The little digital clock drifted slowly across the television screen, ricocheting off the edges and corners on its random path, the little numbers changing colour at each impact. 5:13 AM and the pinkish hue of the dawn was beginning to stain the sky outside the hotel room window. Rick sat unmoving on the edge of the expensive leather sofa, vision blurred and eyes heavy after the long night of whiskey, body exhausted from the romps of meaningless sex with the girl still in his bed, his head slowly cracking open as he sobered up.
Should’ve slept, he thought, watching the minute change on the bouncing clock. The thought brought on the cascade of others. Slept enough. Sleep enough. Big day ahead. Big days. The never ending days. The never ending years. How many years now? Too many. Too much. Too much sleep. Years asleep. How many years left? Too many…
He took a few shuddering breaths to slow his whirling thoughts, his chest tight. The leather of the sofa creaked as he leaned forward and put his head between his knees, holding the side of it so tightly that he feared his fingers might crack the bone. The soft hotel bathrobe he wore reeked of bad decisions and he inhaled that pungency to calm his nerves. After an eternity, the whirling thoughts began to ebb and leaned back into the soft embrace of the plush sofa, arms falling limp at his sides. He blinked to bring the wandering clock into focus.
5:15 AM.
Cool metal grazed his hand and he looked; his revolver had slid in next to him, the cylinder resting against the back of his hand. It was an old Smith & Wesson Model 29, a relic of a time that had faded from Earth’s history, and something of a private obsession of his. He had kept it well serviced since he had purchased it; cleaned and oiled at least once a month even though he’d never fired it. It only had one bullet anyways. Cops and criminals had long since adopted more sophisticated weaponry; plasma pistols, sonic tasers, and other electrical hardware that looked flashy but never seemed to capture the gravitas of a good old bullet. Whenever someone noticed the gun, he would explain it away as being a replica of the one Dirty Harry carried, a piece of nostalgia. Of course, that excuse was only useful to those who had heard of Dirty Harry.
How long ago did Dirty Harry come out now? Rick wondered, cradling the revolver in his hands. He didn’t know what year it was now, didn’t keep track of those sorts of things anymore. He could ask the television, which was voice commanded— Hell, he could probably ask it to play Dirty Harry and it would do so. Would the ultra high definition screen be able to handle the grainy reality of 1971? He had no idea.
Rick spun the cylinder with his thumb and it clicked menacingly. Snippets of Dirty Harry’s famous lines passed through his mind. …This being a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off…
His implant buzzed suddenly, so hard it rattled his teeth. Rick clenched his jaw against the assault, his vision vibrating with each pulsing rhythm drummed against his skull. He growled, pressing the barrel of the revolver to his temple, where it fit snugly over the device embedded in his head, finger on the trigger. He stared at himself in the dark television screen, the little clock bouncing around his ruddy reflection, eyes set with manic purpose as he pressed the cool metal into his skin.
Just one bullet. Just one to stop the madness. To get out of this contract.
“Do I feel lucky?” he muttered. He closed his eyes and squeezed.
Click.
The vibrations stopped and Rick sighed, shutting his eyes and lowering the gun back to his lap. Apparently not lucky enough.
The room fell silent around him again and he waited for his ragged breathing to stabilize before opening his eyes, returning to the calm serenity of the dawn. At the corner of his vision a tiny pixelated envelope floated in the dimness, indicating he had mail. His hand ached as he loosened his grip on the gun and tapped his temple where the little device was wired into his skull. He cleared the notification. The envelope vanished and he glanced up at the television again, the little bouncing clock reading 5:20 AM. He watched it go around his reflection, the sagging old face of a dead man still walking, boxing him in with its unstoppable crawl through the empty black void.
“Coward,” Rick snarled at his reflection. Shame rolled through him as he slammed the gun down onto the low coffee table, the half-drunk bottles littering its surface clinking together, while a couple empties fell onto the thick carpet with a thump. From the bed, just through the doors behind the couch, there came a startled snort.
