Hedon
Jason Werbeloff
Hedon
Copyright: Jason Keith Werbeloff
Cover design by James T. Egan of Bookfly Design
Formatting by Polgarus Studio
Published: 19 February 2015
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Fiction by Jason Werbeloff
Novels
Solace Inc
Solace End
Preparation 162
Omnibus edition: The Solace Pill
Hedon
Shorts
Your Averaged Joe
Visiting Grandpa’s Brain
Contents
Part 1 Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 2 Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part 3 Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Other fiction by Jason Werbeloff
Dear Reader
Acknowledgements
Hedon (n.)
A unit of pleasure.
Part 1
Chapter 1
Keep your thoughts positive.
– Mahatma Gandhi
“BIGS,” the sign flashed in neon blood. Anand’s heart beat in his ears as he dismounted the motorbike, a few yards from the entrance. It was early still, the sun barely appearing over the scarlet horizon. Only half a dozen bikes sat in the parking lot. Not busy, yet. But he still got the beats. As he did every morning before he walked in. That arrhythmia he’d known forever, but never spoke.
The drive wasn’t that bad. A year after he’d started his job at BIGS, he’d begun to enjoy it. At first he’d resisted the routine, but by now he’d softened to it. It only took him a few minutes to ready for work. He’d gulp down the glass of Soylent, throw on his work robes, rinse his teeth with bact-aid, and pack left-overs and two apples in his satchel – all in fifteen minutes. Then he was out the door, his helmet under his arm.
Yeah, the morning ride wasn’t that bad. It took ten minutes to drive past the fissuring Wall of the ghetto. They usually suspended holo-ads on the surface of the great Wall to hide the grime. To hide what everyone knew was inside.
SHANGRI
Ensuring your happiness, so you don’t need to.
Anand was grateful, really he was. His life wasn’t that bad. (“A grateful life is a good life,” Master Dzogo would say). It was better than before the Debreeding. Before, there was no way he could eat fruit each day. Fruit, meat, wheat, water – there wasn’t nearly enough for everyone. And the problem? The problem was the Breeders. Humans. Humans everywhere. Population swelling without controls. Yeah, Master Dzogo was right. Unchecked breeding was the problem.
SHANGRI
Reducing the Breeder threat, one embryo at a time.
This holo-ad was one of Anand’s favorites. He’d known a Breeder-couple that lived downstairs – the Goldsteins. Mrs. Goldstein had cried when they took her away, and Mr. Goldstein had shouted in a language Anand didn’t understand. But the men in brown suits hadn’t understood Mr. Goldstein either. They didn’t slow at all when the older man raised his voice. The Brownies dragged Mrs. Goldstein by her elbows at first. But she flailed around like a fish. (Master Dzogo said most Breeder-women flop like fish – “that’s why they smell as they do”). So the brown men pulled her by her hair instead, those long black strands that Anand liked so much. He hardly saw women anymore – only the lottery winners and the dykes. (And the dykes weren’t really women). He still remembered Mrs. Goldstein’s hair. Dark and frizzy. Jagged. Like the silhouette of the city at sunset. But her hair wasn’t frizzy in the brown men’s hands. In their hands, her hair was straight. Taut and oily as they dragged her out the door, down the stairs, and into the Embryology Van parked outside.
Anand was told at school the next week that Mrs. Goldstein was Carrying. Carrying an embryo. How selfish, Anand thought, to bring another child into this world. A world that had little food as it was, almost no water. Mrs. Goldstein was taking the food right out of his mouth, Master Dzogo explained. Selfish.
Ten minutes, and he was past the Wall, his bike carving a path through the high-rise city. Holo-ads floated along the sides of these buildings too. Memory additions and subtractions, tax consultants, bathhouses (there was the ad for BIGS, Anand’s throbbing heart noted), water purifiers, marijuana outlets. The holo-ads cycled throughout the day, cascading down the sides of the buildings from the morning bell through to the evening bell. So many ways to spend one’s hedons.
Anand’s plastic sneakers squeaked as he dismounted the bike and stepped onto the cracked tarmac. The beats. The beats in his chest as he hesitated at the black door. He pressed the buzzer. Silk robes scratched against his skin beneath his biking outfit while he waited for Chokyong to release the magnetic lock on the door.
A young man waited beside Anand. “Hey,” the young man said with a wide smile. His cheeks ruddy red, clothes disheveled and dusty from the ride here, he blended with the smoggy sunrise behind him. The rusted sun glinted off his shaved scalp. Anand knew the man wore no silk robes beneath his biking gear. His trained eye could tell the young man wore no underwear at all.
“Morning,” said Anand.
“I’m Donys,” he said, beaming.
“Anand,” he replied. He couldn’t meet the young man’s gaze as he spoke his name.
The magnetic lock disengaged, and the door opened. Anand’s heart leapt painfully at the hot-wet air that tumbled over him. The young man placed a hand on Anand’s back, and stepped aside for him to enter. Anand’s skin itched beneath the stranger’s touch.
Fifty minutes to fuck.
