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[no-on3-n0e]

Apocalypse Everyday/

Everyday Apocalypse

4.

It’s gonna hurt so much.

The Beat! didn’t have an office or headquarters, but it did have a building.

A magnificent tower at the very center of the surface sector, reaching all the way to the top of the dome.

Through the great columns of the filtration system, the great red glow of The Beat! beaconed with the filthy openness of a Pleasure Lounge.

The building had the look and feel of the classical architecture of the second millennium- the glass spires of the skyscrapers of yore. It was even squared off slightly at the bottom the way old buildings used to, but tapered more like a needle the higher up on went. The tower glittered in the burning light of the sun, and cast its own glow into the night, and all throughout the cycle, the huge red letters on the sides read out THE BEAT!

It was an intimidating and beautiful thing;

unless you knew the joke.

The great tower wasn’t really a tower at all. Most of it was just the dome's support beam, and only the first two floors were even accessible.

Most people would never get close enough to notice the sloppy facade, the single dingy door, the feeling of oppressive lifelessness about the whole place.

There weren't any filters this far from the edges, so the air was warm and felt almost sticky. The ground began to slope slightly the closer one got to the hub, so the silt that would occasionally find its way through the filters would all inevitably end up here. The area was also strangely noisy. The many networks of wires and cables sending electricity, heat, fuel , coolant, and Fume  knows what else up and down the gargantuan support beam. 

It hummed without end.

The combination made one feel like they were being pressed into a great wall of static, every sense being activated to absorb the unintelligible noise. It filled in the spaces where silence ought to be, but it added nothing. 

The brain at a certain point could adjust slightly, ignore the noise, breath slowly and deliberately, walk carefully to not stir up the dust, but it just doesn't stop.

It just didn’t stop.

Spend an hour there  and you’d have a headache, spend a week there you’d lose your mind.

Joneson had lived here his whole life.

The dark red crawl of night rolled across the surface sector and the glowing red letters of The Beat! lit in response as Dave crossed the last few steps to the small heavy door on the side of the tower.

And then he stopped. He stood for a while to collect himself for the task ahead of him.

He’d been inside the building many times over his 40 or so MegaSecs working for The Beat! .

Dave thought it was one of the strangest places anyone had ever come out alive from.

The first floor was an old-fashioned style domestic living space. It was some of the finest old antiques to survive the Division. Joneson even had a kitchen, filled with appliances that had been used to prepare old-world food; a popcorn machine, an apple corer, a potato peeler. Joneson would proudly show them all to Dave everytime he came over.  

Then the old man would guide Dave over to one of the many ornamental seating arrangements, describing to him once again the harrowing stories of the travels of this piece or that, transported by some of the very first pilgrims to leave the old world for the colonies, before the Divide even.

The second floor was where all the data banks  for The Beat! were stored. 

The racks of heavy machinery warped the floor above where Joneson lived, and repairs and installations were extra tedious thanks to the stairs.

Why the strange arrangement? Why not keep that crap on the ground floor? Dave had asked the man the first time he’d been over, back when he was naive about his triggers to rant.

He’d gotten a tirade about zoning this, regulation that, and so on and on.

Dave got the impression that Joneson wanted the inconvenience, enjoyed the feeling of self-sacrifice that came with the danger and misery; or maybe he was just hoping that one cycle that gravity would finally give him an ‘out’ that wasn’t his fault.

Dave stood before the door for an age, listening to the hum run through his bones, the thin silt in the air tickling his nose hairs, tasting strangely burnt in the back of his throat.

When he could no longer find any thoughts to stall him… yes, nothing else to stall him… nothing? No, nothing at all-

Dave knocked.

No response.

“Mr. Joneson? It’s Dave, I was coming to check in”

No response.

Dave knocked a little harder and raised his voice,

“It’s Dave Win, sir- I’ve got an update about that info you wanted me to grab”

There was only silence- or well, only the constant noise of the relentless thrum, but Dave couldn’t hear any other human sounds- nothing that even indicated the man was inside.

Anger gripped Dave for the nth time since he’d started this whole disastrous cycle. 

This was a complete abandonment of the norm in their relationship, a disrespect that clawed down his already raised nerves.

Dave was the only person who ever came to seeJoneson anyway. Joneson didn’t go out, ordered everything through drone carts, and had a private hygiene and waste cubical. Probably nobody even knew what he looked like anymore since his public photos hadn’t been updated in hundreds of cycles.

Dave looked around in frustration, trying to find something to get the attention of the man inside. He got deliveries, right? So, how would the drone’s alert him to pick up his stuff? 

Half of a strange thought bubbled up in Dave’s mind, a mental image of one of the efficient little hovering discs Total used for deliveries. He pictured it unfolding a precisely segmented robotic arm, at the end of which was, against all reason, a misshapen white-gloved hand reaching out and pressing a doorbell to announce itself. 

He hadn’t meant to chuckled under his breath,and he had absolutely no idea where the impulse came from, but he then said out loud,  in a quiet sing-song voice -

   ‘Ding-dong’--

– And there was sudden tearing in the fabric of local reality as Joneson threw the door open with such force that it bounced on its rollers just as Joneson attempted to lurch forward.

His roar of rage turned into a screech of pain as the door hit his arm. 

Dave leaned back some, but otherwise did not move away. He knew not to change his face until he was sure what expression to show, and he had no idea how to react right now.

The man’s rage broke enough for him to bark out three harsh word-noises- 

“What’dyda callinme nay?”- 

what did you call me- what are you calling me- what did you call me now..- Dave’s mind raced through various translations, but his mind couldn't fathom what the man thought he’d been called-

 Dave put up his hands and tried to shrug against the vague acqusation, 

“ I-”

Joneson shoved a shaking fist at Dave, spitting out slurred expletives  ;

“Ding your fucking dong-ding fuck Dave- rip your fucking dingdongdickhole bitch’ll kill’ll you feck-

“What?!” Dave stammered back, “I didn’t say, I mean I wasn’t saying to you anything, I was just thinking about a joke-”

At the word ‘joke’, Joneson’s already cartoonish rage became an almost abstract display of color and motion. 

