"Enjoy the Magic of Friendship In Your Own Living Room!"
Past the floating island of plastic garbage and around the street corner where the dead and diseased lay burning atop last week's pile of corpses, a single bar manifested on Gabriel's holo watch. His heart leapt for joy. At long last, he was getting the first semblance of a signal, and that's how he knew that he was nearing home.
He tapped the diode on his right wrist, twisting and turning the band over scarred skin and twin rows of booster marks. The person in front of him coughed constantly, the rider behind was puking over the side of the ferry. The air smelled of spilled oil and human waste baked at a constant forty degrees Celsius. This was one of many reasons Gabriel kept his mask on until he was lying in bed.
A few more taps and twists, and his watch tapped fully into the Axialnet. Gabriel pressed a finger to his visor, activating an AR screen over his view field. This drained his mobile reserves by a factor of ten, which—considering that he was down to four percent charge after a day's full shift in the bit mines—meant that soon he'd be net-numb. But it was worth it to see how much debt he had accrued.
His watch projected a barrage of holomails for him and him alone to see. Red numbers bled a vertical barrage, flashing along the periphery. Gabriel sighed into his mask. He was sinking well over three hundred thousand beijings on three separate digicounts. Still, it wasn't quite as bad as last month. His loins only burned slightly when peeing; he was twelve weeks into farming his seventh kidney. If he missed another payment, he'd sell the organ, purchase another protein pill off his pension, and grow a eighth before winter.
There was a hoarse grunt from behind. The ferry's oarsman was shouting a phrase in Yinnihan, the only words of the Indonesian-Mandarin pidgin that Gabriel understood. It meant that a stop was coming up. His stop.
He killed the holofield and untinted his visor. Looking ahead, Gabriel watched as his ferry was steered through a narrow channel of wooden platforms resting crookedly atop rusted stilts over brackish filthwater. The docks had been built atop the carcasses of older shanty towns, and those atop graves of even older ones—all submerged. They clung to building faces that once spanned six car lanes apart, but generations of being slathered with floating hoovervilles had narrowed the canal to just enough space to afford coming and going ferry traffic... or the occasional body barge that drifted in buoyant burnt mountains down the alleys and main aqueducts of Cootharinga, covered with ravenous gulls. Nobody bothered with the gulls.
The oarsman repeated his grunt. Gabriel stood up, locking his lower left prosthetic so as to stay balanced upright. The ferry rocked slightly as the other passengers did the same. The person vomiting over let out a lasting wheeze and dipped clean over the side. The canal swallowed him with a brown splash of oil. Nobody gave his parting a second glance.
The boat scraped up against the dilapidated marina. People unpeeled onto the garbage-strewn planks and lurched towards carved concrete entrances that once were fifth story windows. Gabriel joined them, stepping over piles of refuse and half-eaten canines. Hollow-cheeked mothers situated on sun-bleeched stoops reached towards him and the other citizens, pleading in multiple creoles, gesturing towards rows of their scantily clad daughters and bartering their nethers for beijings. The oarsman pushed back and swatted at the tarts for the seventy seconds of allotted loading time, and once a fresh wave of workers had stumbled aboard, he pushed off and navigated flame and detritus to reach the next stop around the bend.
Gabriel walked wooden lattice bridges, zigzagging higher and higher up the heights of Cootharinga, scaling extra floors that had been built over the decades through metal shingles, carbon printed planks, and recycled plastics. He passed close to the central hub of the waterlogged district: a police shack flanked by starving people crucified to suspended car chassis with jigsaw license plates rearranged to profess their gross misdemeanors to all passerby's. Naked children waited in the shadows, waiting with shivs and chisels to carve the meaty toes off the deceased once the officers lowered them from their aluminum crosses.
There was a broad hum from high above. Garbriel squinted skyward. There was no sun to see through the smog and exhaust fumes. He remembered his great grandmother telling him that there was a singular source of the bright light above everyone and everything. When three large drones soared through the monoxide mess, he almost saw a glimpse of that mythological beacon, but it was all too swiftly blotted out as the fires from the garbage pits below filled the air once again.
