I was early for my appointment with Mss. Elcat and Pfîc, JEs., but I didn’t mind. Waiting had never bothered me.
The receptionist’s moon-blue hair was done up in a wavecurl, a youthful cut that clashed with the rest of his by-the-book demeanor. In a kind voice, he took my name and offered me the office suspension code. I was sure I knew what Elcat and Pfîc, undoubtedly hotshots in slick suits, offered as far as waiting-room suspension went, but I accepted the code anyway. It wasn’t every day that I was summoned to overtown for a routine debt reckoning; these meetings typically happened at an outposted diplomatic office in my neighborhood, which they must have shuttered.
Before entering sus, I took in my surroundings: the foyer was a clean, spare, modern room with plastipane walls the color of fuel. It was all razoring angles and prim and proper definition, and the receptionist’s haircut shone brightly within it like a ball of blue sunshine.
I drew up the code and entered the susworld of the law firm. My assumptions couldn’t have been more accurate. Honestly. In sus, I was now sitting in a room on what was easily the three-hundredth floor of a glorydays highrise from old Earth, and through a window the size of my entire apartment a glitzy cityscape washed right up, in agonizing detail, to a peach-about-to-rot sunset. I hadn’t been to many fancy law offices in my life, and had been in fewer of their susworlds, but that vista was nearly photographically what I’d anticipated. Not that I took any pride in that. It was just such a cliché.
“We can actually have the meeting here in New York Tower, if you like,” said a voice behind me. I turned and saw a man, thirtyish, standing beside my chair. The absurd peach sunset was glowing him up like an electricity portrait. His hand was drawbridged out in my direction and he had, of course, a winning smile.
“Oh, no, that’s OK.”
“Sure. Right this way.” In a collection of motions that seemed to happen all at once, he reeled in the drawbridge, unpinned us jointly from sus, pivoted, and gestured towards a doorway. I hadn’t even managed to shake his hand. Out of sus, the room had reassumed its smooth dark modernity, and the receptionist had reappeared. What had instantiated the receptionist in sus? I hadn’t even looked over that way. Probably a fern or a coatrack. As I walked past the still-grinning associate, I noticed that the blue of the receptionist’s haircut had grown significantly fainter, which is a knock-on effect of mass-produced, lowgrade sus graphics. When sus is done right, you only feel more embedded in the real world, colors singing louder, after you unpin.
“Now then,” said the lawyer, “it would seem that your administrator, YH and Telc., has elected to trigger its right to update your payment scheme, according to Clause 37.b.3 in your contract.”
“All right.” This was nearly the exact wording on the letter I had been sent. I got one every year or two, always the same line.
“YH and Telc. have engaged the law services of Mss. Elcat and Pfîc, JEs.,” he went on, “which is a planetary subfirm of the interstellar advocacy group PRIMFICE, as perhaps you know. As such, we are empowered on behalf of our client, YH and Telc., even if your correspondence has possibly involved PRIMFICE letterhead or other experiential branding.”
I nodded along, uninterested.
The man then set off on a sonic flight of jargony greywords about economic instruments and fund jurisdictions and body interest rates, filling the interstices between these things with names, policies, acts, and bureaucratic ordinances, careful always to tag the lattermost with a corresponding date and year, and I tried to follow his meaning, I really did, but I couldn’t. Not even close. His office was beautiful, that was for sure: jetted like the foyer and crammed with expensive plastica in the form of antique red and blue pens, little ovoid sculptures, and other knickknacks.
I realized, eventually, that the man was speaking a deal and a half more than usual for a debt reckoning of this type, which started worrying me. Desperate to catch up with him, though unable to rip myself from daydream, I managed at least to wrap my thoughts around the number. That’s what this entire meeting boiled down to, anyway, the number, how much more I would have to start paying back to YH compared to what I currently paid. Which I didn’t even know, because I’d automatized my paycircle—like everyone—and this guy surely knew that or could have safely assumed it. But he was still joyriding his names and laws and acts and ordinances, as well as, lest I forget to mention it, the corresponding dates and years of the lattermost, and he was simply not to be stopped.
