Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  Still, he was at the end of the day a slave, and as the billowing canvas tents of the market appeared down the road before him he felt a tide of gloom come over him. He had been an owned man for twenty-five years now, and the worst part of it was that he was coming to accept it. He could rationalize to himself that Karl was a hard but fair man; he had, on any number of occasions, and he assumed that he would likely continue to do so. That rationalization would not change the basic course of his life, though: he was a slave, and he would die a slave. He tripped on a jagged chunk of asphalt and cursed bitterly. As he made his way over the rougher portions of the road and into the market, he felt a pall over the day.

  The market was fairly busy; the farm families from miles around were finishing up the purchases they needed for the day, and were socializing in the wide central common area. Weathered wives and muscled farm lads conversed on the splintery picnic tables, gabbing about weather and growth over relics of days long gone. The servants of the richer farmers did not join in the conversations but stood off to the side, resting up for the journey back and passing the occasional low-spoken word amongst themselves. Richard could tell the servants apart from the others by the simple expedient of their hair: the servants had none. It was a mark of Richard’s worth and prestige as a slave that he was granted the affectation of his natural hair.

  Surrounding them, tents ringed the common area with rickety booths set up in front of each one. Men and women stood behind these booths silently, eyeing the crowd; some, those who were not locals, were already packing their goods into crates for the long journey to the next market place. Had Richard come to the market hours earlier, in the height of the morning, all of these merchants would be hectoring the crowd, loudly hawking their merchandise to a much larger group of potential buyers. Richard preferred to come late in the day, however; he hated large crowds, and he hated being sold to in such an obvious, crude manner. There were parts of his former life that still held fast, he reflected.

  He approached the booth of a merchant he knew well; he was a local man, silent but trustworthy, who dealt in both restored goods of the old world and substitute items for goods that could no longer be made. The man had a selection of oils pressed from various plants and animals; they were always good quality and the merchant had assured Richard on any number of occasions that they all came from highly reputable sources. This was not something Richard was inclined to care much about, since the oils always seemed to do what they were intended to do. He asked the man his advice and quietly paid for the suggested oil with a handful of irregular silver coins; the man weighed them expertly in one hand and nodded his acceptance. Richard pocketed the oil and headed into the common area to find something to eat before he began making the trip back. He would be cutting it close with the schedule but he reckoned that he could afford to grab a bite before he began to walk back out into the wastes.

  As he walked into the sparse crowd he noticed a tent that he didn’t recognize. This was not a completely unknown phenomenon, as roughly a quarter of the tents in the market were of the mobile variety, following the caravans that made their slow way around the Great Lakes. This one was different, however; there seemed to be a low hum coming from it, a force of some kind that drew him towards it. He forgot about getting food and decided to investigate this new tent. He had no money of his own and would not be able to afford any of the interesting merchandise that this new tent might offer, but he would at least be able to browse, until the merchant kicked him out.

  The flap was heavy and the interior was dark; Richard had to wait awkwardly for his eyes to adjust to the much lower light levels. This was not helped by the flare of light that came from something on the other side of the tent. He covered his eyes, pained, and began to regret his decision to enter. Once his eyes adjusted however, he felt a peculiar, gripping shock run through him. The tent seemed to be filled with old electronic devices, a veritable smorgasbord of things that Richard had forgotten about. There were laptops piled up on each other in shaky stacks; bins full of circuit-board odds and ends; a shaky-looking rack that seemed to be displaying flat, grey batteries of various sizes and shapes. What had flared light at him upon entry, however, was what looked for all the world like a large LCD flatscreen monitor. Around the monitor was a neatly put-together rack of hard drives, servers, UPS batteries, and daisy-chained USB hubs studded with a panoply of USB drives in a rainbow of colours. He stood in the entryway with his mouth open, too shocked to understand what he was looking at. The hum that he had heard from outside had grown louder, but there was no indication as to where it was coming from.

  Part of the tent wall pulled away and after a moment’s gaping Richard realized that it had been a curtain. On the other side of the curtain a large man in weathered cowboy boots and nothing else was riding a stationary bicycle for all he was worth. Sweat was flying off of his lean, muscled form and running down onto the frame of the bike. He panted and looked at the person who had entered his tent for a moment without speaking, continuing to pedal.

  “Hold on a second,” the man called out, and something about his voice tickled at Richard’s ears. The man seemed familiar...

  Then he was off the bicycle and walking towards Richard, his chest heaving and his manhood swinging back and forth loosely. Richard found that his mouth simply would not close, and that heart-attack shock of recognition shot through him like an old friend. Richard had last seen the man over a quarter-century ago, buying up the entire stock of Richard’s electronic storage inventory. The past walked into his present and left him speechless.

  Troy Larkson stopped in front of Richard and put his hands on his hips.

  “Well, now,” he drawled. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  TWO

  Richard stuck his hand out automatically. “Richard Adams, Mr. Larkson. Do you still have any of the equipment I sold you all those years ago?”