Dave spoke quickly to push through the impending armageddon

“No! Its just a joke, I heard it while I-”

 a thought shot through Dave about how to de-escalate

“It was part of a joke some wannabe told while I was trying to get info from Dr. Smith- I got a sit down interview” –

 he searched his mind desperately for anything that would get the rancid old arguetainer off of him - flattery! And give him a better target-

“You’ve been right about everything Srax! Dr.Smith, the- there’s this- BIMBOT! He’s gonna use the Update to turn them all loose. He’s got this whole army of  bimbots coming for– fo-for-”

for what? Information? Property- what would get someone like Joneson excited? 

 “OUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!” 

Dave put his arms into the air, selling the horror with a physical display of how impacted he was by this dark secret. His next move was a bit of a gamble considering how volatile the man could be, but Dave took the chance and put his hands on either side of the man’s shoulders, and when Dave dramatically looked into his boss' face, he saw in the man’s wide dependent-like expression of mischievous glee that he’d made the right choice.

He leaned in, confiding in the man with a conspiratorial whisper,

“I’ve got it all! All the documents- the White Papers! They’re on video admitting it! But Smith set one of them- he’s got them disguised as people! He’s got one of them to steal my TD!”

There- everything taken care of all at once. 

Now he had more time, didn’t have to explain losing his TD, and he could count of Joneson’s full support on destroying Synamon.

He found that he was quite proud of the fresh conspiracy he’d come up with on the spot.

The idea that an ‘Intimate Companion AI’, or a bimbot as people like Straximillion thought of them, could operate outside of the specialized quarters of the Entertainment District was a source of constant moral panic. 

The synthetic lovers were the only AnthroTools that were still required to be plugged into an on-site power source, and the data banks that were the repositories of all their carnal knowledge was kept on specially stored networks where their indecent nature couldn’t taint the AnthroTools vital to survival.

Suspicion was built into them, their temptatious forms offering a home to all kinds of human vice. It was very easy for The Beat! to get out at least an article per cycle on how the dens of sweet reprise were exploiting the Laborers, were being used to do this or that experiment of people, were being used to destroy families and Laborer Corpo-Unions, and on and on and on and-

And maybe Dave could even get Joneson to give him a new TD! He might be able to talk him into getting an upgrade too. 

If it was for a story this juicy after all…

The information went through Joneson’s mind slowly. His heaving breaths slowed some and his glassy bright blue eyes stopped rolling erratically, and focused on Dave. 

Dave took in the man as he began to settle back into the regular-irregular form he remembered.

It was impossible to truely tell the man’s age. If he was as old as he looked, he’d have been dead for at least fifty cycles. 

He was completely hairless, wrinkled and yet swollen.

His skin was a mismatch of discolored patches, netted with inflamed blood vessels, dark marks of illness, sun damage, and age.

Dave assumed the man was mostly blind by now because his milky blue eyes would roll unfocusedly and bulge as he ranted. 

He gave the general impression of a baby that had hadn’t aged, but instead rotted as it got older.

Still, there was something remarkable about the old man, the way he just truely never seemed to stop, the sheer in-exhaustive amount of energy that he could put into the stupidest things out of sheer stubbornness to do things the way he wanted to. 

The gas tanks, for example.

As the man hobbled and wobbled into the living quarters of the tower, he dragged with him the ever present canisters of medicated gasses.

He refused to ever take a step into the medical clinics, refused to allow any of the medical drones to so much as give him a diagnostic scan.

He instead relied on Blue-times tech specially made for him by a craftian in the Memeorical district.

Each tank cost enough credits to buy a man from a whole MegaSec’s worth of labor, and Johnson blew through at least a dozen every cycle.

If the unlabored mob had any idea the treasures that railed over their heads, the swill would rip apart the drones for the opportunity to haggle their payloads for enough credits to buy some humanity.

The gross man turned and slowly made his way back inside.

Dave waited until the man settled himself into a crumbling relic of a chair, and when he was sure the bloat-wad was relatively calm, he walked forward and began the verbal dance. 

 “ Ok Srax  buddy, this is the big one- we’ve got the Total’s star doct-“

“Don’trusd  -hes a sneaky-snake- crawllinbelly- whad-did-dee needda help anyone wid -got more goin on- them bimbot bitches-

“Yup, yup, yup” 

Dave nodded enthusiastically, letting the interruption slide past him as he barreled through to his goal-

“That’s right Srax, he’s got an evil bimbot- it’s disguised as a woman named Synamon who sto-

“- andriods- gonna gid all DN rays in with microwaves to- and everyone knows it to- it was inda docmints-...”

“YES Strax- it’s in the documents, anyway she- it- I, ah, shit-“

Dave cut himself off Johnson broke out into a gut choking cough.

“HCKn- THit-IEtt-HcCkn-GhhUh-uh-nh

The lump of a man chokedand went from the red of a wound to the red of the sky.

Dave watched as spittle expectorated across the room and it took all of his will power not to just leave.

This whole experience was even more demeaning knowing this fuck-clump was one of the most memeorically influential nodes in the colonies.

For many born within the colonies, the Arguetainer was the source of their shared memory of the Blue-times ; skyscrapers that reached to the moon, banquets of hot fresh food that were refilled every cycle by abattoirs and fields that teemed with all manner of animals and plants, family homes with whole rooms filled with filtered water that a full grown person could submerge themselves in for simple pleasure.

Dave heard the hacks ease to a wheeze, he counted to 10 in his head, and then started his line of attack again.

“I can get the scoop, a real exclusive, an insight into the company that no one has- But!”

Dave paused for dramatic effect, Joneson leaned in

“It’s not gonna be easy” Dave concluded dramatically 

“Ahh HA-HOOoooo wee” Joneson shifted in his seat and began to pump his arm in the air as quickly as his various tubes would let him. 

