The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Walking,” said Alyssa, loud enough to drown Hayley out. “I’d hike before I sat here waiting for this truck to come back from the dead.”

  Kathy put her arms around the girls. “Go on, Ken. Hit it.”

  His throat dried like a cotton snake crawled up from within. Damn Eldon and his ‘maybe he’s real’ talk. They’re just stories. Folklore. He pressed the little red button. A buzz emanated from under the hood, followed by the labored whine of a starter and the rattling of diesel combustion. The truck’s frame vibrated.

  “31 La bestia está enojada. Se gruñía!” Cielo trembled for a second or two and clamped on to Kathy.

  Halcón laughed at him. “32 Es el motor, no bestia.”

  “Yes!” Hayley bounced in her seat.

  Kenny fiddled with the tiny shifter he’d installed in the console, dropped the truck in first gear, and eased it forward. The backup drive didn’t have the torque or the top speed of the normal motors, but doing forty-and-change was a damn sight better than zero.

  Luna wriggled out the rear window into the bed, and with guidance from Kathy, opened the storage box holding the rations. The ten-year-old ferried food packets to the window two at a time. Once she’d retrieved a ration for everyone, she stuck one in her teeth and crawled back in. Crinkling plastic filled the cabin, along with Eldon grumbling about getting the ‘radiation omelet’ again.

  “Don’t drink that. It’s hot,” said Kathy in Spanish.

  Cielo examined the tiny red-orange bottle of hot sauce from his ration pack, tilted his head, and slurped it down. The boy seemed to be waiting for something, but after a few seconds, shook his head. “No fuego.”

  Alyssa picked up her little bottle.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Kenny. “That kid’s been eating who-knows-what his whole life.”

  Undeterred, Alyssa poured a little in her mouth. Within seconds, her face glistened with sweat, but her expression remained stoic. “Okay, it’s got a bit of a kick.” She added a couple drops into her meal packet.

  Kenny raised both eyebrows, impressed. Hayley sniffed her hot sauce bottle, and coughed, near gagging. Cielo took it out of her hand and drank it like tomato juice.

  “All yours,” muttered Hayley.

  “It’s not so hot,” said Nasir. “I make hotter.”

  “Make?” asked Kathy.

  “Oh yeah.” Nasir nodded. “I have a small grow tank.” He held his hands out to define a three-by-two foot space. “Bhut Jolokia peppers.”

  “What’s that mean?” asked Hayley.

  “It’s Hindu for ‘burnt asshole.’” Eldon whistled. “Never again.” He turned to face the back seat and pointed at the girls. “If either of you two ever wind up in the military, and someone dares you to eat somethin’… don’t.”

  Alyssa laughed.

  “How much longer ’til we get home?” whispered Hayley.

  “It’ll be about three days at this speed.” Kenny grinned at Eldon. “Shouldn’t be a problem. The Old Man gets weaker the closer we get to the modern world.”

  Hayley took a deep breath. “Okay. I can handle this. I don’t even know what I’m scared of. I’m just scared.”

  “Shit, man.” Eldon shook his head, chuckling. “You and your voodoo.”

  Kenny glanced over with a smile. Eldon seemed confident ‘the voodoo’ was made up, but his eyes said otherwise.

  t 11:02 p.m., Joey dragged himself into his apartment. He stopped by the bedroom long enough to discard clothing down to his briefs and went to the kitchen to procure food. A few minutes later, he flopped on the couch with a giant bowl of instant ramen in his lap and an ancient movie about the Old West on a huge 200-inch holo-panel in front of him. He’d already seen it dozens of times, and used it more for background noise while watching the foamy lumps evolve into shrimp.

  Nina would be horrified at him eating such crappy food, but it reminded him of the years he’d spent on the fringe. Such a life lurked three seconds of bad luck away from anyone in West City. He yawned and leaned his head back on the soft couch edge, gazing around his one-bedroom place. Division 9 paid quite well, so he’d gotten an apartment on the high end of middle, expensive enough to where he had a separate bathroom and kitchen. The fridge didn’t trade places with the shower, and it had a LaundroMaster. If he stuffed a pile of dirty random garments in one end, clean, folded, and color-sorted clothes came out the other.

  Almost like having Mom around.