Except by a voice: “Hey. Hey!” It cut in from the office doorway. The associate paused and looked over at what must have been a colleague. “Your R1–7 case file data has just been sent by the court committee, and it looks good, man. It looks good.”
The associate grinned, much differently to how he had grinned my way earlier, and whooped. The interloper left.
“Was that Elcat?” I asked, curious about the eponymous characters of the firm.
“Huh?” The associate had already drawn breath to continue speaking, and seemed surprised to find me in the room.
“M. Elcat? Or maybe M. Pfîc?
“Oh, Krysst! No. No, no.” My question had amused him, the clear facial evidence of which embarrassed me, so I shut up.
“Now, you understand the importance of the entirety of the foregoing?” he asked, finding me newly stupid enough to require clarifying questions. “That YH is recalling your fundament? You’ll have to just sign a few things.”
I turned cold in my chair. I couldn’t have heard that right.
“What?”
“Just routine forms. Always the same, these kinds of transactions.”
“No,” I said, shakily. “Not the forms. YH is recalling me?”
A wave of earnestness emptied his face of expression for just a moment, and we saw each other. We found one another vacant, which is the most depressing thing.
“It’s all here,” he said, recovering his perfunctory self in no time. “In the addendum to your letter.”
“But that—” I stopped. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter how untranslatable that hieroglyphic language was, even when a lawyer had tried to explain it. Only when the information had finally broken the surface of reality, the “upshot” if you like, did it ultimately make sense to me. For most people it would have been the same, I dare say. And today’s upshot was that YH didn’t want my money anymore. They wanted me.
“M. Raibringarthu?” came the voiceline.
“Yes, hello,” I responded blankly. “That’s me.” The news from the lawyer had, four or five hours later, reduced me to a sort of automaton. I was going through motions, sipping my second beer of an evening that promised a plethora of beers. I was staring into the fridge, hoping for a surprise. Were there some leftovers I’d forgotten about? Or a nice cut of beef synthete I could fry up? Or maybe ten million estatres I could buy off YH and Telc. with?
“Listen, I happened to hear of your predicament.”
“My what?”
“Your legal trouble, M. Raibringarthu. The recall of your fundament.”
The fridge blurred as my mind’s eye swiveled. “Who are you?”
“If you don’t mind, I would rather not say my identity just yet. But I have become aware of your dealings with YH and Telc., and I might, might, be in a position to help you.”
I closed the fridge and drank slowly from my beer. “OK.”
“Would you consent to meeting with me to discuss a possible furtherance of your case?”
“I… sure.”
“And may I also ask if the YH and Telc. ambassador has issued you with leaving papers yet? Typically it takes a few days, so it would be improbable that she has, but if I knew your extraction date it would already help me.”
“Ah, let me just double check.” I scanned for any inping that would contain this apocalyptic detail and found none. “I haven’t received anything yet.”
“Very well, M. Raibringarthu.”
“Please, Rai is fine.”
“May I propose a meeting in the Whibbat?”
My favorite neojazz bar, just down the block from my building? That was auspicious. “Good idea, except the Whibbat doesn’t open till after business hours.”
“Perfect. It is after business hours, M. Raibringarthu.”
“Huh? You want to meet right now?”
“I’ve already ordered a glass of peachwater. I’ve got a table near, I think, the stage. Where the electriano is set up. See you in ten minutes?”
I studied my beer bottle. “Sure.”
Despite the mention of a lifeline, albeit in a context of tenuous anonymity, I felt more dismal than ever. I put on my jacket. The afternoon since the meeting at Elcat and Pfîc had been two parts anger, two parts panic, and one part the feeling like I deserved all this. Of course I didn’t… but YH’s terms had always been clear. This was how corporeal administration worked. Then again, rarely did you hear of someone’s fundament actually getting recalled: it was always the neighbor’s cousin’s colleague or somebody, that kind of thing. I’d called around to some friends, who were horrorstruck and righteous and leaky-eyed about my situation, and several protests against the laws were made alongside promises to see me tomorrow for tea. I hadn’t told my parents, yet. They would take it badly that they had ever signed us up with YH, even though this was hardly their fault. Shit. I mean, my life was over. How do you tell people that?
