Second Chapter - A Time for Sons of God
When she gets to the office each
day, she spends ten minutes just sitting, before she truly begins to work, a
daily reminder to the self as to where she is, as the world around her does
it’s best to unground her, to rip out the carpet from underneath her and reveal
to her that she hangs over clear blue sky, a problem all the more powerful as
slowly the world’s global economic engine grinds down, gears slowly wearing
away their spokes, and this time no one around bothering to fix them back up to
snuff. No, it’s not the apocalypse, but it may just be the end of something,
and most particularly the end of her everything, but maybe, just maybe, that’s
what it will take to prove her point.
Maybe this time her parents will
actually consider what she’s been saying all these years.
The company, a conglomerate,
technically, although, as with many of the aspects of her Great Creation, the
line between truth and technicality is far spread. Started at an ideological
level out of a dorm at the University of New Mexico (she’d gotten into better
schools, sure, but that wasn’t the point - as little debt as possible would be
necessary to build her Great Creation), but with all papers filed in a one room
basement flat in Monaco, over-leveraged from day one against the company that
did not yet exist, all expenses in initial setup taken against the vintage
Porsche belonging to a friend’s grandfather. The debt was there, but only where
it would pay for itself directly.
The power of the Great Creation was
not in the idea, not really. The idea was there, but there are many ideas, both
Great and Terrible, and not all the Great ones become Creations, and not all
the Terrible ones are allowed to die as vagrants in back alleys.
So the initial idea was allowed to
grow, to pay off all initial debt, and, in the course of a summer in that
basement flat, the right People were already talking about her Creation,
entitled Spectre, a new kind of subscription driven social network, where
people paid for their privacy, rather than using their privacy to pay for their
fun. No customer data would be sold to third parties. It was a tempting
marketing line.
The information was still stored,
used internally as the first building blocks of the empire that was soon to
come. But internal use seemed natural, so long as it was simply a social
network, and the visage of what it was to become remained secret dreams of her
chosen few.
And soon the angel investors started
circling, with their promises of huge quantities of capital, and not just the
usual quiet runners of the world machine, they who set behind a shroud and
direct all the grand puppet strings with an infusion of cash here, an
investment there, a quiet word in a smoky room, thousands of futures gone in a
whisper, but the good men as well, the honest men, those who wished to build a
New Web free of constant surveillance. If only they knew what they were buying
and building.
Investments were secured, finances
were held more on track. She finished university, wanting not to be just
another Zuckerberg model apostate. Do it right, do it straight, then build the
empire. Rather than expanding upwards, reaching for the mantles of Facebook and
Twitter and all the rest, her company moved sideways, thanks to them so-called
as angels.
Every tiny start up who interested
her and her advisers was bought up for whatever exorbitant sum its owner named.
The angels got nervous, but the picks mostly seemed to be right, and each new
arm of the company grew to support the head. Five years in, her company’s market
value surpassed Facebook. There was no IPO. There would be no IPO. No stock, no
board, all hers, all the little arms. The initial angel investors had all been
quietly bought out. The various branches of the company were positioned to most
ideally serve the centre around which all they rotated, led by individuals all
uniquely loyal to Emily.
Her take home salary was, of course,
by the standards of the average world-dweller, exorbitant, but by the scale of
the company, by other companies like it, rather unimpressive. She had a nice
home, but she based out of the ABQ after all, not Monaco, and nice in
Albuquerque is a statement that comes with certain qualifications. It was her
style, she always said. It was about the company's success she always said.
When she was small, and she’d shown
such drive, her parents used to tell her constantly that it wasn’t worth it,
the focus, the construction, it would never be anything. Just a soulless entity
sucking the marrow of the world for make benefit its own skyward trajectory.
They would know, eventually. This
company could be something more, not just yet another social media site, but a
global force, controlling the flow of the great Everything, supranational,
beyond, in its own great web, the mere squabbles of men or gods, instead one
great collective god, every trip to the store, every peek at the web. Every
hospital visit. Every war. All would borrow a part of her company, and as a
result it would only grow.