Gabriel watched as the trio of rotary craft zoomed their way towards one of the towering arcologies on the north end of the equatropolis. Just then, three cheeky citizens burst out of a higher lattice looming above. With the desperate swing of an improvised polearm, they attempted redirecting one of the drones into a collision course with a nearby neon sign.
But the craft righted itself. It spun about. The nearby neon illuminated the immaculate 'Amazoogle' logo on its chassis, just before a lateral panel unfolded to reveal a magnetaser cannon that unloaded brightly upon the would-be ambushers. There was barely a scream to register; the torsos of two attackers were rendered to brittle soot and the third ran away, gargling on the blood of his adolescent companions. The drone retracted its weapon, dropped a beacon for local law enforcement, and zipped off to resume its delivery for the zero point zero zero one percent waiting calmly up in the arcology district.
Just a few more blocks, and Gabriel saw the second bar pop up on his holowatch. He took a shortcut through a bovile market, where blindfolded farmers with leprotic faces peddled headless beef livestock suspended from protein re-sequencers. The methane count in the air here was unbearable, and it was the only thing keeping the local real estate down, which is how Gabriel could afford a home so high above the water.
Three bars. The remnants of a skyscraper loomed ahead of Gabriel, resting in an eleven degree slouch against an array of reinforcement beams anchored deep into the smoking drink. He walked through a forest of dangling plastic curtains, stepping over paralyzed homeless huddled in the shade, their skin molded to the concrete barbs set in the ancient floor. Two burly men in gas masks stood at the base of a stairwell, eyeing him wearily through dimly-glowing visors. A third bouncer lingered loosely against the corner, feeling himself up as his holowatch projected an array of kaleidoscopic erotica that soothed the chemicals he had recently injected into his veins.
Gabriel stepped before locally-hired guards, before whom he performed a series of intricate hand-signs. He then pulled the collar of his mesh shirt down, exposing a pale patch of flesh beneath his forever-scorched face. One of the guards held a wand, slapped it a few times, and produced a blacklight. This manifested a curved series of dotted stencils woven into Gabriel's flesh. Satisfied with what they saw, the allowed him passage up the stairwell... and towards home.
It smelled even worse inside. But that meant Gabriel was safe. He strolled up three flights of stairs, the walls sprayed all over with every vulgarity in every language imaginable—and some curses that had yet to be adopted. Thin slits had been sliced into the concrete, exposing slivers of hazy deathlight from the decaying world beyond. This was necessary for ventilation, along with rows of spinning fans powered by growling generators.
When Gabriel reached his floor, he had to traverse a gauntlet of slumped drug addicts, dying seniors, and paraplegic women nursing their neighbors' infants. The apartment corridor was a series of apartments all on its own, with “homes” separated by hanging sheets of plastic and soiled stacks of styrofoam. The air rang with crying children and weeping schizophrenics. The pathway that Gabriel had traverse between the stone-dense humanity was barely wide enough for him to strafe through sideways, but he managed well enough.
At long last, he reached the most valuable thing on the entire level—a solid door. Gabriel gave it three knocks. A view slot opened up, with a pair of eyes peering through. A few seconds later, the door's six locks unfashioned, and it opened inward very very slowly. Three residents had to move half their possessions to make room for Gabriel's entrance. He slid through, waited patiently for the door to close behind him, and dropped a sliver of beijings into the jar belonging to his landlord: a legless old man seated on a dilapidated sofa with the only controls to the air-conditioning for that entire flat.
Once upon a time, this apartment housed three rooms. Since then—after much ingenuity—it had been converted to house twenty. These were more crawlspaces than rooms, and they were symmetrically arranged around a central cubbyhole that contained one sink and one toilet—both of which were backed up and rendered useless by compact layers of human effluence. Gabriel continued walking—more like sliding—sideways towards his destination, serenaded by the coughs and wheezes and horny grunts of countless unseen residents sealed tightly on either side of his claustrophobic sojourn. At last, he reached it—a sliding door above a sliding door above a sliding door. There was a combination lock that he turned. The compartment opened with a hiss. He loosened his lower prosthetic, gripped a pair of rusted handle bars with strong upper arms, and hoisted himself up until he could worm his way into the singular hole that he owned.
