The message flashed up in the corner of Flynn's goggles and he rolled his eyes, leaning against the rough brick wall and drumming his fingers. Margaret and he had only been sleeping together for a few weeks, and already her presence in his life was more of an imposition than a pleasure. She had recently begun to behave as though their relationship was more significant than it was, and whether it was a tactic or true delusion, it was becoming clear that something needed to be done.
Flynn glanced around the perpetual twilight that was Marty's house, trying to decide what to do. The building had clearly not been build with the intention of being lived in; some sort of warehouse or storage space was more likely, with high ceilings and limited natural light, and Marty had performed only minimal decoration since taking residence. Couches and tables had been scattered around at random, and the walls were smeared with garish graffiti and plastered with a collage of posters for a variety of gigs, performances and exhibitions from the last ten years. A variety of shabbily dressed artistic types lounged around the room, many of them hunched over some sort of complicated board game, several more focused totally on their goggles. In the corner, the largest group were assembled in front of a bank of cameras, striding stiffly back and forth and calling out stilted, nonsensical lines.
Flynn was sorely tempted to
ignore the
question and continue waiting for Marty to appear, but he knew that
he could not. He knew this stage of the game, knew the message that
would follow and the message after that, each more pathetic and
hysterical and difficult to deal with than the last. No, she
needed to be dealt with now.
What's up, babe? What do
you mean?
He was aiming for an air of relaxed banter with a touch of hurt beneath it, tapping quickly onto the hardboard mounted onto the forearm of his coat. The sleeve mounted keyboard was out of date and out of fashion, with most wearable systems relying on a softboard worked into gloves or gesture recognition, but Flynn enjoyed the retro look of the hardboard. It showed his age, he knew, but there was a sense of pride there as well, of tradition, not to mention the sense of ridiculousness that overcame him whenever he saw someone flailing at invisible keys in a public place.
Margaret's response was almost immediate, and Flynn was once more grateful that he'd blocked her from live communication several days ago. He scanned it as he pushed off from the wall and began to stroll aimlessly through the room, wandering in the general direction of the couches.
You seem mad at
me. What did I
do? I miss you.
Flynn wanted to tell her that this
was what she had done, that she was continuing to do it even now. He
sighed, a long slow exhalation of air that he hoped would sweep his
frustration out with it. There
was
no way to make her understand that, of course, no way to broach the
topic without leaving himself vulnerable to the full range of her
controlling neediness. He hadn't been to bed for far too long,
longer than he dared calculate, and he suddenly felt as though he
lacked the strength to handle the Margaret situation now.
“Flynn!” Marty appeared, seemingly from nowhere, his grin broad and slightly manic. He was shirtless, his broad chest bearing several new tattoos since the last time that Flynn had seen him. Flynn reached up and pulled his goggles down from his eyes, pausing awkwardly before leaning in to give the larger man a one-armed hug.
"So what have you got for me that's so special anyway?" Marty led the way through the chaos, Flynn following close behind, stepping carefully over two boys curled into one another's arms on the floor under a pile of threadbare blankets, dead to the world. "I don't get up this early for just anyone, you know."
“Did you actually go to sleep last night?"
"Well,
no. But that's not the point." He yanked open one
of
the bank of perpetually stocked fridges and handed Flynn an oversized
can of energy drink, taking one for himself at the same time.
Flynn
looked at the label. "Didn't they ban this stuff a few
years ago? After all those people had seizures?"
Marty
smirked. "Not in Indonesia they didn't. It's great with
whiskey." He cracked the seal and took a pull, and after a
moment Flynn did the same. The drink was fizzy, acrid and good. Flynn
could feel it going to work on his burned out system almost
immediately.
"Anyway. Here." Flynn put his bag on the ground
and opened it, pulling out thick wedges of bright green plastic and
piling them up. Marty knelt down and took one, clicking it
open
and grinning. Flynn sat back on his haunches, sipping the drink and
watching Marty as he powered up the machine and started fiddling with
it. “Solid state drive,” he said, not sure if Marty was even
listening. “Solar cells across the back, with a crank on the side
for backup. Open source hardware, blueprints already loaded, same as
all the systems.”
"Weren't these things made for the
third world?" Marty asked, not looking up. "How did
you get your hands on them?"
Flynn shrugged. "I
know some guys at a charity that went broke. They bought them
up then couldn't afford to ship them over. What're you going
to
do with them?"
Marty placed the quietly humming machine
on the pile and pulled his own goggles out of his pocket, slimmer and
more discreet than Flynn's set, holding them up to his eyes while he
air-typed one handed. Flynn presumed that his payment was being
transferred. “I've got a plan. I'm going to try to get the
homeless around here online."
