The Rage Room

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I kept wiping my eyes and trying to sneak glances at what was happening. We were covered with pale green shaving cream that smelled like cedar and pine with a touch of Old Spice, still a bestselling male fragrance. I figured out why the scent was familiar—it was like the after-rinse detergent at the rage rooms. Where were we? I was sure that was no coincidence. Was this a government-sponsored initiative? But Norman had said these were biohackers, geeks.

  “Rub your bodies,” the Roundabout announced, disturbing my thoughts. “Rub your bodies.” We did as it said, motivated I guess, by fear that if we didn’t, it would.

  “Cleaning cycle complete, rinse cycle initiated. Rub bodies to remove excess residue from cleansing cycle.” Caught under the steaming waterfall force of the rinse cycle, I welcomed the opportunity to rinse every pore.

  The water stopped abruptly, and panels extended from the wall offering stacks of thick white towels, neatly-folded track pants, a hoodie, a T-shirt, white slippers, and an additional small metal tray with toiletries.

  Shasta pulled on the clothes while she was still wet.

  “Where did our old clothes go?” Knox asked. “I was kinda fond of those jeans, man. It’s really hard to get good jeans these days. And that hoodie, I got it on the set of an ad with a Justin Bieber cover version, and the guy even signed it. It’s worn off, but still. And my shoes man, NikesNewCentury. I can’t afford to replace them. And this shit,” he tugged at his white garb, “makes me look like a mental patient.”

  “You’ll get them back,” Norman said. “Shasta, you’ll get replicas. You guys need to relax. This is a safe place. Janaelle’s just got a thing for cleanliness.”

  “Where did the water go?” I asked, and Norman pointed to the edges of the room. “Drains. So cool, right? Shall we move on?”

  The door had opened without us noticing, and the Roundabout, reduced to its former ball size, rolled along like a ball-bearing.

  We passed an enormous warehouse lab with floor-to-ceiling windows and technicians in white suits studying computers. I stopped and stared. “Norman,” I said evenly, clenching my fists at my side and barely stopping myself from pounding the shit out of him, “you’ve got some explaining to do.”

  I was looking at a massive ball suspended in the centre of the room. The ball was at least the size of four station bubble cars, and it rotated slowly. The surface was a matrix of edge-to-edge angled screens, like a dragonfly’s eyes. The whole thing looked like a peeled pomegranate, enough to make a trypophobe run screaming, but that wasn’t why I was glaring at Norman. It was the content on the screens. Each screen showed a rage room, with a man or woman, hitting or screaming or smashing things. Hundreds of rage rooms.

  I stared at Norman, and he studied his fingernails and gnawed at the edge of this thumb. “That’s The Eye. Janaelle will explain everything,” he said, walking away. I had no choice but to follow him.

  We heard a strange noise, a gurgling sound, and we all looked around, including Norman. “My stomach,” Knox apologized. “I’m hungry.”

  “We’re here,” Norman said.

  The Roundabout stopped at a glass door and extended a bony steel finger. The door opened.

  “You said you were hungry?” Norman asked Knox, and he gestured to a long mahogany dining room table with full crystal place settings, complete with place cards and starched napkins shaped like swans.

  “Janaelle loves swans,” Norman said. He found his name card and sat down. “Let’s eat.”

  “You’ve forgotten something, little brother,” a voice rang out into the room, a deep, husky, lounge-room voice. “Naughty boy. What did you forget?”

  “To say grace,” Norman looked shamefaced. He held out his hands. “Come on, hold hands, and don’t argue.”

  We all grabbed each other’s hands.

  “Dear Humankind, we have thus far failed you. We have failed you with our greed, our selfish preoccupations, our lust, and our laziness. There is only one Creator and Her Name is Truth, and we shall set Her free. Namaste.”

  “Namaste,” we muttered, not wanting to look at each other.

  I unfolded my napkin. “Is there a menu?” I asked, half-joking, and Norman shook his head. “Grilled cheese and tomato soup,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it,” Knox said, and he looked around expectantly. “More robots coming?”