“What is— What’s wrong?” The girl’s head rose off the nest of squashy pillows, the outline of her wild mane of frizzy curls catching what little morning sun there was.
“It’s nothing,” Rick said, voice cracking from his dry mouth. “Knocked some bottles over looking for my smokes. Go back to sleep.”
“Hnnng,” she replied, collapsing back into the plush bed. It only took a few moments for her breath to turn deep and slow again.
Rick sighed, knees creaking as he stood and stretched. He grabbed the gun off the table again, now sickened by the way it felt in his hands, and moved to the wardrobe near the door where he placed it into the inner pocket of his old bomber jacket while fishing out a pack of cigarettes. He closed the wardrobe, padded across the small sitting room toward the sliding balcony door and dug around in the pocket of the soft hotel housecoat for a lighter. He pulled out the little battery-pack deal they were calling lighters these days, wondering again what was wrong with a good old-fashioned flame, and clicked it into life. The blue arc of electricity remained burned into his retinas as he eased out onto the balcony, shutting the door noiselessly behind him. He exhaled a long stream of smoke as he came to the rail. At least cigarettes were still the same.
A huge billboard dominated the street across from his hotel, soulless advertisements smeared with pigeon shit flickering across it. Smiling faces hocking BioSyne’s new drugs or surgeries designed to treat the human condition; a still of smashed vehicles spouting smoke and splattered with blood advertising the next Carnage event; an ad from a company called Embryo showing off their latest line of eerily beautiful companion androids, which were sexbots so far as Rick could tell; and of course the idyllic All-Earthling family posing in front of an Edenic landscape, their dead eyes wide with wonder and their teeth a shade too white, while off to the side the family dog galloped toward their new home, a modern domed structure that didn’t match the virgin landscape at all. It was an ad for the grand adventure of NexGen’s Galactic Pilgrimage and it made Rick seethe with hatred as he read the glittering letters in the upper corner: ‘Dreams are just a lightyear away!’
Below the billboard though, other words were scrawled, ones that could only pertain to the Pilgrimage. The faded spray painted message of ‘EARTH FIRST!’ was entirely more powerful, in Rick’s opinion. He pulled on his cigarette, exhaling another line of smoke as he traced the crudely painted letters one by one. The Earth First Movement was forcibly kept out of the port towns, or at least they had been when he was last on Earth, but it seems times had changed on him again. They must have been gaining ground if they were brazen enough to vandalize something so close to NexGen property. He shook his head, leaning on the rail and looking away from the billboard.
Port Northwest lay in long shadows in these early hours and Rick breathed in the silence alongside his smoke. The other hotels along the strip were mostly blacked out still, the few restaurants and bars at street level all quiet and dark. As he looked down, he saw only a couple cars rolling silently along the clean streets, the unlucky few residents whose days actually began this early. If he craned over the balcony rail, he might’ve been able to see their likely destination: the launch control buildings surrounding the towering starship that Rick would be piloting skyward before the day’s end. Traffic would soon be thick with the next round of pilgrims headed to the stars, this time to the lush and luxurious Proxima-E, a freshly terraformed colony way out in the fathomless depths of space. One-way tickets that included space travel on one of NexGen’s state-of-the-art ships, a quarter-acre plot of NexGen land when they arrived, a NexGen modular home that was fully automated from construction to maintenance, and year’s supply of NexGen food rations until the clients had settled into their ticky-tacky NexGen community. All for a low, low price of six million credits per head at the family rate. All the resources for your new home cannibalized, crafted, and crated off good old Mother Earth, which the pilgrims would never see again.
Rick sighed, lighting another cigarette off the dwindling butt before pitching it off the balcony. He took another long inhale and tapped his temple, the implant clicking as it activated. The translucent digital display opened in his field of vision, its cyber-green hue overlaying the real world, a toolbar coming out from the side with his various bookmarks. The mail icon blinked impatiently and he selected it with a twitch of his thoughts.
