Chapter 2 | Into the Night
“You,” the cook said, rubbing his eye with one hand, gesturing towards Bek with the other.
She was looking at the glowing, neon menu on the wall of the small, open-faced noodle shack on the side of the road. They were protected from the swirling dust and winds outside by a temporary enclosure that could be raised or lowered with the shack’s central operating system. Along with the cook, they were the only three people for miles. They took the two middle seats in a line of four that faced the counter at the front of the shack. There were small abandoned tables outside of the enclosure, currently covered in blowing dust.
She wasn’t reading the menu so much as she was staring straight through it. Suddenly she’s back with her brother again — she’s 12, he’s 14. He’s ordering noodles for them. “Kake Udon. Two of them.” He looks over at her and rolls his eyes. They’re wearing matching dark blue jumpsuits with patches that read "Systra".
“You! What do you want?!” the cook barked, snapping her back to the fluorescent light from the ceiling of the shack, mixing with the soft pink and blue neon glow from the digital walls of the small shack, flashing ads for sleepers, sexual stimulants, mind and body enhancements, meta-insurance, work placement lotteries, and on and on.
“Bek! What’s your deal? Tell him what you want.”
“Kake Udon. And a shot of Nürva.”
“Oooh, add one of those for me too,” Bill added, his eyes widening.
The cook turned to start making their orders.
“Nürva, huh?”
“I’m feeling a little off.”
“Well, you know me; I’m not gonna yell about it. We have some time to kill anyway,” he gestured towards the swirling darkness outside.
The dust outside had a pink and blue hue around the edges as it swirled through the neon light from the shack.
“What are you going to do after this contract?” she asked.
“Go back home to Chicago, probably go to the Union Club a few times, bet on some fights until the next cycle.”
Bek felt her chest and throat tightening.
“You ever think about trying to get transferred? Maybe take a LASP test again... I don’t know... just try to get out of here?” she asked.
“Where the fuck would I go?!” he laughed.
“I don’t know, maybe the Pacific Pact? Or one of the colonies in New Russia? With your background I bet you could even get something in the Styrene Fields outside of Tehran.”
“I looked at visas once. The paperwork was fucked. I filled it out and then realized I needed a year of wages just to submit it. Plus, no guarantee something comes up that I've tested for. And honestly, I’m not tested for much. I don't see my scores improving. If anything I'm dumber than I was when I took 'em 15 years ago. And I was dumber then than I was when I took them 20 years before that. I’m good here. This place is dog shit, but I’m good just wasting away here. I'll be up for pension eventually, long as I don't fuck anything up too bad in the meantime.”
“You’ve been running contracts here for Systra for like, 25 years or something, right? You could easily get them to transfer you to a Chinese subsidiary or something. There’s your ticket to New Rus. I hear nightlife is pretty wild there. Or you could transfer to one of their government contracts with the RSDD.”
Bill started laughing and then choking dramatically on some Gyoza he’d just put in his mouth. He took a drink of water and gasped, laughing again.
“Are you fucking kidding? Me, at the bottom of the ocean? Cleaning radiation in the Russian wastes is stupid enough. I'm not sitting in a box a quarter mile underwater. No thanks. To all of it,” he started laughing again, shaking his head as he grabbed another dumpling.
Bek shrugged and reached for a dumpling too. Bill shot her a look, but she took one anyway.
“You could scav out in the Wastes. Or, I don't know... catch passage into the RMAZ, start over out past Denver, find a spot to drop a container to live in?"
Bill was shaking his head as he chewed the last bite.
"What about mining?”
“Mining?I don't want to go out west. You think it's hot here, it’s unbearable out there. And who knows what the fuck is going on in the Rockies. NewsCorp says it's just gangs and cults. I would rather go live in the sopping wet, shit-filled wastes than out west, but no, not the mines.”
“No, not the Deep Earth stuff out west.”
“What, mining up north?”
“No, no. I’m talking about–”
“You don’t mean Ceres?!”
She was silent.
“You do mean Ceres. Damn, Bek. I thought we were friends all these years, now I find out you want me to go and die on a cold rock in space. Very nice! Trying to get rid of me, huh? Grab all my contracts?” he was waving his arms around in a display for an audience of nobody, settling back down as another ad came on their interfaces and in the shack.
“Get your name on the waiting list for placement tests. It’s never too late to get re-placed! Skilled and professional applications start at 10,000 credits. Get registered with the Department of Labor to take the LASPs. There’s no limit on re-testing. Now offering labor contracts for accrued registration fees. To be added to the wait list, say ‘add to list’ now.”