  He muttered. Mars… Mom wanted to see him. Even working for the government didn’t quite fully assuage his worry that someone would try to kill him if he went back up there. The second day at the office, he’d gone poking around the Marsnet, but couldn’t find any active file with his name on it… and Nina’s boss had assured him he’d been cleared. A wicked grin spread across his face.

  I gotta find whoever spanked Nightwing… ask him to go say hi to that bastard dragon on Mars.

  Few hackers impressed Joey, but anyone who could take on a Grade 10 AI and make it run home to its proverbial mother, he’d literally bow down to as Master.

  A disc bot zipped across the room, ran into a pair of underpants he’d left there a few days ago, and spun out of control before hitting the coffee table with a loud whack. The little unit got stuck going in circles as the fabric tangled one of its wheels. Laughing, Joey ambled over to it. He de-briefed the bot and sent it on its carpet-cleaning way.

  “Hmm. What do you think? Should I live up the bachelor life a bit more or bring up the whole ‘moving in’ thing with her?”

  The silver disc glided across the living room without a word.

  “Yeah. I agree.”

  He fell back onto the couch and slurped up ramen for a few minutes while watching Kurt Westwood blow the hell out of outlaws in The Kind, The Cruel, and the Unsightly. For whatever reason, whoever remade the ancient western film with digital actors (and all new special effects) was forced to change the names of everyone involved, (and the title) despite them being dead for four centuries.

  I doubt a .45 Peacemaker tore fist-sized holes in people.

  Joey laughed at the ridiculous gore.

  The movie paused itself.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  “Incoming vid from…” A pleasant female electronic voice changed to his recorded one. “The censorious bloviating―”

  “Answer!” yelled Joey. Shit I forgot to change that. He fumbled with his NetMini, changing her announce to ‘Sis.’ It feels so weird not to be at war with her.

  Katherine appeared where the movie had been, her giant face and severe bun made her look like something out of an ACC boardroom. “Joey… oh for fuck’s sake, put some clothes on.”

  “I have clothes on.” He snapped the waistband of his briefs. “Underwear is clothing. This covers more than what you used to sunbathe in. You do realize you can’t get a tan from artificial windows, right?”

  “Whatever.” She looked off to the side, but smiled. “I wanted to thank you for whatever you did to Grant.”

  “Awesome. He leaving you alone?”

  She flashed the sort of grin he expected to see on a lawyer right after they caused the downfall of a multibillion-credit company. “Oh, he’s a little too busy to bother messing with me right now.”

  “Oh?” Joey raised red plastic chopsticks full of noodles to his mouth. “Do tell? Whatever happened to the poor man?”

  Katherine rolled her eyes. “He’s being sued by four clients for various reasons, as well as the Bandau Group… after they terminated him. There’s an ethics inquiry and he’ll probably wind up being disbarred. I also heard something about criminal charges for tampering with the Defense Force network.”

  “Poor guy.” Joey stuffed his mouth.

  “Quite.” Katherine scoffed. “That idiot got so pissed that he raged at me over the vid… I recorded the whole thing, including the death threats. Oh.” She laughed. “The chocolate dildo was a nice touch.”

  He grinned, noodles slipping out of his mouth. “Now
who would go and send him anything like that?”

  “So…” She exhaled and looked down for a second before resuming eye contact. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay. Today sucked. Tomorrow sucked too. Next week or so’s going to suck as well.”

  “What happened?” She blinked.

  Joey twirled another load of clear noodles around his chopsticks and ate them, sipping the super-spicy broth while he chewed. “Whoo…” He exhaled. “I got a good batch. Oh nothing much. Nina sent down a giant request and Preema’s pissed off about having to do actual work, so she datacated on me.”

  “Huh?” She scrunched up her eyes. “Datacated?”

  “A portmanteau of data and defecated. I’m buried under busy work.”

  She covered her mouth and laughed. “Oh, Joey… sometimes you make it so easy to forget you’re intelligent.” Her mirth faded to that sympathetic stare one gives a doser they’ve tried and failed to help get clean. “So when are you going to visit? Mom wants to see you.”

  “Hey.” He raised an arm, gesturing at the apartment. “Ease back with the pity bit. I’m not slumming it anymore. And soon.”