‘TO THE ESTATE OF CAPT. PATRICK M. WHITE, NEXGEN GALACTIC INC., SHIP NO. PW-069:
A BALANCE OF 2,500,000 CREDITS HAS BEEN ADDED TO YOUR ACCOUNT ENDING IN 1795.
ACCESS CODES FOR THE GANYMEDE JUMP STATION HAVE BEEN ADDED TO YOUR COMMAND DOSSIER, FOR SINGLE USE ONLY. RETURN TRIP INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE TO YOU UPON ARRIVAL AT PROXIMA-E.
NEXGEN THANKS YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SERVICE AND WISHES YOU SAFE PASSAGE ON YOUR UPCOMING VOYAGE.
- D. MONTEREY, ACCOUNTS PAYABLE - LABOUR DIVISION, NEXGEN NORTH AMERICA’
Rick blinked to close the notice and flicked his eyes toward the banking app, which opened to show his current balance. His credit balance was obscene, so much so that it made him nauseous just looking at it and he blinked it closed. The going rate for a good jump pilot was high enough, coupled with the years – decades – of interest he’d accumulated through simple time dilation, to say he had a fortune to his name was an understatement.
All that money and not a single meaningful thing to do with it, Rick thought. He pitched the cigarette butt over the railing, gripping the cool steel and closing his eyes to clear the display as his thoughts began to whirl again. They own you, Rick. Body and mind until your contract is up. There are new planets terraformed every year, new colonies to shuttle people off to each time you get back to this dying rock, and barely a few nights to rest in a lonely hotel room in between, no one to call or visit with when you’re on your own home planet… Hell, you can’t even build a casual relationship with the call girls… He recalled his last docking, when he had hired the services of a skinny girl called Carly. She couldn’t have been much older than 20, blonde and peppy, with a bubbly sarcasm about her that he’d found endearing. And how old would she be now? Is she even still alive? You’re alone and NexGen wants to keep you alone…
Rick started as the door slid open behind him, the girl from last night pausing with a single barefoot past the threshold.
“Sorry,” she said. “Am I intruding?”
Rick shook his head, pulling out another cigarette as she stepped onto the balcony and slid the door shut behind her. He lit his smoke and watched as she curled bare legs up in one of the low chairs, only wearing a pair of lacy underwear beneath a baggy grey sweater. She’d pulled her wild tangle of black curls into a knot at the back of her head, her eyes a little bloodshot from the partying they’d done the night before, but still looking fresher than Rick had felt in years. She made a face at him as she saw him looking, scrunching her wide nose with a playfully challenging leer. He snorted. The woman could twist herself into positions that would be forever burned into Rick’s memory but was shy about him looking now? He politely averted his eyes as she shifted into a more ladylike position, tucking her legs beneath her. From the front pocket of the sweater she pulled a small tablet and e-cigarette, putting the latter to her full lips while tapping the little screen to life with her thumb.
“Sleep well?” Rick asked. It wasn’t the first time one of the call girls had hung around the morning after. Some were apt to flee once the night ended, others slipping out before sunrise, but there were more than a few that would take advantage of a night at a luxury hotel. Soft bed, hot shower, free breakfast, et cetera.
“Not bad,” she said without looking up from her tablet. Her voice was dusky velvet and sent the same rumbling interest through him that it had the night before when they’d met in the bar. She frowned at something on her screen, squinting her eyes and bringing it closer.
“Don’t see too many youngsters with tablets anymore.”
She glanced over at him, quirking a brow as she took another hit of her e-cig. She exhaled a thick cloud of cotton candy scented vapour. “Youngsters? Alright there, grandpa.”
“I’m just saying,” Rick went on. “The Neurolink was all the rage last time I was planetside.”