At the Whibbat, I found the table immediately.
“M. Raibringarthu, hello,” said the woman from the voiceline, who looked about my age. She half stood up to shake my hand, then sat down and kicked out a chair for me. The gesture would have been dramatic if I had done it, but for her it was natural. She had the look of a hotshot, something (I imagined) of an Elcat or a Pfîc.
“Rai is fine,” I said, taking the seat.
“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to take your case. And I’m sorry for your bad news.”
She inhaled to say more but I, with uncharacteristic assertiveness, butted in: “How did you come to hear of my bad news, by the way?”
“I’m an associate with Pfendrix, Xon, and Dunnau,” she responded, smoothly. “But I’m not here because of my firm’s rivalry with Elcat. I’m also a member of the Debtors’ Rights Soc, which is an independent body empowered to bring counterinformation to debtors in times of litigation or duress.”
I nodded, as if this were all routine.
“I received a tipoff about you from a friend at Elcat,” she went on, arriving at the answer to my question. “And I think you might tick all the boxes I need for a suit I’ve been hoping to take to YH and Telc.”
“Hi, Rai!” said a familiar waitron, I think named Den, emerging from the greens and greys that were smearing the bar together. The Whibbat was always hard to see properly, cascading as it did with changing shades and shapes. You tended to recognize the interior not by any exact single feature, but by the familiar tones of color and the idiosyncratic pulses that rhythmed the movements of the patrons and waitrons. Hard to explain, but that’s what long years of neojazz performances can do to a place. The way the Whibbat glitched and swirled resisted clarity of any type, and there was comfort to be had in its irreducible blurs. For me, at least. Tons of people hated neojazz. “House beer, as usual?”
“Oh…” I looked at the lawyer’s glass of peachwater, still nearly full. “Yes,” I decided. The waitron, with a cheery step that I took for pleasure at seeing me with what must have appeared to be a date, or at least a friend, disappeared into the watery fluorescence of a spotlight. Spotlight? Ah, yes. It was Entday. There was always neojazz at the Whibbat on Entdays.
“Anyway,” said the woman, flatly.
“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”
“The DRS does a lot of good work educating debtors about the details of their various obligations.”
“OK.”
“You are a citizen of YH and Telc., I understand.”
“I have that superb fortune, yes.”
“And your parents are too, but they signed a nonhereditary contract at your birth, right?”
“I believe so.”
“Ever been a citizen of any company other than YH and Telc.?”
I shook my head no.
She leaned forward, bending the light of the bar along with her. “And you were born at Wengterîc Hospital?”
“Yeah, not five minutes up the road. You’ve done your homework.”
“Good,” she said, her eyes turning the color of excitement. I did not, in the slightest, see where this interview was going, but I apparently had a gift for wheelhousing lawyers with regard to their professional expertise. “In that case,” she went on, this new thrill starting to relax her, “with your permission I would like to file a claim against YH and Telc., on your behalf, stating that the city has a jurisdictional right to your body that supersedes that of YH and Telc.”
I laughed out loud, a bizarre somatization of all the horror and shock of the day. “The city?” I grinned in confusion. With ideal timing, Den brought over the house beer. I thanked him and took a swig.
“There is precedent,” she went on. “In fact, there is a law—granted, an extremely old law—that gives the municipality the right of administration of people living physically within it.”
“Making me a ‘citizen’ of the city?”
“In a way.”
This sounded like a joke. But when the goose is staring down the fox, any new hunter, no matter the severity of its delusions, is welcome on the scene.
“It is admittedly a longshot,” she said, sipping the peachwater at last. Such poise. Highly disinterested. Meanwhile, I was half done with my beer already. “Cards on the table, M. Raibringarthu, this is a pet project of mine. I graduated Kelzter two years ago, where my theory exam prepared historical eventualities in corporeal collateral law; your case is the first I’ve seen that fits the modeling I did more or less perfectly. May I explain?”
I nodded, though she was already speeding onwards.