  “Soon?” She raised one eyebrow.

  “Yeah, soon. As in not immediately, and not too long.”

  Katherine shook her head. “Can you vague that up a bit more?”

  “Let me try and talk Nina into coming with first.”

  “Who’s that?” Katherine leaned closer to the screen, making her nose enormous. “Nina?”

  “A woman I’ve been seeing for a while.” He smiled.

  She put a hand on her chest and blinked. “You’re seeing a woman?”

  He frowned. “You’re not going to make another ‘thought I was into guys’ joke are you?”

  “No… I just didn’t think any woman would have the patience to deal with you.” She winked.

  “Hmm.” He stared at her giant image, daydreaming about flying up her enormous left nostril, which became a cave lined with medieval torches.

  “What are you thinking?”

  He blinked off the flight of fancy and smiled at her. “Driving a hovercar up your nose… this screen is so big I can see your brain.”

  She leaned back, a hint of blush in her cheeks. “So you’re in a relationship with this woman… who is she?”

  “Works with Division 9 too. ’Course, she’s in field operations.” He started to put more noodles in his mouth, but hesitated, chuckling. “Oh, you remember that thing Mom always used to say about me being so into technology…”

  Katherine tilted her head, looking confused. “That you’d wind up marrying a computer.”

  Joey laughed. “Heh, yeah. About that…”

  Hah! Joey made a switchblade sound as he popped his middle finger out and used it to poke the ‘compile’ button on his terminal. He impaled the gem-like green rectangle and twisted his hand back and forth as if driving a blade deep into the heart of a dragon.

  “You sound entirely too satisfied with yourself,” muttered Abby.

  “Just caught and killed an elusive bug in a pet project.” He winked. Now time to see if this gamble pays off.

  Rather than dredge data like Preema expected, he’d spent most of the previous day writing a daemon to do the comparative analytics. The time he’d poured into that, about thirteen hours, should result in code capable of doing sixty some odd hours of data grinding in about four since it would remove the bottleneck of a human looking at things. While writing it broke no rules or regulations, he knew Preema had given him that job as grudge work, so if she learned he squirmed out from under the tedium, she’d only hit him with something worse. No one would hear about his bit of engineering unless he needed to unveil it to save someone’s job, and it would have to be a someone he liked working with. He’d pretend to spend the next week hammering away at the data… but instead, he’d be out hunting for Shinigami.

  It made sense to run the program right away, so if it did fall flat on his face, he’d only lose four hours. As much as it pained him to admit, he did like working for Division 9, so the idea of wasting a week, running the program at the last hour, and having nothing to show for it didn’t appeal to him.

  I don’t like to lose.

  Since he had a little while to wait before the compile process finished, he locked his terminal and headed out in search of a nice lowbrow lunch: Cyberburger. The franchise closest to the Police Administrative Center was one of a handful of locations participating in a new promotion called ‘Cyberburger Ultimate.’ Higher-grade machines and better OmniSoy resulted in food that supposedly didn’t degenerate into goo within twenty minutes of molecular reconfiguration. Their marketing slogan, ‘As natural as vat-grown,’ gave him a mild headache to think about, but he’d been wanting to try the new food for a while.

  As a promotion, PubTran and Cyberburger joined forces to give people Ͼ5 off their Cyberburger order if they took a PubTran car round-trip to pick up their food. Granted, the ride cost Ͼ38 each way, but he’d be paying it anyway to go there, promotion or no.

  Nine minutes after leaving his cubicle, Joey strolled up to a massive Cyberburger franchise. Burnished steel walls with chrome-framed windows and over-stylized hamburger glyphs made the place look like a black tie restaurant from the outside. He walked past a holographic koi fountain with a simulated waterfall and into a warm room filled with the smell of pseudo-beef, maybe-tatoes, and nuclear cheese.

  Arms wide to either side, Joey inhaled the glory of mega-cheap dining. “Ahh, my castle, I have returned.”

  Four bright-faced Class 1 dolls made to resemble teenaged girls stood behind the counter. Their skin had a noticeable plastic sheen, and visible seams and gaps showed around the mouth and joints on the hand. All wore burgundy uniforms with skirts so short no self-respecting parent would let a teenager walk out the door in them. Each had a badge featuring a golden burger above the letters CB, with a cute name underneath. Tiffy, Katie, Mia, and Maddie stood behind plastic forms holding datapads that displayed a menu alongside a NetMini reader.

