara I’m making some progress?”

“Where the hell do you… [sniff] …think we are? We’re not at Archelaos right now, and that means I don’t talk about Archelaos. Now hurry up and finish this shit before those bastards out there lay siege to this stall.”

People had been pounding on the stall door ever since we’d gotten in there, which had been a long time ago. I finished my second line, handed off the bill. I watched the reflection of Nick snorting in the LED, and when he traversed the distance of the line his eyes became shifty, looking sideways in my direction, and without warning he quickly vacuumed up my final stripe of gonine.

“You goddamn thief!” He came back up sniffing hard and laughing, but I wasn’t joking around. I’d been threatened with termination at work, and my need to grapple the jet was quite a fucking sight bigger than Nick’s. He walked out of the stall, pushing past some of the bathroom-goers who’d been waiting for us to exit. In the periphery I saw a great stone carving of a humanoid figure on the ceiling screen following me out of the stall, probably notification that security had their eye on the situation.

“What’s your problem,” I seethed into his ear, watching him inhale water into his nose.

He hardly seemed to notice I was there, and when he finished at the automated sink he attempted to walk out of the bathroom without saying a word before I latched onto his shoulders with both hands and hurled him into the hand dryer near the door—there was a pronounced metallic squeak I could hear even over the music, which had switched again. I confronted him at close range, meaning sincerely to menace him. “I paid for half that shit, meaning I should probably be kicking your ass right about now.”

He laughed, the gonine visibly affecting him already, looking up toward the hovering figure. “Go ahead. Beat the everliving shit outta me. I fucking dare you. But do you even realize how fast your life would disintegrate? There’re ceiling screens in just about every bathroom in Grid. You’d be hauled off in”—he snapped—“milliseconds! You’d lose your job, I’d sue you for every last red cent, and you’d have a handful of months in prison to think about how satisfying it was to exact retribution over a single line of gonine. Wake up! You’re irrevocably plugged into the system right now, buddy. So just cut the bullshit.” He never once stopped smiling, his teeth uneven and not at all a pretty sight. I was shoved backwards and he walked out the door.

Adrenaline and gonine were galloping through my system, stripping whatever rust had formed on the insides of my veins because I was suddenly very limber and powerful, my hands forming fists and loosening at a healthy rate. I went to the sink as well, feeling a wet trail of analgesia snake its way down into the deep regions of my throat, the flame-tile glowing hotter. Once my heart rate returned to normal I left the bathroom and wound my way through the crowd, every surface a screen, a continuation of the astral images on the ceiling in the bathroom. Bodies became dark obstacles. From a top-down perspective I was sure we looked like a recording of densely-packed bacterium moving at random. Standing upright against the lurid red tint of the universe were the M16 space pillars, a triplet of provoked cobras, and once I moved within striking distance I was handed a glass of absinthe by Ronstadt, who had bought the first round and was proud of it. He leaned in and mentioned something about an inept bartender who couldn’t pour what he’d asked if her life depended on it, so sorry if my drink had the taste of concentrated ass. I accepted the apology. Sitting at a table were Aria and Veronika, subdued and bored, sipping similar glasses. Millie was speaking to Nick on the opposite side of the table, and before I looked away I saw her dart her tongue into his ear, his head retracting away. Quentin showed up with a couple friends from work. The whole tint of the universe framing us changed away from red, and now we stood in a diluted leafy-green radiance. Ronstadt was in the mood to talk, but first he motioned with his head to the girls, probably implying something about Nick’s orgy story. I nodded, trying to make it clear no words were necessary. He asked, “You see Mobyle’s speech today?”

“No, I was at work.”

“Me too, but our supervisor wanted to watch so we got a thirty minute break.”

“Was it good?”

“That guy flips me out with how much sense he makes. Some initiative about info organization. Information structuring. I don’t know. He mentioned the goddamn building, anyway.”

“The building?”

“The building site I’m working at. InfoZebra’s movin in there. It’s a scraper. You didn’t know that?”

“InfoZebra’s building a scraper in Grid?”

“Yeah, at like the almost exact center. Downtown.”

“Holy shit.”

“We’ve been workin underground for three or four weeks now. Thing’s comin along.”

“I had no idea.”

“So how’d you feel last Friday? When I dropped you off you were practically drooling in your own lap.” His teeth spread out green in the radiance.

“You can probably imagine,” I said.

“Missed a hell of a night, though. Too bad.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Well keep a stiff upper lip, guy. It’s lookin twacked again tonight.”

But he didn’t understand how to use that word, unless he was commenting on the number of people in Zeal, which actually was fairly twacked in not the strictest sense of the word, the doormen exercising no control over numbers, or maybe it was a comment on my own personal twacked-outness, entering into the familiar opening scenes of bad grappling, DealEase and Tamara Yardblast and Archelaos Chevrolet all fenestrated into a ragged sheet by the machine gun fire of adulterated gonine, collapsing into a specter of rising dust, ready to reassemble at a moment’s notice. A million separate layers, once stratified and thinly stacked, rushed together to form a solid chemical groove. I seemed to see Aria Forum and Nick Ibyoo on the grooves parallel to me, hair rippling behind them, our velocities unstable. At the last moment their grooves converged, mine shooting drastically upward toward a spot of chattering flaming light.