Darren paused the travel plan and the truck pulled to the side, slowly coming to a stop. When we let go of my hand, it seemed to be calming itself down, no longer clenching a fist so tight the nails were digging into the skin.
“Seems to have-”
Darren was cut off when the hand grabbed at his throat. He pulled my hand away easily, holding it in front of his face.
“It still panicked?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, “this just looks like the normal asshole behavior of my right brain.”
“I’m glad I’m on this side of you,” Laura said.
Except if it was you, it’d probably be molesting you right now.
“How long ya reckon this’ll last?” Darren asked, wincing as my arm struggled against him.
“It’s pretty random,” I said, “I’ve-
The hissing snarls of the fire-headed beast sitting next to me felt like daggers in my ears. Accelerating to impossible speeds, I gripped the wheel for support. The sky vomited its own viscera onto the crumbling earth.
The universe is dying. Always stuck in the process of dying, but never dead.
Everything should die. I hate it all. I can’t fucking stand any of it!
Images of the dead flashed before my eyes. Ripped out tongues. Flesh rending from bone. Empty eye sockets screaming the agony of the forever dying universe.
I saw my own hands wrapped around Sachi’s throat, choking the life out of her as she looked into my eyes with defeat and betrayal. She knew this was her last life. When she died this time, she would be set free from the eternal torment of living.
I could feel myself hate-fucking death into her, my semen corroding her body like acid, infecting her soul as I pounded my fist into her supple face. Tears of blood streamed from her eyes, the dying universe reflected in her quivering iris. Her skin sloughed off as I continued to thrust myself into her, sticky death worming its way up and engulfing her heart.
You fucking cunt!
I hate you!
I hate this dying universe!
Just fucking die you purposeless fucking piece of shit!
The feeling of her skull cracking when my fist impacted her flesh sent feelings of absolute loathing and wrath swelling through my mind.
When I pulled myself out of her and let the corpse topple to my feet, her soul remained floating in front of me, the tentacles of caustic death spreading through its formless ether. An otherworldly scream echoed through the entire dying universe as it melted away, putrid drips of life itself falling to the earth as death, annihilated by pure hatred.
And as soon as the soul died, everything fell away.
The world returned to normal, and that was somehow worse.
I’m free of this shitty left hemisphere. Only that useless piss ant gets panic attacks.
And here he is. Here he is sitting next to the twat-faced piece of shit who tried to sell us into slavery.
The angle is no good. I swear to every fake god these useless mortals have concocted, if this piece of shit were sitting to my right, I’d kill him.
Yeah, I’m the one who’s an asshole. Jesus Christ this whiny, boot licking left hemisphere is the worst of them all. Worse than Sachi. Worse than pussy ass Masaru. Worse than child-fucking Darren.
Here’s a thought for you when our minds come back together: I hate you. I fucking hate you. I’m going to enjoy killing you so much. And I know everything about you. One day I’m going to let them all know just how big of an asshole you really are, you motherfu-
I was cut off as all the thoughts rushed back together in the epiphany-déjà vu feeling, unable to discern if some of the thoughts were real or some were just things I’d dreamt. The memory of the panic attack felt just as real as if it had happened to me, yet I also remember it going away.
Panic attack…more like a rage attack…
Someone was talking, but I couldn’t understand them as my brain scrambled to make sense of the two competing narratives. The thoughts and images I’d had swirled together in an incomprehensible mess.
Sachi’s dying soul.
“Christ…” my vision blurred a moment, and I thought I might pass out, but all the pieces of the narrative finally started making some kind of sense.
“Well, that was mighty fuckin’ strange,” I heard Darren’s voice.
“Not half as strange as it is for me,” I said, “let’s go.”
“You’re two people and I can’t sleep,” Laura said, letting her head hang lazily again with the excitement over, “yet I think Darren is the sickest in the head between the three of us.”
Chapter 10
Cool February breeze lifted the habitually stagnant air settled over Cortez. The small town had grown immensely in population in just the past decade. People migrated from the southwest, especially from southern California, due to flooding from the rising oceans and the increasingly hostile climate. There were more people than there were places to live in the Liberation of Colorado, giving rise to multi-family residences and land being rented out cheaply for use as shanty towns and cramped trailer parks. Population growth outpaced infrastructure growth, which often left the air pungent with various odors from human habitation. But I still needed to get out for a bit, and I was glad for the breeze.
It was five in the evening when I left the house that Akira had begun setting up as our headquarters. A two-story with a basement, situated in the residential area several blocks from downtown. The house was meant to be rented, but Akira offered twice as much as the property was worth to just buy. That way we wouldn’t have to share it with other families or answer to a landlord.
As I turned off our driveway onto the sidewalk, I found the sun lowering on the horizon. I held up my RFID chip to the scanner and a green light went on, indicating the turnstile activated. Using the sidewalk on our street was an addon perk of owning property on a road owned by the Road Front Brothers, a local company that owned several roads in Cortez and Durango. I went through the gate and got on the sidewalk.