“Wheeeee gottem!! we’re winning, we’re winning!” Joneson’s cries of joy were gratingly high-pitched compared to his regular low slurring. 

The joyous exclamations led to another coughing fit, and Dave found himself examining the walls as the man turned a pop-art purple. 

Every corner of the room was covered in priceless kitsch from the Blue-times.

Pages of strange text and images were tacked to every space on the walls. Advertisements, textbook pages, drawings, and diagrams depicted fauna of all varieties, some with great flat arms that hung themselves from the sky, some all but limbless as they moved through liquid medium, some that combed through and over the old world’s flora. 

The only creature Dave recognized was a mosquito, pictured on a page labeled “Deadly Insects!” the caption underneath the image of the wire-like creature said “Female mosquitoes drink your blood and make you itchy! Ouchy! They carry a deadly disease called Tuberculosis and live in polluted runoff, never go near unsanctioned water stations!”

Dave didn’t know what tuberculosis was, but he remembered seeing tubes of mosquitos along with other kinds of research specimens back when he’d been an unclassified dependent. Why would anyone keep around such a horrible creature? Especially if you had to feed it blood? Dave knew once again the thing he’d known his whole life- every smart person was a moron.

Once again the man’s ragged breathing return to a normal-ish tempo and he saw the man’s color stabalize,

“I’m going to have to go undercover to get the last piece of information I need. Everything is in place, but I need to borrow a different TD to cover my infiltration into - well, I probably should tell you where I’m going. I trust you of course, I know you’d never crack under torture, but… well, who knows who’s listening to us, and what new devices THEY might have to get into your mind and read your thoughts. Well, I guess WE will know what devices THEY have after I get my info, but, well…”

Dave let his sentence fade out without a conclusion.

Joneson was the type of person who preferred to make his own conclusions up about things, and if you wanted something from him, it was best to let him get on with his fantasies

“Ahhh HA-aaa!” gushed the elated Joneson, his thumblike head nodding in agreement with whatever conclusion he assumed Dave to be implying.

“SOoooo…” 

Dave led on, beginning to walk towards the beckoning light of Joneson’s TD plugged into the Total Home Station, the only modern piece of furniture in the room. 

“I’ll just go ahead and grab your TD, and I can get it back to you before the beginning of the next work cycle- the 34th at the very latest, and we’ll have enough stories to run a whole special- we could make run it at the beginning of Eighthmonth, that's usually a slow week for-”

“Hey!”

Joneson barked out suddenly

Dave had just got as his hand slipped around the TD when the man shouted out. 

He didn’t turn around- didn’t move at all.

He had to just stand there and try to breath because if he did anything else he was going to finally snap- going to burst that bloated wart-baby.

He waited for the man to come at him first- waited for one last word, one more vague glurb, one last tone that could be taken offense at-

Dave held the TD, unmoving, waiting for Joneson to finally break that last straw…

…

But the man was silent, save for his heavy wheezing breaths.

Was he…

waiting?

Dave slowly turned, TD in hand, prepared for the barrage of nonsense, but the man just kept looking at him.

For the first time in their relationship, the two looked each other in the eyes.

Neither looked away as Dave slowly slid the TD into his pocket.

The man gave no reaction to the unsubtle theft- his stare unflickering.

Dave realized for the first time in his life that the man had brown eyes. They were clouded with age, and red nets of blood vessels ran through the yellowing orb, but the narrow band of color was a soft light brown.

His irises were pinholes.

When he finally spoke, it came out slowly and much more clear than his usual ramble- and there was a strange note of … something

“You wanna sit wid me summore?” 

“Uuuh

 Dave had absolutely no idea how to react. This kind of request had never been made to him before from anyone- let alone Sraximillion Scorpxion Joneson IV.

Dave tried to search for what angle the old man was playing, searched those eyes for some clue to his deception…

And found nothing.

Less than nothing.

An epiphany suddenly hit Dave; he didn't need to lie to the old man, he didn't need to rob him either.

Dave could’ve just asked him for the favor.

This deflating old relic, in his creaking tower of lies and nonsense, had absolutely no one.

All he had was his forum, generated slop that would be of no interest to anyone if it weren't for Dave’s eye-catching titles and Joneson’s inflammatory delivery.

Joneson was a contrived person.

More of an idea than an individual, and probably not one single other living person had even heard his natural, unfiltered, speaking voice.

If Dave never came to see the man, never rested his eyes on his broken frame, acknowledged the existence of his living form, would Joneson even exist anymore? 

Maybe one of these cycles, Joneson’s lungs would finally pop, or his fabrication of a tower would crash in on him, or he’d finally succumb to the madness of the endless thrumming beat… 

Eventually, this man’s cycles would run out he’d be gone- but his voice, his strange energy to inspire chaos, everything he cast into the world would keep going.

And this man had no one in the entire colonies.

Except for Dave. 

A giddy sense of power washed over Dave, followed immediately by a sick wave of nausea. 

It was like realizing you were worshiped as a god by a mosquito.

“Uh, I’ve gotta head out really, I’ll definitely come again as soon as I can. Before the beginning of the next workcycle, like I said-'' Dave spoke uncertainty, though he did not make a move for the door, too completely engrossed in the pathetic vulnerability of his boss.

“I gotussome good stuffs” Joneson broke in, speaking brightly, like a bargaining dependent. Joneson waved his hand at a black jar on the table.

Morbidly fascinated, Dave picked it up and unscrewed the lid to reveal a small dark cube.

Ah, drugs.  Maybe that explained the man’s strangeness.

Dave eyed the cube curiously. 

It was dark and grainy, but light seemed to stick to it in flakes.

He picked it up and realized the thing had no weight at all and was strangely soft.

It looked a bit like the silt that built up outside the dome of the surface sector.

Sometimes during a bad storm, some of it would get through the filters and would hang in the air for hours until the vents could get it pumped out.