And then they’d have to see, right?
Its values would be iconoclastic, a
rejection. Certain industries she wouldn’t touch. The wedding industry, for
one. The mortgage industry, for another. Arms are fine, but we all have to die
someday, as she always said. But controlling the absolute freedom of the
individual? That was a step too far. She would control the world in her own
image, of life beyond the zero sum game of marriage, family, death, a farewell
to values.
Even if it meant the end of
something.
Of course, it wasn’t there yet. It
was large, it was powerful, it had its hands in much the world, but it wasn’t
yet the one power. And she was starting to catch the eyes of those for whom a
supranational superpower would be of gravest concern.
A few months prior, her company had
announced a new product, another social network. It was noticed in certain
circles, but it would not make a major impact on the company's finances, one
way or another, a mere footnote on a quarterly report. It was created as
everything, writ solely for her. A way to finally provide for her parents what
the company never really could, a boy to bring home without having to bring him
into her home.
He awakens with his face half stuck
to his pillow with drool, ensnared amongst sheets, body stuck fine with sweat.
He considers immediately that he probably should stop sleeping with sheets
until noon living as he does in a land of 110 degree summers, but then
remembers he doesn’t care.
As he extracts himself from the
sheets, looks down at his body, muscles sinewy beneath tanned flesh, it could
be attractive if anyone with any real subjectivity were given the opportunity
to see it, but then that just becomes, really, a certain kind of Schrodinger’s
Cat, and he looks up outwith his floor to ceiling windows, and the desert it
stretches out to meet the feet of mountains stood commanding fifty miles away.
The ground lies flat, desert sage,
low brush, the slightest rise and fall of hills, sound wave palpitations out, a
clear view all the way to the first bastions of humanity, a faint cluster of dwellings
and shops, a road spooling out in either direction, and in one it runs past
him, with a dozen miles keeping the cars from his door.
He watches vultures flip and slide
across thermals and he remembers where he first learned that word, some book he
read when he was small about kids who turned into animals in order to destroy
some alien menace. He wonders why it should come to him now as he watches the
vultures free, but maybe it’s the incredible ability of empty blue sky to cross
infinite time and space, this sky now above him the same that he saw still a
child, caged to his parents’ very particular set of values. Freedom now, not
absolute, but close enough.
The vultures settle downwards on
some point, dark against the not-quite-white sand, way out at the edge of his
property, and he picks up a pair of binoculars set on his bedside table, looks
to the point. A coyote lays with guts hung out, sparkling amongst the sunlight,
and then the vultures, they begin to pick at the corpse.
Putting down the binoculars, he
stands, feels the cool hardwood floor, then feels a slight crackling of bone
and muscle weighing down on itself, his self each morning felt slightly heavier
for the mere effort of getting out of bed, and he wonders each morning if it is
a sign of age, weight, or the depression seeking its way back onto the marrow
of his soul (its last assault still inscribed onto bone and flesh and nerve
endings and joints and heart and soul and body real and politic and spiritual
forever as bullet holes in the side of half the buildings in Baghdad or
Mogadishu (name a 21st century war zone - there are plenty) and he wonders half
if it isn’t a might presumptuous to ascribe his own spiritual conflict onto
such fights for flesh and blood, but, he remembers, there is still a life
thrown into the mix of this war). Then he feels his knee pop, and pain ripples
up his back. Fucking jogging, greatest conspiracy against modern man rendered
by so-called doctors, right up there with love itself...
He wanders out of the bedroom into
the great room, more floor to ceiling windows to one side, looking out on the
same desert, and behind the back wall, solid dirt and rock behind concrete
wall, the beginnings of another mountain, and beyond the great room and the
kitchen is his garage, letting out in a cleft cut into the foot of that
mountain, but in that garage, well that’s his true freedom now, 0-60 in 3.4
seconds, but will it be fast enough to beat the devil inside him? Find out in
tonight’s episode of Drunken Asshole in a Muscle Car, or, alternatively, nearly
laying out his shitty 40 year old Triumph with every turn as both tires lose
traction in desert sand, and he hopes that this time maybe he will and there
will be a conveniently placed rock.
