On her first full day in the city Melody checked off the places she was supposed to visit. Heritage sites and tourist traps. Establishing shots of movies she'd never watched but knew about anyway. Buildings upon whose collation some vague sense of national identity had been bestowed.
She ate her lunch, a ham and cheese croissant sandwich, on a bench in a park near the Peace Memorial, whose frequent defacements had all but closed it off to the public, and afterwards she sat watching the trees sway.
She rode the line up to a certain upscale boulevard, where she browsed designer labels, under what seemed like particularly watchful staff eyes, and afterwards, having purchased nothing, she ate a macaron, for the first time, in the cafe of the lobby of the Shambhala Luxury Hotel and Tower, on her way out of which she was stopped by a blue-eyed tourist couple looking for directions, to whom Melody, who spoke little English beyond simple greetings and numbers, could only offer an embarrassed apology.
Later on she took the line south to the shore and traced the waterfront. She walked as far as the abadoned concrete malting silos that bordered North Chapel before walking the same distance back to the station, where she took the train and rode it to Revocation Square, below whose billboards and building-length advertisements and -width marquee tickers she sat, on the edge of an empty busker's stage, sipping Coke from a glass bottle, watching the pedestrians at the intersection mow each other down each time the hexagonal crossing chirped its all-directional signal, while high above her and the rest of the crowd, on the same roof as a parabolic RNA collector antenna, the remainder of the sunless day counted down in an array of six overblown Nixie replicas, its undelimited sequence announcing to the Square, with each audible relay click, each moment's complement.
“Can you believe that hideous thing?” asked a white-haired lady, who'd come into existence, next to Melody, solely to gripe. “Subjecting the public to an eyesore is one thing. That's a matter of taste. But at least have the damn sense to make it practical. Whoever the city commissioned it to, some hack artist, no doubt, clearly values self-gratification over societal benefit. The only time the damn thing is readable is exactly noon. It's right once a day. That's the very definition of a broken clock.”
“I don't think that's the definition of a broken clock.”
“Stupid,” said the lady, shaking her head. “Stupid, stupid.”
Melody polished off the rest of her drink. Then, on realizing she'd missed her cue: “Oh hey, uh, wait. Do you know what the tubes start at?”
Mid-stage left: “Come again?”
“What's it say at midnight? Does it go to all zeroes, and then it goes straight to, like, twenty-three fifty-nine … fifty-nine? Or does it go right to twenty-four-myriad after zero-zero-zero”—counting off fingers, thumb—“zero-zero-one?”
Looping around her hands the grips of her dirty, crumpled plastic bags, each one brimming with all sorts of spinster goods, the lady delivered her parting line: “I never cared enough to find out.”
But Melody cared. So she stayed. She watched the crowd thin, the storefronts shutter. She watched the first two tubes burn, static at naught and nought, and of all the (very few) diversions that could've lured her away from her goal, she glimpsed the tail-end blur of precisely such a sight, crossing Main a block north, disappearing unresolved and out of view down a perpendicular side street.
Right, then. So that settled that.
She left the Square and hiked up Main: alongside steaming sidewalk vents, on which grates the city's outdoor residents were setting up their beds for the night; underneath two-frame neon signage, endless loops of heady steins clinking, stilettoed legs kicking, hands divining crystal balls; past a man with a sandwich board and fanny-pack voice amplifier, decrying to the pedestrian congregation, or any other who would listen, or not listen, the degenerate hordes of ideologist filth who would seek to rewrite the true name of the Continuate in this current year, twentieth Rectified; past—or more precisely, in this last case, walked past, stopped, turned around, returned to—a enclosure of harpies down a dimly-lit alleyway, a ring of cellulite within whose punches and kicks a lace-trimmed blur was being stun-locked.
“Hey, uh, I don't know what's going on, exactly, but … I think you should stop doing that to her.”
“What, this little bitch? Believe us, she deserves it.”
“This precious little cunt here's been stealing all our business.”
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Melody: “Regardless … in any case … um … I still think you should leave the poor girl alone.”
One of them laughed as she delivered an uppercut. “Girl? This ain't no girl.”
Another added, “Scram, kid. Best not to meddle in affairs that don't concern you.”
And another, after landing a roundhouse kick: “You ain't from around here, eh? Got a bit of a First Division accent there, don'cha? Maybe you wanna make some money, we got a job for ya … Then we can talk ...”
Melody backed away, sensing the gradual shift in attentions. “Um … No, thanks.” Calling out to the recipient of the circle's wrath: “Hey, I'll … I'll come check on you later, okay? There's, um”—this last part to herself, as she carried on with her original route—“there's something I really need to check out first.”