People had to stay in their spaces or in emergency shelters then.

Even a few minutes of breathing in the dust could rip up a person’s lungs. 

“What is it?”

Dave asked suspiciously.

He was beginning to regret picking up the strange cube.

The flecks started coming off, sticking to his fingers. Dave tried to drop the cube back into the jar, but it clung to him.

“DMA”  Joneson’s voice rang out, somehow both whispering and booming through Dave’s skull. 

The cube was disintegrated, the grains losing their form from the heat of his finger tips, but rather than falling apart it became an opaque goo.

Dave waved his hand wildly, acting in horrified instinct.

“Huhhwhau?” Dave couldn’t seem to make his mouth work.

It was sinking into him.

The darkness and the light began to grow, destroying all color. 

The light screamed, destroying all sound.

Dave’s being was flash heated by the noise, dissolved into the light.

For a lifetime, there was nothing, and then static began to form.

[no-on3-n0e]

Apocalypse Everyday/

Everyday Apocalypse

 3.

I’m sorry

_______________

Dave was rooted to the spot.

The gravity of his loss sticking him in place, his mind raging.

The freaks, the sheer freakery of the freaks, that insane woman, that pathetic excuse of a celebrity scientist, the waste- waste of everything, his time, his talents, all of it wasted. 

His fist closed tight around the sandwich, watching with satisfaction as the paste-like dough oozed out of the plastic film.

For a moment, the satisfaction of destruction soothed his mind, but then the moment passed and Dave was still without his TD, still without his work -his salvation from the squalor of the cohabitant zone, and now he had no diner.

Dave threw down wad, stamping it into the walkway for good measure.

There was no time to get back to the eatery before the shift change, and in any case one of those filthy unlabored scum probably already took it. If that pathetic Dr. Smith had better control over his woman, if that freak woman, that hell-maid Synamon, hadn't made his job impossible, hadn’t basically terrorized him away from the eatery, he wouldn’t have rushed off and forgotten his TD. 

It was as if the world was conspiring against him, challenging him to give into despair. But Dave knew he was smart enough to get past whatever nonsense he was forced to deal with.

Dave was special.

He had a power that no one else did, an ability that gave him leverage in every situation, let him mold the wills of lesser people, and always kept him calm in trying times.

Dave knew he was better than everyone else. That was his power.

He knew in his heart he was superior to every other person across the colonies.

It didn’t matter if they had other skills, had more credit, had things Dave wanted- Dave knew he could get those things, manipulate those minds, get people to do things for him.

So this was fine- Dave wasn’t really worried. He was fine, absolutely fine, with having lost- having basically been robbed of- his TD.

He just had to come up with a plan.

He couldn’t get into his rented space without his TD to verify his identity, but since he was unlabored he wasn’t automatically logged into the central database. Getting a new TD was also going to require trying to get an appointment with one of the representatives at Total and explain the situation if he wanted it replaced. If he was found to have been negligent in losing his TD he’d have to work one of the lines until he paid back the company for the waste of resources. Being a Pro-Quo worker was even more humiliating than being the lowest grunt laborer. At least the low-tier laborers were due the respect that all laborers deserve, but everybody looked down on the pathetic people forced to repay their debt. Getting stuck as a Pro-Quo worker could even lead to a person becoming a total dropout- then it wasn’t long before you ended up as a scum-sucker clinging to the world in the pits of the cohabitation zone.

No.

It was pointless to worry about the TD, that was gone, move forward- stay out of the pit.

So what instead?

Dave poured his heavy head into his hands, leaning against a venting column as he puzzled through what to do.

He needed somewhere he could just sit and think for a while, but there was no way to get any quiet or privacy without access to his credits. 

Dave was smart enough to not get tangled up with anyone who wasn’t useful, and so this left a very small pool of people he could go to.

Dave groaned as he realized who his only option was.

 Dave wretched internally while simultaneously beginning to get his mind in the right order to deal with his boss.

Sraximillion Scorpxion Joneson IV.

He’d been a titan back in his prime,

He had been one of the first pilgrims to join the colonies as a young child, and his family soon became key players in the prosperity of the colonies and their surface-sectors.

Sraximilion Scorpxion Joneson the Second brought the Xian church to the colonies, eventually becoming the church’s first Holy Executive Officer.

When people had arrived in the colonies with only the clothes on their back, desperate for shelter from the silt storms and the burning sky, one of the first things they would see when they finally got past the magnetic locks and into the safety of the surface-sector would be the great form of Sraximillion Scorpxion Joneson II, a sign hung around his thick neck saying ‘SALVATION!’. 

Joneson II taught the scriptures from memory, enrapturing his audience with stories of the benevolent and wrathful Xian God who had sent his only begotten son, George Washington, to found the holy land of America.

After that whole business that nobody really mentioned anymore, the title of HEO of the Xian church passed out of the Joneson family, but S.S. Joneson IV made sure to keep up his grandfather’s preaching through The Beat!.

Family, natural family as Joneson would put it, was an extremely important topic in The Beat! and one of the constant attacks Joneson made against his enemies was that they were trying to destroy the family. Dave’s boss had no children that he knew of, and the man never brought up his own parents, but Dave knew that was part of the man’s success. Knowledge is a barrier to true passion.

Dave had grown up listening to Joneson, or at least his AI assisted voice, and had recognized his power early on. He enthralled people.

It didn’t matter if people loved or hated him, they would tune in to listen to whatever insanity he spewed.

His opinions were so bombastic, his views so asinine, his cadence so without rhythm or reason, he was fascinating. 

Joneson- through the waves of The Beat!- had the distinction of having one of the few distinct synth voices. Anyone broadcasting over the networks had to pick a synth voice to speak through, to ensure quality and clarity over both networks. Most voices were generated using dozens of people’s sounds collected anonymously from the great cloud of unending noise.

