TREADMILL
Lili feels like they weigh a million pounds. Fortunately, they aren't the sour, drunk type of passed-out. Just laid out by something THC-heavy, which Lucas keeps telling them will happen.
Pinned.
“Come on, just help me out here.”
Jess crosses her arms. “You have lipstick on you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Come on.”
The laptop screen is blank but for the playlist of old anime rips they had been watching together, having run through it all while they were unconscious.
She hauls Lili off him and lowers them to a laying position on the opposite side of the couch. Their retro goth girl bangs are stuck to their face where they were pressed into him. The left third of their lovingly-applied lipstick is gone, the crimson-purple that's normally nearly-black smeared into a light stain. Lucas stands, and almost falls over. His entire right leg is asleep. Jess grabs him and slings his arm over her shoulders. The exo is on the folding butterfly chair across from the couch. He tries to shake the tingly prickle off and walks himself towards it.
“Cannot believe you two got sloppy and used each other as make-out dummies.”
“Wasn't booze, for what that's worth.”
He sits down into the exo and starts buckling the padded plastic braces around his calves and thighs.
“What, then?”
Phased out of his body, and pulled into an over-the-shoulder camera position. Piloting the organic system around like a video game character, or a drone. Hollowed-out and coated with something nonstick, so the coolness and warmth can slosh around inside him a molecule away from actually touching his nerves. Lili, doing the same, on the outside, pressing his skin in without quite going through the perfectly-smooth force field of recreational anesthetic dissociation.
She picks the tiny zip bag up and looks at the remaining half of the gram. “Fucks sake, white powder?”
“Just some K. They didn't do any, just ate one or two of those 25 milligram gummi worms or something.”
“Where the fuck did you even get ketamine? That Ruby woman?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact.” He buckles the waist and chest braces. “Speaking of which, progesterone and your particular white powder.”
He taps the shoulder bag on the coffee table with the toe of his boot, and buckles his arms up.
“You had breakfast yet?”
He snaps the plug into his deck, and feels the exo connect to him. It tightens up a little around his limbs and waist.
“Been busy.”
He wipes the same smeared purple-crimson off the right side of his throat, and brushes his teeth.
In the kitchen, he heats the 12” cast iron up until the oil shimmers, and dumps a few fistfuls of frozen hash into it. Cracks three eggs into a mug with a splash of milk, whisks, and pours that in while tilting the potato half of the pan up. Divides it between two plastic plates and puts it down on the card table where Jess has been typing on her laptop. She takes a bite without looking away from the screen.
“I don't get you two, sometimes. You and L, not... her.”
He takes a big bite, impassively. They ran out of hot sauce a while ago.
“It doesn't bug me out, or anything. I like you. It's just, you know, weird ambiguity in open relationships is never great.”
They eat.
She punches a key that does something decisive, and then the remote work client's hold on her breaks.
“I don't think I'm being unreasonable. It's just, you know, figuring what your deal is. I use 'deal' collectively, here.”
He sets the empty plate down on the counter, and looks at the panel on his right arm, skeletal in an organic, AI-generated way that's made out of rounded voids. A planed-off sheet of some sort of cultivated, engineered coral instead of the polygonal bracing of the original portions. Pink, like vitrified Pepto-Bismol instead of the businesslike carbon engineering.
Sometimes people just want to touch each other.
She can tell she's running into a wall. “Anyway, that replacement working out for you?”
“Yeah, thanks. Tell whoever fabbed it that it breathes great. Good foam on the inside, too.”
She glances at the bag, and at Lili. “Thanks, too. I haven't been able to get the tabs for weeks, much less legit valerate solution. I was starting to get... really scared.”
“You know how to reconstitute it as a sterile injection, right?”
“Yeah. I know how to cook up.”
The alarm flashes in the corner of his vision. “I gotta hit the bricks. Make sure they eat something that isn't just ramen. That, and their meds, before they log onto the brainworm factory.”
“Yes, dear, I'll remember to feed and medicate the love of my life.”
He opens the door. The heat slams into him. “And make sure they drink something with electrolytes in it, they're going to be dried out from that weed.”
The foot of mud in the gutters and on the sides of the buildings is already drying and cracking in the sun, radiating swampy ambient damp. He puts his respirator on and starts walking towards the title loan garage, trying to not think of all the contaminants that the storm had washed out of the city. Again. The humidity is brutal. He needs to get on his bike and get air moving over him.