Bek shook her head at Bill and the ad.
“Sir!” Bill tapped his empty shot glass on the counter looking at the cook, “I’d like a refill, Root Whiskey this time please. I just found out my friend here would rather I leave the planet than continue working with me.”
Silently, unphased by the drama, the cook slowly half-turned his body and, without looking, grabbed a bottle and poured the purple-ish whiskey with one hand while tending to the pot of broth and noodles with the other.
“Seriously though, Bek, what is this about?” Bill asked her, settling down.
“I don’t know, I was just curious I guess. Every month we get sent out on the same jobs, and we complain and moan about the same stuff: Systra, the Board, NAU, the gangs, the Labor Department lottery, the other idiots who run these routes, everything. But here we are.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” he lifted his shot glass and threw his head back.
“I don’t know. All I’m saying is why don’t any of us ever try to get out of here?”
“Because we’re the children of nobodies. We don’t have anything. We don’t even have nothing. We have debt on debt on debt. I just told you I can’t afford to submit a form, even on full-time wages, because it costs a year’s salary,” he grabbed another dumpling, “Another whiskey, please!” he asked the cook, continuing through bites of Gyoza, “I guess I could do what some of the crew have done, really go for it at the Union Bar next time, rack up so much debt that Systra decides to sell me off as high-risk? I'd be more expendable than a mop. They’d throw me into an endless closet on a cold empty rock to be forgotten about. And there I'd sit til I died. I can do that here.”
He was right. It was pointless. She was being moved from one track to another and that was all there was. There was no choice to be made. She'd hardly had a choice in anything, thrust and clamped from job to job since she was a kid.
“I guess.”
She looked down at the bowl of noodles the cook had just set in front of her.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded subtly as he turned away, placing another steaming bowl in front of Bill, who was already plunging his sticks in with one hand and his small spoon with the other.
He slurped and chewed on a long string of thick noodles.
“You okay, Bek?” he turned toward her on his chair, his mouth full.
“Yeah, I’m–uh... I just...” she stopped for just a second, and then it slowly bubbled up until it finally fell out of her as her eyes got hot and filled with tears, “He's dead. Lund. I got a call on the way to the depot." She turned to wipe her eyes as she got control of her breath.
“Oh, fuck. No,” he sighed, throwing his napkin down on the table and taking another shot. He turned to the cook, “Could we just get the bottle?” holding out his credit key to be scanned. He grabbed the bottle from the cook and poured two more shots.
“That’s, just... it's horrible, Bek. What happened?”
“Not sure,” she lied.
“I saw him at the Union pretty much every time I went there. He hadn’t been there much the last few weeks though. I figured he ran out of credits, was out on a contract with somebody,” Bill turned to Bek.
“He’d stopped taking contracts with Systra the last year, then he stopped taking anything at all the last few months,” she poked at her bowl of food, swirling the broth around.
“What was he doing?”
She shook her head and shrugged, another lie. “Did you guys ever talk when you saw each other?” she asked.
“Oh, sometimes, yeah. We’d talk about the fights, or shit talk the Board and Systra. Sometimes we’d play cues if there were open tables and no snipes hanging around. Usually, we just took our three drinks and watched the fights,” he slowly shook his head in disbelief, his shoulders sinking, leaning his arms on the counter to hold this newly added weight.
Bek felt a little lighter. Her throat and chest started to loosen, and she realized she hadn’t really taken a full, deep breath since before the depot. She breathed deep. She sighed.
Bill turned back towards his food and started to eat his noodles again, continuing, “I guess I should say, he would usually take his three drinks–I’d usually start making wagers for drink vouchers with the crew. I’d lose track of him, but he usually seemed to get out of there before midnight,” he poured another round of shots.
“I remember seeing him hanging with Kola Tetrow at the end of the night sometimes,” he raised his glass.
“To Lund,” he whispered.
Bek felt the heat of the whiskey loosening her chest and throat. She looked at her noodles. It was the first food she’d had since her number came up for this job 2 days ago. She flashed back to her housing unit in Chicago, picking apart her last piece of stale bread, removing the green pieces as the daily Department of Labor work lottery broadcast came through her interface. The gaps between contracts were increasing in frequency and length. She felt her stomach rattle a bit.