S.S. Joneson IV had gotten his own voice to use, modulated only slightly to nullify the sounds of his wheezing, coughing, choking, spluttering, stuttering, slurring, and swearing, from disrupting his tirades.

Maybe Joneson’s mannerisms were refreshing- the rest of the synth voices they heard were so forcibly cheerful, often with strange tone inflection and emphasis.

Sometimes people would use that fact to comedic advantage, often deliberately using anachronistic voices and speech patterns to strip all seriousness or sense from everything said. Just because it was funny.

Maybe Joneson was funny too.

People prefer novelty to honesty, surprise over stability, fantasy over reality.

The way to get ahead in this world was to find what people wanted and convince them that it was right around the corner.

Or even better, convince them that whatever it was they already had could be taken away from them by some nefarious something, someone, or whatever.

This was all Joneson’s fault. And Synamon and Dr. Smith.

Joneson’s paranoia about Total, Dr. Smith, the big update- all of it was so stupid and now he had nothing- less than nothing.

But Dave knew that even when he had nothing, he still had more than enough to get what he wanted so long as he had the contents of his own head.

So what if he couldn’t bring Joneson the info- who cared about information anyway? The story was the point.

And Dave knew how to tell a story.

Something the old man wouldn’t see coming- and he could throw that scad of a woman under the bus at the same time.

 Joneson’s was as predictable as he was chaotic, and Dave knew how to fold the man like a sheet into any shape he wanted.

The task was unsavory, and dealing the man made Dave feel sick for cycles afterwards, but this was a desperate situation. 

Dave began to drag himself towards the hub of the surface sector, seething silently as he schemed.

Synamon. He’d splurge himself in her suffering. He’d drag it out, use her for all her worth as a media object- then when he’d squeezed her dry, he’d make her his pet project for a smear campaign to rival all others.

 Honestly, it was probably a kindness to her to make sure she never disrupted another man’s business again, one cycle she might incur the wrath of someone less considerate than Dave and end up getting herself killed.

Dave smiled to himself, almost skipping as he crossed the bridge leading into the hub.

It’d be trivially easy to swipe his boss’ TD until he could get a new one.

Ever the optimist, Dave went forth

[no-on3-n0e]

Apocalypse Everyday/

Everyday Apocalypse

2.

Oh.  Baby.

______________________________________________________________

Dave’s position at The Beat! didn’t provide a consistent credit rate, and he never even knew how he earned the credits he did get.

It was all based on a complicated set of figures; something to do with the flicker-through rate, scroll-speed, registered-base node pings, how intoxicated his boss was, if anyone famous had their genitals publicly caught in anything, and so on and so on and on and on, and on. 

When he’d first started at The Beat!, almost 30 MegaSecs ago, the whole operation was basically running on GigaSec-old databanks just re-wording old articles inbetween paid-programming.

The only thing The Beat! had that actually kept it in existence was the fact that it was too much trouble to seriously purge it from the NATNET.

This was all fine for Dave, who had sauntered into the never-ending crisis of The Beat! and distinguished himself through basic competency.  

He hadn’t been qualified as a laborer, scoring perceptibly below average on the math section of his Computational Analysis and Reasoning Exam.

His grammar and linguistic sections were average though, and this at least meant he had a place in the elusive and competitive Content Creation field. 

Being labored gave one instant access to the shared value of the colony; laborers were the lifeblood of the colonies- they were what allowed the colony itself to exist, they created the colony’s value.

Dave didn’t want to create value- he wanted to have value- personal value.

Ostentatious displays of intelligence would get him head-hunted into some branch of some industry, where they’d hand him enough comfort and distraction that he’d forget all about trying to be an individual.

And so Dave worked at what he was good at- which was hiding what he was good at, until he was in a position to use it to get what he wanted. 

He managed to increase the popularity of The Beat by figuring out what exactly what people wanted: validation, and ‘righteous’ fury.

He’d known from the offset that whatever was in the articles themselves didn’t matter. People didn’t flicker through articles to read- or even have the articles read to them by a synthetic voice.

They skimmed headlines to make comments.

The bizarre interview he had just gotten would be perfect for spinning out headlines full of enough speculation, suspicion, and intrigue to keep The Beat’s scum-suckersand sum-null consumers busy for the next 10 GigaSecs.  

Dave busied himself with planning the rest of his cycle- each step calmed him.

He walked quickly out of the eatery stall, heading for the magnet-locked gate that led to the outer circle. 

Bus tracks criss-crossed the surface sector in meticulously designed routes.

The buses were for laborers only- they eased the laborer’s access to and from their homes and had stops all along the entertainment districts. 

Dave, as an independent-unlabored, was able to rent a single-occupant space using some of his extra credits.

There were 120 such spaces in the liminal area between the entertainment districts for sub-sectors I and IV. 

Since he was on foot, there was only a sliver of time where he could get back to his space before the laborers would start piling out for the shift turn over. 

All the exits would all be blocked by buses piping in dreary-eyed Renewmen, Caliberists, Filterers, Titrationists, and all the other small cogs of the human machine that kept the surface sector working. 

They’d fill up every eatery- cramming and shoving to get what was theirs- before submitting to their shifts. They’d work for 15 KiloSecs, take a 1 KiloSec break, then work for 12 KiloSecs before being released to spend the rest of their cycle as they saw fit.

The released- some of them were beginning to trickle in from the other side even now, were making hurriedly for the outgoing bus terminal.

Those laborers were flushed with effort and satisfied knowing they’d earned their slice of society.

Their Total Devices charged with fresh credits, they’d get into the bus and sit, while the complementary Simulcast screen played advertisements for how they could spend some of their credits having a bit of fun.

Fun.

Some of them found it by punching in directions to get perfectly-programed intimacy from a Live ‘n Lovely in the Pleasure Lounges.

Some of them would rush to the Light Stations or Vibe Halls to have their neurons bounced around enough to knock away their woes.

Some would even step into an exchange booth and roll their credits into tokens to play at the RNG halls.