  But instead, a tiny woman walked in, wearing a long skirt and wheeling a food trolley.

  “No,” she said, and her voice was the deep chocolatey lounge-room tone we’d heard over the loud speakers, at odds with her tiny, birdlike body.

  I peered around to look at her steel leg, but her skirt covered everything. She caught my stare, and I blushed. She was around thirty, and her hair was thick and black, almost blue, lustrous, falling to her waist. She looked familiar to me, and I stared at her. I knew I had met her before. But where?

  “So, Shane,” she said, cutting to the chase. I shook myself back into the moment, thinking I’d figure it out later. I knew her. I just had to figure out where we’d met. “Norm here says you need to travel through time. What makes you so special?”

  “You tell me,” I fired back. “I saw you guys, with the rage room footage. I’m not here by coincidence. You guys picked me. Not the other way around. What’s the deal?”

  She passed around plates of sandwiches, and Knox and the others fell on them. I tried to hold back, like a man of principle, but my hunger got the better of me and I grabbed my sandwich. Janaelle ladled out bowls of soup and took her place at the head of the table.

  “You’re right,” she said, not eating but watching us. “Norman said you’re the guy. And the lab technicians agree. They say if anyone can go back and change the past and therefore the future, that you’re the guy to do it. I’ve got my doubts, but I guess we’ll see.”

  “Do you guys own the rage rooms?” I asked, and she shook her head.

  “No. But we hacked into them to study the world. We’re trying to find a reason to have faith in mankind. You’ve got to have faith in something. Don’t you agree, Shane?”

  I stared at her, cheese stuck to my chin. I wiped it off. “I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I don’t know. You’ve seen the evidence of my life. I can’t tell a lie.”

  “Lying is pointless, you’re right. You did respond well when Norman told you there was a chance you could save your family. You insisted on taking immediate action. That was a good sign, although I can’t say I’m completely sold on you.”

  I jumped up and threw my bowl of soup against the wall. The bowl didn’t smash, but the red soup ran down the pristine wall like blood and dripped to the floor.

  “When in doubt, smash something,” Janaelle observed. “Not exactly an award-winning move. And that was just a small test. You fail so easily, Shane. You don’t seem to be a man of strong mettle to me. A man who comes looking to time travel should be of strong mettle. You realize this, don’t you? You’re a weak man, a man looking for the easy way out, the simplest solution. Time travel isn’t that. If we do bring you in, you’ll need to get your emotions under control. And you’ll need to learn some science. Can you do that?”

  I was trying to think of a convincing way to tell her that I could when Knox interrupted me.

  “What about us?” he asked. “I’m just here because of Shasta. I don’t like being underground.”

  “Is it worrying you now?” Janaelle asked, and Knox closed his eyes.

  “No,” he said, surprised, “it isn’t.”

  “We gave you a bit of help,” Janaelle said smugly. “We patched you up. When you were in the shower, the Roundabout pinned you with a tranquilizing microfiber patch to help lessen your claustrophobia. It immediately entered your blood stream. Pretty good, huh?”

  Shasta jumped up, angrier than I had thought possible. “Bitch! You drugged me? I want outta
here. Fuck you, bitch. Let me go, now!”

  “You can check out any time you like,” Janaelle sang, “and you can always leave. Bye bye, birdies. Your clothes have been restored, and Norman will escort you off the premises.”

  “Shut the fuck up and let me out,” Shasta yelled. “Now!”

  “No, don’t go!” I shouted. “They could kidnap me or hold me hostage or kill me.”

  Janaelle nearly fell off her chair laughing. “Yeah, right. Listen, we were going to let your friends go anyway. They’re not part of this. And Shasta, honey, all we did was patch you and your boyfriend with a forget-this-ever-happened drug so you won’t remember a thing. Nada. I hope you had a good dinner. Good soup, huh? Old family recipe, although I add sherry. It’s the sherry that makes it so delicious.”