“You’ve been a full citizen of YH, and only YH, from birth, but it’s a nonhereditary contract signed by your parents, meaning that no conflicting contract can reasonably complicate your situation. Now, crucially, the wording in YH’s bylaws is that its jurisdiction over you supersedes that of any other ‘corporate governing body.’ Other administrators’ bylaws just say ‘governing body’ or something similarly broad. You see where this is going? So our burden is only to prove that the city constitutes a ‘governing body’ yet not a ‘corporate governing body,’ and that you are a ‘citizen’ of it. Tough, but that’s what my whole degree looked at. It’s crucial that you were born at Wengterîc Hospital, one of the only medical facilities in the city that kept video records of ID implants back then, so we can easily and systemically prove that your birth occurred within city limits. All of this puts us on the best footing possible when it comes to employing the municipal law to our advantage.”
She had warmed into the subject nicely, and now downed the rest of her peachwater in one shot. Good for her. An intimidating silence sat with us at the table until I said, somewhat meekly: “Sounds good to me.”
“I’ll need your cooperation in releasing some of your data assets, like the vid record at Wengterîc. Let’s meet in front of the hospital tomorrow morning, say at eight?”
“Fine, good. And… wow. I mean, thank you.”
“Oh, and this is pro bono, all right?” she added with, I think, a look of cool resolve. The longer we sat there, the less well I could actually see her. It wasn’t the spotlights or the beer. This just happens in the Whibbat. An effect of all that neojazz. “The DRS is independently funded and is interested in pushing the conversation on debtor politics,” she was saying. “So the services are free of charge. And it’s not like the partners at my firm mind my taking on Elcat and Pfîc in my spare time, eh?” With that, she punctuated the conversation by rapping her empty glass on the table.
Den, either by chance or at the summons of this conclusory drumbeat, appeared and asked if we wanted more drinks, and furthermore if we would remain happy sitting so close to a stage upon which the one and only Cut Plastic Quartet would soon begin to play. His questions seemed to hover only in front of the lawyer.
“We are quite finished here,” she responded, addressing both queries at once. She gathered herself to leave.
I looked for disappointment in Den’s face that this date was so curtly concluding, but couldn’t find it. Then again, he was looking a little fuzzy too.
“Thank you again for this opportunity,” the lawyer’s voice said to me, while she elongated in height or stood up. “I will pay for my peachwater at the bar. See you tomorrow.”
Three or four house beers later, the Cut Plastic Quartet and I were deep into its second set, a motile jazz narrative that was sweeping me along like a spore in wind. The susworld architected live by the band, about a bazillion times more sophisticated than that hammy New York Tower nonsense from the law office, was an uncanny wooded landscape of flowing textures in which the four musicians were trees that kept getting cut down and hauled away, but then would gradually grow back in new arboreal form. One of them sometimes regrew as an armoire instead of a tree, which the audience uniformly found hilarious. Funnier still, while the trees were lovelessly chainsawed down the armoire was always carefully transported away by a moving company in whose van it would neatly fit. The electrianist was particularly talented, if my drunken tastes can be trusted: the tree that instantiated her made the subtlest spatters of pain and color whenever it got hacked to bits. Brilliant. As the evening matured and (to my relief) became something distinctly other than the day, what the quartet ended up playing was a sort of disreality that, ever since my devastating news, felt like the only truth I had.
After the band’s final number, and my I-don’t-know-how-manyth house beer, the Whibbat turned its barflies and ardent neojazz fans loose. I found myself alone and drunk and residually suspended on the streets of undertown. Best to go straight home, but the very obviousness of that fact suggested that I take an enormous and pointless detour. Why shouldn’t I? So I walked and walked and walked. It was night inside my mind, and the city had gone strange: the lava-red façades looked purple or even grey in the dimness, and the whining of the cars skittering by was strangely muted by the dark. Then a curious thing happened. As I walked onwards, everything around me, from parked taxis to concrete liftbooths to my own reflection in a shop window, gradually became instantiated as a tree. Like how a melody gets stuck in your head, the visiontrack of the Cut Plastic Quartet was now replaying through my eyes. It was rattling around in my sensorium and I couldn’t help reseeing it. The result: the swift and total forestation of the city. Where block-offices had been, huge trunks now yawned upwards into a galaxy of leaves. Streetlights were bendy shoots, concrete k-rails were flowering bushes. As I wandered, I even spotted one or two finely crafted armoires nestled in the underbrush. Avian titters and windswept branches further dimensionalized the scene, the sound teasing out a thousand shades of luminescing green, all of them fully available to my thirsty eyes and ears. Bad sus makes reality look dimmer. Good sus makes reality look realer. But brilliant sus transforms reality, changes not only your underlying attitude towards things and noises but also, concretely, how your senses take them in. The feeling is incredible: there is a tidal excitement pulling on everything, so strongly that the visual and the auditory are no longer tethered to any mainstream ontology.