The smartest of the labored would remain on the bus until it reached the labored-housing district, and they’d go home and store their credits- their full earnings and their extra pay.

It is imperative to not hit 0 credits.

So long as you could keep a hold of one- just one credit- you were able to move freely.

If you were labored, it was expected to go to work and demonstrate your ongoing continued worth to society as you accumulated credits.

If you were unlabored and had at least one credit, you were expected to either continue to demonstrate credit-earning social value, or fuck up and end up a scum-sucker in the cohabitation-zone.

Dave’s place in society was that of an independent-unlabored.

He earned enough credits to justify his unlabored existence.

If he were to fall under 1, he’d be a sub-prime unlabored. He’d have a 10-cycle period to earn back a credit- and if he couldn’t… he’d still be allowed to exist and everything, but… well.

There are lots of ways to exist.

Dave hurried past the Recycling district towards the gate, but had to slow down as he neared a wall of public NATNET outlets. 

There was a huddle of grubby labor drop-outs slumping in heaps. 

Their faces were waxy, bellies descended, skin pallid.

All of these were symptoms of a diet of just the free basic Total Nutritional Block.

Dave held himself close, eyes down, walking with the speed of purpose, past the row of eyes and clasped hands. 

Dave did not pity those he would not see. 

He hated them all for looking so sad, so lost and empty, and squandering every opportunity the colonies had given them.

When he was past the crowd, he finally breathed out, and his tense anxiety bloomed into quiet rage.  

Squanderers. Shamble-makers. Sub-prime scum-suckers.

If an individual couldn’t temper their cravings, if they gave into the urge to spiral- to succumb to desires, then you’d end up the victim of life in a perfect world.

They had all been given a chance, they all could still work, but they were ungrateful for their existence.

When the system is designed so only the lazy, degenerate, and weak can fail, then there is no decent person left who will help you. 

If it weren’t for Total Corp. and their conglomerate policy that every human life is priceless, the scum-suckers would have been driven out into the dust choking wastes to char under the red sky.

Still, whenever their addictions to sensation was–the Lite Stations, the Pleasure Lounges, the glittering tokens of the RNG halls– it outpaced their capacity to earn enough credits to justify their consumption of social goods.

So they would be pushed out.

Sub-primes were unable to travel too far from the cohabitation zones, could not go past the magnetic gates that led to the entertainment and living districts.

They’d hang around like vestigial organs until they finally gave up trying to beg around the bus terminals. Then they’d sink into the cohabitation zone and live like parasites-doing nothing but sucking down basic blocks and doing whatever it is they do in that pit.

He’d seen some of them in their later stages-  they began to droop like the air was leaking from them, their eyes becoming occluded and dull.

 Every food had the same basic nutritional content since it was all produced from the same Total Nutrition Blocks.  You could survive off of just the basic blocks- but it was really meant to be manipulated in some way to be anything worth eating.

You couldn’t exactly chew the things, you had to kind of mush and grind it, and it would come off as layers of gritty paste. The paste had to be sucked and rolled in the mouth for KiloSecs at a time.

Eating them raw long enough would cause their upper palettes to gradually lose form, their teeth would wear down to nothing- if the didn’t fall out first.

It was not uncommon to see a group of the toothless things sitting on their haunches in the corner of a shanty, passing around a block of sustenance, as they all took turns wearing down the outside of the block- creating an outer paste of nutritious saliva that would be passed to the next person.  

If you lived in the cohabitation zone, you were forced to rely not only on the provisions of the colony, but also the other wastes around you.

Dave couldn’t live like that.   

Even when dealing with functional people he tried to limit his interactions.

Dave could see through people easily enough to get what he wanted from them, but he didn’t want to spend more time than he needed around them. 

Dave’s natural cynicism about the human condition allowed him to write the perfect headlines to encourage users to spend hours on the site; lured enough to generate shock and outrage, but falling perfectly within people’s pre-existing prejudices to be instantly believable.

Once he was back in his single occupancy space, he'd be able to click his TD into the complimentary workspace, and he'd begin to work on engineering the right headlines to whip up his commenters.

The comment sections of the articles were always reliable- some people were coming to The Beat!  just to argue or vent. 

As he walked, he patted his pocket where his Total Device sat re-assuredly, and felt the weight of the rectangle holding his hard work. 

It squished slightly.

  Dave stopped in his tracks.

The weight in his pocket where he always put his TD, the weight he had absentmindedly assumed was his TD, it–

He pulled it out in horror–

It was the yellow brick of the eatery sandwich.

[no-on3-n0e]

Apocalypse Everyday/

Everyday Apocalypse.

I think I’m trying to tell you something

____________________________________________________________

    “I wanna start wid a joke”, the woman's saccharine, childlike, voice broke the tense silence. She was sitting easily, almost lounging in the stiff plastic folding chair. She had ordered hot tea and was stirring it aimlessly and unbothered by the stirrer’s slow dissolving.  They were all three sitting at a table meant for two.

    Dave had arrived first and had expected to only be meeting with Dr. Smith. The doctor sat squirming in his fold out plastic chair, looking like a bored teenager.  People on the NATNET and the Simulcast networks were going crazy over him right now.  Simultaneously, they were calling him a messiah and a devil. 

The man was the current darling of self-righteous super-patriots and pious peaceniks alike, and the stress of dealing with his admirers and detractors had made Dr. Smith a difficult man to get an interview with.  But somehow, he was sitting here now, in this grungy eatery with the common muck, looking as miserable as Dave felt.  

Dave couldn’t have just told his lunatic boss that he didn’t want to do this once-in-a-lifetime fact-gathering.  He was making easy credits for, supposedly, not too hard of a job.

    As the only one who really did anything at ‘The Beat!’ Dave’s main job was to go through the word-vomit text churned out by the AI article writer and turn it into content. The AI used databanks to generate articles, listicles, video scripts, instructional videos, obituaries, etc.  However, the never-ending cries for novelty meant that the databanks were always critically low on new titillating gossip, so these fact-gathering expeditions were sometimes necessary. 