“Kola?” she pulled a first noodle up to her mouth and tasted the rich, salty broth. She suddenly felt all of the hunger she'd been ignoring, quickly reaching back down for a big knot of noodles, and then another.
“Yeah, he’s something isn’t he? Can’t stand that little fucking scab,” Bill growled, “You think Lund got caught up with him?”
Bek shrugged, assuming Bill would come to the same conclusion she had.
Bill thought for a few moments and went on, “I know K’s one of the only people in the towers who would regularly defer work contracts almost every month. And he’s the only person I’ve ever met who took monthly ‘vacations’ whatever that means out here. Not sure how he affords to do any of that.”
“You ever hear anything about him running back and forth from the Wastes, working with gangs out in the RMAZ?”
“I thought you said you ‘didn’t know, weren’t sure’ what happened?” Bill raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah, well, who knows what happens to a person… But if Kola's hanging around it makes me wonder.”
“I didn’t really hear anything about any of that, but I could at least put together that he wasn’t on the level with most of the people in our pool, or with the managers. And definitely not with me. He never took contracts, but he always wore Systra gear. Seemed like he was with a Systra-backed crew somehow.
He paused and scrunched his face a second, working something out in his head.
“Wait, all this shit about Ceres… what did Lund owe?”
She hesitated, then sighed, “Well, he owed, and now I owe 50 thousand after processing fees, and clearing his open contracts, and his debts with National Gaming.”
The cook turned and grabbed the empty plates and bowls, refilled their water bottles and took the dishes to the corner sink. Bill picked up his shot glass and eyed the bottom of it, turning it in the light, hoping the air might settle.
“That motherfucker. He left you sitting under 50 thousand? That's total trash, Bek. And so, now… Ceres?”
“It was that or the Atlantic Basin.”
Bill gently scoffed.
“When?”
“I’m supposed to leave for Lunojz with Chicago Dynamic in two weeks.”
He puffed out his cheeks and let out a burst of air.
“Damn. No more Systra, huh? And not the Atlantic Basin then?”
“What would you do?” she finally asked him.
“I have no fucking idea, Bek. No fucking idea,” he shook his head.
“I’m worried 50k isn’t all he owed.”
“I don’t think National Gaming would leave anything out, Bek. They’re not exactly known for their generosity when it comes to collecting debts.”
“No, not them. I’m talking Kola and whatever crew he was with.”
“Fucking Kola. What a stupid name. Who thinks of this shit?”
“His dad was a Systra lifer. He seriously worked in one of the root processing factories his whole life, and he made it all the way up to management. Loved that root sugar cola shit so much he named his kid Kola, but with a K, I don’t know why. Maybe because of a legal thing with the company?”
“This world is sick,” Bill muttered under his breath. Bek let out a small laugh.
“They were always nice to us growing up. His dad would give us extra promotional Systra stuff that didn’t get shipped off to the EU or the West Coast. I think that’s why Lund hung around them so much, it made him feel rich or secure or something,” she paused, imagining them all running around the housing stacks as kids, all in bright blue Systra hats, “But from what I know about Kola in the last few years and the way that Lund acted last year, I think they were getting into some off-the-tracks shit.”
“Like what?” Bill asked.
“Running drugs? Maybe cooking Z. But I don’t know what Kola does or who he works with exactly,” she paused, looking out the windows of the enclosure, “You’re right though, he’s the only guy in our pool who’s in and out, always passing up jobs.”
“If his dad was management, why’s he in the labor district?”
“His dad died before he took his LASPs. Then he skipped altogether. Ended up going to live with an uncle in Rochester for a while — uncle was SekForce, I think. Kola came back a few years later. My brother was excited, but I thought he seemed different from when we were kids. Then Lund seemed different after a while.”
She grabbed the whiskey bottle this time and poured out a shot for each of them. It was still black outside, dust swirling around. The wind created a constant, deep whooshing sound that blended with the whirring from the shack’s power generators and ventilation.
“InnoBev presents Jet Black’s Premium Root Whiskey. Ooh that’s smooth. Long Day? Long Night? Get Jet Black. InnoBev and Jet Black are Sys-”
“I don’t know how you put up with this shit in your head all of the time Bek,” Bill said, grabbing his scrambling wand and passing it over the back of his head. He held it up and looked at her, pausing. She nodded and he swept it over the back of her head, interrupting the ad.
“Let me know when they kick back in. I can’t handle the shit constantly coming in.”