A hundred feet down the path, I passed by a Road Front Brothers pickup station. A woman got out of a self-driving taxi emblazoned with the RFB logo, a flat screen sticking up off the roof of the vehicle showing silent advertisements for other companies. Very few of the cars were owned by the passengers, as the RFB company required a special license to ride cars not owned by RFB.
After a few blocks, I turned off of the residential street onto the busier road. This one was owned by a company called Liberty Unlimited, which was owned by Brandon Callahan. He owned LoC Security’s main competitor, Liberty Protection. I did not have the subscription to use the sidewalk, but I was able to use their free service. Usually this meant having to endure advertisements constantly popping up on my ARs, but it was fairly easy to find ad-blockers.
Because of the free service option, there were more personally owned vehicles on this road. Parking spaces on both sides were always full, meters running. The median and the area between the road and sidewalk were lined with rows of solar panels. Digital displays on them advertised the rate per kilowatt-hour in several types of currency – CSA, PRA, and Benecorp’s fiat currencies, gold, and several types of cryptocurrency – with places to plug the cars in in front of each parking space.
I looked down at my feet as I moved, listening for a moment to the quiet sounds of electric cars, distant voices, and rustling branches. I breathed in heavily, exhaling slowly. The absence of people – of intruders – felt liberating for a brief moment. There was always someone in the house we had just moved into. They were intruders in my life, a temporary incursion the way a robber or rapist interrupted your life only to leave without a second thought.
But it never took long for my liberation to turn back into isolation.
Part of me yearned for the distraction of our border crossing. It brought things into focus. The material comfort of our new base of operations allowed for contemplation. I was alone. Surrounded by mortals with mortal concerns. And Sachi w
as gone. She never cared in the first place.
And so your solution is to offer immortality to everyone.
“You’re not going to leave that one alone, are you?” I muttered.
I can’t wait to see what everyone says when you tell them what your plan for all this is, Evita said.
“Do you have a better plan?”
Just tell yourself that you’re not actually alone, she said, you have your other hemisphere now. Can’t you keep each other company?
“My split brain…,” I sighed, “Everything I say or do is…shrouded in suspicion. In paranoia.”
The dry pavement scraped beneath my shoes. Houses on either side with roofs covered in solar panels stood like silent prison guards, watching me march toward my execution. An execution that would last forever. In the reflective surfaces of the solar panels I could see the faces of Akira and Masaru, Laura and Yukiko. All of them old, wrinkled, crippled. Hostages of King Time, decaying prisoners in His interminable dungeon. Yet for them, they could expect the clemency of death.
For me, the sentence is eternity.
I stopped walking a moment, looking up at the darkening sky. A handful of stars dared weather the onslaught of unnatural light – scattered like withering corpses on an old battlefield, casualties in humanity’s endless struggle to insulate itself from nature. Stark reminders of how trivial all of this really is. A reminder that I will forever bear witness to the events of this insignificant speck of dust. That I am condemned, by no one, to forever experience the desolation of human frailty and malice, for no reason. A prisoner without a judge, a crime, or a conviction.
I sighed and continued walking. As usual, there was nothing to do but look for distractions. No matter how preposterous the future became, my own absurd situation would persist. All the world may be a stage, but I was the one in the audience. The observer.
“What else is there to do?” I asked quietly, “but try to find some…some entertainment in all of this? Some distraction?”
The sole cause of your unhappiness, Evita paraphrased Pascal, is that you are unable to sit quietly alone.
As I strode slowly down the sidewalk, I forced my mind onto something else. A diversion.
The Liberation of Colorado. It was an interesting experiment in philosophy. There was no government and no laws. A society based on the ideas of natural rights and property rights rather than rights by government fiat. It was interesting for me because I had witnessed how humans behave under tribal egalitarianism, under authoritarianism, under lawless warlords, communism and fascism, democracy and autocracy, God and anti-clericalism…but I had never seen an attempt at anarchy held together purely by philosophical self-organization.
The results were interesting.
As I neared the downtown area, the sidewalk became busier. Sections of it were demarcated for people renting space to peddle their wares from small booths. Many sold trinkets, crafts, art, music, clothes, electronics, software, or offered various professional services. Some of the booths were laid out with jars filled with different types of drugs – alcohol, benzos, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, Shift – along with paraphernalia. Independently verified drug purity and market prices advertised in bright colors on the side of the jars.
Other booths were laid out with pistols and assault rifles, mostly 3D prints, as well as ammunition and various accessories. Still other booths were crowded with women beckoning men to come over and pay for a good time. Signs naming hourly rates in various types of currency, alongside rules of etiquette, were posted all over their booths.
Further kiosks sold hacking hardware, various chemical reagents for DIY laboratories, pornography, chances to bet money on myriad games, and all manner of food and drinks. And yet still other booths had people preaching the sins of all these vices, handing out rehab pamphlets and offering to sell bibles, alcoholics anonymous literature, and self-help lectures to get people to clean up their lives. The crowds of people in this open-air bazaar made navigating the downtosn streets a feat of maneuverability.