 The mysterious Dr. Smith was supposed to be the lead developer on the new update to Total’s networks; which included the shared scaffolding for the NATNET, the Simulcast, and even the Paramantle.

Smith was the newest flavor of celebrity- hypercredited, seldom seen, and often referenced by other heads of industry as truest genius of whatever fields they were promoting.

He refused to talk to most reporters, brand kings, or sector heads, and no one could even really get close enough to him for a picture.

In every image of him, he was always surrounded by leggy, shiny, attention starved creatures who sucked in focus. Whether this was a tactical move to stay private, or simply the gravitational effect of celebrity, Dave didn’t know or care.

 Dave thought of Smith as more of a mascot, and his whole character as part of some great game that he didn’t care to play.

Dave had only sent the request for an info debrief to the man’s personal assistant as a matter of principle. He’d never expected the actual man to even see the message.

 He had been hoping for a simple facts list; that’s all that was needed for the AI to generate a series of articles all about how the doctor was evilly silencing small platforms, how he was the secret adopted son of the last Tsar of Asia, how he had donated 1000 public terminals to the cohabitation zone, or had single-handedly saved all the colonies’ supply of Total Nutritional Blocks from buzz-rot, etc., etc. It was all garbage, facts were just details.

Dave even planned to include a little piece about how Smith’s team had refused to talk to him, but the doctor himself had sent Dave a direct message on his personal Total Device agreeing to meet. He’d given an address a time and told Dave to meet him the next cycle.

So here they were; the apathetic aggregator, the squirming doctor, and his trophy bimbo.

It was the bim- woman, who just spoke, and Dave felt his head throb as he realized that this 1-bit arm-candy was going to interject herself and make this whole thing even more annoying.

Dave sighed and stopped the recording on his Total Device.  "We don’t typically have jokes in these things, miss…”  Dave paused for her to give her name, but she just smiled at him blankly.  Perhaps she simply assumed Dave had to know her name already. 

She must be one of the main characters in his rotation of hangers-on then. 

There are always perpetual parasites that define themselves through their relationship to a celebrity and will make themselves into a node of attention for the gossip and rumors they arouse. 

Truthfully, if Dave thought hard, he could probably put a name to the face, especially since it was his job to keep those rumor mills spinning.  Whenever things were too peaceful to get eyeballs on new articles, he’d go through old articles and comments for any figure that was the focus of intense feelings of rage, jealousy, or envy, and whip up something excitingly deranged.

 But Dave didn't feel generous enough to sort through his mental list of low-tier celebrity wannabes, so instead Dave turned the pause into a cough and continued.  

“Uh- right. Listen, miss, my job is to go through a list of questions, ask a few background facts. I log them into the database for the article generation program, then I can put a little quote or two in here from the doctor. I’ve got the quote prompts right here, and there are some options for the doctor to re-word if he’d rather choose from our optimized quote list.” 

Dave tried to layer his statement with as much emphasis as possible that the interview was only intended to be with Dr. Smith, and that her input was unneeded and undesired.  The idiot woman couldn’t seem to get the hint.

She continued to smile, her expression unsettling in its unchanging placidity. 

He refused to look her fully in the face, looking to his interview subject instead, trying to subtly get his attention. The doctor wasn’t looking at him or the woman, he was instead entirely fixated on scraping at a piece of melted plastic stuck on the table.  The nature of this miserable meeting began to dawn on Dave. 

The doctor had simply brought one of his doll-like girlfriends out for a walk. The bitch had probably nagged him because she wanted her own piece in The Beat!, or maybe- Dave’s cynical mind spun at the speed of conspiracy, maybe she’d sent the message. The doctor was probably snagged by this shrieking sneaking whore into coming here to flare off whatever filler-shit she was flocking.

 Dave had been duped, and now he was expected to entertain this nasty woman.  He was trapped here. He couldn't really be expected to hold on to his job if he got up and left a meeting attended by Dr. Smith, even if it was a farce.  So Dave sighed slightly harder than he had earlier, turned to the colorfully made-up face, and spoke dryly, trying to keep every hint of anger out of his voice. 

“Sooo… yeah, the programs that write the articles can’t really do jokes. A joke has to have a set up and pay off, and the way the programs work is by just moving through a sentence and picking the word that is most likely to appear. It's good enough to know what information banks to pull from, and some of the better aggregator sites can even afford AI programs that know when two or more information banks are linked, but they can’t really do more than organize facts in a readable way. That’s why my job is to go out and collect enough facts to keep the information banks updated. What with all the new interest in Dr. Smith’s work, we’d really like to be one of the first sites with fresh content for our info banks. So, if I could just ask Dr. Smith some questions–”

     “Oh, yall guys don’t havta write the joke, I wrote it already!” she interjected brightly. 

Dave wanted to explode. Calmly, he replied

,  “Um, miss, I really just need information about Dr. Smith” 

Dave said his query’s name slightly louder, almost shouting, but the doctor of supposedly everything was still digging at the lump of plastic on the table. 

 The esteemed man seemed to have found that when the little lump of plastic was scraped off, it left behind a divot in the table. He was now further scraping into the table with eatery’s flimsy straw, trying to shave away the layer of white ash in the indent. The straw wiggled and bent as the woman continued to speak.

  “My joke’s ‘bout Johnny's work!” she said brightly.

‘Johnny’

 Dave bit back his tongue. 

The doctor didn’t seem to care about her brazen familiarity though, and Dave felt himself move from apathy to contempt for the doctor as well.

They were both laughing at him.

 Clearly, this was some kind of game- the doctor wouldn’t even look up from the spot on the table, and Dave was having his precious life and credit drained away here in this turn-over of an eatery- a public eatery when both of these cartoons had enough credit to buy new lives for every unlabored in the Cohab Zone Dave had just passed.

If he was going to be toyed with, it ought to at least be invited into one of the private eateries.

