T's Story

Liam and T, as Thaddeus now bid Liam call him, lounged at an umbrellaed sidewalk table outside Le Petite Boulangerie, sipping their iced lattes with an extra glass of ice and nibbling day-old chocolate croissants. The bistro’s brick facade was still in disrepair, and the broken windows were still boarded up after the earthquake. Qualified carpenters, masons, and so on, were swamped with work and demanding top dollar. Even they struggled to obtain critical building supplies given transportation challenges, including several key bridge collapses during and after the quake.

A welcome easterly bent the ephemeral spray from a mister in their direction and the forest fire smoke away from Portland for the moment.

“Can’t remember the last time I had one of these babies,” T said, waving the pastry in the air. “Reminds me of Montreal.”

Montreal?

“So—?”

“So, the psilo was a bridge too far,” T continued. “Never done hard drugs, and never will. I didn’t buy Ouro’s bullshit, so they kicked me out.”

“Wow,” Liam said. “You mentioned chipping.”

“I did.” T side-eyed his companion questioningly.

An unleashed Australian shepherd interrupted him, nosing at both of them. Its companion, a young, Sheermasked woman in a sports bra and threadbare Daisy Dukes, bade her wayward charge return to her side.

“He’s supposed to be leashed on the sidewalk, ma’am,” T chided with a fake smile.

“It’s all good,” trilled the smiling, aqua-tressed woman as she slipped the dog a treat. “He’s a teddy bear.”

“No, ma’am,” T countered, “he’s a dog, and dogs s’posed to be leashed.”

The woman scowled at the pair as she led her companion away. Having crossed the street, she took a moment to leash the dog, giving them an elegant, ebony-tipped middle finger as she strode away.

“Ten to one, she’d a called po-po if we were both Black,” T said, making air quotes for a reason Liam couldn’t discern.

“Po-po?” Cops, it occurred to him—a second too late.

“Cops, PF, cops,” T affirmed.

“What cops?”

“Amen.” They bumped fists again.

“And what the fuck is PF?”

An older woman sitting nearby glanced at Liam.

“Ooh, language, paleface,” Thaddeus chided. “Good thing this place is French. They won’t understand you. Ils ne comprennent pas.”

“Parlez-vous français?”

“Oui, un peu,” Thaddeus replied. “Did I not mention Montreal?”

“Paleface,” Liam intoned after a solemn moment. “Ah. Capiche.”

Chuckling, T raised his latte in salute and continued his story.

“So, I marched down to the school with the rest of ’em,” he recounted. “We all followed that crazy fuck, Ouroboros, with his stupid Onewheel and his flute. He’s not bad with the flute.”

“The microchips,” Liam prompted.

“I’m gettin’ there,” his companion informed him. “Anyway, I was already vaxxed and boosted.” He locked eyes with Liam. “I ain’t stupid.”

Liam nodded agreeably.

Biting off some chocolate from the croissant, Thaddeus chewed it thoughtfully, his eyes closed.

“So, the question was, do I go along with this plant business and eat?” he asked. “Or do I maybe go hungry?”

“Plant?”

“Implant. Microchip,” Thaddeus said. “Try to keep up, bro.”

“I’ll try,” Liam said. “Please continue.”

“Anyway, my health ain’t what it was,” Thaddeus said. “I’m borderline diabetic, so they keep tellin’ me. I figured, what’s more important? The loss of privacy? Hell! I live in a fucking tent—when I’m lucky—so how much privacy I stand to lose?”

“If you’re planted?”

“Implanted!” T exclaimed.

Ah. “The chips are actually implanted under your skin?”

“Where else would they put ’em?”

Liam shrugged. “In your head?”

“Which is covered with skin.” Shaking his head, T eyed Liam dolefully. “Everybody who wanted in or at—at bein’ the grounds, you dig, but not the school itself—had to be chipped.”

“How did they insert them?”

“Guy did it with some kind of injection gun,” T said. “Word was Ouro numbnuts paid a tattoo artist to shoot ’em into our arms. About the size of a grain of rice.”

“Hurt?”

“Nah, it was strawberry shortcake, man,” T sneered. “Course it hurt. Like hell.”

Wincing, he stared at the bandage on his arm.

“So—”

“So, hell, yeah, man, I got drunk and cut the fuckin’ thing out myself,” T explained, “with a kitchen knife.”

“Jesus.”

“Smarts like a mother, but good riddance,” he continued. “Cut it out the night I left. Got infected, uh course, but the ER patched me up and gave me some antibiotics and Tylenol. Said they couldn’t give me anything stronger.”

“Jesus.”

“Coulda been worse,” he said. “I was only there eight hours.”

“Eight hours!” Liam exclaimed. “Where?”

“St. Vincent,” Thaddeus said. “Walked over there.”

“Walked?”

“They said I was lucky,” he added. “Coulda gotten gangrene.”

“God damn,” Liam said. “What do the chips actually do?”

“Track everything.”

“Like the military.”

“A-fuckin’ men,” T said. “That’s why I left. I miss a meal here and there, but I’m used to that. At least I’m free,” he said before popping the last bit of croissant into his mouth.

Free to go hungry?

T started wiping his fingers on his pants before grasping the paper napkin in his lap.

“So, what’s the point of the implants?” Liam asked.

Thaddeus took a subtle, thorough look around the other tables and up at the sky, a hand shading his eyes, where a couple of quads cruised high up. A server followed his glance for a moment before turning his gaze elsewhere.