  Troy grinned, and then began to chuckle with an awkward, uncertain tone. He accepted Richard’s hand and rubbed the back of his head with his other.

  “Well, uh, let me get some pants on, ok?” he suggested. He walked back to the area with the bicycle and pulled the curtain shut. When he stepped out a moment later he was wearing a pair of ragged denim shorts covered in black, sooty stains. His grin had also become much more certain, and he was wagging his finger at Richard.

  “You’re the guy from that electronics store in St. Catharines!” he exclaimed. “I got the collection started at your place!”

  Richard nodded. “You did, bought every last one of my hard drives as I recall. You were going to, uh, download the internet, was it?”

  Troy laughed and clapped his hands. “I did just that, as a matter of fact!” he replied exuberantly. “Well, the parts of it that mattered. I mean, you aren’t just going to go download all the message boards, right? What the fuck would the point to that be?”

  Richard laughed and it was with considerably more delight than he’d been accustomed to lately.

  “So what did you download then?” he asked, and then stared around with a sudden thought. “How are you getting power in here? We’re nowhere near an electrical station – miles and miles, really”.

  Troy looked uncomprehending for a moment and then he realized what Richard was talking about. He gestured around vaguely.

  “Batteries, man, all sorts of batteries. So many batteries we had. I scavenged them from warehouses and rigged up the whole thing you see over there. I use the bicycle as a generator and charge them about once every other day or so when I’m stopped”. He shrugged. “Want to look up something? I usually charge for access but I’ll let you use it, seeing as how we go way back and all. I grabbed all of Wikipedia, and the eHow wiki, and as many infographics archives and ebook stashes as I could find. I have any book that was ever translated into digital form, most of the movies and music that was on there...the useful stuff and the artsy stuff, you get me?” Richard nodded. “Alright, so is there anything you want to look up?”r />
  Richard suddenly felt extremely shy. “I...I don’t really know. I have no idea. It’s...it’s like you’ve offered me the sum of human knowledge to choose from. How can any one man choose what to pull from that?”

  Troy nodded sagely. “Infinite choice, man. That’s why most people who come to me are looking for something in specific, and are willing to pay for it”. He looked around. “Tell you what, since you’re here and all, look around the place. If you see something you like that’s not too expensive, it’s yours. Deal?”

  Richard chuckled. “I don’t know how much of a deal that is for you, but I accept”. He looked around. “You have a lot of stuff in here”.

  “That I do,” Troy said as he turned his attention to a mouse-and-keyboard set that he had mounted in front of the monitor. He made some clicks and a smattering of keystrokes and a sugar-sweet tinkle of Debussy filled the tent at a low volume. It threw Richard’s concentration off as he browsed; it had been so long since he had heard recorded music that it seemed unreal to him. He picked through a small bin of cracked and chipped junction points – switches, hubs, routers, and the like – and tried to catch up to his thoughts. He felt as though he had stepped into the temple of a shoddy, run-down deity that still had the ability to perform miracles.

  “Can we change the music?” he asked suddenly. Troy laughed and began clattering at the keyboard once more.

  “Sure thing,” he said amiably. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Hah,” Richard laughed, “we come back to the same problem as before. When I can choose anything, I can choose nothing”.

  “Well, give me a feeling, then”

  “A feeling? Well, give me something that rocks, I guess. Some old rock n’ roll”. Richard stopped and considered his words. “There’s a phrase I haven’t said in a while”.

  Troy rubbed his chin. “Rock n’ roll, eh? Bottomless hole, rock n’ roll, take me on a blatant doom trip, yeah?”

  Richard turned his head to stare at him quizzically. Troy searched through a list of artists and albums and stopped on one. He gave one last double-click and the long-lost sound of a thick electric bass and drum filled the tent with demonic force. Richard grinned as soon as he heard it, and then nearly split his face in half when the distorted electric guitar kicked in. He listened along to the song with rapture, and as the album continued he returned to his browsing, with a much more positive outlook on the task. Every song that came out of Troy’s speakers seemed like the best song Richard had ever heard; the hooks were always massive, epic affairs and yet the songs still managed to get in and out in about three minutes.

  “Who is this?” he asked finally, his finger tracing the outline of what had once been a high-class laptop, the kind he would have once sold to an aspiring mobile gamer. He reran those words lovingly through his mind multiple times; he seemed to latch on to them as though they possessed some sort of talismanic property.

  “This is Guided By Voices,” Troy replied, “no big deal, just the greatest rock and roll band ever to walk the Earth”.

  Richard snorted. “If they were the greatest I would have heard of them at some point, I think”.

  “You sure about that?”

  Richard stopped in his perusal and turned to look at Troy.

  “Yeah, probably,” he replied, although he didn’t feel confident about this assertion. He had never really been more than a casual music fan, and he’d normally just put on the radio and listened to whatever was on there. He supposed that there must have been other music being played beyond what he’d heard, but he’d always just assumed that the best stuff got filtered onto the radio. He’d never heard this stuff, though, and that gave him some pause.

