MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets

by George Saoulidis

  Ty couldn’t believe his luck. He ran home and took a shower.

  “What is so important that you had to show me in person? We have texts and email and stuff, you know,” Sklippie whined as he came inside the Shoe.

  Ty beamed at him.

  “What?”

  Ty pointed up. There was a sign there, ‘Shoemaker Labs.’

  Sklippie opened his mouth, but had nothing.

  “And this is what we’ve made!” Ty blurted out and shoved a tablet in his face. The video showed an intro of Shoemaker Labs, with Ace rattling off their projects in detail. Sklippie’s idea for an external blood supply. His low-cost skin glue, that activates with ultraviolet light. And went on and on.

  It looked kinda awesome.

  “This is great, right?” Ty said.

  “Yeah, it’s good. Do we have any feedback from people?”

  Ty spat out the words, “Pft! Do we have any feedback, he asks…”

  Ace glared at him, but smiled nonetheless.

  “How about enough to remake the defibrillator drone and start working on the other projects too?” Ty announced.

  “What the- Really?” Sklippie said.

  “Oh, really.” Ty put one arm over his friend’s shoulder and guided him inside. “And the best part is, we’ve got people around to support us.”

  Mr. Papadopoulos waited with his son. He looked full of life despite his enormous bulk. His son looked miserable.

  He carried a Greek flag.

  “Nico, what did we say?” Mr. Papadopoulos said.

  “Asklepios, please carry the flag.”

  The End

  BOO! A Halloween Story

  There is something seriously wrong with their faces, mama.

  I’m writing this in an email instead of telling you on videochat. I’ll explain why in a bit.

  I’ve been in Athens for just two months. Honestly, it’s all very overwhelming. Back at our horio there were what, five hundred people around? Here there are five hundred people at any given time around you at Papagou avenue.

  It’s… different. I was used to knowing everyone’s face, or at least having a passing familiarity with everyone I see each day. Here the sheer mass of people is crazy, mama. You see so many people every day when you go out, that you just tune the faces out. Maybe it’s impossible to handle all these faces, they are strangers after all, so we look away and ignore them.

  We forget about them. But does the brain ever truly forget anything? Where do the faces in our dreams come from, if not from passing strangers in our lives?

  It all started at October 31st. Halloween morning. Becky, my roommate, barged in and demanded I help her with the decorations.

  “Come on you sleepyhead,” she said, pulling the covers, “we’ve got so many things to do before the Halloween party tonight!”

  “Ugh.” I covered my eyes from the light. “We don’t celebrate Halloween in Greece.”

  “Sure we do,” she said.

  I noticed at that point she was wearing a witch’s hat. “Nice costume. Where’s the rest of it?”

  She glowered at me and showed off her sexy witch outfit. It bore the concept of a witch costume, for sure. The essentials. With bits missing, and skin exposed.

  Becky was one of my five roommates. She was the one who welcomed me and made me feel at home. It was tough, adjusting to the city life, and Becky knew that. She was from the countryside too, but had adjusted a little too well to the Athens lifestyle these past two years.

  “Wake up, now, mister. We’ve got two Halloween parties tonight!”

  “Two?” I rubbed my face.

  “Yes, the one at the villa which I’m decorating, and the after-party at the cemetery. All the cool guys will be there.”

  “I see. We wouldn’t wanna miss the cool guys.”

  “Here’s your frappe,” she conjured up a glass from behind her back.

  “Oh. Niiice.” I sipped and took in the caffeine.

  She waited. “Well?”

  “I’m not coming.”

  “Why the fuck not?” she exclaimed.

  “Dunno. First of all, as I said, Halloween is not something we celebrate in Greece, so it’s dumb. Second of all, it sounds like, too much, you know?”

  She put her hands on her waist. “Aren’t you an anthropology student?”

  “Yes…” I said carefully.

  “And aren’t you supposed to integrate yourself into foreign cultures and study their customs?”

  “Yes,” I sighed. I saw where this was going.

  “If this were, let’s say, Japan, wouldn’t you mix in with the locals and experience as much of the local culture as possible?”

