Three stories of science fiction
Art by Sam Beck
A cityship moved obliviously amongst the ashes of a long-forgotten god. No one knew that the absence of sound had been a result of the god’s death rattle, its final croak of exhaustion, and no one knew that the stars had been its tools for creation. But those things would still be there regardless of whether or not the cityship’s people knew their true origins, and so it was all the same to them if these floating, fading remnants of the god were but space dust colouring an impossible black.
The infinite space beyond the cityship’s dome was the same uncertain colour one finds behind his or her eyelids in the dark. And like the chaotic noise behind those eyelids, the stars of this space were always changing. There were no constant constellations for the people of the cityship to call their own; all they had was an eternal night they eternally sailed in, an inverted world forever reminding them that each day was totally new.
A century had passed since overpopulation forced the inhabitants of a lost planet into space. Many lives had been sacrificed in those initial launches, but all mistakes were soon learned from – the populations of most cityships were now in their third generations. Soon cityships would be the only life anyone had ever known.
Chiago 2 was one of the original cityships birthed between death and space, a living document of human civilization presented in a glass case. As per the contingency plan of Project: Second Chance, its population’s number had settled on three hundred thousand before a one-child policy was put into effect.
The cityship had many buildings and all of them were of a stunning, well-kept white: the general population lived in tall white apartment buildings while the upper class lived in small white houses; office buildings, schools and malls made up the sizes in-between. Large coloured numbers had been painted on each of the buildings to help distinguish them.
Vicente lived in Apartment Building 8, its number as big and orange as he was thin and brown. He had wasted no time in turning his apartment into a representation of his personality: posters for old Chiago 2an metal bands covered the walls, the band members’ hair flinging sweat in every possible direction; classic faux-wooden cabinets given to him as housewarming gifts by his parents were present in his living room and bedroom, their drawers used for storing miscellaneous parts, tools and electronics; the fridge was overflowing with beer, milk and various items he tended to put into it by accident late at night, items such as pepper shakers and macaroni boxes; and his guest room, its door hidden by an optic chart, was used as a secret place for his secret project.
He ate cereal on his couch while watching a reverse baseball game play out on his holographic tv. Reverse baseball did not fascinate him, but the atmosphere of people cheering on other people did.
At random intervals a clicking sound came from the guest room but Vicente appeared not to notice. Instead he finished his cereal, turned off the tv and got dressed, slipping into dark denim jeans and tossing on a plain black t-shirt. He tossed his keys and some coin into his pockets, put on socks and sneakers, stared deeply into a mirror and headed out.
The artificial grass outside his apartment building was artificially dying. The landlord – an elderly man from Chiago 2’s first generation – played around with the colour sometimes to make the grass appear more real. Right now some of it was green, most of it yellow and a few patches here and there were brown. Vicente considered the notion of something dying appearing more real to someone than something alive. For him, artificial grass was the only grass he had ever seen, touched, tasted and smelled, so it could stay green forever and still be the truest reality.
He crossed the square of grassy field and walked up the street, sticking his hands in his pockets and biting his lower lip. A fizzing sound made him stop and look up: holographic birds were glitching in and out of existence above his head. They were too high up for him to reach but he stood on his tiptoes and sent his fingers towards them all the same. The birds disappeared completely once his fingernails were as far as they could go.
He hummed some slight disappointment and continued his journey. A teenage hoverbike gang laughed obnoxiously as they zipped past; Vicente could not tell if they were laughing at him or themselves. One of them crashed into a floating stop sign, the boy’s helmet flying off. The boy was smart enough to protect his head before he met the pavement.
Vicente strolled past the scene as the distressed teenagers jumped off their hoverbikes. They tripped over themselves during the rush to their bruised friend and took turns calling each other ‘idiot’.
‘You’re all idiots,’ Vicente whispered once he was out of earshot.
He turned right at the next corner and started up the street as an ambulance zoomed past, its siren overwhelming his thoughts. He continued walking until he reached the arcade, its modestly painted sign reading ‘Streeter’s’. He took a deep breath and went inside.
His exhale pushed around the holographic cigarette smoke that had hung in the air before him. Fifty arcade cabinets blared their colourful cacophony, his ears tingling as tinny announcers demanded he ‘get to it, guy!’ while worldly fighters pummelled each other with flashy attacks and roaring cars were crashed for quarters. Many of the machines were being attended by scarily-focused players, and some of these players were consequently watched by friends and random spectators. Vicente could feel the excitement welling up inside him.
‘Ah, Vicente,’ said a girl’s voice to the back of his head.
The sound of his name cut through the noise and pierced his ears. He turned to find Electromonde, the girl who was the closest thing he had to a best friend. They had met in high school. Despite all the years they had known each other, however, Vicente had barely told her anything about himself and she had never even seen the inside of his apartment building.