And Dave had no choice but to play along it seemed. 

 “Fine”, he breathed in defeat, giving her a wave, “let’s hear it.”.

The millisecond the words left his mouth, it began-

     “So, god one day looks down and up at all the people and sees they’ve gone bonkers. Just absolutely-lutly bonkers. An’ he’s like- ok, I dunno even what to do here- I’m not cleanin’ dis up! But- he’s like, he’s- just-he can't even judge anymore!  An so he don’t even know if they all of ‘em deserve- cause its not like you can- I mean god you, not you-you, but like, it’s not like god can all undo the apocalypse- I mean, not the whole apocalypse, cause then its like- ok? What even was that? But anyway- my point is- it’s that god, you’know- the god in my joke you know, he makin’ up his mind about what to do about the ‘Up-an’-at-‘em Pop-Off’ an’ he get’s this whole great idea. So first, he goes outta time an’ space, an’ he make a big ole button, then he goes lookin through all the humans- an’ he is god an’ all, so he can see everything you know, he gets to lookin’ down, an’ he finds the most normal-est, boring-est, whatever-est person in the whole entire group of human. Um-, an’ he picks him up, um- an’, god shows this guy the button- an’ um -so,  god says to the guy, he says:

“Iffin you press that, there’s a 50/50 possibility that ya destroy the entire universe- all da people, all da rocks, all da hydrogens, all of it- the total bang-a-lang”-

an’ the guy, he’s just standin’- or, floatin, I dunno- he’s there, an he says,

“Wow god, that’s alota-lotta-lot! What tha other 50 chance I get?”

 An god, he dont tell ‘m, he just say

 “Ya only might gonna know dat iffin you press da button!”.

An’ the guy say to god

“Do I gotta choice?”

An god’s all like-

“Uh, yeh dude, you’ve always-always-always gotta choice. Ya ain’t gotta press it, we can just hangout in dis void for infinity’

An’ so god an’ the guy are just sittin’- standin’- whatever, while this guy finally gets bored  waitin’ around, an’ also ‘cause he- he’s just all- all like, curious ya know?  About all da ways it could go- an what he might get an’ stuff- an so he gives in an’ he finally presses da big button-

An’ a big soudn goes outta the whole void-

-it goes-”

The woman smiled now, her face changing for the first time from it’s placid smile, now taking on an impish look.

 She breathed in deeply, and Dave allowed himself to notice for the first time her hugely inflated chest. She smiled widely showing off her perfect blue-white teeth, her glossy lips stretched taught. Her perfect lips curved in an arc that ended in the corners in two uncomfortably sharp points. Her cheeks were two rounded scoops of flushed flesh that rose to hide her eyes. Her eyes were further hidden behind the dark net of lashes, that sprouted like the slashed wires of a gutted machine. Dave stared, mouth agape, as the full-barrel shouted:

“DING DONG!”

Dave was about to weep from rage. He clenched his teeth and tried to curb an animal instinct to slap her. Then this obscene, loud, idiotic woman clapped her small hands together, her manicured nails tapping together, and- oh god, she kept going-

    “SO! The guy an’ god, they’re all like lookin’ around and now they’re just in heaven, an’ everythin’ is normal and fine, an’ they lookin’ down on da un-destroyed universe.

So, the guy, he says to god

‘That’s it?’

An god, he says to ‘em, ‘

‘I guess!’

An’ the guy shrugs an’ says

‘So, can I press it again?’”

The end of her ‘joke’ brought a cold silence. 

 Dave hated this woman more than he had hated anyone or anything in his entire life. 

He stared at her with as much open disgust as he could manage, but her strange smile never changed. 

It was unsettling–Dave felt like there was something deeply hollow in the smile.

Her skin was near poreless, her full figure showing all the signs of to-spec refinement, and the cut of her mirror-glaze skin wrap reminded Dave of the various pop-up ads for the ‘Intimate Companion’ AI dolls in the pleasure lounges. 

But, those eyes, the two pinpoints of focus… he felt…

Dave realized that no one had reacted to the joke. Dave had yet to even close his jaw, the doctor was inexplicitly trying to straighten the straw he had been poking the table with, and the woman was…

She was still just smiling and staring… and …  just smiling and staring. 

Her hands flat against the table, her posture straight and poised, and behind that smile her eyes were…

inscrutable.

There was that feeling- that odd stationary drop.

A sense of- sudden pressure change perhaps?

Time extended forever in the gulf of silence and he felt crushingly embarrassed to be the only one experiencing such discomfort- that he alone was unable to extract himself, and that his two torturers could seem so disinterested in his suffering- each second that passed killed him and birthed him anew into a deeper hell. 

About 15 seconds passed altogether.

Dave squirmed a little, physically scooching his chair further away from the pair. 

He realized he was backing down, afraid, slightly afraid, and this only confused him even more and made him angry. 

He gave up any sense of social necieties and cut to the only coherent thing he could think to say.

  “I don’t get it,”

He tried to find a way to change the woman’s expression- landing on cruelty as the easiest route “I don’t think you understand your husband’s work very much”

He layered the words with deep condescension and superficial pity, but she broke through with a staccato-alarm of a laugh and said-

“Oh, Johnny isnt my husband!” 

Not a hint of shame or any tone of ire.

“Oh reeeally, I suppose I just assumed- since you two look sooooo clooosse. And he seems so happy for you to talk for him, hm?”

It should’ve been impossible for her to not understand how unhappy he was with her presence and her stupid little interjecions, but instead she released another horrible little laugh.

And Dave noticed that she did so without moving her lips much.

“Nope! We work together!” 

 This too was delivered matter of factly, and Dave couldn’t tell who was more pathetic.

Finally, like the dome-rattling thunder of the black-storm sky, the doctor’s voice finally broke out:

 “Shut the fuck up, Synamon!”

The interview only took about 3 and the pair had left without paying for Synamon’s tea, which admittedly hadn’t been drunk.