It was as much a coffin as it was a home. A paper-thin mattress bundled with blankets acted as an eternal cushion, sunken down the center with the shape of Gabriel's adult body. The far wall that hugged the length of his prone human form was covered from top to bottom with notes, cracked datapads, calenders, and layers upon layers of scarcely-read legal bills. Sandwiched in the corner was an array of plastic containers stuffed full of long-expired vitamins, pills, ointments, and dried foods. Off against the far end—where Gabriel's feet nearly touched—was a singular digital viewscreen that was turned on when he entered, that stayed on as he laid his body down, and further remained on even when he was away at work at the bit farms.
For now, Gabriel lay facing upwards, his nose nearly scratching the “roof” of his compartment. He stripped off his jumpsuit and pants—a tight, acrobatic ritual that he had trained himself to perfection over decades of dwelling within this veritable box of a dwelling. He took off his holowatch and fastened it to the ceiling, plugging it into a threadbare lightning cable that took a few flicks of the finger before it could recharge the aging polylithium cell of his mobile device. Finally, he removed his visor and mask, exposing hard lines carved into the framework of his mouth that refused to go away.
Feeling the shivers, he slid his arm towards a pouch hanging from another portion of the ceiling. He produced a needle, gave his wrist an alcoholic swab, and injected his third booster of the day. It would be a good half-hour before he could breath evenly again, so Gabriel passed the time with some personal maintenance.
With a sweep of his leg, he dragged a conical device affixed to a series of translucent tubes attached to a lateral filtration system that ran through the foundation of the apartment. This—he clamped over his genitals and sphincter, relaxing with the knowledge that his lower implants would wireless sync with the excretion system, and sometime overnight the filtration would slowly evacuate and clean the contents of his abdomen so that he could function in time for work the next cycle.
As he felt the pressure flowing artificially downward through his body, he squinted at the viewscreen past his toes. Gabriel tapped a button sewn into the side of his mattress, raising the volume. The discolored image of rolling tanks and flaming drone strikes flickered a continent away, meanwhile a woman spoke in charming Malay about strategic advancements made by the Sinophalanx over the irradiated plains of Kashmir. Then there was an advertisement about resort vacations to the amber shores of Valles Marineris, followed by a pharmaceutical announcement concerning the latest breakthroughs in artificial spermatology.
But then...
...there was an advertisement that Gabriel had never seen before. With mesmerizing colors that he hadn't witnessed since childhood, when wounds bled brighter than they did in the last ten years, and the pulsating myths his grandbearers spoke of took form in his youthful mind. At first, Gabriel thought he was hallucinating—something that occasionally happened when he dug too deep into the holo-matrix at work, and his nerves crossed a high frequency digitizer, causing him to envision shapes and pigments that weren't really there until a wandering foreman chemically induced him back into lucidity with threats of termination.
But—Gabriel wasn't the average tumor-riddled fool. He understood a creative artifice when he saw one. His viewscreen was one of the few within the apartment that still fully functioned, and he would absolutely murder to keep it that way... for moments such as this... moments when he discovered—by the gracious broadcast of those gleaming arcology stations far to the north—a scant fraction of that zero point zero zero one percent mirthful imagination.
They were animals. Too bright and rosy to be real. Quadrupeds—pudgy but adorable—with faces far more akin to humans than equines. Gabriel knew about horses—just as he knew about the moon. They both existed... somewhere. Somewhere beyond the mirk and grime and smoke of this necessarily obfuscated moneyscape. All four-legged things eventually found themselves reborn—headless and fat and consumable—dangling from protein sequencing racks and sold by people who blinded themselves to excel at such toxic trades. If the floating denizens of Cootharinga could barbeque the moon for table scraps, they would just as swiftly. And profitably.
Gabriel knew that people made poetry about the moon. So it was only fitting that civilized people—those with the resources, loftiness, and clean water to count as such—would likewise sculpt fictitious art about man's second best victim. But to plaster vaguely simian faces with childlike eyes onto them? And for them to talk and sing and dance like cherubs straight out of a puppet holo-theatre?
"Enjoy the Magic of Friendship In Your Own Living Room!" the tiny horses sang and giggled across the viewscreen. “Download the Equestrian Trial Run Today!”