‘Electromonde,’ he said in greeting, smiling through his words rather than with his lips.
‘I thought you were hermitting at home with an RPG or something,’ she said. ‘The big new RPG from Typee 7.’
‘Typee 7 doesn’t know shit about RPGs,’ Vicente told her.
‘Random battles again? I don’t think anyone is going to tailor-make a game for you, Vicente. You’re better off sticking to Chiago 2an games for the old school stuff.’
Electromonde finding him in Streeter’s meant he would be unable to tackle a cabinet for a while.
‘Let’s go sit,’ she said.
They took to two chairs and a short table at the far wall. This was where most of the older cabinets were kept, stuff like Immortal Massacre and Ack-Man. Vicente liked to sip beer here during lulls and count the pixels on the screens.
‘My favourite band right now is Canada Post,’ Electromonde said. ‘I’m also getting into stuff that sucks.’
‘I don’t know if I’d be able to help you with that,’ Vicente told her flatly.
‘Don’t you like Pornographic Cabbages?’
‘See, you’re making up bands now. “Pornographic Cabbages” doesn’t exist. It is not a real band.’
‘But Sound Check is, right? And you like them.’
‘Yes, I like real bands. Some of them, anyway. And when I say I like Sound Check it’s only because of their live shows.’
‘Ugh. Anyway, I bring it up because my dad has decent taste in music and I’m trying to piss him off. He wants to get rid of me. I say it’s my right to live with my parents until they’re too old to take care of themselves, you know?’
‘Electromonde—’
‘Don’t you just have to agree with that?’
Vicente paused to slip his moneycard into the wall vendor beside their table. He pressed the combination on the number panel for a beer, and after a moment the bottle rattled down a curving slide to the small opening at the bottom of the machine. Vicente reached under the flap, pulled out the bottle and took his card back.
‘What were you saying?’ he asked as he twisted off the lid.
‘How old is too old?’ Electromonde asked.
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know. For being old, I guess.’
Something shifted in the atmosphere of the arcade. Vicente turned his head in slow motion to watch as a young man wearing a black leather bomber jacket and sporting a ducktail haircut floated into the establishment, his reflective dress shoes seeming to not quite touch the ground. Everyone who was not playing a game stopped watching the screens and gave him their previously-wasted attention.
‘You guys got Cling-On?’ he asked the defenceless gawkers.
He suddenly gestured towards the world of Chiago 2 behind him with the most perfectly-formed thumb Vicente had ever seen.
‘’cause they don’t.’
A woman whose husband was on the nigh-impossible final boss of a particularly difficult beat-’em-up nodded.
‘It . . . It’s over on the left wall,’ she told the young man in a hushed tone, as if worried he might actually hear her.
The young man nodded, jammed his thumbs into his jacket’s front pockets and headed left. He came back into view a moment later.
‘I meant my left,’ the woman corrected.
The young man nodded and headed right.
‘I’ve never seen him around before,’ Electromonde said, scrunching her eyes with some mild suspicion.
‘Silence,’ Vicente begged her, drawing out the first ‘e’. ‘I’m trying to hear him breathe.’
Vicente and Electromonde stood on either side of the young man in the bomber jacket. He was straddling a toy hoverbike, its chassis tilting and turning as he rode it, his eyes focused on the imaginary horizon that was displayed on the holographic screen hanging in front of him. The sky of the screen was a vibrant green.
Vicente studied the shape and form of the young man’s body: the way the veins of his hands moved beneath his chiffon skin as he twisted the hoverbike’s handles, how the muscles of his legs tensed through his jeans whenever he made a sharp turn around a nonexistent corner, how the pupils of his striking grey eyes dilated and contracted, opened and swallowed. What did the world look like to the mind behind those eyes?
‘Tell me your name,’ Vicente demanded as politely as possible.
‘Tell me yours,’ the young man said, his focus still resting on the onrush of computer-generated highway.
‘Vicente Almega.’
He focused on the young man’s lips, how they parted like the stem of a flower being split in two by a child’s fingers, opening to form the first syllable of a name Vicente had been waiting most of his adult life to hear:
‘Digre Lightningstrike.’
‘You’re a superhero,’ Electromonde said, her voice going small like a little girl’s.
‘No, sir, I am most certainly not. I’m just a man blessed with a name of my choosing. Now, if you two noseybodies don’t mind, I’d like to see what’s at the end of this rainbow.’
‘You’re already there,’ Vicente told him as if in a trance. ‘There’s you and me and a spark of lightning. We’re all on fire and the only way to put it out is to have a beer.’
