Кори Доктороу - Make Shift - Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

I walk through the crumbling entrance and start hauling myself up the concrete stairs. Jan would be proud—first stairs I’ve walked in ages. It’s only two flights but I’m gasping by the time I reach the top, so I take a moment to catch my breath, and to steady my nerves, too.

I can hear the sounds of humming equipment, whatever they’re using to project the lights, but still no footsteps. Czechs aren’t much for dancing. Maybe they’re all just sitting in a circle with their beers.

Hopefully everybody turns around and sees me at the same time, instantly startled and ashamed. More likely I’ll have to wave my arms around to get their attention. That doesn’t seem dignified, but I’m in too deep now to worry about dignity, so I round the corner and step inside the party.

The room is empty.

I blink, then blink again. Lighting equipment is set up, strobing electric lime and purple across the bare concrete walls, and there are a couple little pocket drones circling the room, cams rotating for a full view. But there are no irresponsible kids coughing in each other’s faces. The only human is me, a confused old fart with all the righteous pent-up anger leaking out of him.

There’s a freshly stenciled message on the wall, and I don’t need my phone to understand it: Koronapárty ve VR —Corona Party in VR. The words are accompanied by an old-school QR code.

I stare at the message in disbelief, then dig out my phone and scan the code. My screen fills instantly with a mob of avatars, dancing cartoons superimposed over the grungy concrete room, all grinning because they know something I don’t. I walk in a dazed circle, holding my phone out in front of me. The avatars can’t see me. I walk through them like a ghost.

I disconnect from the feed, feeling a lump of hard plastic in my throat. I’m in an empty half-built building, pissed off at people who aren’t here. Nobody to rage at. Nobody breaking lockdown rules or curfew, except for me in about ten minutes. Just a bunch of kids throwing an online party and using a slummy old building as their backdrop.

And of course I didn’t storm over here for the greater good. I did it to unload some of the anger that’s been curling around me tighter and tighter for months now. Anger at Jan for leaving me all alone. Anger at myself for keeping it that way, for turning down my sister’s facecalls and backing out of visits, for giving up on work. Lockdown’s the perfect excuse to shrink the world down to a cage and not let anybody inside.

Since nobody’s around, I finally let a few tears out. It hurts. Feeling mad’s always been so much easier than feeling sad for me. But I let the tears come, and after a while it feels okay, even if it’s fogging up my mask something awful.

There’s another message stenciled under the QR code, and this one I feel I should know—the words sort of prick at my memory. Každý je vítán , it says. I blink and frown at it, then finally hover my phone over it.

Everyone is welcome.

I think of the VR goggles gathering dust at the top of my closet, the ones I promised my sister I would start using. I really doubt the kids meant me, but it would be kind of a laugh, wouldn’t it, just to pop in. Maybe just long enough to tell my sister I attended a localized virtual reality corona party when I finally facecall her.

The housebot can probably help me calibrate everything. It’s cleverer than it lets on.

ALL OF WILMAR’S FRIENDS AT THE FACTORY HAD WATCHED THE STORM HEADINGtoward the Mojave for a week, watched it gathering force, watched as it defied the best predictions as it failed to veer off toward the ocean, carving a line from Portland, through Sacramento, sparing Vegas, arrowing for their concrete plant.

Wilmar had a feeling about this one. It was going to squat over the factory for a long, long time. Long enough that he could go home to Burbank, see his family, his old school buds. He hadn’t been home in the fall for a long time, but the weather kept getting weirder and the spring rains were now fall rains, he guessed.

But after five days back home, Wilmar was ready to get back to work. It wasn’t that he missed his work friends. Truth be told, he wasn’t that tight with anyone in Mojave yet. He’d been at the factory for most of a year, ever since graduation, and he’d made only weak friendships there. But he missed the work.

HIS FIFTH MORNING BACK HOME, WILMAR COULDN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO GET OUTof bed. His internal weather matched it, grayness clouding his personal sun, and he recognized the signs of his brain doing its bad thing again.

Hiding under the covers, he started pull-refreshing Friendster and swiping.

It offered many people for Wilmar to hang out with—old high school friends, people who loved the same board games as him, people who liked hiking the same trails as him, people who liked the same kinds of clubs as him. There were dinner parties and dance parties and people who needed help moving or with community projects like digging out empty lots contaminated by old Lockheed fuel leaks. Burbank didn’t have a lot of heavy industry anymore, but the construction sites and even some of the productions at the studios shut down when the sun stopped shining, and there were lots of people with time on their hands. But he swiped past all of them.

He knew himself well enough to recognize the signs of depression, and he knew that the best thing for it was to socialize, but he just couldn’t bear the thought of it. Somewhere, the sun was shining or the wind was blowing or the tides were crashing on the shore, and there was energy to spare, and so in those places, workers who’d been enjoying a break had been liberated from parties and family and lying in hammocks and had been sent back to work in factories just like his, sintering prefab concrete and craning it onto long, slow-moving electric trains for shipment to the inland newtowns.

“Wilmar, are you still in bed?”

His mom had surprised him by seeming much older than she had just a few months before, but now he’d gotten used to it and was mostly surprised by how hard she found it to knock before entering his room. She said it wasn’t his room anymore, it was her “office.”

“Yes, Mom.”

She scowled. “I have work to do, kiddo. Papers to mark. Up and at ’em.”

Mom had always marked papers at the kitchen table, and as far as Wilmar knew, that was fine with her. Apparently it wasn’t fine with her and had never been fine with her and she wasn’t going back to it any time soon. How much concentration and peace and quiet did she to need to review eighth graders’ essays about Shakespeare anyway?

He pulled himself out of bed and dressed and even made the bed and gave his mom a kiss on the cheek when she pushed past him to sit at her desk with her tablet.

After a late breakfast, he sat on the front lawn on a folding chair, amid the late zucchini and the very late sunflowers—in September, seriously?—and nodded at the people going past. A dozen kids blocked off most of Verdugo and set up a street-hockey game, letting the odd car squeeze past at a crawl in the single lane they’d left clear, calling a time out and making more space if two cars needed to pass in opposite directions, though the drivers got dagger-stares for not timing their crossing better.

In Wilmar’s boyhood, every day had been known and knowable far in advance—if you asked him what he’d be doing on a specific Tuesday two years from then, he could tell you that—barring illness or maybe a wildfire—he’d be in school, and then maybe at band practice, and then home gaming.