Nick Cole - Soda Pop Soldier

“Perfect, Perfect, PerfectQuestion. Did ya make it back to the rally, mate?” he asks me.

“Cheers, Kiwi. It was touch and go, lost a lot of grunts. But, yeah, we got picked up at the rice paddies just as WonderSoft started dropping their artillery all over us.”

“We lost three slicks at the LZ,” JollyBoy announces happily. The joker he is never fades, even when he’s delivering the worst of news. Losing three Albatrosses made me glad I was on one of the slicks that got out of there. What a cheap way to get it. It’s one thing to be out there fighting, making a bad choice, getting caught in the cross fire, whatever, and losing your day’s winnings and bonuses. But catching a slick and feeling safe as you hear the turbines spool up and thinking you’ve just escaped one bad day of gaming and that you’re gonna get paid and make it to the next fight only to have it explode a moment later—well, that’s another thing. A bad thing.

“Any players?” asks Fever. Fever cares little about the fighting. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen him running around with his weapon out. He only carries his med packs, boosts, and revival pads. He cares more about us than the battles.

“Yeah,” JollyBoy says with a smirk. “ShogunSmile and WarChild …”

“These laughin’ newboys with their haiku tags. Serves ’em …” Kiwi’s drunk, but just drunk enough to catch himself at the beginning of a lecture on tag choice. His discipline isn’t long for this world.

“What’re you listening to, PerfectQuestion?” asks Fever, catching the music in my background.

“Lemme see … ‘Vietnam’ by this reggae guy, Jimmy Cliff.”

“Sounds good. … feed me.”

“Me too,” says Kiwi. I patch them into my music, inviting JollyBoy also.

“No thanks, PerfectQuestioney. The Harlequin likes his industrial trance calliope mixes.”

JollyBoy is weird.

We play music for a while and watch funny clips from the day’s battle, usually something we or our grunts did that was dumb. We talk about what went wrong and what we should have done, all the while each choosing a song, not realizing we’re saying something about ourselves, the day, and maybe life. Finally Kiwi plays “Waltzing Matilda,” mumbles something about the long ride to the Wonky Boomerang and logs off without further good-byes. JollyBoy has long since faded into other conversations. Fever smiles and says, “Keep your head down, Perfect,” and is gone. I scan the cantina for RiotGuurl.

Why?

Because it was her first battle as a professional. That entitles her entrance into the bunker. I tell my empty apartment it wasn’t her fault that we lost and put on “Black Metallic” by Catherine Wheel. Another drink and I force myself to think about Sancerré and a relationship that’s coming apart at the seams. But my guitar-driven thoughts keep returning to RiotGuurl.

Who is she?

Where is she?

And why do I care?

Chapter 3

At twenty to midnight I wake, still sitting, still holding the remnants of a watery glass of amber scotch on my stomach.

This is my life. Digital death, destruction, and some computerized mayhem by day, long lonely nights with too much scotch and too little of the woman I loved.

Love? Loved?

Love.

Too much of some, and too little of something else.

“Do I love what I do?” I ask myself as I throw on my trench, a vintage leather piece purchased as a reward after promotion to professional, and hit the streets for the short walk to Madison Square Garden. I guess I do, otherwise why else be out on a dark winter night, dirty green glowing frost clinging to the sidewalks, just to see the fruits of my defeat?

Just before midnight, across the street from where I stand in the shadows, the giant PrismBoard goes dark. It had been showing a blond construction worker slaving away in a hot suit setting up a thousand reflector assemblies. Slowly, dawn’s first rays hit the fragile plantlike assemblies, which then burst into life like so many exploding crystals. Around the construction worker, Mars begins to turn green as plants grow, cities rise, and the construction worker begins to age into a handsome silver fox. His hot suit is suddenly gone and now his tanned skin shows through a brilliant white cotton shirt and khaki trousers as an equally beautiful little girl, presumably his granddaughter, grasps his hand and holds up a cola. He smiles and drinks. Then the ColaCorp logo emerges.

The ColaCorp ad runs two or three more times while I wait and then, at just the moment the Martian colonist begins to age for the fourth time, the PrismBoard goes dark. Now, only the blue lights of the tall towers that disappear into the cloud cover below Upper New York remain. Upper New York blocks out the night sky. Strange, eerie lights move back and forth up there, above the cloud bottoms. The dark feels more sinister as those faraway lights provide the only illumination down here in the dark remains of a mostly forgotten old New York.

I feel that preconcert moment before the main act comes on. When it’s dark and you feel like something important is about to happen. Or at least you did, when you were young and a band seemed like it might be something more than it was.

The WonderSoft logo appears on the PrismBoard as French horns, mournful, tiresome, noble nonetheless, begin to serenade the nearby streets with the coming of WonderSoft’s endless barrage of SoftLife products. In front of me, in the middle of the street, a bum in silhouette passes by while techno-Gregorian chants promise both of us hope in a bubble.

What does that bum want from life? Glory days remembered, youth retained, a friend long gone, never returning, suddenly appearing. WonderSoft wants him to have the latest SoftEye. He passes on, oblivious to the expensive marketing of WonderSoft’s next gen product, my defeat, their victory.

“Two sides of the same coin,” says a voice from the shadows behind me. I turn and see a tall and very thin man. Shadows abound all around us as the light from the PrismBoard shifts, and for a moment all I can see is a long coat, a wide flat hat, and a SoftEye gently pulsing purple in the left eye of the stranger. Then I can see all the images of WonderSoft’s ad playing out across him and the light-turned-bone-white alley he stands in.

“I say, two sides of the same coin, isn’t it?” he repeats. His voice reminds me of some English actor from one of the period piece dramas Sancerré watches only for the outfits, or so I suspect. Like a violin playing Mozart. With malice.

“I don’t follow … ,” I mumble.

“One’s defeat, another’s victory. Your loss, someone’s gain.” Now WonderSoft’s Voice of the Ages begins to sell product above and behind me on the giant shining PrismBoard.

“SOFTLIFE, IT’S NOT JUST A DREAM ANYMORE …”

“Who cares, though? We were tired of the old, give us the new,” continues the thin man from the shifting shadows. “A new liberator has come to save us from the shackles of ColaCorp, or U-Home, or UberVodka, or TarMart, or, yes, even someday, WonderSoft.” Golden light erupts across the street as the PrismBoard gyrates wildly to the exciting new life WonderSoft promises. From the shadows the thin man steps forward and I can see him clearly now as the light display floods his face with a thousand sudden images.

“DREAMS, LIFE, LOVE, SEX, FRIENDS, FAMILY, POWER, SOFTLIFE OFFERS ALL THIS AND … ,” intones WonderSoft’s Voice of the Ages.

“Death to the tyrant, hail the new Caesar!” shouts the thin man above it all and throws his long arms sickeningly wide. In the golden light of the PrismBoard I see that he is not so much a thin man, but more a bony man. A man whose skin is so tightly stretched, it shows all the bones in his face.