  “Don’t try to change my mind with proper logic and curiosity prodding!” I joked.

  She waited, eyebrow raised.

  “Yes! Okay, sheesh. I’m coming.”

  An hour later I found myself up a ladder, hanging up bat decorations in an abandoned villa.

  “I really like this place.”

  “It’s nice,” I agreed, balancing on the precarious aluminium ladder we had found. The villa had lost a lot of its former glory, but it was nice indeed. Lots of wood, now with fraying out varnish, latte coloured walls, now riddled with graffiti and soot. Even in this abandoned state, you could tell that this was a fine sample of architecture.

  Becky inhaled deeply. “It has history, you know.” She straightened a picture frame on the wall. There were supposed to be five of them, but only one remained, and that was cracked. “Marika Kotopouli was a patron of the arts, a real thespian.”

  “I didn’t think chemical engineers liked theatre,” I teased. Five bats hung, a million more to go.

  “Of course we do, silly! What does one’s profession have to do with culture? You can be a scientist and a drama queen at the same time, you know,” she said, spinning in place and holding her skirt.

  I stared. I did so at the risk of falling down the ladder, but it was worth it. “I agree. Tell me more about her.”

  “Well… They say she took her first baby-steps on stage. She was charismatic, drawing all eyes on her, performing usually tragedies and classics. She lived a crazy, scandalous life,” Becky said, walking up the wooden stairs and coming down as if there was a soirée downstairs, waiting for her. “She loved a politician, they sent each other steamy letters, their relationship was a roller-coaster. He was murdered in the end, it tore her heart,” Becky whispered, acting it out. “Then she married another man. She never wanted kids. Theatre was her life. She taught some of the greatest Greek actors, Dimitris Horn, Irene Papas, Dinos Iliopoulos. She threw lavish parties and everybody who was somebody attended, of course.”

  As she spoke, my veil showed suggested links and looping videos of the people she mentioned. “I can see why you admire her,” I smiled. “But why do the party here? Doesn’t the university have halls for such things?”

  “On campus? Pfft! Where’s the fun in that? This is where history happened. This is where ghosts will come tonight and feast.”

  “You don’t actually believe that.”

  “No, I don’t. But it sets the mood. Jeez, Anthropology, it’s Halloween! Be theatrical, just this once. Do it for me.”

  I couldn’t refuse anything when she fluttered her eyelids like that. “I’ll be theatrical,” I said, and waved the bat decorations around. The ladder wobbled and Becky rushed and held it in place.

  “Oh gods, thank you. I think I’m done with this room, okay?” I said and climbed down.

  “Mmmkay, it’s good. Equidistant. See? That’s why I chose you to help me out!” she tapped me with her wand.

  “It’s fun.”

  “Don’t worry about spending the night all alone, you’ll know me at the party tonight. Plus the guys from home,” she assured me sensing my hesitation. She was referring to the other roommates. Sure, I knew them, but not so far as to call them friends. But I admit it would be nice to see a familiar face. “Come with me,” she said pulling me by the hand, an
d I followed her up the stairs.

  We got out to the balcony of the first floor. It was wooden. “Won’t this collapse or something?”

  Becky eyed me for a second, then jumped up and down many times and I flinched every single one. The thud of the wood travelled up my spine. The balcony held. Yay for craftsmanship.

  “You need a mask for tonight. I’ve made it a necessity for the invite. No buts, I can’t have you breaking my rules. How will others respect me if I can’t handle my own buddies?”

  “Oh, we’re buddies now?” I teased. “Fine. What sort of mask? Will it itch? I get all sweaty and stuffy, I avoid masks.”

  “No! It’s an augmented reality mask. Here.” She waved and tapped her wrist, then a cube appeared on her palm.

