CHAPTER ONE. Sirius Mullen.
NOTICE: Pending Norvella, Christopher. 11-26-63699897. DOB - 1/8/27. DOD - 4/19/60. DOD -Note: Executed 4/19/60. Living relatives, 1. Norvella, Marbella Anna - mother. Miami Island District. 17, Florida. Lien. Incorrect payment #20004337.07 / 50,000 credits, STCP #1227. All properties become domain of State Corp #1227.
Sirius Mullen laughed quietly to himself while looking at the #1227 readout.
So, all of Christopher Norvella’s properties were the domain of State Corp. That was nothing. Norvella left behind nothing. According to the rest of the file, he never had any wages, never paid any taxes, and had absolutely no property at all. The 50,000-credit lien against the Norvella estate seemed to have been for a mistaken State Corp #1227 payout, an estate payout, ironically, sometime in the distant past.
Sirius thought it over for a long moment. The last thing he was going to do was put the lien on the mother of an executed son, poor woman. Finally, he keyed in quickly on the Dekk Unit in front of him “Nothing itself now becomes the domain of STCP-#1227.”
A prompt came up on the Dekk Unit screen. “What is the value of nothing itself?”
Sirius typed in “The value of nothing itself is 50,000 credits.”
Now balanced, the file saved and closed itself. And that was it.
Oh, he did a funny. Sirius laughed quietly again. Who would call him on it? It would slip by. It would slip underneath. It would certainly slip away.
Plus . . . who was this Christopher Norvella, really? He’d heard the name on holovision. But why in the world was executed? Never clear, no matter how much torque the spin the media put on the whole story . . . and the story itself had faded by now. And, so curious to Sirius as he sat at his desk, why didn’t Norvella ever have a job? Was there something erased, somewhere?
That’s what it was beginning to look like.
And then, for a brief moment, Sirius wondered . . . what really did Norvella leave behind that they didn’t know?
He sighed. He looked at the clock display on the Dekk Unit. It was getting close to the end of the day, quitting time. Home time. And with that . . . he suddenly felt slightly ill. Nauseous. Soon Sirius knew he would be head to toe full of dread.
It happened every day at 5:58. It was time for more pills, of course. But he didn’t want more pills. Pills pills pills.
Sirius shut the Dekk Unit down and folded it up. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the smooth skin of his forehead, then up higher to the place that once had some hair, and far back to where there was still some. Did he just make a huge mistake? There’d be no retrieving the silly things he entered. Not without trauma, answering to the higher ups, this and that, a whole scene and flurry of “Sirius did what again?” . . . perhaps it would be better to leave it, and have it discovered, and quietly go on leave again.
Then, as it was suddenly getting darker outside, he shielded his eyes from the green glow of the office lights above him—hand over his brow as a kind of salute—without realizing what he was doing, until he felt silly about it. But no one saw him. There was no one around him, as he was supervisory level with no one to supervise. It was only him on that whole half a floor, and he could get away with cursing out loud, which he did. But, sometimes, he actually wished for more company in #1227 . . . someone to say to “see you tomorrow” to.
Sirius stood from his desk, took his small red star-shape tie off its clip at his throat of his light green jumpsuit and placed it gently on its hook on the unit divider. He took off his earpiece and mic, and put them next to the Dekk Unit, which was inexplicably buzzing, though clearly off.
Moving now, the nausea abated, and he felt a little better. But the dread . . . the dread was coming . . . and, Sirius felt suddenly very sad.
He didn’t feel sorry for himself. Never anymore, really. The sad was for the rest of it all. Everyone. It was a worn-out tiredness to the bone. It was death. The dead that kept showing up on his files. The dead, though why feel sad for them, he thought? They were getting a reprieve from the dying world . . .
The green office lights above him were suddenly blinking—off, on, offonoff, on.
