Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

The party’s loaded with twelfth grade brus, tall with semi-beards, and a shitload of good-looking girls, too. Usually under those circumstances I’d be beelining for the kitchen, UnderTheRadar, right, but not tonight. Tonight I dive right in, with Maestro raking names and interests off social sites and feeding me the right lines, the right body language, the right handshakes.

I’m hopping groups, sliding in smooth and then taking off at perfectly-timed peaks, leaving some motherfucker laughing their ass off, or some girl trailing a hand on my arm, sloughing them easy and hitting the next circle. I’ve never seen the party so clear before, so laid out, the bonds and chains of social molecules, and the more I move the more amped up I get, like what I always think doing cocaine might feel like, everything so fucking tight and clear and sharp.

I even meet the host, Hamza Hamidi himself, AKA BoothSay3r. Maestro lays out a karaoke file so I can pretend to know the words to his bonus track (Binary, bitches, you a zero I’m the one / and I’m hung like a horse so you know I’m gonna get it dun) and mostly locks down my wince. Before him and Wendee’s friend Kolette go upstairs, they point me to the last place they saw her.

On the way there I pass Dyl at the plasticoated beer pong table, arm slung around a loud-laughing girl, and I can see the same look on his face, the same electric storm behind his smirk, his Socialight a hot pulsing blue at his temple. We give a perfectly-synched bru nod, the nod of a Maestro messing with mere mortals, and right when everything’s at this hard heady peak, the crush parts for a millisecond and I see her.

Holy fucking shit, she’s beautiful. Short skirt, stripy socks, hair done up, chatting with a circle of mostly basketball players. Even without scanning, I can tell she’s running Flirty, tilting her head and her hips at calculated angles that make me want to slam right in there, like, into the conversation.

Maestro points me to the gaggle just behind her instead, and since it hasn’t steered me wrong yet I cruise past her, and I’m doing my best not to look even though my palms start sweating. She’s saying something about Neo Cubism, but somehow making Neo Cubism sound sexy, as I slip into the next convo over. I’m about to introduce myself to a shitfaced 12th grade girl when sharp nails grab the back of my arm and spin me.

“Shad!” Up close, Wendee smells like grapefruit shampoo and lemonade vodka. “I pinged you, shitwit.”

That’s news to me, but I check my Socialight and see she’s right. Maestro must have masked it. “My bad,” I say, nailing the sorry-not-sorry inflection. “Getting heaps pinged in here.”

“Yeah, no doubt,” she says. “It seems like you know pretty much every motherfucker here?”

“Just making new friends,” I say, like it’s not a thing at all.

Wendee slaps my arm. “Well, don’t forget about us little people.” She bats her electric blue eyes kind of mockingly, which gives me heart-swell, and then her fingers creep back to my arm, which gives me the other kind.

Maestro is breaking down the little bit of lip bite, the hand sliding on my arm, and telling me it’s on, on, on.

“Let’s snag some drinks,” I say. “Then you can try jogging my memory.”

The little cleaning robot rolls past right on cue, so I crouch down to tear two Stellas from the duct tape. As I hand her one I can’t resist pinging Dyl, just to tell him it’s really happening and this was all so, so worth it.

I get a weird fuzz back, so I look over to the beer pong and see Dyl laughing, elbow cocked, set to throw. Then, as he opens his mouth to say something, his Socialight sputters right out. Through the sea of articulated shit-talk, what comes next hits like a feedback squeal on the world’s biggest woofer.

“I actually pissed my pants the first time I got high,” Dyl says, no trace of irony in his voice, and the instant he does his pale face goes red like his hair. Heads swivel; the shaky are-you-kidding laughs quiver through the air. His Socialight flickers on and then off again.

“Motherfucker,” I whisper. He’s glitching. Our stupid fucking pirated version of Maestro is glitching.

“I mean, it’s not a big thing,” Dyl chokes. “Used to wet the bed all the time as a kid, so it was probably, you know, related to that, I guess.”

I can tell from how people’s heads stop bobbing that they’ve cut out their music, and from the subtle winking that some of them are recording Eyespys. I stare at the burnt-out Socialight on Dyl’s flushed face, trying to will it back on, but it’s not working.

Dyl goes to grab his beer, to fill in the stillness, but there’s no mod double-checking his proprioception and his long lanky arm knocks over one of the cups. It splashes everywhere. More people stop and stare.

“Didn’t he come with you?” Wendee asks, lips twisting frowny.

Maestro says no, of course not, never seen that motherfucker in my life. Flow with the night. Cut him loose. This is How We Do.

“Nah,” I say, feeling like slime. “Nah nah nah. Don’t know him.”

“He’s really tall,” she says, like that’s relevant.

Dyl blinks slow, owlish. “Shit,” he says to the silence. “Sorry.” His eyes are terrified shiny, how they were when he had to give an oral report in fourth grade, the only kid in the whole class without a Socialight to help him out.

Wendee pushes her cold Stella can against my arm, rolls it up and down. “I feel bad watching,” she says. “Wanna bounce outside?”

Yeah, I want that. Like, I probably want that more than anything. But Dyl’s still frozen there, looking like he might straight-up faint, and I’m the one who gave him a black market mod in the first place, right?

Maestro is telling me to grab Wendee’s hand and go, go, go.

They need to make 3.0 less pushy.

“No, I do know him,” I say, handing her my Stella. “He’s kind of my best friend. Sorry.”

I ping every single person I’ve met at the party, from the bouncer bru to Hamza himself, with a slow-clap request, and then I reach up to my Socialight and switch it off. My head fizzes, then stops. Empty. No more Maestro. No more How We Do. Just me.

My palms are so sweaty I’m envisioning a spray when they smack together. I raise my hands, which are heaps heavy all of a sudden, and start it off. The sound is loud, so so loud, and at the same time the silence totally fucking swallows it.

“Fucking yes, Dyl,” I shout, trying to keep my voice steady. “Motherfucking retroparty freestyle!”

Clap. Heads turn.

Clap. Some hands leave pockets or beers, slow, hesitating-like.

Clap-clap. Wendee’s shoved the Stellas off on someone else, and she flicks her Socialight off and joins in, rolling her eyes but kind of grinning, too. The slow-clap picks up around the room, building, fading, not quite getting there. I clap harder, trying to keep it alive, staring across at Wendee and probably looking like I’m about to be sick.

Then Ash Rigsby slams around the corner, dragging her shirtless boyfriend in tow. “Retroparty!” she hollers. “Everyone turn off your fucking Socialights! We’re doing it freestyle!”

She drapes her boyfriend’s shirt over her head and starts clapping, furious-like, and he does too, kind of grudgingly, and this time it catches for real, and everyone starts hard applauding. Ash kisses her boyfriend and flips off his Socialight while her fingers are all wormed in his hair; he gets the idea and does it back. They bash noses in a totally freestyle mess, and all around the room people are switching off and joining the retroparty.

Dyl, looking dazed as fuck, raises his bony arms in a victory V, then wades over to slap me on the back. He’s smiling, Wendee’s smiling, I’m smiling. I spot Hamza leaning on the faux-oak stairway, holding two champagne flutes full of Jägermeister and post-coital smiling even though he doesn’t know what the fuck just happened to his party. It’s heaps cinematic, and for a blissy millisecond I think everything’s going to pan out perfect.