He hopes Lili remembers to check the AC unit. He doesn't want legionnaire's being added to the list of bullshit they have to worry about.
The garage is at the end of the street, where the old Catholic church used to be, before the heat and wet had made critical pieces of the masonry fall apart and it all had collapsed. Rho is out in the front, tweaking something on his own motorcycle.
“What's up, comrade.” A greeting, rather than a question.
“Another day in paradise.”
He gets up off the sheet of cardboard he was kneeling on, and puts a hand on his hip. The other one spins the little socket wrench around the index finger by the lanyard clipped to it.
“Yeah? That make you the bottom, then?”
“Unbelievable. Jess already bitched us out to you?”
“Well, lightly complained. This is why I don't get crushes on cis boys, no matter how much I'd like to see them getting their faces stepped on.”
“Delightful visual. Why's she pissing in your ear, anyway?”
“Because she's not fucking me, and I'm not maybe fucking her significant other, or maybe you.”
“Despite your all-important code of conduct, you mean? And 'not,' for the record.”
“Good, I got enough polycule drama in my life.” He puts the wrench in a pocket on the bib of his overalls. “For real, though, you good? Sounded kind of like a bender, or at least two halves of one meeting in the middle.”
“I'm cool. Just needed to get outside myself.”
Rho looks concerned.
“Really. I love Jess, but she catastrophizes. Let's get moving. Got bills to pay.”
Rho gets on his bike and mounts the phone between the handles. “You going to be somewhere later tonight?”
“Ruby's, probably.”
“I don't know why you hang around her, man. I get my T from her, but she freaks me out a little.”
Lucas gives him a look, and gets one back.
“Not like that, you know me better than that. Just give me a call if she, like, tries to get you into erotically reenacting car crashes or something.”
He revs and takes off. Lucas walks up the ramp to the elevated foundation that keeps the units high enough above the street to stop most storms from washing them out. He goes into the little office, looks at the camera mounted into the bulletproof plexiglass between the attendant and the customer side, and waits for the ding. Today's part of the payment plan clears, and the unit his bike is in unlocks.
I don't know why you hang around her, man.
He sees the heart inside the spade, ringed with Cyrillic. The rose with a fighting stiletto stabbed through it. The wolf and human skulls, each with a drop of blood coming out of the corner of an eye socket. The arm prosthesis she says is actually a men's model, which she picked because it matches the dimensions of her original arm. The ritual Thai cigarillo, which he doesn't mind the smell of even though he always hated cigarettes. The metallic taste of stainless steel dental work. And, of course, the spider headset, and the big, slightly shiny-looking scars. The things everyone else thinks of first, which she says he doesn't, and that's why she likes him.
“Sometimes people just want to touch each other,” he says to himself.
He sets his exo to 66% assist so he can get a little exercise steering the bike, plugs it into the alternator in the chain drive so it doesn't run the battery down, and takes off. The jobs queue up in a ribbon at the bottom of his vision, instead of the peripherals, which he needs to see out of.
All the places that used to be expensive vegan eateries and niche, “ethically” sourced cafes have long since vacated Park Slope as the affluence withdrew from the vulnerable edges of the island, bleeding the property values formerly shored up by fashionable people who wanted to act like they were slumming it. The empty properties that hadn't fallen apart from the softened earth and remodels exposing internal brickwork are now dark shops and ghost kitchens, serving to provide a steady stream of online deliveries to Brooklyn and the recursively-gentrified Flatbush. Private equity had eaten the split-levels and rowhouses up in agonizing, years-long cycles to the point that nobody knows who they're really renting from, never mind where their debts and leases are tranched.
He weaves through the grids, the air moving over him and the laser-focus turning the volume down, almost phasing him out of his body a few feet behind what's occupying the bike without the need for expensive powder anesthetics. Lili's music, made with ancient synthesizers they have a preternatural talent for scrounging, moves over him and the bike. Layered over each other in a way that's too dense and elaborate for multichannel analog mixing, the melodic electronic noise leans into the curves and speeds up with acceleration. The new one they just put out feels like reds, yellows, and purples. He loses track of how many times he listens to it.