  He came to a table piled with old tablets; he remembered that they had been the big thing in computing right before the plague. They had been little computers you navigated with your fingertip, and they’d been cheaper than a laptop. His mind had just gotten around to dredging up the memory of the tablet that he’d made fun of Samantha for bringing along on their journey when it was suddenly there, on the top of the nearest pile. He stopped and traced the outline of it with his finger, amazed and a little frightened.

  “They were pretty prolific,” Troy was saying. “I mean, by the time you listen to one of these songs Bob Pollard would have written three others. He just couldn’t stop, it was like he had to, you know?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Richard replied vaguely. He had only the most basic idea of what Troy was saying. It was Samantha’s tablet. No, he berated himself, it’s not Samantha’s tablet. It’s the same model as Samantha’s tablet. The odds of it being Samantha’s, well...

  “You like the tablets?” Troy asked. “I got a bunch of them at the last stop I made. Buncha scavengers in Brantford, at the ruins of that cult”. Richard felt his heart stop, and he looked at Troy with a look that must have been quite strange, since Troy gave him an odd look in response.

  “You alright?” he asked, concerned. Richard nodded shakily, trying to blink his way through his racing thoughts.

  “These scavengers...I mean, what could they have found at the ruins? They must have been pretty picked over, right?”

  Troy grinned. “Well, that’s the thing. You’re right, of course. McAllister ran the place over pretty thoroughly during the wars, and the scavs have picked over anything that McAllister’s men left behind. These guys, though, they claim that they found a secret passage in the basement – by accident, as it turned out. They were resting in the basement because there was some pack of wild dogs or something after them. One of ‘em was trying to catch their breath and put their hands on one of the walls and realized that it wasn’t a wall at all. They found a little passageway through there that led to what must have been, like, a fallout shelter or something at one point, at least from the way they tell it. Biggest room in there was weird, painted all white, and if you closed the door it was white too, so the room would have been pretty wild if you were locked in there”. Richard shuddered but said nothing. “There were other rooms in there, too, although they were hidden behind false walls. One of ‘em had a bunch of knapsacks and such in it, lookin’ like they were taken from refugees after the plague. People say that cult that McAllister took out used to kidnap people and eat them, so I guess it wasn’t a huge surprise that they kept all their stuff hidden somewhere”.

  Richard’s head was swimming and he felt the sudden urgent need to sit down. He shot his arm out and caught a stiff lean on the table. Troy took a step back.

  “You ok, man?” he asked, worried. “You’re not, like, catching or nothing, are you?” Richard laughed weakly.

  “No, nothing like that,” he wheezed. “That, uh, cult, they never ate people. Nothing like that”.

  Troy peered at him sharply. “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  “I was part of it for a while,” Richard replied simply. “Right before they got crushed by the Republic. That’s actually when I got taken into slavery”.

  “Oh, wow,” Troy replied, suddenly very interested. “So, like, you saw the whole thing go down. So, were you there when the bridge blew up too early and trapped everyone on the wrong side of the river?”

  Richard laughed harder, shaking his head and trying to conceal the tears running down his face.

  “No, that was on purpose,” he said between bouts of laughter. “I blew that bridge early so the normal people – the ones the cult had kidnapped or brainwashed or what have you – so they could get away. Make a clean break. Before the Republic got them”.

  Troy gaped at him, surprised beyond all words. “You don’t say...” he said, amazed. “Well, they sure got away, all right”. Richard stopped laughing and cocked his head to the side.

  “Did they?” he asked. “I never found out what happened to them after that night”.

  “That’s not surprising,” Troy said, “the Republic doesn’t really like to talk about its defeats. Those boys in Niagara like to talk all about it, though. The Republic sent
men to follow your people all the way along the lakes, picking off the stragglers, but when they tried to cross over into Niagara they found out they weren’t the only army in the area”.

  Richard couldn’t help but smile. “The Niagara Confederation stopped them?” Troy nodded.

  “Stopped them and told them that if they kept going they would be decimated and turned back to bring word to London that such invasions wouldn’t be tolerated. Come to think of it, I think they mark it as a feast holiday down there. I haven’t been out that way in a couple of years, but I seem to recall that”.

  Richard laughed. He felt a strange, vibrant form of relief grow inside of him. “I guess it worked out after all,” he said, his voice shaking slightly.

  “I guess so,” Troy replied. He gestured at the tablet. “So you might have known someone that this stuff belonged to. I only took the electronics from the scavs – nothing else I would bother carrying, only other stuff they had was a bunch of flashlights and shit. I’ve got enough flashlights to turn midnight into noon, so I just took the laptops and tablets and called it a trade”.

  Richard picked up the tablet with a sense of reverent awe. It might be Samantha’s after all. There was only one real way to find out. He pressed the power button but the tablet remained dead to the world. He felt disappointment rise up his gorge, hot and unlovely.

  “Oh, hey man,” Troy said, “batteries on that thing won’t have any juice in them. I’ve got the charger with it, though, and you can charge it on the bicycle if you want”.