It was so odd and forcibly nightmarish that Gabriel... was instantly enthralled.
His gaze flew up to the holowatch dangling—and charging—from the claustrophobic ceiling. The meter barely read “six percent,” but his curiosity challenged polylithium dynamics. He gave the device a few swift taps with one hand, meanwhile his other set of fingers drew the visor back over his brow. Within a minute, he was surfing the digital store of Amazoogle. He scrolled past multiple results from what he entered in the search field: My Learning Digibuddy, My Little Loin Sister, My Limb Donation Circuit.
At last, he found a program with an icon that matched the advertisement that had so felicitously frolicked before him. Gabriel's heart rose... but then it sank. All that was offered was a trial run. He had to download the multimedia installment before being given the option to commit to a high priced half-year subscription that required... … … a lot more beijings than he was comfortable with parting with anytime soon... at least if his kidneys had anything to say about the matter.
He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath... then cursed under his tongue.
With the flick of a finger, he downloaded the app. He had to temporarily uninstall an on-board liver monitor in order to make room. But, within the hour, the program had fully situated itself on his mobile pulsar-state drive. Activating the program with a twist of his wrist, he dimmed his visor and allowed the AR overlay to take over.
His ears tingled with the sound of childish chimes, followed by an emotional wave of orchestral violins with playful piano accompaniment. There was a curious rise of percussion—unlike any sound Gabriel had heard before in his life. It then occurred to him that this was the noise that a quadrupedal animal would conceivably make at full gallop, and such made all the more sense when a virtual cartoon creature phased through the restricting walls of his coffin-bed.
Its face was an angelic pastel masterpiece: a plastic that knew no garbage, only grinning. With teeth whiter than exposed bone and blue eyes that glimmered brighter than drone tasers. It had the voice of a teenage girl, healthier than any being that Gabriel had ever met. It spoke in what was clearly Westhemispheric. He flicked his thumb against his watch, thumbing through multiple subtitled languages, ultimately settling for a terribly localized version of New Javanese, which he only residually knew.
“Whereupon greeted the familiar to Equestria, merrily!” she cooed, and it was the most beautiful thing ever. “Has it rising and sky shine??” There was a youthful giggle, and the tiny horse thing squatted low, resembling a small translucent cat as the AR construct crawled closer across the cluttered compartment to study its mobile host up close. Soon, it bore a friendly smile, blinking its long cosmetic lashes right before Gabriel's visor. “Populations addresses it as Merry Berry! What name given to other that appeals, provide?”
It was at this point that the digital creature paused, its smile forever frozen in time.
Gabriel cleared his hoarse throat. He spoke out loud for the first time in days, and it wasn't to another living thing.
The program's algorithm set in, and the holo-pony unfroze itself, standing upright and winking. “Full healthy welcomes, GAAA-AAA-AAAB-BR333-AWWWL,” it belched the last three syllables through a scratchy baritone. Gabriel really needed to fix the audio receptors of his mobile. “So pleases them to contact liberally!” the pony continued. Not long after, the creature galloped in a circle and slid back up to his side, grinning a crescent moon. “Such impatience it struggles about with introduction of four limbed companionship! But it dwells happily with warm anticipate! Would you embark with it, affirmative?”
A sore lump formed in Gabriel's throat. He nevertheless humored the program with a nod.
“Cheeriness abounds!” Merry Berry shook its tail. Its fuzzy ears flicked as it sat prim and proper, pontificating in a far more formal tone. “Primary initialization: forthwith we embrace a proclamation from grand sponsorship. Hudson-Quebecois Industries. Spear charges the valley with propulsive medicine guarding. In your domicile maximum, hourly! Additionally for all genetic hospitable applicables, day everlasting and afforable!”
Gabriel closed his eyes. He weathered a long sigh, less disappointed than he was exhausted. He calmly waited for the program to spell out its obligatory advertisement, at least for the first ninety seconds when he could wave his hand and skip the rest of the pre-recorded pitch.
The moment he did so, the tiny holo-horse jerked back into a lax pose, smiling brilliantly. “All too right, companion GAAA-AAA-AAAB-BR333-AWWWL! Sings it with happiness upon witnessing anchorage.” Merry Berry cocked her cute fuzzy head aside. “What added venturing do they desire embarking hence minute?”