Donys stared at his watch as he waited for the magnetic lock on the BIGS front-door to disengage. He was cutting things close. In fifty minutes, he had to be at the hospital. Strictly speaking, Donys didn’t need to go to the bathhouse. As a paramedic, he was exempt from mandatory sex – he accumulated more than enough altruism credits from his job to avoid a visit from a tax man. But Donys liked the idea of having excess altruism credits, to transfer to Pleasure Monsters.
As the tax year drew to a close, the Pleasure Monsters started to worry. He watched them on his shifts. They’d drive around town, looking for an old man to help across the street, give away expensive gifts to strangers, tell jokes to anyone who would listen. By the last week of February, they’d be spending hours in the bathhouses, giving head or a hand-job to any willing recipient. The elderly Pleasure Monsters would spend their February spare hours at the hospital, volunteering – especially those with grandchildren. Kids were dangerous, shooting the elderly’s hedons much too high. He’d seen grandmothers with arthritis so bad they could barely walk, but still they had hedometers higher than his. And Donys’s hedometer was high. Very high. He never knew just how high – people rarely told him – but he knew that the LED screen on the nape of his neck flashed a five-digit number.
Donys loved his job. Loved his patients. Loved Shangri. He practiced loving-kindness meditation each morning before his shift, sometimes on his shift. Yes, Donys loved everyone and everything. Usually by July, he had sufficient hedons to last the remainder of the tax year. Donys was a wealthy man. “Rich in spirit,” Master Dzogo would say, pointing to him. “You should all be more like Donys,” the teacher continued, “rich in spirit.” Donys never
blushed, but he heard the sound he heard so often at the back of his brain. The sound of his hedons accumulating. The sound of his pleasure, his happiness, his wealth, growing.
Beep
Donys flashed his warmest smile to the young man who waited beside him at the door to BIGS. The man’s granite cheekbones and thickset brow framed his astonishing azure-blue eyes. “Morning,” Anand said, as Donys glanced down at his crotch.
The door unlocked, and Donys stepped aside for Anand to enter, placing a hand on his back. Muscles rippled beneath Anand’s biking jacket as he pushed open the door. Donys’s cock twitched, and swelled as he felt the steam on his face.
A burly man inside the doorway let Anand pass (Anand must be a serviceman, he thought), but stopped Donys. “Twenty hedons,” the doorman said, holding out a paypoint.
Donys turned, and the man placed the paypoint against the hedometer at the back of Donys’s head.
Boop-boop
Prices increasing, thought Donys, as the twenty hedons were drained from his hedometer.
“Thank you, sir,” the doorman said, and gestured for Donys to go ahead.
“No, thank YOU!” Donys exclaimed, and beamed.
The doorman sighed. But Donys’s smile never faltered. “What is your love if it wavers in the face of adversity? Love them all,” Master Dzogo would say, “every one.” Donys radiated love to the doorman, as he strode to the change-room.
Rows of mirror-clad metal cupboards lined three walls, with long benches stretching through the middle of the room. Donys watched himself in the mirrors as he walked toward an empty unit. He removed his biking jacket and paramedic shirt. He pushed out his chest, flexed a pec in the mirror. He slid his pants down his thighs, and plucked a white towel from the cupboard. He unfolded it slowly, feeling pairs of eyes sliding up and down his calves, and wrapped the synthetic material around his waist.
Beep
Donys shut the metal locker. Snapped the padlock. His hips swung, just a little, beneath the starched towel as he strolled from the room.
The hallway was plastered in holograms. Purple and blue at first, but as Donys neared, the colors bubbled aside to reveal luminescent-white lettering.
The body is the temple of love.
A boy, no older than twenty, sauntered toward Donys in the narrow hallway. He was thin, ribs bouncing and jiggling as he walked. His cheeks were sunken, lost. A hand searched at Donys’s towel as he brushed past, gone forever. Donys would do better.
Urinals to the left, and then Donys walked past the showers. He stopped, and peered over his shoulder.
And there he was.
A stream cascaded over soft, wide shoulders. The young man faced him, nipples dimpled in the hot water. It was Anand. His body was smooth, except for coarse, black hair that cushioned a lazy penis. His eyes were closed to the spray, but he opened them now, and met Donys’s gaze. Anand smiled. Donys knew the young man was a professional, a serviceman. Donys would be gaining hedons when he kissed those nipples, when he licked that stomach. The serviceman wouldn’t get much pleasure out of it, though – so Donys would gain few altruism credits, if any. But those smooth thighs and azure-blue eyes were impossible to deny.
The man turned off the water, ambled to his towel in long, wet strides. By the time he’d walked the five steps to the towel rack, most of the moisture had evaporated from his gleaming skin. Donys, still looking over his shoulder, feet rooted to the industrial carpet, watched a bead of water run down the serviceman’s bicep.
Beep
The man dried himself. Touched himself. Slowly. His gaze never left Donys’s. He winked. Took Donys’s hand, squeezed it. Donys’s towel tented as the serviceman led him to the sauna. The holographic walls exploded in vivid lettering as they passed.
Obey thy heart.