Sirius looked up at them, blinked back. He moved to the row of porthole windows of his floor and looked out at the strange, throbbing vista. Across the ten-lane Westside Parkway, across the fat retaining walls of the swollen Hudson, power plant Fusion One’s giant white towers were pulsating under intermittently blinking industrial floodlights.
What was going on over there?
Beyond Fusion One, as far as he could see, was the New Jersey stubble-rubble of factories, maglev tracks and recycling/scrap yards. There were no lights on all the way to the distant hills. The horizon out there still held a dull remnant of a bloated red sun, but it was sinking fast behind a line of dark hydrogen tank silhouettes.
And then, the sun was gone.
“Aaarrgh,” Sirius grumbled. It was time to go . . . home.
He had to do something. Else. Sirius simply couldn’t face the maglev-tube ride back to his lousy Queens Bubble #555 living compartment, the heavy bustling horror of being stuffed in the train with all those other soon to be #1227 existences. Even if the population didn’t know how meaningless it all was, in the end, Sirius Mullen did.
The lights shut themselves off as he headed toward the elevator. One light made a strange popping noise out over his desk as the elevator door shut him inside.
Sirius walked out of his State Corp building and onto the crowded, percolating-with-people sidewalk. Nearly half of them were wearing their portovisophones, thin-lensed glasses hanging from a sleek headband, with a tiny camera and mic arching out in front of them on a little stiff wire like the fish-luring lantern on a monstrous deep dark sea fish. So the world was awash with half conversations, people looking at who they were talking to displayed in the glasses, other people talking to people with visophones or portovisophones . . . a world looking like people just walking around talking to themselves.
Sirius never wore a portovisophone. Wav-ether so close to his head gave him a terrible headache. And the “I’ll be there soon . . . I’m almost home . . .” had so little meaning to him, really. He moved from the shadow of his building, and winced up at its fine ugliness as he occasionally did. His State Corp division occupied a tall white tube of tiny portholes. The whole thing was like a seventy five-story submarine tipped on its side. He craned to see the top, today. What in the world was really up there? It was a darkening sky of blinking lights of aircraft, and even spacecraft with their solid dim lights moving quickly across the ether. It had been an unusually clear day, Sirius admitted. What that meant, he knew not.
He knew not.
His poly-boots were taking him to the maglev stop, but at the last second Sirius opted for a bar on the corner of 37th and 11th that he’d never set foot in.
The bar wasn’t named, as far as he could tell. It smelled like stale beer as he came in through the sliding door. It was full of people who didn’t look up at the thin, balding man in a light green jumpsuit that screamed obvious State Corp clerk. It was a good place, already.
He sat down in the near darkness at a worn, red plastic bar. He quickly caught the attention of the barkeep, a large man with a big beard who was wearing a tattered black jumpsuit. Sirius ordered a Jamaican ale, which came right then from the tap in front of him, plopped down before him in a big blue plastic mug. He took the ale in fast gulps. It was flat, and tasted woody, but Sirius felt the dread lifting like clouds after a rain.
He wiped it out, and called for another.
He was such a lightweight in terms of alcohol. Which was fine, he decided. Within three minutes, he was two-beer buzzed, and he turned his attention to a conversation going on between an old man and an old woman on stools right next to him. For . . . he’d heard the word . . .
“An’ how ‘bout that Norvella freak?” the wrinkled man next to him said. He was big for old. Strong-looking. Perhaps a military man, or cop, once. The man was swinging a huge bottle of South American beer, and sort of stank like metal from his armpits. Sirius almost broke in and said “How about him?”
“Sam . . . you have entirely missed the point again,” the older woman said. She was large-ish, with long, jet-black hair. She had smooth skin for old. “Any person who says anythin’ against the pro status-quo-ad-nausea State Corpse is a freak to your narrow para-digm. Well, maybe you’re the freak . . . and we’re all upside down, did you ever think about that?” The woman shook her finger at him.
Sirius wondered if she was screwing up her words on purpose, or if it was the peculiar blood-red drink in front of her, nearly empty. Or, was it some language of her youth coming back after a few rounds?