Gabriel bit his lip. He was simply content to just lie there—pressed tightly against the walls of his smelly existence—gazing straight into the fuzzy nose of this seraphim slice of mental abstraction.
It passed the time giggling, then leaned in closer like a parent in old picture ebooks might console a childish figure. “Do they grasp the conjuring of acquaintance gaining? Merry Berry can bestow educationals! Would GAAA-AAA-AAAB-BR333-AWWWL consume forthwith?”
The human being said nothing. Instead, he chose to test something. He reached a hand out, as if to make contact.
He didn't, of course. He couldn't. But—when Gabriel's fingers reached just the right distance, the visor worked in sequence with the suspended holo-watch to make the AR construct simulate just what the user proclaimed to desire. Merry Berry's pink face nuzzled into his palm. Her smiling fuzzy cheeks touchlessly stroked against the booster scars on his wrist. Soon, she was nuzzling up his arm, like a cat—or at least the old things that nobody would have once dared slicing and eating. The holo-watch and visor worked in tandem to boost the virtuality of the impromptu embrace, emitting a wave of crackling static that tugged at Gabriel's arm and chest hairs, and soon the colorful horselet was nuzzling up to his torso, spreading a warmth through his frail features that shook him straight through his tubes.
By now, the latest booster had cleared Gabriel's sinuses in miraculous time... sinuses that now filled with tears. He wasn't entirely certain what came over him, but something inside the being—something deep and hidden within his meaty core needed this color to be so close to him... to engulf him... to surround him with a mist that wasn't hazy or brackish or filled with ashen filth for once. But beyond even all of that—gnawing and slicing its hot way up his bowels and spilling out his palpitating chest—was a haunting concept that he never once ascertained before...
...that perhaps, in some weird and alien way, he deserved this. It wasn't something he could earn after hours upon days upon months of bit farming. It wasn't something he could sell his kidneys for. It was just something... that he could be gifted. For somewhere—rattled to an icy stop within that neglected husk of his—was something that deserved everything simply because it could fathom the grand scope of that unnameable want.
“It severely admires them, GAAA-AAA-AAAB-BR333-AWWWL,” Merry Berry cooed against his ear, barely containing itself within the frame of his visor, which was now growing filmy from the moisture in the man's trembling eyes. “Cannot sustain time to provide introductions to felicitous companions.” It leaned in to nuzzle his sun-scorched chin yet again. “Would they agree upon this conjuring sojourn?”
Gabriel sniffed. He nodded and opened his mouth to reply...
...and that's when the adorable little pony he was hugging morphed into an enormous Amazoogle logo. It hotly illuminated the narrow breadth of his coffin, turning it into a crimson crematorium. All of this, accompanied by the glaring words: “P-L-E-A-S-E S-U-B-S-C-R-I-B-E T-O I-N-S-T-A-L-L F-U-L-L V-E-R-S-I-O-N.”
Gabriel held his breath. He clenched his eyes shut, squeezing the tears away. He tried to imagine Merry Berry's sweet and adoring face, forever smiling like a hazy ghost beyond the digistrokes of that glaring corporate logo. But he knew that the moment he reopened his eyes, all that would remain would be his concrete prison, closing in all sides, painted with the numbers and currencies that would take an entire lifetime to pursue, and a forgotten legacy to outshadow.
So... he uninstalled the program.
But once he took another look at the viewscreen looming just beneath his feet like the mouth of an incinerator...
...and the live footage of charred tree husks being slowly devoured by oceans of plastic and sludge dotted with lifeless fish...
...and the endless exchange of picket signs, rocks, and smoke grenades along the graffiti'd walls of every remaining mountain metropolis in the former Arctic...
...Gabriel soon found himself downloading the program once again. Only—this time—when Merry Berry sat prim and proper to announce the pharmaceutical advertisement she was programmed to, Gabriel let the whole thing play out. It would last ten minutes, after all.
Just long enough for the adult to curl up around the equine spectre in a deep hug, clinging to its colors from another age, and weeping himself gently asleep.