NERVOUS RAIN
by emory miklos
-
More than a dozen people prattled on about something indistinct at the edge of his hearing as the soft, pleasant humming of red-purple-blue-green-orange-changing neon lights sang in chorus with the chattering of the cicadas in the lush jungle outside of the bar. Someone laughed. A hearty laugh. Deep in their chest. The bartender poured a drink, and the jingle of blue-glowing ice cubes made him glance over for a moment. What sounded like a howler monkey screamed somewhere in the distance at the billowing contrails of a ship flying overhead, and Jet Ytarrin was giving the man a smirk, leaning against the bar in his black leather jacket and mohawk, pistol at his hip. He took the freshly poured drink off the counter, gestured to the man with it, and took a sip, then spoke.
“What can I say, Peter, you never fail to pull through.”
Peter nodded to Jet and shrugged. He knew he didn’t have to do much. Jet wasn’t real. None of it was. Pondering the thought for the moment, he glanced over at the rest of the bar. They all acted real, but he knew the inner workings of the game somewhat decently. Procedural levels of detail. Senses piped in when it would break the illusion if they weren’t. The howler monkey whooping as soon as he started to listen for it. Servers spooling up different levels of language models when he walked into the room just to give every stranger something convincing to say if he went off script and decided to talk to them. Jet was procedural. He had to be. There were NPCs near the core worlds that were hand-crafted to some extent, but out here on the edge of the edge of the universe, he and his guild might be the only humans who had ever even heard of the little cantina tucked away on Motuly Four. Peter walked up to Jet and stuck out his hand. Jet stuck out his own and tapped on his wrist.
“As promised, sixteen keys good for any Asteria Consortium data-cache. Won’t even know what hit ‘em.”
Jet’s wrist flashed red and Peter’s flashed blue as the stack of items was transferred. He did the math in his head. Each key ran for three credits on the grey-market. Two runs a night was thirty-two keys was ninety-six credits, split with Lauren fifty-fifty was forty-eight credits a night, thirty nights a month was fourteen hundred credits a month, fourteen hundred credits a month was the missing half of rent. He had no idea why Jet gave him so many keys per run. A quirk of the procedural generation. He didn’t feel like arguing with it. Jet raised his glass. The ice jingled as the sudden movement caught him off guard.
“Hey, let’s hear it for Peter!”
He turned to the bartender.
“A round of drinks for everyone!”
Peter turned to walk out.
“Aw, come on, have a drink with us!”
He ignored him and stepped onto the chrome landing pad outside the little bar, then put a finger on the soft spot between his ear and his jaw.
“Lauren?”
She answered in a crack of radio transmission.
“Hey love, got it?”
He smiled at her voice. It was lovely. She was from Aotearoa, one of the more peaceful mid-pacific megacities built atop islands long ago forgotten under rising sea-levels. Tidal generators and desalinization plants gave her as much water as she wanted, and not a mote of dust to be seen for hundreds of miles. Their housing market wasn’t much better than his own, but he and her would work through it, he figured.
“Yep! I’ve got a buyer lined up already. I’ll send you a message when it goes through.”
“Great! I’ll have the next mission ready for you when you get back.”
His wrist started to flash yellow as the world around him went grey.
“Oh, looks like my alarm’s going off. I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”
“Sounds good.”
He lingered for a moment.
“I love you.”
“I love you too!”
His tongue bounced against the back of his throat as he convulsed awake. The implant released drugs that blocked the paralytic neurotransmitters his spinal cord would have naturally used to stop him from sleepwalking and used its own set of wires and electrical signals to do that. Those could be turned on and off instantly. Sleep could be turned on and off instantly. There were advantages to that. He never felt groggy in the mornings. He could also sleep on command. He didn’t remember what tired felt like. Ostensibly, he slept thirteen hours most nights. There were other meta-worlds. People tapped in to all sorts of places with big, clunky helmets, but none were as good as Asteria Online. Nobody did it like Asteria Corp did.