Cut Plastic Quartet. Wow.
The clarity of the woods was striking, absolutely stunning. Ethereal. I rushed ahead and greedily lost myself in a thick wilderness of city-turned-forest, too much sensory input (and perhaps drunkenness) to leave any room for coherent thoughts. I was a kid again. I’d never seen a wild forest before, had never left the city in my life unless you count a few odd trips to the outskirts and back. But here I was, and it all made sense.
I walked for what felt like hours, mesmerized and happy, until one by one the trees began getting hacked to bits and hauled away. I doubled back the way I came, but it was happening everywhere. Faster and faster. It was like crashing after a high or no longer being able to picture someone’s face. As the forest was thinned out, every urban object reappeared, intact and serene. With it came the return of my situation. What an absurd proposal, what this enterprising law graduate had so deftly outlined earlier. Filing a claim on my behalf! Even if she succeeded, surely it would only end up activating some municipal clause that could also come and haul me away at a moment’s notice. Nobody gets through this life as anything but a corporeal debtor.
But what was I thinking? She would never succeed. YH and Telc. had trillions of citizens across countless planets and moons, it would never go out of business, it had as many interests and investments and lines of production as any other megacorporation. Hell, I wiped my butt with toilet paper made by a goddamn YH subsidiary. They had paid my every medical bill, had negotiated all my rights as a resident of the city. When I was stopped for a traffic violation last year, it was YH that settled it. What’s one tiny municipality, and one tiny law associate, versus YH and Telc.?
“Dear M. Raibringarthu: In light of emergent information regarding your situation, your extraction date is hereby delayed by a period of six months.”
Huh?
I reread the letter’s enticing opening line eight times before continuing. The rest of it contained only the myriad details of precisely when, where, and by whom I would be transported away. To where, I might add, it did not say. Rarely was such information made explicit, though rumors of hard labor and medical experimentation abounded. And nobody ever came back.
In the weeks after meeting my self-motivated champion but before getting this letter, my sense of self had been steadily eroding. At work, the datascrolls kept jamming up in my brain. I tried to check them for inconsistencies and wrongly placed bytes of grammar, which was my job, but you can’t proof a symbol that has lost its meaning. It took me triple the time to do simple projects, and once the uppers heard I’d been recalled I stopped getting flak for it. If the lawyer hadn’t forbidden me from doing so, I would have quit the job. “Looks bad,” she’d explained on voiceline. I’d been angry about that. What did it matter? But I obediently dazed through the days staring at symbols that wouldn’t hold still or spill their secrets, and frequented the Whibbat most nights. Always alone. There was a contagious void-feeling in my friends and parents which only made me more miserable. Only I had been recalled, after all. They couldn’t help me, didn’t know how it felt. I had to weather all this on my own, and all I wanted was beer and neojazz.
But then… this letter.
I sat in the living room, on the couch, rereading it. Looked like my ambitious attorney had scored a huge point against YH. She’d been right: it would have looked bad if I had quit my job. Clearly, she had the panache of a real Elcat or possibly a young Pfîc. She would be celebrating with her colleagues tonight, somewhere in overtown, somewhere nicer than the Whibbat. I wanted to celebrate, too. My extraction date had been coming next week, but now I had a stay of execution. For the first time in weeks I felt fuzzy lines turn solid in my gut. I actually had news to share with somebody.