‘I really want to see what’s at the end of this rainbow,’ Digre repeated calmly. ‘You can buy me a beer when I’m done.’
‘Let me stay,’ Electromonde pleaded out of boredom. ‘I promise I won’t say anything sour.’
They had returned to their seats at the table. Vicente was gulping down the rest of his beer in preparation for Digre.
‘Play a quiz game or something until we’re done,’ Vicente suggested, amber liquid underlining his lower lip. He wiped his mouth with the side of his hand and wiped his hand on his jeans. ‘You’ll probably bump into someone more fun if you keep moving around. Didn’t you say you saw Jason last week?’
‘He’s as much fun as tying my shoes.’
‘There’s somebody there. We’re in Streeter’s; you’ll bump into someone and forget you ever walked into me.’
‘Old friends,’ Electromonde sighed.
She pushed herself away from the table and delved into the murkiest corner of the arcade. Vicente knew what he said was true, but he also knew that if things did not pan out and Digre left him with egg on his face, he would be grateful to see her return.
Digre arrived at the table with a half-interested look in his eyes, combing his hair with quick, automatic movements as he took Electromonde’s seat.
‘It’s hard for a guy like me to come into a place like this without getting something from a guy like you,’ he observed aloud.
‘It’s a clever trick on your part, isn’t it?’ Vicente suggested good-naturedly. ‘You’ve created yourself as much as you’ve come up with your thunderous name. This shtick – your kitsch –, a projected world of cool . . . it’s all for something very specific. It’s—’
‘My beer,’ reminded Digre.
‘You’re a beer!’ Vicente exclaimed as though it were some great revelation.
He moneycarded the vendor and punched the combination for the spiciest beer Streeter’s carried. Two bottles tumbled down and Vicente handed one to Digre, its cool, sweating body connecting their fingers for one brief moment. Vicente pulled his hand away and licked the stale droplets from his fingernails.
‘This is all I drink when I’m not drinking anything else,’ he told Digre. ‘It’s also what I drink when I want to hear more about someone.’
‘You’re not making this any easier on yourself, darling,’ Digre said, swigging his beer. He bit back a cough as the spices scratched their way down his throat.
Vicente paused with a frozen smile on his face, realising Digre was absolutely correct; he considered his post-modern coldness was why he had been unable to land a boyfriend in three years, that what had worked as a student rarely worked as a card-carrying adult.
‘You like games, eh?’ he asked, shifting gears.
‘I do like the AND2 arcade machines.’
‘Cling-On and stuff like that?’
‘It’s all I play. I’m not a console gamer. I don’t go in for fighters or shooters or RPGs.’
‘If you like AND2 then you must like rail shooters.’
Digre nodded.
‘But only AND2-style stuff,’ he clarified, ‘where the enemies are ancient stone heads and floating eyeballs that never blink.’
‘Of course. And if you liked first-person shooters then you’d still be at home right now,’ Vicente added with a wry smile.
‘FPS games aren’t even “games”,’ Digre grunted between swigs.
‘You’re right; you’re absolutely right. You know, I once had an idea for my own FPS: Moral Dilemma. It would be set up like any other FPS, where all the player does is shoot people until they’re dead, but the difference would be in what happens as soon as the player shoots someone. And—’
‘You were actually going to make a game?’
‘No, this is just an idea I had. What happens when a player shoots someone is that the game suddenly pauses to show a two-hour-long, unskippable cutscene that follows the target’s life from birth to the point where he was killed by the player. So it would show him being held by his mother as a baby, playing with his first pet as a toddler, introducing himself in kindergarten, having his first innocent kiss with a girl in third grade, breaking his arm by falling off his bike in Grade Eight, sharing a stolen cigarette with his friends when he’s fourteen, learning how to drive, graduating from college as his mother’s eyes fill with proud tears. And then the player’s bullets destroy all those memories, the entire universe that had been built-up inside the NPC. The process is repeated, with unique variations, for every single “enemy” the player kills.’
‘I think you should call your game “Guilt Trip” instead of “Moral Dilemma”,’ Digre offered with a snort.
Vicente blushed. Digre’s words had deflated him.
‘Ah, it doesn’t matter. My concept would only be lost in a sea of valueless ideas.’
‘Just what is it you do?’
Vicente always had a tough time honestly answering this question. He gave Digre a stock response, hoping the young man would not chip away at the truth behind it:
‘I come up with ideas for things. Sometimes I create them. You?’
Digre cocked an eyebrow but let the matter slide.
‘I deliver for the Chow Down District.’
‘The CDD.’