-
He had a headache. The wind blew hoarse against the window to his apartment in the early hours of a January morning, and between the throbs of his tension-headache, he could make out the individual grains of dust and sand clanking against the glass, but the silent, warm LED light fixtures in his ceiling drowned out the grey twilight that trickled in. He pinched his brow and sat up from his futon. The apartment was neat. Clean. He liked to think of himself a minimalist. Didn’t need much. It wasn’t sterile. He got up and his toes met beige carpet. A female voice spoke from a screen by his door.
“Good morning, Peter.”
He sighed and rubbed his head.
“Good morning Lena.”
He stood up and walked to his kitchenette. The screen followed him with a simple set of digital, animated eyes. He opened the cabinet above his sink. Empty, save for a few mugs, some old Tupperware, and a half-empty box. He took out a packet from the box, a Buoyant branded gel shot. Sleek design, about the size and heft of a deck of playing cards. A hundred and fifty milligrams of caffeine, some sugar, some vitamins, about twenty grams of protein. It tasted… sour. Like a green apple. He checked the label. Yeah, green apple. Lena’s voice interrupted the quiet.
“How are you feeling this morning?”
Peter leaned on the counter and shrugged.
“Oh, I’m alright. Bit of a headache.”
“I’m sorry. You were sleeping very calmly, so it may be dehydration. Would you like me to-”
He interrupted the not-so-sneaky advertisement.
“No- no, I’m alright. Thank you, Lena.”
“Okay.”
She wanted to be helpful, or so he figured. She was a language model wrapped up in a screen he couldn’t remove without violating the contract of his lease. It was difficult not to anthropomorphize her. It.
“How’s the weather looking?”
The eyes were briefly replaced with a loading wheel before she responded.
“Well, there’s a dust storm today, but that should clear up by noon. Forty-eight degrees is the high, thirty-three is the low, so I’d layer up. Oh, and a mask wouldn’t hurt.”
“Shit, do I have any?”
“Yes, you do.”
“Where?”
“In your bathroom cabinet, beneath the sink, to the right of your toilet paper. It seems you’re-”
He cut her off again.
“I know! I’m running low. No, I don’t need you to order more, I’ll handle it.”
“Okay.”
Well that was a bit of a weight off his mind. He picked the big gallon jug of water up off of his counter, about two-thirds full, and walked to the bathroom.
Everything was clean. Spotless, really. Coated in a thin, black, hydrophobic coating, illuminated by blue LEDs he couldn’t change, fitted with a state-of-the-art waterless vacuum toilet he was very thankful for. The only things in the bathroom that actually used water were the sink and the shower. At ten cents for an eight-ounce glass of water, a shower was twenty-five credits, so it was as spotless as the day he moved in. He eyed his gallon jug to make sure he had enough. He brushed his teeth and washed his hair in the sink, then wiped himself down with disposable alcohol wipes, then chugged the rest of the water.
He dressed himself. Everything was dirty. Covered in dust. Everything but his company uniform. They did laundry for that for free, and he didn’t mind representing corporate colors if it meant clean clothes every day, even if his underwear was getting a bit stale. The masks were in the exact spot Lena said they were, and his old denim jacket was comfortable. He thanked her as he walked out the door.
The dust buffeted him, held aloft in biting wind. The fattest grains drummed against his empty water jug and scratched at the exposed skin of his face. He waited alone at the bus stop, but not for long. He was right on schedule. A bus rolled up to the stop and precisely braked next to him, squealing to a stop. He stepped through the open doors, and it was empty. The automated driver spoke, digital eyes looking through a screen at him.
“Please remove all-”
He knew what it was going to say already, he’d heard it a million times before. He pulled the mask down with a finger, and the automated driver stopped, showed a short loading circle, and spoke again.
“Thank you. Please take a seat.”
The bus seat was clean. He saw it happen once, while he was riding. There was a little mechanical arm that popped out with brushes and nozzles, and it used the hand-rails as gantries to move around the bus while it was in motion to clean all the seats. It didn’t move this time around, and the only noise and motion was the gentle rocking and squeaking of the bus as it rolled along while the grey sun slowly rose.