More paranoia?

“Like I said,” he continued, lowering his voice, and leaning toward his companion, “the plants tracked and recorded everything we did, along with our vitals. Some computer somewhere crunches the numbers and awards points based on how you measure up.”

“Measure up?”

T shrugged. “Behave and produce.”

“Where do the points come in?”

“You redeem the points at the store.”

“I saw that on his webcast,” Liam said. “Store have a name?”

“Freedom Buys Here.”

“No way.”

“Word,” T said, his head bobbing. “You can earn better digs, better food, burners, burner minutes,” —he held up his phone— “and better jobs. Ouro-numbnuts preaches that when you’re planted, you don’t gotta worry about your next meal, or where you’re gonna crash, or if the po-po will fuck with ya, or if somebody’s gonna mug ya, or if you’re gonna get sick.”

He stopped talking as a ponytailed waiter whisked by with an order.

“They gotta work, yeah,” he continued, hunched over the table, “but they know they’re gonna eat, so they can think about what all they’re gonna spend their precious fuckin’ points on. Top earners get to live in one of the schools. AC’s spotty with all the brownouts, but it’s better than nothin’.”

“Top earners,” Liam mused. “Sounds like a sales contest.”

“It’s a fuckin’ cult,” Thaddeus declared. “And besides the plants, I wasn’t down with the deefs.”

“Deep fakes,” Liam muttered.

“Ouro fucks with people by showing clips of ’em in his webcasts.”

“How does that fuck with them?”

T gravely fixed his eyes on Liam. “A lotta Caminos in those clips weren’t in those clips.”

Liam stared. “What do you mean?”

“They weren’t there when the pictures were taken,” T declared. “They were deef’d in.”

“You can’t be serious!” Liam slumped back in his chair.

“Serious as a heart attack, bro.”

A woman seated at the bar looked at the pair for a moment before returning to her conversation with an unseen listener. T looked around to see if anyone else was peering in his direction.

“Fuckin’ A,” he told Liam in a near whisper. “Our homie Ouro gets his assets stoned and cooks his videos to fuck with their heads.”

“Assets?”

“What he calls his followers, his clientele in private, or so I’ve heard,” T explained.

“Wow.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “people who were in the original vids vanish. He changes other people’s faces around, so you lose track of who was there with you. It’s seriously messed up, bro.”

“They start questioning reality,” Liam said.

“Somethin’ like that,” Thaddeus said. “I knew I hadda leave when I saw myself standin’ on top of that fake hill, waving at a drone.”

“You weren’t really there?”

“I never set foot on that garbage heap,” he said. “Other people said the same thing, but kept it under their hats.”

“Didn’t want to upset the gravy train?”

“Didn’t know what to do,” he said with a pensive shrug. “Some of ’em was freaked out. Some of ’em decided they musta been there after all. Most of ’em just kept their heads down and clammed up. They figured numbnuts must know what he’s doing,” he continued. “Figured maybe he is crazy, or they are, but either way, they were better off than they’d been before.”

“So why make a stink?”

Wide-eyed, Liam leaned in on an elbow, chin in hand.

“The ones who’ve had the psilo just didn’t give a shit about the vids,” T continued, clearly reveling in his narrative. “They weren’t gonna cut off the gravy train, either. They tell everybody else how they should be grateful to numbnuts for feeding and housing them. Said he gives ’em hope and helps ’em past their fear of the future, fear of death.”

Liam shook his head pensively.

“If Ouro’s treatment ‘rechannels your essence’ sufficiently,” T continued with air quotes. “You’re eligible for slash. He claims slash gives you power that only he can teach you to use optimally.”

Liam gaped and continued to gape at the sight of what appeared to be the rear end of Tate’s exterminator van cruising past the bistro. He didn’t catch the plate.

Is Tate keeping tabs on me?

“What’s up, bro?” T asked, following his gaze quizzically.

“Nothing,” Liam replied. “Do you still talk to Caminos?”

“Sure,” T said. “They can buy off-rez time, and they don’t seem to care that he can locate ’em and maybe eavesdrop on ’em any time.”

“Maybe?”

“Nobody knows for sure,” T said. “That’s his game. Keepin’ people off balance.”

A long silence followed.

“Want another croissant?”

“Split one?” T asked with an eager grin.

“Fine.”

“Why are you so interested in this wack shit?” T asked.

“My wife died a few months ago.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, bro,” he met Liam’s gaze expectantly.

“Thanks,” Liam said. “She asked to be cremated, which I did. Found a perfect urn that she would have loved to put her ashes in.”

“Nice.”

“Had her, or them, on my mantelpiece for months, with some pictures and other mementos.”

“Uh-huh.”

Thaddeus shifted in his chair and looked skyward again. The drones had disappeared.

“Anyway,” Liam said, quickened his telling, “she was a gardener, and I decided she should be in the garden with her flowers, scorched or not, so I put her outside.”

“Nice.”

“Then somebody wearing a hoodie with an Ouroboros logo on the back stole the urn with the cremains in it.”

Another long silence.

T laid a weathered hand on Liam’s wrist. “That is so messed up, bro.”

Liam shrugged and nodded his thanks. He swiped at the beginnings of a tear.

T looked thoughtful for a moment. “You think her ashes ended up in El Camino?” he asked.

Liam met his steady gaze. “Tell me everything you know about Slash,” he said.