  “Knox!” I shouted, and he wouldn’t look at me. “You can’t leave me!”

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “Gotta go. Good luck. Come on, Shaz.”

  They left without a backward glance, and I was left alone with Janaelle.

  24. DESCENT INTO HELL

  JANAELLE WAS BEAUTIFUL IN A FELINE kind of way, and her incisor teeth were capped with silver. She was wearing steel-rimmed glasses, and I wondered what technology they housed. She was probably reading my mind right at that very moment, scanning my brain and somehow implanting controlling microfibers. Maybe the soup had been bolstered with micro-fibres, extra roughage. Hey look, you can lose your mind, but don’t worry, you’ll have a great bowel moment, ain’t life grand?

  “I’m going to give you what you want,” Janaelle said. “I don’t have the faith in you that Norman has, but then again, he knows you much better than I do. To my mind, the data’s ambivalent about you, but if Norman says you’re it, then you’re it.”

  “I’m what?” I barked at her because Mother had used that exact word too about me. Ambivalent.

  “Never mind. Because you either are or you aren’t ready. But what you have had is a long day, and you need to rest. We’re going to give you a crash course in relativity, both special and general, quantum mechanics, and wormholes.”

  “Isn’t there an app for that?” I wasn’t joking. “Why can’t you just download the info on my CP?”

  “Unfortunately, we cannot. While we can manufacture apps for all kinds of things, you’ll need to do some old-fashioned homework. Norman told you that we’re pioneers of biohacking? I’m sure Norman told you about my steel leg?”

  “He did.”

  “I now have two. Much better. Have you ever looked at feet? Disgusting things. Toes. My god. The worst. And knees? The god who invented knees—what was It thinking? I’m far happier without my knees and my feet. I’m much speedier too.”

  Next thing I knew she was standing right by my side. “You travel at the speed of light?” I joked, but my heart was hammering. How had she done that?

  “Joke all you like, Sharps, if it eases your discomfort.”

  “But seriously, with those long skirts too, how did you do that?”

  She grinned a vampire smile, and there was something attractive about her in a gothic, terrifying sort of way.

  “Do you have faith, Sharps?” she asked. “Stupid question. You can’t or you wouldn’t have done what you did. The world’s going to change; that’s all I’m going to say. Try to remember that at some core level, although you will only remember some parts of this and not others.”

  “Patchy microfibres?” I joked.

  “No. Human interpretation and subjective memory of any given event. That’s primarily what we study with the rage room profiles. Every human being has a number of experiences in any given day, but how they interpret them, internalize them, react to them, and remember them is entirely unique, unpredictable, and unmappable. You’d think we’d be able to map memory and plot predictable behaviours, and sure, serial killers killed animals when they were kids, but which memory will stick in your brain as being a good one versus which one would annoy the heck out of the guy next to you, we cannot say. Science is exact, but humans are the exact opposite.”

  “I try to remember the good stuff, but there wasn’t much,” I said, feeling sorry for myself. “My father was a drunk and he left. I was a loner at school with no special talents and no interests in life. Nothing. My mother never liked me.”

  “It’s true that you missed out when the happiness gene was being handed out. And I know you tried. And Norman knows it too. You just wanted to be a normal guy, a perfectly normal but perfectly perfect guy, and that, Sharps, is where you went wrong. Unrealistic expectations. Although I do salute your affection for cleaning products. I also thought Celeste lacked attention when it came to personal hygiene.”

  “You knew Celeste?”

  “I’ve said too much. I’ll take you to your room, and we’ll reconvene tomorrow. I would say don’t worry it will be fine, but that’s a lie and you know it. But it will be an adventure, and you might come out of it a better man.”

  She walked me down a hallway and opened a door to a bedroom. The bed was large and soft and I wanted nothing more than to face-plant and fall into the nothingness of sleep.

  “Faith,” Janaelle said to me as she left, “may seem at odds with my chosen career in science and the clinical surroundings in which I live, but I abide by, and respect, the fundamental principles of human morality, not to mention a sense of order within the world that was created by a being more extraordinary than we can ever imagine. But that’s just me. Sleep well, Sharps. More tomorrow.”