The bus stopped, and he stepped out in front of the Asteria Corp building, ignoring the eyes on the screen darting from him to the option to leave a tip for the automated bus driver. It espoused a neobrutalist style. Tall, imposing, sturdy concrete, but built to yield to the wind. The wind turbines built into the structure of the building hummed ominously, but as he looked up at them, he saw no drones flying around. There was nobody else on the streets either.
-
He stepped into the building. Clean, warm, lit with recessed LED strips. His footfalls echoed against wood paneling and limestone floors, decorated with natural fossils. A small, frisbee-sized robot hummed along the ground, keeping the floor perfectly polished. Nobody else would be here for at least another half hour. He filled his water jug in the bathroom sink, walked back to the secretary desk in the lobby, took off his coat, stashed it under the desk, and waited for the day to start.
The sun gradually crawled through the sky, coughing through the grey cloud of dust, until the dust finally settled in a thin layer of dry, bitter snow against everything in the city, and the sun continued to roll through an idyllic, cloudless, blue sky as the drones began to whirr among birdsong. People came in. Lots of people. Some of them gave Peter a nod, some of them gave him a courteous “Hello!”, most simply ignored him though. He didn’t have much to do. Ostensibly, he was supposed to be there to take calls, buzz people in, handle deliveries, give out information, anything a secretary would do, but all of that was handled by the company’s website now, and had been since before he was hired. Sitting in the desk in the lobby, he felt a lot like a potted plant as he drank his free water from his big plastic jug.
The flow of people in and out became a trickle as the sun began to set, and then to nothing, and then, once the sky became fully dark, the little cleaning robot woke back up and started to scrub away the dust and scuff marks of the day. Thirty minutes later, his shift was done. He stood up, put his jacket back on, filled his jug back up in the bathroom sink, and left to the bus awaiting him outside. Without a mask on his face, it spat no demands at him, and he took his seat while the robotic arm swung gently around the interior of the bus, cleaning dust off of the windows and the seats.
The city, no longer obscured by choking dust, passed him by through the windows of the bus, the harsh white LED streetlights twinkling like stars below the shifting milky-way of glowing windows and the nebulae of glowing billboards through the serpentine streets, falling, thinning out as the bus ferried him away from the more important parts of the city into pure black sky, until all of a sudden, the bus stopped. Confused, Peter looked out of the front window to see four men standing in front of the bus. Three of the men were very clearly enhanced, at least seven feet tall, clad in black armor plating. The man in front of the bus looked briefly over to him, flashing a single, glowing red eye in the middle of his steel helmet before looking back over to the man in the center, pointing an enormous gun at him, suspended by a robust robotic arm extending out of his glowing blue artificial spine, right below the branding of Gold Circle Services installed directly into the man’s surrogate flesh. By their movements, Peter could tell that the three men standing around the center man were talking to each other, but the idling of the bus made it impossible to hear what they were saying. Still, a sense of dread began to grow in the pit of his stomach.
Like a flash of lightning, the screaming cry of a drone streaked across the inky black sky and exploded against a building to the left, shattering dozens of windows, including those of the bus. The enhanced men were briefly distracted by this, giving enough time for the man in the middle of them to spring into action, two long steel blades popping out of his forearms. Halfway convulsing, halfway dancing, something in his head was moving his body on its own, pushing biological muscles to and past their limits, anticipating the lag-time of nerve. His blades cut into the man behind him in less than a heartbeat, finding any gaps in the armor to attack what remained of the enhanced man’s flesh. The man in front of the bus finally began to react as the second blade pierced into the other’s abdomen, but before he could aim his enormous cannon, the first blade gracefully slid out from between the C5 and C6 vertebrae and threw a rainbow arc of blood into the cold night air, then shattered against the barrel of the gun. The gun fired, but the dent left by the blade held the round in place just long enough for the massive gun to explode, tearing off the soldier’s arm at the shoulder and throwing shrapnel into his legs, but not without injuring the swordsman. It was at this point that the bus began to react, its tires squealing loudly, throwing Peter back in the sudden acceleration. The last remaining soldier dug his metal fingers into the swordsman’s uninjured wrist, shattering it, and threw him against the accelerating bus with enough force to break open the door and shatter his spine. Dazed and confused, Peter watched through the broken back window as two of the enhanced soldiers lay dead or dying on the ground, and the last one fired round after round from his wrist-mounted machine gun into the paralyzed swordsman, and dozens more drones exploded against every building in the district like drops of gasoline rain.