“Bastards,” my mother sniped. That’s her all over: wrongdoers are not to be listened to, even in a context of academic analysis. And nothing angers her more than if they make a repentant move. “Now they postpone your extraction after just a little legal meddling? It means nothing to them, obviously. They’re taunting you. They can reverse their decision to recall you in a snap, you know—it’s only your life in the balance.” She sipped spiked tea, shook her head, snapped a biscuit in half. My father sat at the table looking through old pings and legal tomes. He couldn’t deal with problems except by fixing them. This wasn’t something he could fix, certainly, but that didn’t matter. His plan was probably no more complex than to keep reading law texts until he surpassed my hotshot attorney in expertise, and then onwards and upwards till he’d cracked it. It was pointless and he knew it. That’s why he didn’t articulate any such ambition aloud, because my mother would only obsess over its futility and put the kibosh on it.
Sitting at the dinette, I drank my mug of tea.
“We applied for citizenship at Kstif Inx., you know,” my mother said.
Oh, Krysst. “Ma…” I began.
“Those bastards rejected us in no time at all. Less than a week, wasn’t it, Haffa? Absolute bastards.” She looked like she wanted to spit. I had never seen her so angry, which is to say I’d never seen her so sad.
“Bastards,” echoed my father, still reading.
“We want out from under these YH people,” my mother went on. “And obviously none of the other interstellars want us, given the court case, but I thought that a local indy firm like Kstif might go for it. But no.”
“Ma, don’t be crazy!” I had found my words. “You and Dad stick with YH and Telc. If you haven’t been recalled by now, at your age, you’re well out of the woods. Don’t mess up your own lives with rash decisions, OK? Promise?”
“They are bastards,” she said.
I didn’t want to defend the system, but she’d cornered me. (And I had come here with good news. Just imagine.) “All the companies do this, Ma. It’s in every contract. I knew the risk, you knew the risk, everyone knows the risks. Short of simply abandoning society altogether and sticking your head in the dirt somewhere, we all have to debt with someone. YH is as good as any. And better than most.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m just asking myself what the blazes they’re going to do with you. You know that indy firms tend to be more forthright about that in their contracts.”
Didn’t do me any good to wonder about that now.
“Yeah,” I said, “but life as a citizen of Kstif…”
“Pfft.” She fired the sound like a full-stop from a gun. Having forced me to be dismal, now she couldn’t stand it. But she knew perfectly well what I meant, that even if indy firms offer their citizens better recall conditions, which they surely do, they also provide a fraction of the wealth and opportunity and rights of the big hitters. What kind of life is that? Plus, the biggest risk of all: firm goes under, sells your citizenship to Krysst-knows-who, you end up completely overtaxed or sent off to the asteroid mines at a day’s notice. No, no. Signing with an indy would have been a radical life choice for my parents, and—I looked around their apartment, surprisingly chic given their incomes—nobody in this family was a radical.
I was tapping an errant rhythm on the chrome tabletop and didn’t realize it till my father asked me to stop. My mother topped up the spike in her tea; probably there wasn’t any tea left by now. In the pregnant silence the foodprinter suddenly piped up with the transmission of our dinner order and we all jumped. But we found our voices again, set the table, sat down to eat. Sedulously, we avoided all serious topics over the meal.
When I put on my coat to leave, however, my father caught me. “The letter is good news,” he said, warmly.
After the letter, the symbols at work regained meaning. For a few days, I actually tore through projects faster than before. But as the clock ran down, so did my hopes, and after five months without any further developments in the case the symbols grew alien once more.
Meanwhile, my lawyer had become a staple on the news. The stay of execution she had won me was apparently celebrity-inducing on its own, and as a consequence voice agents and newsfolk started hassling me, making it harder to enjoy neojazz gigs at the Whibbat. They would come right up, sit next to me, jam a microphone in front of my face.
Then, with three weeks to go, another letter came. It was a carbon copy of the last, only with a new extraction date.
Again, a six-month delay.
The process repeated itself: hope returned before looping back into despair when no developments emerged. This time, however, the road to despair was a little shorter.
Then, at the last moment, another letter.
Five and a half months later, another.
