Self Made

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dex intended to spend the time on the train studying his maps, researching Ljundberg and maybe catching a quick nap. He managed a little of each on the four hour trip, with the exception of the nap, but ended up staring out the window most of the time. The train moved quickly on its magnetic levitation rails, but Dex seemed to be endlessly fascinated by the landscape whizzing past. Of course, the train made a few stops along the way and Dex gawped openly at the unfamiliar cities and people.

  When the train slipped into its berth at the station, Dex gathered his things and ensured that everything was safely tucked into his bag, then he slung it over his shoulder so that it clung tightly to his chest. He walked out of the station and pulled up the overview map Annabelle had sent him. There was a local train stop a block north of the intercity train station and he set to walking toward it. If he took the local up a while, he could get off at the station closest to the kiosk where Ljundberg’s chip had last registered.

  Even though it was nearing midnight, the crowds were thick at the local train stop. It looked like a two train wait to Dex when he arrived, joining the mass of people that were more like a throng than a queue. When the train arrived and its doors melted away, he moved forward with the teeming mass. More people crammed themselves into the car than he ever would have dreamed possible, but he wasn’t among them. The doors re-materialized, blocking out the unlucky and locking in the, perhaps, even more unlucky. The train sped away and Dex looked around him wondering how people lived like this every day.

  He had always lived in a smaller centre and this was the longest trip he’d ever taken. He and Maks once traveled to the next city over for a weekend party and Dex had been as taken with train travel then as now. There was something about seeing all those other places, full of other people, whipping past at over five hundred K — it was one of the few times Dex ever felt hopeful about the world. It seemed like all those people, so close yet so distant from each other, just going about their daily lives, held the most amazing potential in the universe. The utter normalcy of it all amazed him.

  Here in Guadalajara, though, that same crush of humanity, in their banal daily existence, almost suffocated him. Dex worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle even the short train ride, but when the next train arrived, he was swept up in the blind human momentum and into the car. He was aboard and the doors closed before he even had a chance to think about escaping. Once the train started moving again, he pulled up his map and set his system to notify him when his stop was approaching. He rocked back and forth as the light magrail wound its way through the city, held upright by the crush of people on either side of him.

  His system pinged him, warning that his stop was approaching and Dex slithered through the crowd toward the door. He barely squeezed out the open side of the car before the door reformed and the train zoomed away. Dex looked around him, at the street and the community he’d traveled so far to visit. There was an eerie sense of familiarity here, the street looking only a little different from a hundred streets Dex had walked before. Tall, anonymous buildings lined the road, which was narrow and clogged with people walking to or from work, the expressions on their faces vacant as they spent most of their attention on some online distraction.

  This particular neighbourhood reminded Dex of the area he’d lived in when he lived with Maks, full of old and poorly maintained independent apartment buildings and discount food and booze stores. Dex suspected there would be a couple of bars or game halls nearby, since these run-down communities tended to be home to the physical world entertainment areas. Dex walked north, carefully watching the other people on the street.

  On the high speed train south, he’d managed to spend a few productive minutes checking out Mr. Sterling Ljundberg. He got an image capture of the man’s avatar from Marionette City, a tall, thin, dark haired man, with shoulder-length hair flowing out behind him. He wore small spectacles, an unusual affectation and had a van dyke beard. Of course, there was absolutely no reason why Ljundberg would necessarily look the same in the physical world, but it was all he had to go on. He’d asked Annabelle to see if she could come up with something more useful, but he hadn’t heard from her yet.

  Dex pulled up his list of potential accommodations and had his system cross reference it with the local area map. Almost immediately, a spot on the map started to glow with a dull red tint. A faint dotted line appeared, drawing a walking path from his current location to the nearest place he could rent a bed. It was a cheap travelers’ inn, but so long as it was clean, Dex didn’t care. He was actually pleased that it was a lower class establishment — cost wasn’t a factor, since his expenses were one hundred percent billable, but low rent rooms were more likely to have talkative people.

  He opened the door to the inn and his system immediately popped up a greeting message. “Welcome to El Presidente Metropol Hotel,” the bright banner read. Underneath, room rates and availability were listed and Dex chose a single room with attached lav. His system pinged, notifying him of the first night’s rate being withdrawn from his account. The hotel’s system gave him a password to enter at the chip writer and Dex dutifully stick his left hand in the machine, then sent the password to its server. After getting his room key programmed into his chip, he followed the map up the lift to his room.

