Hedon

by Jason Werbeloff

  Anand tried to clear his head. Cyan mumbled something about an apartment.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked them. The burns on his back pulsed steadily.

  Chokyong held up The Tax Man’s hedometer and the silver memory dumper. “We’re going to give the people of Shangri something to remember.”

  “Compassion,” boomed the Vitta’s voice from a dozen loudspeakers in the square, from televisions and holo-projectors and radios throughout Shangri. “Compassion is what sets us apart from the Greed that caused the Collapse.”

  “There it is,” whispered Chokyong, pointing at the tablet screen Milton held. “That’s the Broadcaster’s IP address. Must be. Strongest signal.”

  Milton nodded. They stood behind the butchery, their backs to the wall. All eyes were on the Vitta. Nobody paid them any attention.

  “They were hungry ghosts, with their Capitalist Greed. Money, money, money. Their blood ran green. They …”

  “It’s b-b-been a while since I hacked a Brownie device,” whispered Milton. “But I’ll get in.”

  Chokyong had watched the red-haired man when he was only a boy. The way he’d handled the scanners and the hedometers back in Khartoum. Sometimes the machines malfunctioned. Milton was always able to fix them, often taking them apart entirely and putting them back together.

  “They left us with a problem. The Breeders. Population soared, food and water plummeted,” continued the Vitta.

  “Encryption is pretty weak. Arrogant b-b-bastards,” said Milton. “Give me a minute.”

  “So the blessed state of Shangri has given us a solution. The Culling,” said the Vitta.

  The crowd broke out in a chorus of cries and bellows. “Solve this!” yelled a man with curly hair, and threw an egg at the podium. The transparent forcefield intercepted the projectile, and the yolk dripped in harmless yellow tears onto the stage. A guard pointed and shot a silent pulse rifle. The curly-haired man blew apart at his midriff, one of his arms smashing a shop window behind him. The crowd retreated a step and fell silent.

  A guard hurried to wipe the forcefield clean with a brown rag, and left the stage.

  The Vitta sauntered to the first box on the conveyer belt. With a beatific smile, he lifted the tiny girl from the wooden enclosure. She couldn’t be more than a week old, thought Chokyong. It could be Echo, but it could be one of so many others.

  “Today,” the Vitta’s voice climbed to an ecstatic pitch, “we sacrifice the few for the happiness of the many. Let the Culling begin!”

  “J-j-jesus, I need more time,” said Milton.

  The cries from the crowd rose in a desperate plea. “Don’t!” shouted a woman. “Please,” mourned another.

  The tube in the baby’s arm turned purple. The creature shuddered pathetically. A last spasm. “One hedon per baby girl!” barked the Vitta, his voice carrying easily over the crowd. He tore the IV from the baby’s arm, and turfed the dead child onto a waiting silver tray. Chokyong thought he heard the slap of meat against steel as it bounced. A Brownie pressed a button and the tray angled so the child slid down into the waiting crematory.

  “Bring the next,” called the Vitta, beaming. He flourished his arm in a magnanimous gesture.

  “I’m in,” said Milton. The tube in the second girl’s IV purpled. Chokyong could do nothing but stare. “Uploading the memory packet now,” said Milton. A woman standing nearby Chokyong fainted, her skull striking the sandy sidewalk with a wet thunk. Chokyong’s hands were cold as the Vitta’s heart.

  The second baby slipped into the furnace. Black smoky tendrils of life climbed into the noon light. He could smell it. A rich stink. Like roast pork on a Sunday afternoon. He salivated, and bile forced its way up his gullet.

  “Done,” said Milton. “Ready when you are.”

  Chokyong wiped his mouth, and nodded. Milton tapped the screen of the tablet.

  The Vitta had forgotten how much fun this was. The way the crowd hung on his every word. The way Shangri hung on the gift of every hedon.

  “We give thanks,” he boomed, “to our Lord Buddha, for his compassion. For his laws of kindness.” He motioned to Siegfried. “Bring the next child.” A splinter of sunlight broke through the clouds, and lit his enormous stomach in divine splendor.

  He lifted the child from the box. Raised his foot to step on the potassium trigger –

  A rush of images filled him. He was overdosing in a heroin bar, his friends pounding on his chest, crying. He was driving a Yamaha on the highway, wind blowing through his mane of black hair, when a police car smashed into him from behind. He was on the district heap, only a girl, while a man he knew somehow to be his father forced his cock into his mouth. It tasted of long-dead fish. He was a serviceman in the bathhouse, his anus tearing, as patron after patron fucked him. He bit down on his tongue. He was sitting beside her deathbed, his wife of thirty years, as she exhaled her last breath. His world broke in two, and he fell between them.

  Loss and pain filled the Vitta’s heart. The five-figure reading on his hedometer fell to nothing, and then fell further. The hedometers of every Brownie guard in the square did the same. As did the hedometer of every Shangrian in the city. The Broadcaster did its work, stuffing the mind of every Shangri soul with the memories of The Tax Man.