The public tired of the story as it stretched thinner and thinner across time. I should have appreciated being left alone by the newsfolk, but without them I drifted into a horrible limbo. At least the attention had provided a specter of progress. Without it, symbols and bytes swam in agrammatical liquid across my workscreen, menacing me with unmeaning. Had I been gutsier, I might have had the strength to wish for my lawyer to finally lose. I had no certainty, no life, no sense of self anymore. But I wasn’t gutsy. I had no idea what to hope for.
It took eight years. Eight years, built out of one stay of execution imbricating another, until my lawyer finally lost. The upper court rejected her last appeal and she gave in. Just like that.
I was recalled.
I lay in a tent pitched in the brush of the old growth, a forest about two thousand standard years old according to the best estimates of a former geology postdoc called Stim. While most of us can now sleep through it, Stim still yelps at night when enemy forces launch soundthunder at the front lines. Or at least he did when I last saw him, back at barracks. For his sake, I hoped he was still deployed near the YH quarries, because the soundthunder was much worse out here.
Somebody from H Platoon, one of YH and Telc.’s resource acquisition security-force units, where I had been assigned, had told me the name of this moon. But I hadn’t heard him, or else I just couldn’t remember it. Nobody seemed to know it. It certainly wasn’t important to YH, not compared to the minerals they were ripping out from deep underground.
The fighting had been stovetop hot today and my head ached. In spite of the throbbing pain, however, lying down on my half of the tent felt nice. Territory and resources have to be secured, came the echoes of the H Platoon officers in my head. Map and hack the enemy ground sensors. Expunge all enemy combatants.
I let myself relax. As much as I missed my family and friends and neojazz at the Whibbat, nestling down in this tent after a hard day was just…
Night fell fast on the moon: in the time between checking my e-rifle and bedding down on my sleepsponge, the insectile hum of woods had revved up from silent to full nocturnal volume. I picked out the chromatic trill of one species, the almost saxophonic breath of another, and the wind playing the branches like wild cello strings. The synthetes of the tent stopped bullets but not music. I ran my fingernails across the H embroidered on my expensive waterproof plastica battle jacket, which I wore to sleep, as per protocol. I liked the texture of the logo.
“Rai, man, what are you thinking about?”
Sheldok, my field partner, never let much time elapse without asking me this question. Even when we were blasting our guns at something, he would sometimes shout it at me, and only half-jokingly.
“I’m thinking about the forest,” I said, sleepily. “This is my first time in a real forest, you know…”
“Bro, I know, you tell me every day. And I tell you every day: you’re soft as shit. Your fancy city living was so fancy that a collection of trees has, like, blown your mind.”
I closed my eyes, spoke slowly. “No…”
A long pause. “Bro?”
“…once, I was residually suspended so hard that my mind was blown for real. I full-on hallucinated a forest, right in the midst of the city. Ever since then, all I wanted was to be free, to be wild, Shel… it broke the part of my mind that knew the limits of its universe…”
A long beat: insect symphony.
“Bro,” he said.
“A concert so good that it breaks you out of chains.”
Sheldok shifted on his sleepsponge. His voice, though low, was lined with wakefulness. “You are soft as shit.”
Distant thundersound brought my mind outside the tent, to the nightfallen forest where stellar light filtered through vines, leaves, branches. Despite, or maybe because of, the frailty of the luminescence, all edges outside were razored and clear to the touch. I ventured into this organic city, drifted down its lanes and avenues. Breathing sweetly, I folded myself like a harmony into its strange makes of citizenry.
There is life after debt.
Even if they wanted me to destroy it—
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Jeffrey Palms lives and writes in Luxembourg. His MFA in creative writing is currently underway by distance at the University of Glasgow, where his research looks at how music can be used in science fiction contexts to challenge mainstream notions of “progress.” His short fiction is forthcoming in the Aner Welten anthology of monsters and his creative nonfiction book I’m Having a Knippchen was published by Black Fountain Press in 2021. He also reviews books for Shoreline of Infinity and teaches the odd creative writing workshop at the University of Luxembourg. He grew up in a wooden house in suburban Detroit. |