“Honestly, I barely notice them. And that scrambler can’t be good for rest of your implants or your brain for that matter.”
“I think it’s worse if you stop noticing the ads. I started saving up for a premium upgrade with reduced ads and privacy controls. It’s 6 months of my bonus credits, but I don’t care. I can’t take it anymore. I’m gonna fly off the handle one of these days...”
“I ran into Lund down in oldtown a few times last year. He was getting off a boat with a bunch of ghouls, looked like they were on Z and Dust and probably a bunch of other shit,” she said, raising the glass of the dark purple whiskey to her eyeline before putting it to her mouth and continuing, "Also saw him with Kola down at the shoreline going in and out of some of the condemned buildings more than a few times. Then there was last month when he was gone for two weeks. I thought he’d been killed or OD’d or maybe just fell into the water or out of a window or something. I almost called the coroner to see if anyone had turned up, but then he just rolled into my place one day looking like a skeleton with skin stretched over top, acting like everything’s normal while I’m sitting there vaping, strung-out, sleepless, and panicked.”
“I guess I noticed he’d been a bit different, but that’s a lot of people around the towers, especially lately.”
“Well, whatever it was, I don’t think it was good. And I know how it goes for people who get wrapped up with sponsored crews.”
“Yeah, like getting wrapped up with Systra, but without all of the paperwork and bullshit,” Bill tried to lighten the mood.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, sorry…” he paused, thinking for a second, “So you think he owed money to some crew, off the books?”
“I don't know. Maybe. I guess I just think I’d be harder to find on Ceres than at the bottom of the Ocean?”
“Not if they can find their way to Ceres. It’s not that big of an asteroid!” he laughed, trying again to lighten the mood. It didn’t work.
Suddenly, the cook turned towards them, shuffling the rest of the dishes away, grabbing their glasses and the whiskey bottle. He quickly scanned their credit keys for the remaining costs and abruptly pulled down the shutter on the window, leaving them sitting alone in the enclosure.
“Thanks!” Bill yelled to through the shutter, continuing quieter to Bek, “I guess? Damn. What’s his problem?”
Bek shrugged and looked back out the windows of the enclosure, noticing two faint lights in the dark, swirling dust storm, coming from the west of the shack. They approached quickly and soon the headlights from two autocycles emerged from the chaotic pitch black and parked to the side of the shack.
The cycle covers slid back slowly allowing the passengers to climb off. Each was dressed head-to-toe in black jumpsuits with black helmets and dark tinted facemasks.
They each removed their helmets, revealing two men with cropped, dirty blonde hair and grease-smeared faces, their noses and mouths covered with ventilators. One had a stern, serious face that didn’t move as he swung his long, ape-like arms, walking towards the door. His body filled the entryway to the small enclosure. He paused and looked at Bill and Bek before removing his ventilator mask and taking the seat to Bill’s left.
The smaller man had wide eyes that darted around. He removed his ventilator. He kept opening his mouth as though taking gulps of air, looking like maybe he was going to say something, closing it again and blasting air out of his nose. Every time he took a big breath, he revealed blackened and yellowed teeth. He quickly sat to the right of Bek, his head darting around like he was confused by it all.
“What-is-the-fucking-problem-here?!” the shifty man yelled, banging on the shutters to the front of the shack, “FOOD! WE WANT FOOD!”
He leaned back on his seat, his eyes darting around the shack, his body bouncing on the stool.
“Better get back to the job, eh?” Bill said quietly to Bek, getting up from his chair.
“Wait,” said the larger man to Bill’s left, putting a firm hand on his shoulder as he began to stand up, forcing him back into his seat.
Bek’s face suddenly felt hot, her heart pulsing in her throat.
“Yeah, yeah! Just wait a second there,” added the shifty man, “I feel like I know you. You just have one of those faces that screams ‘Yeah, you know me!’ I can’t put my finger on it. What do you think Duff? Do you recognize them?”
“Sure, yeah, I do,” the large man added.
Bek felt a massive cave forming in her chest.
“Yeah, yeah, I do too!”
Chapter 3 | It's Just a Job
(2054, New American Union, Omaha Station)
“Do you have any questions, Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
“You need to be there by 0300. A TexaMulti Energy maintenance truck will pull up to the north side at 0400. Get yourself something to eat while you’re there. It’s on me.”
“Sir, thank you, but I will pass on the food. Village House never sits well with me.”