Then there is a knock at the door,
and at first he panics, then he goes for the bath robe hung slack over couch,
it’s lowest folds touching the floor, a weight pulling it down, threatening to
rend it from its place of purchase. The weight, he grabs, a Sig Sauer P220,
switches off the safety, holds it just behind his right buttock (half exposed
in his underwear), and moves carefully to the monitor by the door, connected to
CCTV.
Upon his stoop sets a tall man, dark
complexioned, black cowboy boots, jeans, stained, (is that blood?), black
t-shirt, black cowboy hat, a Smith & Wesson 29 on his hip (Dirty Harry’s
gun of choice), and the whole picture, well it speaks quite loud and clear -
this is one bad motherfucker, and the door, with him at its other side, must
now and forever stay closed. He stands with his weight back on one heel, and
his arms are crossed. His long hair hangs loose, and he brushes a lock aside as
he waits, an image of serenity, with the vague suggestion that so much as a fly
on his nose would free the revolver from its holster, and he wouldn’t hesitate
to use it.
But this monster our hero knows,
unlike so many that come a’knockin early in the morning, and he knows how to
make this monster bleed, or, as necessary, work for him, and moreover he knows
that this one too is a disciple of the junkyard prophet. Five locks click open,
three electronic, two traditional.
“Hey Diablo, what’s up?” Diablo is
the name he chose, not the one chosen for him. He was born Jesus Estevez
Estrada.
“Hey, uh, hey man. Emile. I was
thinking we could uh, maybe take a ride and, maybe shoot some rabbits? I think
they’ve been getting into the plants again man.”
“Why do you think the rabbits are
getting into the plants?”
“Well, I know how many there are and
there aren’t as many as there are and I think someone is sending rabbits to
fuck with my crop. Profit margins and competition and all that.”
“Who is someone Diablo?”
“Well, my competition. Or maybe the
DEA is on to me, but I’m always so careful, so it must be my competition.”
“Your competition is sending rabbits
to fuck with your pot plants?”
“Yeah, yeah man. Will you help me?”
“Sure man, sure.”
He dresses, straps his gun to his
waist, then pulls his bike out of the garage, puts a helmet on, looks to
Diablo’s Harley, gives him a halfhearted thumbs up. They ride and as they move
from the mountains the desert kaleidoscopes out around them, flashing by images
at 70mph, whirls of dust and bits of sage, bugs smacking into helmet
windscreen, at least for Emile, Diablo, well they cut straight at his face, but
he seems not to mind.
They stop eventually at a wind swept
vista, below them in a small valley a green house, tiny, really, but with
enough space to provide all in the county so inclined with weed. “Look on my
works, ye mighty and despair,” this the whole sum pushable product of the
self-famed drug king Diablo, but it’s his and that what matters, and he gives
away more than he really sells, but still he sees himself as he wishes others
to, and this, the doctors say, may be for the best.
No one has the heart to tell him
that cannabis has been legal in the state of New Mexico for half a decade.
The money, what there is, not a lot,
but enough, comes from his parents, his mother grown rich in the fruit shipping
business. They say let him sell his weed, it keeps him from the real Bad
Motherfuckers.
First episode, had to hire some
private dick/wanna-be private soldier to go over the border and drag him back.
Now he’s left to his devices, to run
rabid over this empty country, kept in some sort of place by the prophet and
the writer, but what kind of guides are more ever lost than their flock? This
isn’t a time for Sons of God.
“Diablo, I’m not sure if these are
the best guns for shooting rabbits...”
“Rabbits are stupid sons of bitches.
The noise’ll let em’ know we mean business, you know, and we mean business,
don’t we?”
“Sure man.”