“They will never execute me for spoutin’ shit, that’s for sure. We built ourselves a pretty good world here, now. Finally. You think about it. We have everything we need. Don’t you forget the time of troubles. My feet still own the feeling that I didn’t even have a pair of shoes for a year.”
“Oh shuuuuut up. Pair of shoes for a year. Your fact’s become a romanticized fiction.” She rolled her eyes in Sirius’s direction, seeing he was now in on it.
“You take everything for granted now,” he old man said. “Take the fusion plants off-line and see how you women of a certain age get along without your face massager lifter machine . . . right?” Then the old man threw Sirius a wink, trying to get his support.
Sirius gave them both a thin smile, and that’s all he could manage.
“God, I can’t believe you. It’s people like you who killed the poor guy.” Then she pointed hard at him. “Killed him just by being you.”
“That’s right. I damn well did. I know where living a life of well-meaning ideas gets you. Nowhere but poor, hungry and dead.” He pounded the bar, revving up, then grabbed it, trying to stay on his stool.
Sirius briefly met the eyes of the woman across the top of the man’s brush of white hair. Her eyes were suddenly narrow with anger, and the weight of intoxication.
Life of ideas . . .
Sirius wanted to tell them both it didn’t matter what they thought. In the end, every person is as meaningless as the next. Rich, poor, fat, hungry, ideas, no ideas, bad meaning, no meaning, you’ll all end up dead.
Sirius ordered another ale.
On the maglev tube back to Queens Bubble, Sirius—quite drunk and actually feeling fine—zoned out on the holo-gram ads moving on their plates above the doors. The ads cast interesting glowing patterns onto the lemon-colored floor, like featureless ghost blob versions of what they were pitching.
Each stop, the auto-conductor squawked an unintelligible phrase from a speaker in the ceiling. Finally Sirius said “Braaaw arrrmram!” back to the speaker, mimicking an interested reply.
A thin teen boy nearby in a black headscarf and red jumper laughed at this, and smiled at him. Sirius could recall sitting across from this particular teen many times that year, the guy coming back from school, or wherever, the same time, same car Sirius took . . . third from the end. And he could tell right away that this was the first time the kid ever noticed him.
When Sirius’s stop came up, he stumbled off the train and nearly fell on the platform. The he plopped himself on the long moving sidewalk with the thousands of other long-faced, tied-from-their-ol’ meaningless and draining-day Queens Bubblers.
Idiotic place! he thought, and suddenly, he liked the roundness of the very word. Idi o tic.
The sidewalk was ill-maintained, and moved with clanks and screeches, and occasional lurches as it carried riders to each specific section in the bank of gray condominium towers plopped under the gigantic silver sheet of the bubble above. Sometimes, when the load on it was light, it moved too fast and people had to leap quickly, comically, off. Today it was impossibly slow.
Such was home for Sirius. Though touted completely safe from Uvs, dioxins, fumes and radioactivity of any kind, Queens Bubble was ugly supreme, served under diffused, yellow light. Idi o tic, a life of breathing in the air of his neighbors again and again just to be safe from dying, and it was killing him. Why . . . why? he thought. Why?
The reason was always missing from his imagined readout on the Dekk Unit, the readout that he saw in his mind many times:
Sirius Xavier Mullen, 44-88-75511338, DOB 7/12/16. Single. 1333. Apt #78, 822 Queens Bubble #555. Supervisory Clerk. State Corp #1227. Amend. History of mental illness. Nervous breakdown 7/12/55. Medicated. Homosexual: therapy ongoing. Attempted suicide 12/25/57. Medicated . . .
Though, as far as he could tell from the phantom readout, he wasn’t dead yet! In his mind, Sirius deleted the whole thing, and tossed the Dekk Unit out his State Corp building office porthole window—fifty floors high—and a great wind caught it, and the unit flew out across the retaining wall and it slipped into the dark brown Hudson, never to be seen again.
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