“What do you mean? Village House is fine,” the Captain looked up from the datapad in his hands, shaking his head quickly, his eyebrows furrowed, coming to upward points on each side. “I take my wife on Wednesdays after worship. She loves the waffles It’s a fine place,” he added, defensively.
“Yes, sir.”
The Captain looked back down at his datapad, scrolling through a file.
“Do you study?” he took a sip of coffee from a mug with the words NAU / NATO Conference 2034 on the side.
“Waffles, sir?”
“What?”
“Are you asking if I study waffles, sir?”
“No, I mean do you study the Holy Writings of the New Temple?”
“No, sir. My parents, their parents, and I think their parents too, they were all practicing Atheists, sir.”
“The New Temple calls you, Sergeant Torvik. Don’t deny your heart the truth of the Great Reunification.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m sending you a free copy of the New Paradise Handbook to your personal files now.”
A bell-tone played in Sergeant Bill Torvik’s in-ear implant as small red blinking light appeared in the corner of his vision. A notification scrolled across the top of his field of vision: New Paradise Handbook: Tenets and Principles of the New Unified Temple, v2.3b by Jordon Gartner. Would you like to add to your reading list?
“I think once you read it, you’ll be eager to share it with your new friends out west. I encourage that. Not right away, of course. Just, sometime after you’ve made roots, if you find an open heart, I encourage you to share the Truth and the Light.”
“Is this part of the operation, sir?”
“No, Sergeant, of course not." He paused, his face straightening, and stared at Bill for a moment as if to say yes, of course it is. Bill felt like an hour passed in that moment.
“Anything else, sir?”
“You’re dismissed.”
The Captain extended his arm and raised his right hand to face-level with his index and middle fingers pointing straight up. He drew a circle in the air, then a line from top to bottom. Bill recognized it as a blessing of the New Unified Temple. He’d seen it back home: guys with shaved heads walking through the streets in their pajama pants, making the sign at people they passed, painting it on windows and walls, dancing and wailing at the sky.
Bill stood, saluted the Captain, and walked out of the small, dark room to a long hallway. He walked past a few more rooms like the one he’d just exited. In one, he saw what looked like agents from the NAU Sec Bureau. They were seated at a small table with a man who they must have been interrogating. His shoulders were slouched, he was looking down at the table as they slapped it with a folder, yelling at him in Mandarin.
Bill continued down the hall and exited onto the main concourse which connected the Airport and the Spaceport. He merged with the queue of people coming and going to and from their gates and followed the blinking signs towards the passenger pick-up area. He looked out the tall floor-to-ceiling windows just as one of the triangular planes was slingshot vertically into the sky from a tall metal tower.
He reached the entrance to the terminal and walked out into the open air to find the car that had been sent for him. He looked down the row of parked cars with digital marquis displaying the names of the passengers. He walked all the way to one end of the short-term parking area at the front of the terminal and back to the other end, wondering why he hadn’t seen his car yet. He started to panic a bit. Don't fuck this up already.
He stopped and thought for a second, laughed and rolled his eyes, remembering something. He pulled out his data stick and pressed a button, extending a rectangular hologram perpendicular to the stick with his information, the passport file he’d been assigned for this operation.
“Keith Martin,” he said quietly to himself.
He closed his data stick and looked up to see a driverless black sedan with his fake name scrolling across the digital marquis on the door.
He got in the back of the vehicle and pressed his face up close to the scanner on the back of the passenger seat. The display screen on the seat glitched for a second.
“Scanning… Scanning... Scanning... Welcome, Keith,” a voice came over the speakers, “We’re 20 minutes from your destination: Midtown Village House restaurant.”
Bill picked at one of his fingertips as the car pulled away from the concourse, turning onto a main road towards the flashing lights of downtown Omaha a mile ahead. The car zipped around the edge of downtown and continued up the road, eventually pulling off the road towards a tall sign with lights missing, still recognizable as the Village House breakfast chain logo.
The parking lot was empty, save one old beater car from the turn of the century, not even self-driving. He could see inside the restaurant as the car pulled close to the front door. There were only a few patrons inside, one man sitting by himself, another couple being seated.
“Thank you for choosing TripBuddy. Enjoy your visit, Keith,” the voice from the sedan said as Bill got out of the car and entered the restaurant.
He scanned the interior again as he seated himself. The man on the far side was drinking a coffee and looking out the window. He had a stocking cap and a long, dirty trench coat. Homeless, maybe. The couple was drunk, giggling quietly to each other, seated together on the same side of their booth.