  Joey couldn’t remember ever hearing about a live person working in a Cyberburger as a clerk. Why do they even bother with the fake terminals?

  Each ‘girl’ had a line, though Maddie’s only held three people. Joey walked up behind a doughy man with shaggy brown hair, tan pants, and a white button-down shirt a little too big for him despite his carrying about sixty extra pounds.

  Joey glanced at his NetMini to check the time, not that he had to worry too much. He didn’t have ‘hours’ so much as they wanted a certain amount of things done. As long as he finished what he needed to, the exact times of his arrival and departure didn’t matter.

  “What is taking this man so long?” muttered the man in front of him. “I do not have the time to stand here waiting for him to decide between chocolate or vanilla in his milkshake. I only get forty-five minutes for lunch.”

  “Sucks,” said Joey.

  “Excuse me?” The man looked back, showing off a bushy moustache. “Were you speaking to me?”

  “Yeah. I said it sucks you only get forty-five minutes for lunch.” Joey glanced at the man’s breast pocket. A gold nameplate read Milton Swanson―Systems Architect below a round icon of a crown with an I in the center. He grinned. “You’d think a network administrator would at least get the full hour.”

  “Oh. Yes. I should but, HR refuses to budge.” Milton grumbled, balling his hands in fists. He sounded furious, but his voice never quite made it above a tentative partial whisper. “I… I think I need to send another email.” He faced forward. “Yes. That’s what I will do. I’ll send another email. They will have to listen to reason.”

  “Sure. They’ll have to listen to reason.”

  “You’re right.” Milton nodded. He waited all of ten seconds before leaning right and peering past a woman with dark brown skin and a ‘lawyery’ skirt suit. “Umm… Excuse me. Can you please decide on your milkshake? Some of us are on a time budget.”

  Neither th
e woman in front of him nor the indecisive man in a t-shirt and tattered camouflage pants reacted.

  “Would you like to Ultra that?” asked Katie.

  “Uhh,” said a short woman with a rainbow-colored afro in the next line. “What does that mean?”

  Katie, permanent smile on her plastic face, began a lengthy explanation of how the Cyberburger Ultra used improved machinery and high-grade OmniSoy to create food that never lost its integrity.

  “It’s―” said Katie.

  “As natural as vat-grown,” muttered Joey along with her.

  The indecisive man at the front of the line whipped out a NetMini and fiddled with it.

  “What the hell are you doing now?” asked the woman in front of Milton.

  “Working out calories.” Milkshake man tapped at his holo panel.

  “Umm, sure,” said Rainbow. “That’s cool.”

  Katie finished her order.

  “Oh, hey, Milton,” said Joey. “Thanks for breakfast. I love egg and cheese sandwiches.”

  “What?” Milton looked back at him.

  “Next,” said Katie.

  Joey grinned. Ack, right. Masaru knocked him out. “Oh, never mind. Thought you were someone else.”

  “Oh.” Milton looked downcast. He checked his watch, and grumbled.

  A spacey-looking guy, almost seven feet tall but as skinny as Joey stepped up to Katie. His shitty attempt at dreadlocks hung down to his waist. “Umm, I’ll have a Chickentron Mega with cheesey-tots and a pomegranate soda.”

  “Would you like to Ultra that?” asked Katie.

  “Umm. I dunno. What’s that mean?”

  Joey’s right eye twitched. “Hey, Fern-boy. She just explained it to the woman right in front of you. Extra ten credits, better food. Yes or no.”

  Katie droned on with the same explanation.

  “Huh? Fern?” The man twisted to give him a confused look… three seconds later.

  “That hair. You look like the nine-month aftereffect of a desperate, sex-starved palm tree dragging a fern into a dark alley and touching it repeatedly in a bad place.” Joey gestured at the guy’s face. “And shave that shit. That’s not a beard; you got someone’s short and curlies stuck to your chin.” He faced the front of his line. “And for fuck’s sake. Who gives a damn about calories that comes here to eat? Let me give you a clue: this food has shitloads of them. Does your fitness app have a setting for shitloads?”