Flynn frowned, considering. "Really? What're they going to do with
that?"
He
shrugged, slipping his goggles back into his pocket. "I
don't know. Look for jobs, get laid, same stuff the rest of us do
with it I guess. Say, you remember Miho? Cute little Asian
girl from the party last week?"
Flynn took a moment to
catch up with Marty's sudden conversational shift, then shook his
head. He didn't have a particularly good memory for people, and a
week was a long time ago.
"Well, she remembers you. Asked about you just the other
day."
Flynn stood and brushed himself off, feigning
nonchalance as a paradoxical wave of excitement and fear ran through
him. "Cool. Send me a link and I'll check her
out."
Marty grinned. "Already done, my man, already
done."
On the way out, Flynn paused to watch the players
in the corner. They were acting out scenes from old video
games, a digital counter hanging on the wall showing the number of
viewers in live time. One of the actors beckoned to him,
insisting that he should begin collecting the megacrystals of
superheart scattered throughout the five kingdoms of
darkness.
He smiled and made for the door.
Flynn pulled his goggles up
over his eyes as soon as he was back in the glare of the outside
world, adjusting them to compensate for the brightness. He swallowed
the last of the energy drink, feeling the mild and pleasant buzz run
through him, and tossed the empty can aside. He pulled on his
headphones and began making his way back towards the station.
Marty was as good as his word, and when Flynn checked his messages there was a link for the girl, whatever her name had been. Her profile was somewhat generic, though it was on a new social network, one that he hadn't had time to investigate yet. A trendsetter, then. Flynn remembered her now, all smiling eyes and multicoloured hair, flashing the cameras with the V sign that Asian girls had made at cameras for as long as anyone could remember. He spotted people that he knew in a few of her pictures, flipping rapidly through them while climbing the stairs back up to the train line, which would make getting close to her easier. He grabbed her email address, traced her back to a network that he was highly ranked in and sent her his standard handful of gifts to get her attention.
By then he was on the platform, milling around with the rest of the crowd. Another message from Margaret came through, but he couldn't find the strength to open it. He was sure that his dismissal of her would come back to haunt him at some point, given the number of acquaintances that they shared, but it was difficult to make himself care. He was going to see Angela now, and thoughts of other women were fading rapidly from his mind.
When the train arrived Flynn shuffled aboard with the rest of the group, pulling his paper copy of The Great Gatsby from his bag as soon as he slumped down into his seat. He was the only person aboard with a hardcopy book, the few readers in the carriage using a tablet or goggles, but he had long since learned to ignore the strange looks. He pulled his goggles up, blinking to refocus his eyes on the page, the strap and eyepieces remaining a comforting pressure on his head. He sank down into the seat, shifting to get comfortable on the hard plastic as the train began its long journey through the city.
An hour later, he disembarked onto the platform beneath Angela's apartment building, pulling his goggles back down over his eyes in a gesture as automatic as breathing. She should , he thought, be waking up about now. She'd checked in with him when she left the party last night to let him know that she hadn't taken anyone home with her, coyly suggesting that he should stop by come morning. Flynn had been deeply engrossed in a system build at the time and hadn't responded, but here he was now, right on time. He glanced at the time display in the corner of his goggled vision. Just over five minutes remained until the time that she'd suggested that he try her, but it would take at least that long to reach her floor.
For as long as he had been coming here, Flynn had felt deeply out of place in Angela's building. Nobody who disembarked with him or passed him in the halls bore any wearable connectivity, or else their devices were so expensively discreet as to be invisible. Their eyes lingered on his own bulky, home-modded devices before sliding derisively off. His hair and t-shirt, both references to long-cancelled comic strips, drew a long and appraising stare during the security check, and he alone received a pat-down and bag search. The formalities concluded, he found himself pressed into a lift with half a dozen carefully groomed management types. They looked as through they were returning from their morning jog, or whatever wholesome activity their kind started the day with, and Flynn experienced a brief surge of sweaty paranoia as he wondered if they could tell how long he'd been awake for.
The elevator reached the eighteenth floor, and Flynn pushed out into the corridor with a palpable feeling of relief, doing his best to resist the urge to move quickly and furtively towards Angela's apartment. She'd made him a copy of her security card several months ago and he let himself in, slipping off his coat and bag and dropping them in their usual place by the door. Finally, he slid his goggles from his head and placed carefully them on the thick wooden coffee, feeling vulnerable and exposed as he did so.