He picked up the ordering tablet at his table and got a coffee and some toast. He wasn’t lying when he told the captain that the food didn’t sit right with him. After his stint in the Border Wars, going days at a time with no food followed by days of nutritional paste, his digestive system had been wrecked.
Within a minute a woman walked out with a cup and a plate and set the coffee and a sad-looking piece of brown toast in front of him.
“Enjoy,” she said, walking away as she spoke.
He pushed the toast away and took a drink of the coffee. He could smell that it was burned and hours-old before it reached his tongue.
There was a TV overhead talking about the reignited, ongoing conflict in the Free State of Texas.
“Union forces are amassing along the northern border of Texas. President Barthos and leaders of the North American Economic and Strategic Council have gathered and issued a public statement condemning the recent news that Europe is considering admitting Texas to the DETOUN. This move by the EU and the South American Alliance is being seen as a betrayal of promises made after the end of World War Three. Leaders from the international community are warning of a potential invasion by the NAU. They condemn what they’re calling unwarranted and illegal totalitarian aggression.
Meanwhile, President Barthos is calling for a de-radicalization and return of Texas to the Union. He issued a warning to those who would use the young nation of Texas as a proxy to ‘destabilize our new, delicate Union.’ Meanwhile, in eastern Europe, the rebuilding continues…”
Bill stood up and walked to the TV to change the channel. He couldn’t find any buttons, so he unplugged the screen from the wall and sat back down.
He looked at the sad piece of toast, then out the window to see a semi being unloaded in the back with the word “SYSTRA” plastered on the side in bright blue and orange letters.
“Not interested in current events?” suddenly the man from across the restaurant was seating himself across the table.
“Look, I’m not interes-”
“Just relax, Bill. I’m a friend.”
“I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about,” he started to glance around a bit, nervously, checking to see if he’d missed anyone or anything in the restaurant or the parking lot outside.
“Yeah, sure. I'm your contact.”
Bill sat silently, waiting for some indication that this was safe.
“I was in Texas too. Ops, Western sector, under Calhoun.”
Bill stayed silent.
“Blue-line, 873, Delta,” the man said. Bill suddenly felt relieved, hearing the code his intelligence group had been given to identify themselves.
“Red-line 619, Gamma,” Bill replied.
“Blue-stop 524, Omega,” the man offered the final piece.
“How did you know to find me here? I'm supposed to make contact at—” Bill asked.
“I was assigned as support. I made contact out west 6 months ago. I’ve been back here for two weeks to brief Central. I knew they were sending me back the same day as the person I’m supporting so I thought I'd stop here first. I recognized you just now from my time in Texas.”
Bill waited, taking a long sip from his coffee.
“I had two good friends, we enlisted together back in ’41 after the fall of DC. They both ended up doing an eastern tour in Texas. Told me about you. Plus, I recognize you from a photo they sent me of their unit. It’s fucked what happened to you guys.”
Bill started to flash back to their botched Dallas operation. They were supposed to create a corridor to Houston to cut off the militant cult being propped up by the Euro-American Dawn. He felt the same visceral, physical sensation he’d had that night, realizing they’d been lied to in briefings, dropped into uncontrolled territory with nationalists on one side and the fundamentalists on the other. It was not, in-fact, a zone “largely under the control of the NAU,” as they’d been briefed.
There weren’t any innocents left to protect in the region, nobody to liberate. They’d all left or died in the fighting. Mostly what remained were small gangs fighting for control in the chaos. It had been, at best, a strategic failure. At worst, it was a well-designed catastrophe to pull the NAU further into a destabilizing conflict. It worked.
“We heard your entire unit got wiped. I assumed that was bullshit, but I know for a fact my friends didn’t make it – I saw their bodies in the end.”
“From what I heard, Western ops didn’t go any better,” Bill said back.
“Yeah, that's true. We at least knew what we were getting into there. 3 months in Odessa in the crossfire of three opposing insurgent factions wasn’t the honeymoon assignment I’d hoped for. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to go back to New Mexico. Just glad we all made it out.”
Bill was miles away, wondering how he’d gotten from that nightmare in Dallas to here.
“I’m Mike.”
“Your real name?”
The man smiled and said, “Let’s stick with Mike.”
Bill laughed quietly.
“Well, I’m ‘Keith,’ if you can try to forget what you already know about me,” Bill continued, “When do you head out?”