  The room was about half the size of his own apartment, holding just a bed and a chair, with a 20 cm ledge along the wall acting as a table. The lav was tiny, but functional and clean and overall Dex was perfectly happy with the space. He stripped, used the lav and set his system to wake him in seven hours. He took a corresponding hit of SleepingJuice and climbed into the narrow bed.

  • • •

  Dex awoke before his alarm went off, the light from the small window illuminating the room as if he’d turned on the high output LEDs. He sat up, rubbed his face and turned off his system alarm. He padded over to his bag, rummaged around inside it and pulled out a small bottle of Flying Fish. He took a sip, just enough to get the juices flowing and walked over to the window. It was warm in the room and he hadn’t found any way to get at the room’s system to change the temperature — he wondered if maybe the room wasn’t even climate controlled. Dex looked out the window at the dark haze in the sky, turned a light pink by the high sun.

  He absent-mindedly rubbed a hand over his flat belly, the muscles beneath firm and defined. The food bricks regulated metabolism and the Flying Fish counterbalanced the booze. Pretty much everyone, except the most physically fashionable, looked like this — lean, muscled and young. Dex had seen a few people around following the most recent trend of having softer bodies, created by complex diets or specialized metabolism supplements, but Dex couldn’t be bothered by trends. He didn’t even take the Flying Fish for his looks — it was more to just get out of bed in the morning.

  There wasn’t a lot to see out the window — just the street he had walked up the night before and the facades of the other nearby buildings. It was the colour of the sky that really got to him. Dex wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a sky that wasn’t grey before. He just stood there, looking at the colour deepen, then fade away and after he’d been at the window about a half hour Dex finally turned and walked into the lav.

  He showered, dried off and dressed, then packed up his bag and headed out of the room. He took everything with him, unsure if he’d be returning and took the stairs the three flights down to the lobby area. There was a small kiosk set up with breakfast flavoured food bricks and water and Dex bellied up to its bar along with a handful of fellow guests. A half dozen chairs were set up in the lobby and Dex took a couple of the bars along with a large water bottle over to one of them. Sitting, he tore open the wrapper of one of the food bars and hungrily tore at the sticky mixture contained inside. Washing it down with a swig of water, he turned to look at the other people in the lobby.

  As he’d suspected, most of them seemed to be focussed on their physical surrounding, Dex only saw one person
with the thousand metre stare that being online generates. He decided to take a risk and turned slightly toward the man sitting in the chair next to him. “Hi, there,” he said and saw the other man nod in response. “I just got here last night. Is there anywhere to go hang out here, I mean physically near here?”

  His neighbour merely shrugged, mumbling, “Dunno,” but a hyper-fashionable, slightly pudgy woman leaning up against the wall across from them said, “There’s a place just down the road. The Free Robots Cafe. It’s pretty big, they serve palatable coffee and real drinks, but it’s usually full of Offline Cleanse types, so if you’re not into that sort of thing, it can be kind of annoying.”

  “Offline Cleanse?” Dex said.

  “You know,” she said, rolling her eyes, “that new anti-tech fad? It’s all over the boards these days.” She ate the last bite of her food brick and pitched the wrapper in the recyclatron before heading out the front door. Dex sat back in the chair and went online, searching for information about whatever it was that the woman had mentioned.

  The woman had been right, the regular gossip boards were full of posts about the Offline Cleanse. It turned out that a fairly popular vid actor had become fond of the concept and his fans and detractors had gone crazy posting about it. Pretty soon it had hit the radar of the mainstream posters and it seemed to be the topic du jour for most of the big boards.

  From what Dex could gather, it was based on your standard luddite ideas — that things were better in the past and that people had lost touch with each other and their own “inner selves” because of the ’nets. The ideas weren’t even all that radical — there was no call for people to permanently abstain from the ’nets or remove their implants. The main concept was for what they called “purification days.” One weekend a month, adherents were expected to go offline completely. That meant no messaging, no boards, no system generated wake up alarms. It was extreme, but only in the most basic sense and Dex thought three days a month was a pretty low commitment if you really believed that being online was “unnatural” and “dehumanizing”.

  However, it certainly sounded like a good explanation for Ljundberg’s disappearance. He’d been “missing” for a couple of days now and the Offline Cleanse required complete severance from the online world. Dex paged over to his messages, looking for something from Annabelle. If he could just get a good idea of what Ljundberg looked like, he might actually be able to find him. It seemed like it was time to put in a good long shift at that café.