After crossing the next intersection, Melody turned into the branching one-way of her destination, her heart racing in anticipation, and there it stood, exactly the thing she'd thought it was, waiting for her at the far end, stance erect, payload angled, its armoured bulk flood-lit from all sides as if in its indeterminate anatomies the machine were on display for none else but her, the person responsible for its deployment, the eternal freshman who had effected, by her mere arrival in the capital, a nation-wide change so dramatic as the one she had in mind now: a return to that state which had ended on a day between her and her brother's births, on that borderline between eras, between Reconstituted and Rectified; a re-instigation of a Continuate under—
“—martial law?” The old man gave a condescending laugh, tobacco-cured, phlegm-thick, which deteriorated into a hacking cough. “Don't make me laugh.”
Melody, pointing to the Katarina unit: “Then what's that? The Continuate's prepping for a fight, ain't it?”
“Kid, read the side. Tell me what it says.”
Squinting: “Pro-per … Prop … Pro … ? Look, my English sucks. I can barely—”
“‘Pro-per-ty of U.S. Army.’”
“U.S.? America? What the hell?”
Prompting the old security guard—incredulous that Melody still hadn't pieced together two and two from the numbers around her: the scowling decorators, the craft services table, the camera crane, the foldout chair with the word DIRECTOR written across the back—to question what exactly the schools were teaching kids these days, h-how come kids nowadays were getting stupider by the—
“Hey! HEY! What's all this here!”
Melody turned around to see a man with a megaphone, pinching his forehead in frustration. “Look at all this. Look what you've done. Your footprints are all over the place. We're going to have to”—loud sigh—“we're going to have to re-sand all this. Do you have any idea how long that's going to take? We're already behind schedule as it is!”
Melody, still pointing: “Yo, can I take the thing for a spin?”
“I'll take you for a spin, you fucking brat. Come here!”
The director gave chase. He pursued her down the street, under the legs of the Katarina, at which further disturbance of their work the set artists groaned, and at the end of the street Melody turned left, where she bumped into (who else?) the very person for whom she'd promised to come back.
“Hey! Found ya. How you feeling? Are you okay? You took a lot of shots to the head from those … those things.”
The girl tilted her head up to meet Melody's eyes. “There is no need for concern. All parameters are within acceptable deviations.”
“Um … Okay. That's good. I think?”
Behind them, an amplified voice, increasing in pitch: “Geeee-et backherebitch!”
“Aw, crap.”
Melody resumed her escape, and after three more left turns she found herself back at the old security guard, in front of whom she stopped, panting, clutching her side.
Melody, out of breath: “Hey. Come on. Can't I pilot it? Just for a little bit?”
“No!”
“Then at least let me sit in the cockpit.”
“You can't! It's a prop, there's nothing inside! For crying out loud, what are they teaching you in school these days, I swear, y-you kids nowadays get stupider by the—”
Through a megaphone: “YOU! THERE YOU ARE! GET BACK HERE!”
“Gotta run.”
And run she did, without any left turns this time, bolting straight out of Somnhaven, and into Lower Manhattan, or at least some desolate, post-battle facsimile of it, weaving through a diorama of smashed yellow cabs ($2.50 INITIAL FARE) and overturned flaming buses (NEXT BUS PLEASE) and bullet-riddled NYPD cruisers (Courtesy Professionalism Respect) flashing silent red and soundless blue over the meticulously-arranged chaos, behind whose curtain, as the director chased her backstage, lay an assortment of displaced simulacra, unassembled artifacts plundered from a real city's false imprint—railing-deep subway station entrances descending into asphalt, vendor carts selling 2D pretzels inlaid on printed cardboard, Central Park benches seating inflatable flannel-clad 20-somethings hunched over vintage typewriters—all of which Melody stumbled to avoid as she ran, hopped, left and right, over fog generators and squib detonators and boom operators, struggling all the while to maintain her distance from her pursuer, who was, understandably, starting to catch up to her, as, after all, this was—
“—my domain, you little stinking brat! You think you can”—(screech of feedback)—“come on to my set? Mess with people's livelihoods? You got no respect”—(pant, pant)—“no sense of respect. I'm gonna teach you some. You can't escape, can't hide. How much longer”—(huff, puff)—“can you keep on running?”
Longer than he could, evidently, for when Melody finally made it back onto Continuate soil—once the traffic signs and advertisements around her had reverted back from English to National Standard, horizontal to vertical, Latin letters to logographic indices; and there were no more signs directing her to a Brooklyn Bridge that was more than an ocean away; no more dregs of ersatz floating atop terra verum—she found herself alone on a street she didn't know, her legs shaking, lungs burning, wondering, director and Katarina and acceptable deviations already out of mind, if she couldn't somehow still find her way back to Revocation Square by midnight.