The man checked the time and started to get up from the table, realizing suddenly that he needed to leave, “In about 2 minutes. I’ll find you when you get there. Not right away, but I’ll make contact at the right time. Until then, just keep your head down. Remember who these people are and what they believe.”
He got up and started to leave, turning around at the last second, “Pro-tip: don’t lean too heavily on the ‘comrade’ stuff. It’s desperate. You want them to trust you? Just act like you've worked a job before. That's all this is."
He quickly and sloppily made the sign of the New Unified Temple and laughed, shaking his head as he continued out the door to his ride that had just pulled up outside. The door flashed the name “Mike Anderson” across the door.
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Bill muttered to himself as Mike walked outside, got in the car and zipped away into the night.
Chapter 4 | Hey, Man, Relax
(2087, New American Union, East of Platte Station)
As quickly as Duff had pushed Bill back down onto his stool, in a single motion, Bill grabbed his wrist and applied an intense but controlled amount of pressure while twisting a few degrees, bringing the tower of flesh down to the dirty concrete floor of the noodle stand. In that same motion, he swung his other arm around the smaller mans neck from behind as he'd moved towards Bek with a finger in her face.
“You should have just let us leave,” Bill said with the two men helpless to counter his neutralizing moves.
The smaller man was gurgling and slapping at Bill’s arm with no effect. Bek stood there with her mouth and eyes wide open. She’d hadn’t ever seen Bill move that quickly. She knew he’d done time in SecForce, something in Texas, but he wasn’t exactly Johnny Quix at the loading docks these days. She’d never seen or heard of him raising a hand against anybody.
With his arm and wrist twisted up in the air behind him and his body propped up on two knees, through wincing and groaning, Duff called up, “Stop! You’re hurting him! He has a condition!”
“Shut. The Fuck. Up,” Bill replied, twisting the wrist and applying added pressure, bringing Duff fully prone on the floor as the smaller man kept gurgling and wheezing.
“Bill, wait,” Bek could see terror in the man’s eyes and could hear the same in Duff’s whining from the floor. These weren’t hardcore raiders rolling in from the Wastes or one of the AZ’s. They weren’t even as tough as the street crews that hung around the docks back in Omaha or Chicago.
Bill didn’t respond. His eyes were wide and intense, his breathing deep and slow, his nostrils flaring. The man continued sputtering as his face turned red and then blue.
“Bill! Stop!” Bek reached over and grabbed him on the shoulder and shoved him a bit.
He jostled, shook his head a little bit, his eyes loosened as he came back to reality. He let go of the smaller man’s neck as the man dropped to the ground, gasping. He loosened his grip on the other man’s wrist, lifting him from the ground by his arm, keeping him controlled from behind.
“What the fuck do you guys want?” Bill asked the man, tightening his grip a bit.
“Ah, fuck! Nothing, we don’t want nothing, just food!” the man replied in a tired, deep drawl, from behind his greasy, wincing face.
The other man was still gasping on the floor in-between over-the-top coughing fits, his dirty blond hair cascading down the front of his face, blowing forward with every cough.
As he caught his breath, still coughing, he managed to add, “What in the fuck was that?! Death machine! Corporate killer! Holy shit on a cracker!”
“Let me go!” the larger man cried in his deep voice.
Bill looked at Bek, she tilted her head and sort of shrugged as if to suggest it might be safe to let the man go.
He released Duff’s arm and the man moved over to his friend on the floor, pulling out an inhaler, raising it to the man’s face.
“I don’t want it.”
“Buck, take your meds, come on,” he pressed the mouthpiece up to his closed lips and pressed the button, annoyingly releasing a fine mist into the man’s face. Buck opened his mouth around the opening of the inhaler and pressed the button himself this time, inhaling with a deep breath.
His body relaxed and his breathing slowed as he looked up at Bill cautiously.
“Who the hell are you?!”
“We work for Systra. We’re on a contract. What do you guys want from us? Why did you say you recognize us?” Bill asked, his breathing getting faster again.
“Hey, man, relax. I was just doing a pitch. What kind of training is Systra giving out to their drivers? Fuck, you almost killed me.”
“A pitch? What the fuck do you mean?”
“We’re businessmen,” Buck said, his hands raised like he was holding something up for them to see, “I was about to drop my sales pitch on you before you turned into a South American super soldier.”
“What the hell do you have to sell at a noodle shack in the middle of nowhere? Are you noodle salesmen?”