She shrugged, tapping her little screen off and tucking it back into her hoodie. “What can I say? I’m old school. Apparently so are you. I didn’t think anyone but miners and truckers smoked real cigarettes anymore. Those things cause cancer, you know.” She put the e-cig to her lips.
“And those don’t?” Rick said, batting away the sickly sweet cloud as she exhaled. She chuckled. “Hasn’t BioSyne invented the cure for cancer yet?”
“They have, but it’s fucking expensive.” She cocked a brow at him “You said planetside? Are you a trucker?” She didn’t mean trucker in the sense Rick would’ve thought at first, an 18 wheeler tearing down the highway coming to mind, but referred to the interplanetary truckers who ran cargo inside the solar system.
“Jump pilot.”
“Oh neat!” she said, blinking large eyes at him. “But like, what were you before you became a jump pilot?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like, what did you used to do before signing up for today’s pilgrimage?”
“I used to be a jump pilot.” She frowned, clearly not understanding fully. He sighed. “Captain Patrick White, at your service.” Her eyes widened in sudden comprehension, brows lifting in an expression of disbelief. “Just, er, call me Rick.”
“You’re… You’re Patrick White? Like, the Patrick White?”
“Yep.”
“Fuck off. Papa Whiskey? You’re that Patrick White?”
Rick cringed and averted his eyes. He wasn’t sure how many years had passed since that piece of shit series had come out but it must’ve been a classic by now. He had only seen it once, but the thing was like a bad penny that kept coming back to him no matter how many times he jumped. Papa Whiskey had been loosely based on his life as Earth’s only long-term career jump pilot, titled after his ship’s call sign: Papa-Whiskey-069. It portrayed him as a time-leaping space dandy galivanting across the stars to strange foreign worlds, only to return to an Earth that had leapt forward in time during his absence, using old school grit to solve modern day problems. His character always seemed to make fast friends with the ancestors of his lost acquaintances or loved ones, or make it with some human-variant babe when he visited colonies years after the fact, acting the roguish loner who was too complex and mysterious for lasting personal connections, uncaring that he lost them all to the time dilation of long distance space travel.
Whenever he made port, he always hoped the stupid program had faded into obscurity. Just thinking about it was enough to turn his guts to acid. He despised the nickname, seething whenever he heard it over the radio, hating that his own initials were P.W. even. She didn’t notice his discomfort; still dumbstruck, starstruck, and gawking at him as though he were the sun itself.
“I fucked Papa Whiskey,” she breathed, then burst out into a fit of giggles. “Papa fucking Whiskey!”
“Right,” Rick said awkwardly. He lit yet another cigarette in an attempt to slow his thundering heart. Why’d you tell her your name, you idiot? It was easier when they didn’t know. “Well, I got a big day ahead of me. I should be heading out.”
“Dude, you were my hero when I was growing up. My dad was a huge fan and I’ve seen every episode of your show—”
“It’s not my show,” he spat. She blinked at him stupidly. Now she noticed his discomfort. “I had nothing to do with the damned thing besides them slapping my name all over it. Trust me, this gig isn’t just running off to exotic planets and chasing alien tail. You know why most jump pilots only do one run? Because taking a jump usually means never coming back to where you came from. You headed out to Proxima-E, kid? Six month trip on a freighter, for you. You know how long that is here on Earth, factoring in the time dilation through the jump ports? It’s ten to twenty years, give or take. Sometimes longer if you hit a temporal flux. Imagine you take that round trip and it’s only been a year for you, but fucking decades for everyone back on Earth. Your friends and family are long dead, your favourite haunts are nothing but memories, and your planet is—” He cut himself off as he saw a flash of fear in her eyes. He cursed under his breath, tossing the cigarette butt over the balcony.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Her voice was small, nervous. It helped ease his temper.