  She left, and I kicked off my slippers and face-planted as planned. It felt exquisite for a moment, but the bed bottomed out and I fell from a great height into the maw of someone else’s horrific nightmare.

  A man came towards me, and I immediately recognized him. It was the Hockney man, the one from the print I loved so much, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing.

  The print hung on our bedroom wall, much to Celeste’s dismay. I was no art aficionado, but I came across the print when I was just a teenager and it was one of the few things I’d never destroyed. Besides, Celeste kept her horrible Rubenesque neon atrocity on full display. I told her it was unseemly for Bax to see his mother’s lady parts splayed out like that, her enormous nipples glaring like two full moons, but she just laughed. “Good for the boy to know where he came from,” she said, and I shuddered.

  What did I love about the Hockney man? His starkness, his aloneness, the decapitatedness of the scene. The topsy-turvy of reality, the vitriol being spewed from his thick, white, closed lips. The tiny half-buried head that screamed for help, the muted colour palette of putty and green, and the broken earth, speaking of the fissures of life.

  As a child, I’d loved books and art. It was a guilty pleasure in a world where such things were treated with derision and scorn. Crtainly my father thought I was an idiot for my fondness of such “irrelevancies.” I couldn’t stand contemporary music, and I treasured the few print books I had collected. Books in the twenty-second century were no more than audio feeds read by robots with dead voices. The print industry had long since died, and art galleries had closed. There was no new fine art and no one to love the old art. But I kept my precious print, and I told Celeste that it had to come with me. It was odd that I stood firm about so random a thing, but it wasn’t random to me. The picture gave me voice. I knew the Walt Whitman poem from which Hockney had titled his art. When I was a boy, I wrote poetry. When my father found my poems, he laughed at me and ripped them up, and I heard him telling Mother that her foolish son fancied himself Shakespeare. After that, I hid my efforts from the world, although I got Jazza to get me black market downloads of all the Penguin classics. To his credit, he never laughed at my love of literature. I’d meant to mention that to Mother when she’d told me of her writing aspirations. Why hadn’t she defended me against my father? I should have asked her.

  And now the Hockney man stood in front of me,
spoiling for a fight. “We’ve met before,” he said, and his tongue was like raw flesh.

  The blood drained from my face, and my breath was short and sharp and loud. I hated that, disgusting mouth breathers. “How do you know?” I asked, and my voice was a whisper. Before he could answer, all I could think was that I was dying and the Hockney man agreed. He smiled as I felt myself fade.

  I rose above myself and watched my sad and crumpled body lying in a puddle of flesh, clothed in ridiculous white sweat pants and a matching hoodie, innocuous garments I’d so naïvely assumed would see me through another day.

  The Hockney man tied a piece of rubber tubing tightly around my upper arm and told me to make a fist as he picked a syringe up from a small silver tray.

  “I thought there weren’t going to be any drugs?” I asked, and my voice was filled with suspicion.

  “Helps the machines read the data,” he said as he inserted the needle, and I watched the fluid flow into my body. He put a HealPatch on the tiny dot that the needle had left. “You’re set up. Have a good night. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  I lay on the queen-size bed with nothing for company but my cries of self-loathing and fear. A war raged on in my head, and I was about to sit up and rip off the cords and pads and leave. I was going to scream that I couldn’t take it anymore when the lights went out and I was smothered in darkness, just like that. The machines stopped humming, the air vent stopped blowing, and a syrupy silence hung in the darkness. I waited for the emergency generator to kick in, but it didn’t.

  “Hello?” I called out loudly. “Somebody?”

  I wished I had taken note of the Hockney man’s name, but I hadn’t figured I might want to see him again.

  Hello! Hello! I shouted repeatedly. I put my full weight behind it, and boy, it felt good to yell like that. I screamed as loudly as I could and kept it up, Hello, hello, hello!