  And as they collapsed, overwhelmed and helpless in the rush of pain from which Shangri had been so careful to shield them, the Breeders rose up. Breeders had no hedometers, so received no broadcast. They broke the line of fallen Brownie guards, trampled and tore them apart in their mad surge to the podium.

  The Vitta had time to think that the forcefields might hold, before they buckled against the weight of the crowd. The last memory that passed through his mind was of a girl with jet-black hair standing at the gates of the Wall, as the metal doors swung shut behind her. The gates were new then. Avalokiteśvara stood enormous before her, his plethora of arms silver in the sunset.

  In the memory, he was looking through the eyes of a woman. A woman with knobbly fingers.

  “It will be alright, Cyan,” the woman said to the little girl. “We’ll find a way. We always do.”

  Epilogue

  Everything’s gonna be alright.

  – Bob Marley

  After the gates opened for the last time, and then fell with the Wall, Anand and Cyan could have chosen to find a place in the city. But Larisa and Milton insisted they stay at the farm. Chokyong stayed too.

  They had found Echo four boxes from the end of the conveyer belt. She was sleeping, none-the-wiser. But when she woke, she fixed her eyes on Cyan’s, and curled her lips in what Anand would always believe was a smile.

  Anand and Chokyong walked to Brann’s house on a cool spring morning, and found her body under the tin roof and the pink rubble. She was grasping a teacup and a smile. They buried her beside Donys, behind the old water tower, on the back of the hill that looked to the farmlands. Larisa sang a hymn, and Cyan cried silently into Milton’s shoulder as Anand and Chokyong lowered the coffin into the earth.

  The loam was soft and damp with the rains, and tiny buds dotted the black fields. Cyan, Anand, Echo, Chokyong, Larisa and Milton spent that afternoon on the porch drinking to Brann and her stubbornness.

  Being only a week old, Echo never understood what the grownups spoke about that afternoon. But the days and weeks and years that followed found her understanding more. She came to adore the crow’s feet that deepened around her father’s eyes. Her mother never cried, but her iron-armed hugs made Echo feel wanted. Aunt Larisa taught her how to tell when the spinach was ready for harvest, and Uncle Milton gave her her first tablet computer.

  Nine years after Donys and Brann died, Echo sat on the wooden porch with Chokyong, watching the sunflowers glow in the cloudless afternoon. The sun had almost set behind the hill, when the girl tapped her Grandpa’s square shoulder.

  “What’s that?”

  Chokyong placed his glass of wine on the table, and squinted at the horizon.

&nbs
p; It couldn’t be.

  He stood.

  The distant roar of jet engines hung on the afternoon air. And then a nuclear flash, brighter than the neon light above BIGS, brighter than the crispest Himalayan morning, blinded him.

  Other fiction by Jason Werbeloff

  If you enjoyed Hedon, take a look at The Solace Pill, by the same author.

  In 2249, 3D printers are capable of scanning and printing humans. Life on Earth becomes overpopulated, bullet-paced, and stressed. Thankfully, Solace Inc has the solution: a pill which slows the user’s perception of time, and blots out the interminable busy-ness of the world.

  But Anders has modified the latest batch of Solace Pills. And this modification is going to change everything ...

  Sign up to Jason Werbeloff’s Sci-fi Newsletter, and download this hard-hitting dystopian sci-fi novel for FREE. Click the link below:

  http://smarturl.it/werbeloff

  Turn the page for more book recommendations …

  Dear Reader

  Thank you for taking the time to read my book. I hope reading it gave you as many hedons as I received from writing it. I’d love to know what you think of the novel. Your feedback, good or bad, is crucial for my growth as an author. Please post your review on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RC77QQK

  If you liked Hedon, you’ll enjoy my short story, Visiting Grandpa’s Brain. Grandpa doesn’t regret donating his brain to Zoogle. But when Judgment Day arrives and the Vatican possesses the world’s largest search engine, Jesus meddles with Grandpa’s search results. And Grandpa is not impressed.

  Visiting Grandpa’s Brain is an irreverent sci-fi comedy horror that will dissuade you from keeping your brain anywhere but in your head. Download the story from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00S0C4P3I

  Finally, please follow me on Facebook and Goodreads, visit my website, and send me an email with your thoughts.

  Yours in voluntary happiness

  Jason Werbeloff

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  Acknowledgements

  The central idea for Hedon (hedons as currency) came to me while sitting in a Filosofie Dinneh Kluhb meeting, run by the inimitable Julie Reid. Thank you Julie, as well as Alnica Visser, Mark Oppenheimer, Chris Fisher, and Jonathan Haenen, for hashing out the idea with me that night. Hedons soared, and a novel was born!

  To my tireless editor, Rae Nash, your mentoring and encouragement have made me a better writer, and a better person.

  Khin Kyaw and Gretchen Peetham, for whom I have enormous respect as authors, as humans, and as friends, thank you for your unconditional support.

  Warren Goldstuck, thank you for always being there to think through marketing plans, writing technique, and world ideas. Your suggestions regarding The Tax Man were pivotal in developing his character when I first started writing this book.

  Finally, to all the fans, friends and family who beta-read the advance review copy of this novel, thank you. The story is better for your efforts.