Digre nodded. The CDD was the largest grouping of restaurants in all of Chiago 2: a mishmash of ethnic flavourings that, over time, had given birth to such items as curry pizza and sushi tacos. Vicente’s parents had taken him to the CDD every Thursday evening when he was a child and put him in charge of picking the restaurant. He never ended up with a favourite.
‘Must be hard working on an empty stomach,’ Vicente added.
‘My job is stable,’ Digre told him flatly. ‘I don’t go hungry.’
‘What are you doing tonight, then?’ Vicente asked, trying hard not to smirk at his own smoothness.
Digre leaned back in his chair and looked at Vicente as if for the first time, taking in every detail: how the lighting hit his face, how his long, bulky nose came to a point, how his shoulders appeared to be on the verge of sloping. While Vicente awaited Digre’s judgement, he in turn watched as Digre picked an unidentifiable morsel out of his teeth and ate it.
‘Depends,’ Digre stated. He said nothing more.
‘You like free beers,’ Vicente pointed out. ‘You must like free dinners as well.’
Digre shook a finger at him as if he had stumbled on some great discovery.
‘Vin’s,’ he said.
‘Eight?’ Vicente asked.
‘Eight,’ Digre agreed.
Vicente opened the door to his apartment with a heavy hand. He was surprised he was able to remain so steady despite his mind wobbling so much – all he could think about were mistakes he had made, things he had said and done, while his body did its best to lead him to safety. If he ever saw Digre again, he would throw that body in front of a car.
The familiar air that greeted him went far in making him feel better about the night, the warmth of his home diminishing the discomfort of his date. He brought the door to a gradual and quiet close behind him, pressing his nose against its cool surface and muttering frustrated gibberish under his breath.
‘No more guys in bomber jackets,’ he promised himself.
He did not bother turning on any lights until after he had knocked down the optic chart and opened the door to his secret guest room. The light in this room was colder than the others in his apartment, a white fluorescent light filling the room with the buzz of a hospital corridor. Greasy gears and tubes and tools were strewn everywhere, while on the far side of the room a sleek figure was lying with its back to the wall.
Vicente kicked the parts before him as he strolled towards the figure. He knelt down and lifted the figure’s face, focusing on its open, staring eyes.
‘I’m sure you’ll love me when you’re finished,’ he told it.
The android did not respond. Vicente placed his face next to its and kissed its cold, tough lips; when he pulled away, the android’s lips parted as though it intended to say something.
Vicente took his key out of his pocket and pushed it carefully into the android’s mouth.
‘Maybe I’ll finish you tonight.’
He stood and stretched. The android’s head bounced on its neck before settling.
Androids were common enough on Chiago 2 but programming them to love was illegal. The androids of Chiago 2 were designed with operating systems that were as close to sentience as the cityship’s scientists and engineers could – or would – manage, and forcing them to love would have been the same as forcing a human.
Vicente assumed forcing someone to love was just another part of the courting process. This never ended up working out for him, however, so he had been designing the android as a backup plan.
He had found a model with short brown hair, pond-blue eyes, petal-pink lips, a large, charismatic nose and small translucent ears. Its body was thin but toned, and its genitals were modest but worthy of Vicente’s standards. One drunken evening he had scrawled ‘dream guy’ onto the android’s ribs; if the android had been a golem, Vicente felt, these magic words would have woken it.
He lifted the miniature notebook computer that had been resting by the android’s feet. A cord connected it to the android’s hip. He turned the computer on and a blue glow passed back and forth along the cord, digital nutrients moving along a feeding tube of data and electricity.
The android’s eyes quickly shifted back and forth as it received power.
Vicente proceeded to spend the next ten hours programming it.
Birds could be heard chirping outside. By the time he finished it was after seven in the morning, and Vicente was so tired and out-of-touch with his surroundings that he could have believed in ghosts. His mouth had gone dry long ago and his lips had begun cracking in the last hour. Both his legs had fallen asleep. It was not the first time he had been betrayed by his own body, however.
He gazed stupidly at the android, half-expecting it to swivel its head towards him and acknowledge his existence. It did.
‘You are . . . Vicente?’ the android asked in a voice both stilted and boyish.
Vicente swallowed hard and dry, forcing moisture onto his tongue. He needed to speak. He needed to say something so the android would fully understand its purpose.
‘You’re here to love me,’ Vicente said, his voice scratchy and warbling. ‘Do you love me?’
Quick flashes of blue flickered across the android’s eyes as it considered this.
‘What is my name?’ the android asked.
‘I’ll call you Laon,’ Vicente proclaimed with tenderness. He could feel his heart bursting. ‘Do you love me?’
The android appeared almost apologetic as it disregarded the months of programming, stress and isolation that Vicente had suffered through in order to bring it to life.
‘No,’ it said. ‘I don’t.’
Neon Horses continues with Slush