And then, he's done for the day. With the last carton of coffee and chili fries, the app tells him that he's hit his limit for today's payouts for his ranking
He has the bike for another hour and a half, but he's going to be out for longer. He pulls Lili's avatar up, their crosshatched devil smirking through a bloody nose.
Can I borrow the e-bike?
Yea sure. Dont think im going anywhere. You going to be back tonight
I'm going to chill at Ruby's a little, but yeah. I'll be back in pocket. Figured you and Jess could use some alone time anyway.
He drives back to the garage, parks the his bike, and signs out for the night. The door locks. He walks back to the apartment. The E-bike is in the entryway. Lili and Jess must be on the roof, or maybe at Jess' place, although it's hard to imagine having more privacy around five other overworked tech jobbers.
The smooth glide provided by the hub and occasional pedaling has always seemed uncanny to Lucas. He's used to the mechanical feedback of the alcohol engine and gearing.
Ruby's quasi-club is an old warehouse by the disused docks, which she had reinforced against tropical storms and hurricanes. She likes to say that she could hit someone on the Battery with a .50-cal, on a clear day.
It's mostly empty on the inside, just a few people hanging around the bar slurping well drinks while a crew sets a big sound system and panes of LED display up, which must be for a show tomorrow night. She comes down the catwalk stairs a second after he walks in, the extended nervous system of the space she's plugged into having alerted her.
“Hey, there.” She adjusts the spider headset on her face, tiny lenses and sensors glinting under the shifting magenta and purple lights.
“How's tricks?”
“One of them just turned up at my doorstep.” She grins that mouthful of glinting metal.
They walk back up to the office that's been converted to a studio apartment, mercifully soundproofed with acoustic foam in the flooring and walls. There are regular LED light bars in the ceiling, but he's never seen them on. It's always illuminated by the salvaged stained glass, some of which must be from the old church that gave way to the title loan garage, along with a real neon sign advertising a brand of kvass in more of that magenta and purple.
He likes kvass. The versions she's given him fall somewhere between cola without the syrupy sweetness, and flavored ale without the alcohol.
“I got the other stuff you wanted.”
She opens a plastic tub and produces a black clamshell case that looks distinctly weaponry-adjacent, along with a generic plastics fab box, and a baggie with a cardboard label stapled to the top. He sits on the bed and opens the clamshell. There's a Taser sitting in the egg crate, along with two double-barrel cartridges and a charger. He picks it up, and turns it over in his hands, looking at the controls and the little PLED screen where the hammer or backplate of a pistol would be.
“NYPD surplus.” She does exaggerated air quotes. “They won't miss it, don't worry. Carts are the aftermarket 25-foot ones. Never let Lilith say I didn't do anything for her.”
He thumbs the safety to “on” and pulls the trigger as the screen lights up. In the absence of the cartridge, it arcs like a regular contact stun gun.
The other box emits that new printing smell when he opens it. There's a pistol frame in it, the body of a magazine, and a handful of small plastic components. All in that matte-gray that fab outfits go with when they don't want to use filament in bright colors. The baggie is a parts kit. The slide, barrel, and other unserialized metal components you can't print up with regular gear, packaged in a big version of what the good spices come in. The cardboard top proudly announces that it's one of the most trusted manufacturers of Glock-pattern parts.
Ruby looks much less impressed with herself now. “There a reason you felt the need to become a member of the armed left?”
“My ghost told me to.”
She laughs a little, softer and more quietly than her usual sharp cackle. “You're so fucking weird, man. Need any three-eighty?”
“If you have a box, yeah.”
“If I have a box.” Same laugh. “I'd offer you a drink, but I think we need to get some food in you first. And a shower, no offense.”
“Been on the treadmill all day.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
She pulls the spider off and walks to the tub flanking the washroom cubicle, shedding the sport bra, ratty jeans, and cowboy boots by feel under a glowering saint in synthwave pallet. He starts undoing the buckles. He thinks he's in good enough shape to comfortably get around with the cane he leaves here, leaning against the dresser.
A circle of Cyrillic, orbiting a spade with a heart inside it. The unit patch of an artillery militia, on her shoulder, with a splash of burn scar hovering above it on her neck. He's never been able to read it, but she told him what it translated to, once.
What you can't see can hurt you.