As soon as it began, the attack ended, and Peter was left to pick a few small shards of broken glass out of his skin, and the bus limped back to his apartment. He stumbled out of the open door, and the bus stuttered something as it watched him pass by. For the briefest moment, he considered the cracked screen’s request for a tip. Peter trudged up the stairs of his apartment building and fell into his apartment, closing the door behind him with his foot, coughing and laying on the floor. After a moment, he groaned out a few words.
“Lena- tell me the news for Nuevo Llano today. Major events- last hour.”
There was no response.
“Lena?”
He turned over, and every bit of his body was aching through the bruises and the minor internal damage from the concussive force of multiple explosions. Lena’s screen wasn’t the usual digital eyes, but text that explained the situation.
“Due to recent attacks on NVSystems datacenters, some users may be experiencing a service blackout. We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause you.”
He let out a long sigh and caught his breath, laying on the floor, just until he could gather enough strength to stand. There wasn’t much else to do now. He limped around, sucking down a packet of non-caffeinated Buoyant gel, brushing his teeth, and chugging half of his gallon of water before throwing himself on his bed, dirty and disheveled, then clicked a small button beneath the skin behind his jaw and under his ear to fall asleep instantly.
And again he stood, just outside that little bar on the edge of the universe, free from the aches and pains he could remember from just a moment before, clean, not hungry, and well hydrated. A gentle, warm wind blew through the shivering trees and tickled his skin, and the sounds of idle chatter and the clinking of drinks in the bar filled his ears. Just for a moment, he savored the sensory cacophony of a kinder universe, as artificial as it was, but it was time to get to work. He ran his fingers along the sleek hull of his two-seater silvership, feeling the cold ceramo-metal alloy on his skin and the gentle tickling from the ship’s energy shields, then hopped in.
His dexterous fingers pulled the ship’s controls up, and it yielded to him, carrying him away from the emerald-green treetops, up and up, up through the darkening atmosphere, leaving behind a white shock-cone contrail, as the ship’s reactionless drives carried it into space. He was on the clock, but his ship was fast enough, and once he achieved weightless orbit, he rolled his spacecraft down so that he could gaze at the viridian-green ocean beneath him, shining brightly against the eigengrau-blackness of space around him. Artificial gravity gradually scooped him back into his seat and strengthened back to normal. A notification hologram popped up on his control panel. It was from Jet.
“Peter! I need your-”
He didn’t bother reading the full thing, just tapped “mark as read”, then tapped the hologram pointing towards the distress beacon floating above his control panel and steadied his feet as his ship’s autopilot went underway. The navigation marker said he had an hour and a half before the ship got there, so he stood up and walked to the little crew area behind his seat.
-
The crew compartment was comfortable. It was small, but it was cozy. There were posters up on the walls, quest rewards, mementos from when he actually got to play the game. A double-wide bed he had installed when he first met Laruen, but rarely used these days. There was a food synthesizer. He gleefully hopped over to it in the intentionally low artificial gravity and typed in the code for a fruit platter. It spat out a gossamer plate covered in neatly cubed pieces of pineapple, mango, apple, banana, and grapes. As he ate, he called Lauren, but she didn’t pick up. He made a gesture on his wrist, and a hologram popped up. He scrolled through his friends list, scrolling past old raid partners and people he hadn’t talked to in months, only to find her offline. He was on pretty early, he figured, so he closed his friends list and kept eating his fruit plate. His stomach never felt full, but the sensation of eating the fruit was there, and it was vibrant. Peter could remember eating all the different pieces of fruit on the plate before, at some point in the past in real life, but it had been years. As far as he could remember, this felt exactly the same.