And so they set themselves to their
task, going through dozens of rounds each, no rabbits dead, though one field
mouse, somehow with the mis-luck to find itself in their gunsights. Meantime
the sun, direct overhead, seemingly unmoved despite the passage of what feel
hours, beats down on the backs of their necks, and Emile starts to sweat
profusely, before finally setting himself down under greenhouse shade.
Finally, Diablo, bored of his
futility, sets next to him, pulls a small bottle of JD out from his half open
shirt.
“So Emile, how’s the writing
business treating you?”
“Still making money off that same
book. No one ever wants to read anything I publish under my own name.”
“I hear you. Jesus I ain’t.”
“Sure man, sure.”
“Your parents still after you about
getting a girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Eh, it isn’t, well it isn’t worth
it, not for people like us, we’re meant for something more, massive product for
me, but you, you’re an artist, man, and that’s your deal, so fuck the whole
love thing, just a distraction. God would I like for a girl to let me touch her
breasts.”
“Yeah. Well. There’s worse things to
miss out in this life.”
“Mhmm. Like whiskey under a
noon-place sun.” Each take a sip, and Emile wipes a sliver of spilled liquid
from the hairs on his chin.
“I actually found something last
night.” Diablo looks to him. “Not someone, something, a new online dating
thing. Not dating, but, well, a way to throw my parents off the fact I’m not
dating.”
“Lies trap you and then you believe
them and it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake and then that’s how I
end up a little confused sometimes.”
“Better than my parents telling me
I’m worthless every chance they get.”
“Well, yes, that’s true. So did you
create an account?”
“Yeah. We’ll see if it goes
anywhere.”
“You say that like a character in a
rom-com, setting up the first act of the story for the inevitable moment when
the two heroes fall in love with a first glance, but it seems to me that would
run directly contrary to your purpose... of course it would direct support
Theirs... no, not your parents, no, deeper, bigger forces. The biggest
conspiracy against the American people isn’t the demonization of drugs, or the
staging of 9/11... But the conspiracy of love, the idea that all we must find
is one another, someone to complete us, and only then we’ll be happy. It’s why
we work ourselves have to death, buy homes we don’t need, drive cars we don’t
want, drink ourselves straight to our darkest places listening to music we
hate, all in the name of love. There will never be a revolution because we’re
told all we need to find is love, then everything will be okay now and forever.
Emile levels his gun, held tight in
both hands, slides his finger ever so slightly onto the trigger, then fires,
and in a flash of fire and smoke a leaden round leaves the chamber and for the
life it is about to take it hangs heavily impossible in the air, now become an
inevitability, but with death now so immediate, so too it becomes an
afterthought, and, Emile likes to think, in this moment as the lead flickers
through the air, the rabbit lives for the first time in its foreshortened life
in total freedom.
She drives amongst the streets of
Albuquerque, but she is not a part of them, behind the wheel of her imported
Land Rover (somehow, the American models never seemed to suit her), instead she
seems to look down on the half empty city, poor and desolate, beaten down on by
the sun and the cartels and the natural poverty of a land without resources of
its own. (And yet they, of web 4.0, somehow they elevate it, make it the centre
of Something).
She parks her car in a lot by the
Rio Grande and wanders down to the water, by which lies a bench, and here she
sits, waits, watches the muddy ooze drift slowly by, lazy, having the sort of
spring day all the City Rats wish they could have, quiet and warm, detached
from the urban chaos.
Eventually, she is joined by another
woman, about her age, give or take, but instead of her sharp cut suit,
expensive haircut, she is cloaked in dirt ladened rags, hair long and thick and
greasy, a few missing teeth, youth manifests differently when separated from
money.
“Hey Emily, how’s it going?”
“You know. Going, despite our best
efforts to the contrary. What about you Cecilia? Getting enough to eat?”
“I don’t need to eat.”
“That is patently false.”
“That is patently false.”
“Don’t want to eat.”
“Come on Cecilia, don’t give me
that.” Cecilia gazes at the river, ponders her next words, and sees what Emily
sees, and in this, the two see as one.