Angela's decorator had designed her apartment to be mostly surfaces, all polished wood and sparkling chrome, with excessively tasteful foreign artefacts placed in all the appropriate nooks and corners. Angela had done her best to spoil this effect by absently piling paperwork on every one of these surfaces, and had followed up this effort with a liberal application of empty wine glasses. The whole apartment had a hollow, echoing quality that even the warmest hued feature wall couldn't alleviate, though Flynn had always liked her taste in flamboyantly abstract art. The floorboards creaked gently under his feet as he moved to the kitchen, pulling opening the refrigerator and sneaking a swig of juice directly from the carton. He paused to relieve himself in the bathroom, and as he did so Angela's cat wandered in and began to winds its way around his legs, yowling optimistically for food. In the next room, Angela groaned and rolled over.
Flynn slipped into Angela's room, his vulnerability seeming suddenly appropriate in the low light, his senses filling with the warm bed and soft female form within it. He lowered himself to his knees beside the bed, gently laying his head alongside hers, content for the moment to be still and listen to her breathe. Angela's eyes flickered open and she mumbled something, nuzzling in towards him and laying an absent kiss on his forehead.
“Hey there babe,” he whispered, slipping a hand up under the covers to slide against her flank.
Angela gasped and squirmed under his touch. “Your hand is cold,” she whined, half heartedly trying to bat him away. The cat, having entered unnoticed, leapt onto the bed in response to the sudden motion, and she squealed and writhed more furiously in response. Flynn grinned as she grabbed him by the arm. “Come here, you,” she hissed, pulling him bodily into the bed, and for a time her body was all that he knew.
As soon as they were done, the act complete, he found himself wanting his goggles once more. They were curled together, naked, breathing softly and in unison, but already the oblivion of desire was fading, leaving him all too aware of the intimacy of the moment. It pressed in upon him, needled at him, so that he felt it as an almost physical threat to his person. Trying to make his motion appear casual, he pushed her off him a little and reached up to take a swig from her bottle of water, passing it over to her. She sat up, pushing her long dark hair out of her eyes.
“You're quite the wake up call.”
Flynn grinned. “That's me, old reliable.”
She laughed, leaning in and kissing him, and for the first time that morning he tasted a woman rather than a body. “I wouldn't go that far,” she whispered. Then she was sliding past him, pulling the sheets around her like a gown and padding away towards the kitchen.
“I'm putting on the kettle,” she called. “Do you want anything? I can order up some food if you're hungry.”
Flynn shook his head, mostly at himself. “No, thanks. Coffee is fine.”
There was a rattle of cat food and a hurried patter of feline feet, a half hearted yowl accompanying the sound. Flynn looked slowly around Angela's room, letting the strangeness that accompanied the space sink slowly in. The room held all the casual comforts of a steady income and successful investment. He was quite thoroughly not of this world, and yet here he was, naked in its midst. Eventually it became too much for him and he slipped out into the living room, scooping up his goggles and snapping them down over his eyes, dodging Angela's gaze as he did so.
When Angela rejoined him in bed he was flicking through some emails, looking for something actually worth reading while half heartedly maintaining half a dozen conversations. “Back online already,” she commented. He could hear a slight strain in her tone, as though she were struggling to control some outburst.
He shrugged, reaching with one hand for the coffee. “Just checking in. There's a few things that I need to keep an eye on.” The Asian girl had not yet responded, he noticed. He remembered her name, of course, but it was unlikely that he would bother applying it until he had exchanged a few more messages with her.
Flynn pulled the goggles up onto his forehead and took a sip of the coffee. It was rich and dark and good. Clearly there were more than a few perks to this sort of life. He pulled up his goggles and grinned at her in a way that he had learned she liked. Her expression softened, so he reached up and pulled her down into bed with him.
“So what's on the agenda for Angela's day, hmm?”
She leaned again him, eyes flicking slightly in the way that they always did when she turned to think about work. “Um. Not much at first. I've got a meeting this afternoon with a scout who has a dozen or so acts that he thinks we might be interested in. Should be good for a hundred sales or so each, based on his last few hauls. Then into the office to try and put a dent in the mountain of paperwork. Oh, and I'm meant to be having dinner with one of the girls from digital tonight.” She made a face at the last one.
“You're not looking forward to it?”
Angela shook her head. “She's a recent acquisition, used to be, you know,” she gestured at his goggles. “Like you. She still gets a bit twitchy at being on the corporate side of things, and she likes to take it out on me. That's until she gets drunk, of course, at which point she starts hitting on me.”
Flynn snorted. “Is she pretty?”
“You'd probably like her. Too much metal in her face for me.”