Fuckit, thought Donys. Yeah, the servicemen were hard to please, but if anyone could, Donys could. Even if he didn’t, he had plenty of altruism credits stored up. Plenty.
The hinges on the wooden door hardly contested as the serviceman pulled Donys over the threshold. With his free hand, Donys felt around in the wet darkness for a seat. His hand landed on a bushel of thigh, and he withdrew his fingers quickly. There were lips on his, searching, parting, entering. Hands on his hips, traveling around his waistline. (Donys was glad he did those extra crunches this morning).
Off. The towel was off.
Beep
Hands. More hands. Four at least. Between his thighs, deep between his buttocks. Probing. Commanding. Squeezing. And as the lips travelled down, between his clavicles, over his chest, he let go. He deserved this, with all the altruism credits he’d stored up. So what if he didn’t have as many to give away this year? He was a good citizen, he knew that. As Master Dzogo said, “Fill your own cup first, so you can fill the cups of others.”
A bead of sweat rolled down Donys’s brow. Stung his eye. But he hardly felt it. Hardly felt it at all.
Anand walked through the doorway of BIGS, and smiled at Chokyong. His boss returned the smile, while he held out the paypoint for the young man who had followed him into the bathhouse. Chokyong was a barrel-chested, sensible brute. Anand had only known Chokyong a year, but he’d become a father to Anand. Kind but solid, the man’s face was easy to talk to.
He strolled to the back of the change rooms, and passed through the curtain to the staff area. None of the other servicemen had arrived yet, and the room with its concrete walls and cement floor was cold. Anand removed his helmet, outer clothing, and shoes, and placed them in his locker. Most of the other servicemen had pictures on the insides of their cabinets. Girls. Keeping such blatant indicators of heterosexuality was liable to get you ghettoed, but Chokyong knew the realities of a serviceman’s life, and allowed his employees to keep their pictures.
Anand asked Chokyong once why he allowed them to keep illicit material. Chokyong had said that most of the servicemen weren’t really normal. They didn’t enjoy other men. Sure, they could tolerate normal sex. “One can tolerate anything if you have to. Even learn to like it,” Chokyong said. “A hole is a hole.” The patrons of the bathhouse never knew it, but most of the servicemen were Breeders. They entered public service after their girlfriends had been taken by the Embryology Van, after their girls had fallen. “Once your girl is ghettoed,” Chokyong had explained, “there’re only two options: convince the Brownies you’re really normal and somehow lapsed into Breeding, or be ghettoed along with your girl.” And the best way to convince the authorities? Become a serviceman.
Chokyong didn’t work as a serviceman. He didn’t need to – he ran the place. But he had a locker at the back of the staff room. And once, when Anand entered while Chokyong was changing into his biker gear at the end of the day, he saw there was a picture on the inside of Chokyong’s locker too.
Anand would normally leave his robes on, but he had to shower before he could get started. So he removed the silk sashes, and wrapped a towel around his waist. The coarse fabric grated against hips, the same place every day. He scratched the rash forming there – would need to put some bact-aid on it tonight, before it got any worse.
The shower was too hot. Anand winced as the water ran down his hips. He opened his eyes. A young man was staring at him. The same young man with the ruddy cheeks at the entrance when he arrived this morning. Donys. Anand smothered the wince with a coy smile, and ran his fingers through his hair. He pretended to enjoy the scalding water, and shifted so his body faced the young man front-on.
Anand was on tax parole. Two tax seasons ago, he’d been left with fewer hedons than the Minimum Hedometer Threshold. With water, rent, food, the occasional joint, and petrol prices increasing, he’d spent too much. The Tax Man had visited him with “options”. Because he was young – only twenty-three – and since this was his first infringement, he was let off a two-year mandatory enrollment in a public service indenture program of his choice. Well, there were only two choices – become a serviceman, or enroll with the Joke Bureau.
&nbs
p; “Uh, I’m not very good at telling jokes,” Anand had said.
The tall man had looked at Anand sternly. “You’re normal, right?”
Anand swallowed. “Yeah, of course.”
“Then you won’t mind being a serviceman.”
That’s when the beats had started. That ache in his chest that came on every time he thought about his work. A year later, and he still had them. The beats, as he walked Donys to the sauna. As he kissed his ruddy cheeks the way he’d been trained. The beats, as he licked the cock that smelt of Soylent left in the fridge too long.
Every day at BIGS was a long day. Between servicing patrons, he cleaned the toilets, scrubbed the showers, washed towels.
Seven a day.
That was the minimum number of patrons he had to satisfy, as per the terms of the indenture program. One down, he thought, as he tasted salty iron in his mouth. At least this one hadn’t wanted to bend him over. Those hurt the first few months, but Chokyong had given him a cream which helped numb the pain. These days, it hardly bled anymore. But he still preferred using his mouth.
Seven hours and seven patrons later, it was time for Anand to leave. The north wind hit him square in the jaw as he opened the black doors to the parking lot. Excitement washed over him when he noticed that the sun hadn’t quite set behind the brown horizon. There’s time, he thought.
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