“No, no... not that kind of business. We're selling an exclusive experience! Ever heard of The Field?”
Bill scoffed.
“What’s that?” Bek was intrigued.
“Oh, you’re going to love thi–”
“2029, the internet as people knew it was shut down to make way for ‘The Field’ . Tech mogel moneygrab scam. Grifter shit, Bek.”
“Don’t be such a zoomer, old man,” Buck was feeling defensive.
“Okay, go ahead then” Bill said.
“Tom Zrbska, creator of the largest one-stop social media platform… He sought to take the internet to the next level, something that interfaced with the brain instead of the other way around. He created a whole virtual space and filled it with every piece of data recorded since the first days of the net. He added dimensions to the internet. It was beautiful. It was–”
“A massive failure,” Bill interrupted. He was sitting on the stool again, drinking the last of his whiskey.
“There were kinks. People weren’t ready for it. Society wasn’t stable.”
“It was a total fucking failure. The algorithms went rogue, started to hallucinate. It turned into an endless nightmare theme park of demons and ghosts and the worst things you can imagine. It was supposed to revolutionize work and living and socializing. Instead, it drove about 9,000 people to commit violent crimes, 1,000 more ended up taking their own lives, and another 23,000 went into catatonic states. The state got the board to shut it down after a week. But they waited too long. It caused a massive catastrophe for the economy and for working people. The old internet never came back online. In 2031, the government teamed up with the newly consolidated supercorps we all know and love to put UnionNet online. And here we are, proud users of the most sophisticated work, logistics, and social platform unleashed on any population in history…”
Bek vaguely recalled reading bits and pieces in history class. She remembered it a little differently, but that was pretty common.
“It’s a little trickier than that, oldboy. But yeah, that’s the basic history. What your grandpa here skipped is the next 40-ish years. They pulled the plug on the connection between the Field’s Servers and the central network. But the Field still existed. And it kept running in the background.”
Bill turned from his whiskey and shot Buck a confused look.
“But they turned off the power. There was no hardware running. It wasn’t connected to anything. How was running?”
“I don’t know. Something to do with static generators and the ability to stay in sleep mode for extended periods of time. They cut the main power, cut the connections to the facility, locked the gates, and left. The building was abandoned for about a decade, just running on the lowest standby mode off of static reserves capturing free electrons from the atmosphere. Then the whole area just east of the Rockies fell apart. Local factions took over, bands of gangs, rich guys with military connections, whatever. Eventually some group took up residence in the old data center and fired up some generators. Some tech-heads in the group decided to plug in to the Field and see what the fuss was all about.”
“I’m guessing they went insane and killed everybody?” Bill interjected.
“No, man… Well, I mean eventually, yeah, there was some internal conflict and it ended in a shootout that left all but 5 of them dead. But that was unrelated. When they got into the Field, they found… Development. Growth. Evolution. They made contact with something.”
“What, like, with aliens or something?” Bek laughed.
“Fuck, I mean, I guess you could say that? There were like, sentient beings in there. They’d developed an entire society.”
“So, what, they were AI’s that were left to grow like some kind of digital fungus?” Bek was intrigued.
“What’s fungus?” Duff chimed in, still sitting on the floor, rubbing his wrist.
“Mushrooms, Duff,” Buck helped lift his friend up from the ground now, “But yeah, I guess you could say that. But it was more than intelligence. It was an awareness. These things claimed the Field had always been there. They say that we didn’t create it, we found it. It was always there.”
Bill scoffed again.
“What do you mean? Before the servers, before the coding, there shouldn't be anything. You're saying they tapped into some kind of pocket dimension or something?”
“Look, grampers, I don’t know how or why, but this is just what happened. I wasn’t there when they made the shift from net 3.0 to the Field or for the shutdown, or when they shifted to Union Net. And I know you’re not that old either. But I know what I’ve seen out at the Farm.”
He and Duff sat on two stools opposite Bek and Bill. He checked on his friend’s wrist and took another puff of his inhaler, taking a deep breath, holding it and then slowly releasing it before continuing.
“And I know what I’ve heard from the oldhead Psikos who were there when me and Duff first showed up. We were just a couple drug pushers back then. Now look at us.”
Bill raised his eyebrows and looked towards Bek.
"So... do you want to see it?"
Bill shook his head and stood up, "No, we need to get out of here. We've got a job to do. Sorry for the trouble but —"
"Yes. We want to see it," Bek interrupted, "Take us there now."