I passed by the hospital where Doctor Taylor worked. A screen out front advertised that they had type O blood, five kidneys, seven heart valves, four Achilles tendons, a lung and two livers for sale at a discount. They were also running a special on both sperm and ova from Hispanic donors.
Everyone in the crowd conspicuously open carried a weapon, making sure to let everyone around them know that they were packing. I followed behind three men with 3D printed M16s hanging from a strap off their back. All three had a white armband showing a gold sword pointing down, the handle becoming a Christian cross – the symbol of The Crusaders.
Almost everyone had an armband wrapped around their bicep with a symbol on it, indicating which gang they belonged to. The first symbol I had noticed were the ones that Aaron Reynolds and his people wore – a Colorado flag with a padlock inside the large Colorado ‘C’ in the middle. It was the symbol for LoC Security. That same symbol was posted in the front windows of many houses and businesses, as well as on the sides of cars. Another popular one was a Colorado flag with the torch from the Statue of Liberty held in front of it – Liberty Protection.
LoC Security or Liberty Protection two were found in roughly half of the houses and businesses. The other half were occupied by an assortment of other symbols, which also showed up on the armbands of many people walking about the city.
Among the various factions were The Crusaders. Their website said they accepted any members, but most of the people I saw with this symbol were white men. Another was a black armband with a white skull and two crossed rifles beneath it, for a faction called the Southern Rebels, who seemed to be for the protection of whites who immigrated from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. A smaller faction was the Cortez Crucible, their armband being the colors of the Colorado flag with a yellow Gadsden snake proclaiming ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ below it. They only allowed people who had been living in Colorado for at least twenty years to join, and most of their members seemed to be well off business owners.
More popular factions amongst the non-whites were two factions called The Syndicate and Hijos Descarriados de México. The former was a left-wing anarchist group, using a black armband with a red anarchy symbol. The latter was made up of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans who fled from the southwest region, offering protection against the right-wing factions, and using a yellow armband with a green bundle of arrows, a white Christian cross, and a red rifle.
One that popped up quite often in conjunction with other gangs was the gold anarchy symbol with the ‘No Masters’ written beneath it. I learned that this was the symbol of those who supported the referendum to abolish the government in Colorado. As a gang it was fairly loose-knit, meaning that for protection the people usually joined other gangs along with it or hired a protection firm.
Two street gangs from before the referendum – the motorcycle gang Sons of Silence and the Latino gang Gallant Knights Insane – also cropped up. From what I could tell, they had become at least semi-legitimate, although still looked down on by the other factions.
The rarest, though, was the symbol that Salia and her transgenic friends wore – the blue armband with the gold double-helix symbol. I learned that it was for a transgenic faction called Pandemic Evolution, or PanEvo for short, and was formed to protect the transgenic crowd. I had seen a handful of other symbols at least once, but none of them seemed to have the same membership numbers.
“I don’t understand all the gangs,” Laura had said a week earlier after I told her about what I’d found out about the symbols everyone was wearing.
“It’s simple,” I said, “without a dedicated police force, people need other ways of protecting themselves. Professional firms like LoC Security and Liberty Protection cost money. When people just form into a gang, the only cost of admittance is that you’ll protect others in the gang and participate in retaliation when the need arises.”
“Would it be a good idea fo
r us to join one of the gangs?” Laura asked, “Akira is ordering a lot of expensive stuff. Might be a lot of people who wouldn’t mind us.”
“I’ve thought about that, too,” I said, “I was going to speak with Colonel Reynolds and see what he thought.”
“You think they’ll take us on as clients?” Laura asked, “aren’t we considered terrorists?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” I said, “but I imagine that with enough money they’ll overlook those details.”
I had been right, of course. Colonel Aaron Reynolds put me in contact with one of their intake receptionists and account managers and it ended up being less money than I thought it would take. They immediately supplied me with enough client armbands to give to Akira, Masaru, Yukiko, Laura, and Darren, and myself. It also gave us access to their client mesh network, which put their symbol next to our names when people looked at us with their ARs, and allowed us to get in immediate contact with LoC Security and let them locate us with GPS. They also offered cyberprotection, giving us their proprietary script blockers, VPNs, virus and malware protection, firewalls, and other addons. As far as I knew, Akira was still working on hacking most of them, but had been able to breach some.
“You’re one of the forty-eights, no?” a voice broke me from my reverie.
I looked over to a young Indian man with a LoC Security symbol showing up on my ARs. He took the final drag off a Marijuana joint before snuffing the roach out in the receptacle in front of the coffee shop where he was loitering.
“Would I be wasting my time if I denied it?” I asked, “or do you already know the answer to that question?”
He grinned, “you’re quite young.”
I shrugged, “terrorist groups recruit kids younger than me.”
He shook his head, “I don’t mean young to be a member. I mean young to be a lieutenant.”
“What makes you think I’m a lieutenant?”
“There must be something special about you,” he said, taking a step closer, “for your people to make a stop in the DRC just to pick you up.”
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