  At this point, mama, I need to explain this to you so you’ll understand what happened. Remember two years ago on my sixteenth birthday when you bought me those glasses? I played around with them for a couple of days but then they gathered dust on my desk, there was nothing to actually do with them at horio. They showed you AR, right? The veil, they call it, because it’s a digital overlay that falls atop the physical world. The veil is also shared, seen by anybody with either glasses or cybereyes. Everyone here has cybereyes, mama. I got them too. I didn’t want to at first, cause they were expensive, but Becky got me into one of those Apollo Medical studies and I finally caved. They gave them to me for free. Sometimes advertisements show up in my field of view, and I just swipe them away. Other than that, veil objects are translucent and useful. You can’t go anywhere in the city without using the veil, mama. You look at a bus stop, the arrival times show up. You look at a person, his public social media profile pops up. You check out a pair of sneakers and you can order it right there and then. It’s magic, mama. I was overwhelmed at first, but it’s funny how quickly you get used to AR. It feels so natural, you don’t even notice.

  So, an AR object is called an ARO, Augmented Reality Object. The cube that appeared in Becky’s hand was an ARO, and we could both see it, and she could pass it on to me.

  I took the ARO in my hands and its data showed up. BOO! A Halloween Veil Mask To Die For. Accept permission request? Y/N.

  “Why does it need permissions?”

  “Cause it loads your social profile and crafts a mask that suits you perfectly. Come on, activate it!”

  “Where’s yours?”

  She said nothing. She tapped the cube in her palm and stared up at me. Her face suddenly bulged out and was replaced by an ugly witch. A total hag, with a crooked nose, a big wart on the tip of it, greenish brown skin and black eyes.

  “Am I pretty?” She smiled, her teeth crooked and yellow. “Sexy?” she asked softly.

  “Ugh…” I couldn’t tell her the truth. Or was a good friend supposed to say it, even though it might sting a little? Or a lot?

  “Come on, it’s only for tonight. It’s Halloween. The spell wears off at sunup,” she said with meaning.

  I sighed. “Whatever.” I accepted the BOO!

  Nothing happened. At least, nothing I could feel. Becky’s eyes twinkled. It was a weird sight in that ugly witch face. The mask, if you could call it that, was perfect. It moved with every expression, I could see Becky’s trademark snides and eyebrow raises. But the face itself, was that of an ugly hag. Also, mama, it wasn’t transparent. This one was opaque, unlike all other veil effects. The BOO! was a custom piece of software, probably something hacked by a computer engineering student. All of the stuff you see in the veil are, well, veily. Transparent, for safety reasons. You don’t want stuff blocking your view when you drive or cross the street after all. It was only in hacked AROs that you saw opaque stuff in the veil.

  “How do I look?” I said, touching my face. I couldn’t feel anything of course. It was all a digital illusion, which only others with the veil could see.

  She gulped. “You look great, actually. It suits you perfectly.”

  “What am I? Not a zombie, right? I’m so scared of zombies.”

  “Not a zombie, promise. Honestly, the mask is perfect for you. Trust me.”

  “Okay,” I nodded, meaning I trusted her. But she trusted me too despite our short time of knowing each other, and I had just betrayed that trust by not telling her she looked ugly.

  So what did I look like?

  Night came, and people started showing up in neat social groups. My anthropologist studies forced me to catalogue them as they came. The artists. The hunter-gatherers. The geeky artisans. Becky had guests to entertain, so I was left alone. They all wore BOO! masks, and thankfully they also had their names pop up on the veil so you knew who everyone was. It was impossible to tell otherwise, unless you knew someone’s voice too well.

  Students from all the schools showed up, it said so in their profiles. Biology students, Chemists, Pharmacists, Physicists, Mathematicians, Theologians, Computer geeks and of course my very own Philosophy department with all it contained. That was the Kapodistriako University. The National Technical University of Athens, or what people called it, Metsovio, was full of students. They too joined our party. There was always a sort of tribal chasm thing going on, but nobody would skip on free booze. Plus, it was a chance to rub their knowledge in our philosophical faces. Becky was from there, Chemical Engineering, so she acted as a hostess and bridged the gap between the unis. It didn’t hurt that we had lots of girls in class.