“Didn't stop you with, what's-her-name, Foxy? At Tom's party a few months ago?”
Angela shot Flynn a smirk as she slid back out of bed and made for the shower. “Doesn't count. I was drinking.”
Flynn smiled back, watching her as she left the room. As soon as he heard the sound of water running he pulled the goggles back down over his eyes. There was a response from the Asian girl and he smiled. She and some of her friends were going to see a band in a few days time, and he was invited. Not an easy situation to make a pull from. He started sifting through her public data, pulling out the contacts that they had in common, sending them invitations to the gig. Even if only half of them fronted up, it would even the playing field substantially.
Flynn hadn't heard of the band in question. In fact, he hadn't heard of the devolutionist movement which they were apparently at the forefront of. The only way for any rational person to follow modern music, Flynn felt, was to pick one branch of the whole mess and stick with it. Even with memory drugs and intelligence enhancers, there was just way too much out there, too many evolutions and revolutions, for one person to keep track of.
Later that day, after making love a second time, the two of them went to breakfast at their favourite café, Flynn's goggles stowed in his bag at Angela's insistence. She talked at great length about her work, which was normal, and Flynn nodded absently while he ate. He had trouble understanding the point of what she did, but apparently there were still people who needed someone to take what they created and give it to people who might enjoy it, and just as many people who needed someone to fetch the things which they might enjoy and sell it to them. It had apparently been big business once, especially for music, but these days it was strictly a niche field. Flynn remembered following music when he was a kid, back when there were hardly any acts, at least not many that people knew anything about, and they would sell millions of discs each. It seemed like a strange way to do things now, but he remembered it making sense at the time.
Angela fell quiet towards the end of the meal. She seemed to have run out of things to say about her work, and as she carefully wiped her lips with her napkin, said “I broke up with Mark, you know.”
Flynn nodded. He'd known, having read about it along with everyone else. He had felt like he should mention it, but hadn't had anything to say. Now he would have to think of something. “Oh yeah. His snoring finally got to be too much for you?”
She didn't smile. “No. I
just...I
just didn't feel it, you know? It just wasn't right.”
Flynn
didn't know, but he nodded. He lowered his eyes, suddenly tired, not
sure if he had the strength for a meaningful conversation. “Hey,
did you ever get anywhere with Marlene? She was cute, I liked her.”
She shook her head again, face set. Wherever she was going, she was not about to be dissuaded. “I was thinking. I've been thinking that I really want something more from you and me.”
Flynn felt fear settle over him. He took a moment to reply, choosing his words carefully, trying to keep them as polite and neutral as he could. “Do you mean that you want to stop seeing other people?” The idea of having only her, no hunt, no thrill and chase and conquest was like a weight inside him. Worse than that was the idea of being solely responsible for her fulfilment, her satisfaction, a responsibility for which he felt wholly unqualified. His hands gripped the arms of his chair, and he fought the urge to run from the room.
“No,” she shook her head. “No, that's not what I'm saying. I don't want that. I just want, you know, more from you. More of you.”
Flynn shook his head, confused. He didn't know what she was asking for, but there was a strange familiarity to this conversation. The same unnameable, irresistible dissatisfaction had crept into all of his relationships at a certain point, and he did not know how to combat it. He sighed, disappointed. For a while, he had thought that Angela would be different.
Flynn didn't look at her, couldn't look at her, but before he knew what was happening his mouth was in motion and words were spilling out. “Well, I don't know what more I can give you. I see you practically every day, except when one of us has too much work on, and it's you that's always going away on business, not me. I'm giving you all I've got here.”
The last phrase tumbled out of Flynn's mouth without him thinking about it, but it changed something in Angela. She settled back, seemed to relax somehow, to accept something. When he met her gaze it was intense, angry and yet somehow sorrowful, almost sympathetic. There was a vulnerability there that Flynn had never seen before, and did not care for. It made him want to look away.
“Is that really true?”
Flynn didn't really know what he'd said, or what he was agreeing to, so he just shrugged and nodded. Angela's lips tightened, and she looked down. “Well, I have to go and get ready for this afternoon. I'll pay on the way out.”
Flynn nodded again, still unsure what he had said but suddenly desperate to take it back, terribly afraid and confused by what was happening. As she rose his mouth opened and he went to say something, though he did not know what it might have been. His eyes were sharp and heavy in his head. She paused, expectantly, hands folded on the back of her chair. Flynn said nothing and she shook her head, then turned and walked out the door.
Flynn watched her go, trying to understand what had happened. Then he shook his head, deliberately pushing it from his mind, and reached down into his bag to cover his eyes..