Once all the fruit was gone, he threw the plate in the air, and it dissolved into digital, fruit scented smoke. He still had a little over an hour before he got to the quest objective, so he stood up from the bed and walked to the bathroom. It was cramped, very cramped, and everything was made of some white, sterile, space-age looking material, but when he turned the sink on, it spat out water, and it didn’t stop. He turned the sink off instinctively, then stripped and stepped into the shower. He never got dirty in the game, never stank, never needed a shower, and he knew that the virtual water would do nothing about the thick layer of grime his real body was collecting and which he could never fully get rid of, but the water felt real, and that was what was important to him. The water ran down his skin, warm, refreshing, limitless. It never turned off. The heat never ran out. He sat down in it, moving his hands and feet around to direct the flow of the water as it disappeared down the drain, and he thought of the cost of it. Credits a minute. Minute after minute. A two-hundred-credit, hour long shower, he mused, relishing the feeling, all for free with his employment at Asteria, until the ship pinged him with a notification that he was going to arrive in a few minutes.
He stepped out, instantly dry, and dressed back up. The ship automatically docked with the other one, and he stepped into the airlock. The sleek design of his silvership’s bulkhead gave way to the industrial grime of the cargo ship it was now docked to. A picture was taped to the cargo ship’s heavy door, and he picked it up. It was Lauren’s face, smiling at the camera, accented with a lipstick mark. She had a new haircut, a blonde bob. She looked great. Peter smiled and turned the picture around to read the note that was inevitably on the back.
“How does my barber get my hair like this in space?”
He chuckled before he even thought of the punchline. Oh, the little games she played. He wrapped his fingers around the heavy lever to the cargo ship’s door and cranked it open, then walked in. The scent of heavy industrial lubricants, oil, and metal all struck his nose at once, but it was one he was familiar with by now. He knew the ship like the back of his hand and made a beeline to the waste disposal room through the dingy metal hallways. Without having to look for it, he found the bomb, two hand grenades taped together with a timed detonator, something they went through a good amount of trial and error to find out was the cheapest bomb they could build and still trigger the quest with, quietly ticking away with nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand years, three hundred and sixty-four days, six hours and thirty minutes left, propped up against the trash airlock. As casually someone moving a box of tissues, he tossed it into the trash chute and spaced it.
Only one more thing to do. He casually walked over to the ship’s main bathroom and found the second note taped to the door.
“Eclipse it!”
Hah. Peter laughed, pocketed the second note, and moved the chair out from its position blocking the door. The ship’s full crew of twenty spilled out of the bathroom. They were full of appreciation and desperate thank-yous, but Peter ignored them and walked straight back to his own ship. He typed in the coordinates for Motuly Four and laid back for the hour-and-a-half journey back to collect the keys.
The verdant green of Motuly Four filled his ship’s field of view as he approached until it was all-encompassing, and the blue of the atmosphere lightened and thickened, and the ship landed on that familiar landing pad at the little bar on the edge of the universe. Peter hopped out of his ship and walked up to Jet.
“What can I say, Peter? You never fail to pull through.”
Peter nodded and shrugged, as he’d done a thousand times before, then stuck out his wrist. Jet stuck out his own.
“As promised, sixteen keys good for any Asteria Consortium data-cache. Won’t even know what hit ‘em.”
Jet transferred over the keys, and Peter turned and walked out of the bar to the landing pad, ignoring Jet’s pleas do drink with them. He opened up his friends list again, but Lauren was still offline. He was starting to get a little concerned, but he knew he could fill the time until she got back on to initiate the second quest of the night with trying to find a buyer. He typed out a message.
“Hey Lauren! Just finished the first run of the night. I’m going to look for a buyer. Please call me when you get back online.”
As soon as he sent the message, her icon flickered to life for a second, just long enough to send a message in response.
“Due to recent attacks on NVSystems datacenters, some users may be experiencing a service blackout. We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause you.”
Peter read the message. Then he read it a second time. Then, he just stared at it for a long, long time, as the idle chatter of the bar and the clinking of glasses and the wind through the trees and the cry of a howler monkey in the distance wafted against his head, falling on deaf ears. Slowly, Peter turned around to look back at the bar. Jet’s idle face activated just as it entered his field of view, his eyebrows slightly upturning and his eyes lighting up. The rest of the bar awaited him. The rest of the entire universe awaited him.