“You’re my friend Emily, not my
benefactor. We both make choices. All make choices. I live with mine, you with
yours. I ask only for your respect of that fact.”
“I’m sorry, I just... worry about
you.”
“And yet you could save me, elevate
me.”
“And yet I don’t.”
“Ah yes, the great iconoclast, we
all live the lives we deserve, and most of us deserve nothing at all.”
“We deserve what we want to
deserve.”
“Then what do we want? You think I
don’t want a home and a job and a savings account?”
“No. But would those things make you
one of us? Could you ever be part of straight life?”
“No, but neither are you.”
“I chose to be something better.”
“Better or worse or straight, we’ve
all gotta die someday.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t you like to
leave something behind?” Cecilia snorts.
“What, the company? When I say, we,
I mean everything always. Everything dies, man and machine, force of nature. We
exist while we exist and before that and after that ceases to matter.”
“Then what the hell are you doing
with your life? Are you even happy?”
“Are you?” The silence hangs heavy
and the trees seem to dip their branches even further towards the water, the
river itself seeming to bulge downwards as if God was aiming to smash it all
out in one smooth stab with a lit cigarette.
“So... how are mom and dad?”
“Why don’t you ask them, Cecilia?”
“Please, Emily, if I so much as
bothered to show my face, they’d probably use the opportunity to make you the
honorary black sheep of the family.” From beneath the folds of her clothes, out
comes a small bottle of JD, and she drinks of it heavily, then passes it to
Emily who takes a quick sip.
“Yeah, well, probably true. I don’t
know if I’d mind that much - might get them off my back about finding a man, or
whatever their fucking problem is.”
“What happened to your new passion
project, what was it? Apostates.com? An entire new division of your company,
created just to convince your parents you’re getting laid.”
“Well, somewhat to my surprise, it’s
actually turning a small profit, so there’s that. I still haven’t matched with
anyone though, which is kind of shitty, considering I wrote the algorithm.”
“Wouldn’t that be something, if the
program you designed just to find someone to satisfy our parents determines
that that someone doesn’t exist?”
“It would be something alright.”
“Maybe you could just just stop
worrying so much about making them happy? After all, you run one of the most
powerful companies in the world at the age of 28. Maybe you should assume that,
if that doesn’t satisfy them, nothing will.”
Emily turns from her sister, and
though the sun is set for noon time, hung straight overhead, casting all in
light, her face becomes of shadow, set apart from this could-be doppelganger.
Emile from his office, one wall all
of windows, watches the sun set in shadows, as the mountains beyond him become
cloaked in shade, and as that shade rushes up to meet his home, swallowing all
in black, just as the stars and moon come out and he sees all the way up
through eternity into god’s nether regions, out here the stars allowed to shine
bright and unblemished, Roswell just a touch too far away to poison his vision
of eternity.
With the stars up and he now amongst
them, he sits back at his computer, ready to continue his next work, a story of
two people meeting from across a great divide and forming an unshakeable bond,
he sees an email, in the “Social” tab, one laid most often empty. The subject
mentions a match and he begins to delete it, when he sees the sender is
“Apostates.com.” He clicks through to the linked profile, and as his eyes scan,
he sees a vision of that which his parents wished him always to be.
Emily watches the sunset from her
penthouse office, and the effect is not so grand, for the lights of the city
blot out the stars, leaving only grey mass, and across from her office she sees
another skyscraper, and within, another conglomeration of people working too
late for reasons forgotten. She, though, finds herself content, company more
successful than ever, something to leave behind.
The day nearly done, markets across
the world closed or closing, time to set off for the hills that couch her home,
she checks her personal email, a luxury she rarely allows herself during the
day. More of the usual, a mention of a high school reunion, sales offers, her
mother looking for an update. And then, from “Apostates.com,” a match, and,
somewhat hesitant, the coincidences of today’s conversation, she opens the
email, and she sees a man just the sort she could see her father, he a younger
man, befriending, or her mother, were her heart still with her, loving.
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