“It’s not you,” he said. It was NexGen and the damned contract he’d signed with them. A lifetime contract, one that they made seem so cushy. An ass load of credits, adventure through the cosmos at my fingertips. Except I haven’t had more than a day or two to enjoy myself anywhere, alone or keeping the company of people I’ve paid for it. No one knows who I am beyond that horrifying facsimile of a television show… He took a deep breath to calm himself, trying not to let his thoughts stray back to the revolver.
Do I feel lucky?
“Rick, I—”
“There’s a credit transfer on the nightstand for three thousand,” he said without turning back to her. “Should be more than enough for last night.”
“For last night?”
“Is that not enough?” He wasn’t sure the going rate for an escort these days but he had paid for everything else last night already, for both of them. A real homegrown steak cut from a cow and not one of NexGen’s 3D-printed atrocities. Real beer made with ingredients grown under a warm sun instead of in a greenhouse lab. Cigars from the Martian Highlands that had cost thousands of credits. Even a snifter of real French brandy, one of the last vintages brewed when it had still been a country.
She laughed behind him suddenly and it shook him from the dark depths of his mind. He turned, frowning.
“What?”
“You thought I was a hooker?” she asked, a smile blooming. When he nodded, nonplussed, she laughed all the more. “Oh gosh. Oh gosh, no. I’m not a— No, I’m not a hooker.”
“If you’re not then— Fuck!” The implant vibrated suddenly, sharp against his skull, and the ocular display flared into life with an urgent notification.
‘ATTENTION CAPT. P. M. WHITE – PLEASE SEE YOUR FLIGHT DETAILS AND SECURITY CLEARANCE CONFIRMATION ENCLOSED. YOU ARE TO REPORT FOR A PRE-FLIGHT PHYSICAL AT 0900 HOURS WITH DR. L. ARGON, NEXGEN FLIGHT CENTRE 17.’
“Are you okay?” The woman wandered through the display, unseen to her eyes, and stood shrouded in pixels. She put a warm hand against his unshaved cheek and Rick blinked to clear the notification, bringing his view of her back to normal.
“Old implant,” he said. “Hammers my skull like a woodpecker.”
“Woodpecker?” she asked, tilting her head.
“It’s a bird.” She made an odd face and he supposed the birds must be extinct. “I have to get on my way. I’m due for a physical before the flight.”
“Oh.” Her face fell a bit.
“What?”
“I just didn’t realize you’d have to go so early.” She moved a hair closer, nimble fingers toying at the belt of his robe, pressing herself against him in a way that made him inhale sharply. She smelled of the night before, of fun and freedom, of clumsy sex, the chemical sweetness of her cotton candy e-cig failing to mask her heady musk as it filled his nostrils. Rick’s fingers twitched, wanting to go to her waist and trail into more sensuous areas, but he hesitated. She was quite young, now that the sun was up.
“Sometimes,” he started, a bit breathless as those cloying fingertips teased at him and gently loosened the belt of the robe. He steeled himself and caught them in his own hands. “Sometimes the mistakes we make in the dark should stay in the dark.” She blinked up at him, big brown eyes seeming so innocent. But she smiled, rising on her toes to kiss him gently on the cheek.
“And sometimes,” she said, voice breathy and wanting, “the things we thought were mistakes take us in new directions that we never thought possible.” She lowered down again and held his eye for a moment, then latched onto his hand and turned back toward the hotel suite, reaching up to release the hold on her wild mane of black curls.
“What are you doing?” Rick blurted, caught off guard.
“Taking a shower,” she replied, smoldering over her shoulder. “Coming?”
The beginning of this story is one I’ve been kind of tinkering with for a while. It takes place in the same world as Carnage and is one of the story ideas I have planned for the world trapped under the thumb of the NexGen conglomerate. Let me know if you think it has any traction at all.
Would you be interested in hearing more about Rick? About the mysterious woman? About the forthcoming pilgrimage? Or what about the Earth First Movement? If so, leave a comment and let me know what you thought!
Thank for reading The Word Dump!
Cover Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash
Great atmosphere and intriguing setup!