  Those girls all showed up the skimpiest outfits the chilly weather and public nudity laws allowed. The party was on in an instant, augmented reality masks on and drinks on hand. I wasn’t the only kind of help Becky had drafted, a legion of students showed up as soon as it was dark and set up the DJ/VJ set, coolers with drinks and smoke machines. The DJ/VJ was two people, in the sense that one was playing the music and the other tapped furiously on his laptop and hacked our veils. He made us see lights like in a nightclub, made ghosts pop out of the wooden floor, made the bats I hung up earlier appear to flutter and follow you with their glowing eyes, made our drinks seem like boiling potions and spiders crawl on the walls.

  I was spooked all the time.

  I could see now why Becky had chosen this place for Halloween night. Sure, the same tricks would have worked somewhere else too, but the ambiance of the abandoned villa really sold the haunted house vibe. You didn’t know if the floor was creaking because it was real wood battered down by the years, or if it was a sound effect from the Spookmeister. That’s what he called himself, many times. He made sure we all knew. You didn’t know if the spiderwebs touching your cheek were real or augmented. The long shadows radiated from what little furniture was left inside the villa, and things hid in the corners, shuffling away when you looked. The black and white photographs framed on the wall showed people that were long dead, yet twitched and moved.

  It was exciting, and memorable, and scary as shit.

  I sat in a corner, determined to wait it out.

  A vampire came up to me. She was pale and had blood dripping from the side of her mouth, glistening in the moonlight. “Hey, you’re Anthropology too. You’re green.”

  “Excuse me?” I touched my face, worried.

  “Green. You’re a first year. I’m second. I don’t have any classes left from last year, that’s why I haven’t seen you before.” Her voice was very dissimilar to her scary vampire face. It was cheery and high-pitched, yet I kept expecting a deep, syrupy, seductress’ voice. Are we certain this BOO! thing is accurate?

  “Yeah, I don’t go out much.”

  “You should join us sometime. We go to Anthropology, it’s a bar in Zografos. Cliche, I know, but it stuck with us. It has a dark chocolate drink to die for! With lemon scrapings and Lemoncello. Mmm!” She licked her lips. Again, it was out of sync, her voice and expression was that of an innocent girl craving warm chocolate, and the mask was that of a female predator licking her lips at the sight of blood. She motioned in the air, I hadn’t gotten used to the gestures yet but I knew it was some sort of a veil command.

  A fr
iend request popped up in my field of view. I fumbled a bit but finally managed to accept it. From Agni, that was her name. In this time of veils and public profiles, you didn’t even have to bother asking for someone’s name, it just hovered over their head like a videogame. But in this case with everyone’s faces covered it was beyond useful.

  “There, I’ll text you next time we go out, you can hang out with us.”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Aren’t you having fun?”

  “Um, not really. It doesn’t help that I constantly think that we’re not celebrating Halloween properly. Our only feast even remotely similar is that of the ancient Anthesteria, the third day of celebration for Dionysos. It was the feast of pots. Leaving out the miasma for the souls of the dead. Around here, instead of kids, the tricks are played by the dead, and if you don’t leave out dishes and cooked meats for them…” I took Becky’s advice and acted theatrically, trying to spook Agni.

  She chuckled, again, her face expressing something very different. “I know what you mean. Well, you learn to go along with it. I know, kids here don’t go trick or treating, the custom is something similar to what they only do on Christmas Carols. They dress up only for Mardis Gras, or Carnival, more accurately. And we don’t really celebrate All Hallows Eve, we’re just finding an excuse to throw a party and wear slutty costumes.”

  “Your costume isn’t that slutty. It’s quite good, actually. You look like a vampire countess.”

  “Thank you!” she cheered but her mask eyed me like a juicy steak. “As any philosophical anthropology student will tell you, there are two kinds of girls: those who find an excuse to dress like sluts, and those who actually enjoy the costume.”

  “You should make a meme out of that,” I said, drinking my bubbling drink. It was vodka but presented itself as a boiling sort of green, viscous muck.

  “It already is!” She elbowed me. “Boy, you really are out of the loop. There, I’ve invited you to our group chats. That way you can catch up.” The drop of blood from the side of her mouth finally fell on the floor and vanished.