Chapter 2: Winners and Divorcees

John took the same elevator up that he took down, big enough to carry both teams, surrounded by nothing but the hum of floors drifting by. Pain shot up from his hand. The adrenaline ebbed out of his neurons, and the distress of his body crept in. Something in his hand didn’t fit right. Every time he moved his fingers, it was like sand from the oceanic rec room somehow got inside.

The other teammates could pretend the station didn’t work the way it did. Leadership controlled Hadfield because they had a monopoly on violence; the rest resented them for it. They would rather hate the lions than be a lion themselves. John’s hand hurt, but it was nothing like the slap his blood mother gave him when John told her he eloped. Not only did he marry out of the Leovards, he married out of the leadership caste altogether. The matriarch said nothing. All she communicated was an open-handed slap to the face. It was the last of her lessons to him. His blood mother never spoke to him after that.

John had pressed the Level 4 button, home of the Easterbrook residence. He didn’t have to go back. Not yet, anyway. John’s elevator was still somewhere around Level 65, so he pressed the 60 button, the next stop on the express line. Until the level matched the level’s rotation, the doors waited to open to the intake room of the unfamiliar floor. The architecture reflected the level’s lack of wealth. The lines of the cramped space were all straight and met at right angles, a maximized utilization of real estate. Scrubbed clean enough to breathe and no more, the air stank.

A few blue jumpsuits wandered into the elevator behind him. They must have gotten off their shifts for medical leave or some such. The lengthwise train left its station, taking its small load of small labor caste to their small destinations in their small lives.

A robotic guide, its torso mounted on top of the information desk, raised a hand in welcome. The flesh color around its plastic joints looked worn. Most likely it was the product of too many jury-rigged repairs to count. The three slits approximated a simplified face. Its mouth glowed when it spoke. “If there’s anything you’d like to know—.”

“Shut up.” There was no need to let the exchange go on. The robot couldn’t get offended. John searched the signage behind it, looking for the closest game café. He found it and left.

John followed the signs through the couple of intersections, through the streams of human traffic, through the sea of blue labor caste jumpsuits. They stank of sweat and grease. The outside of the gaming cafe was nothing more than a door, a sign beside with OTHER WORLDS CAFE in vertical type, no windows. Those inside wouldn’t need anything to stare at but their screens.

The attendant in yellow pulled herself away from her own game behind the counter to look up. Her forehead scrunched when she saw the black jumpsuit. “Hey, there. Can I help you?”

John marched past her. Inside were rows upon rows of booths, each one illuminated by the screen of a gaming computer, each one with a smoke exhalation tube connected to the ceiling, each one housing a divorcee loser wearing blue. There were plenty of labor caste families, but if someone with no skills got divorced, they could always create a polymarriage of one. At least, they wouldn’t be casteless that way. Everyone had a role to play on Hadfield Station. These leaf smokers served as nothing more than a warning to underachieving children.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The overweight gamer in the closest booth, his hair streaked with grey, had a water pipe beside the screen. John pulled the guy’s headset off with his injured hand out of force of habit. The nerve endings inside told him he shouldn’t have. He winced. “Give me some leaf.” 

Drawn out of the reality of his game, some fantastical re-creation of a shirtless barbarian hacking at animated corpses with a sword, he blinked at John. Guy was cross-eyed, like he had trouble focusing on anything that wasn’t a screen. He looked to his headset. “Is your hand okay? It ain’t looking right.”

John’s right hand had swelled into a gross parody of itself. “Leaf!” He held out his good hand curled into a fist. “Now!”

“Okay, man.” The jowls underneath the gamer’s chin jiggled. He must have been twice John’s age but hadn’t seen a day of exercise in his life. “I’ll get your leaf.” The guy pressed pause, dropped his controller, and tapped the burnt leavings into the metal bowl into an ashtray. He opened a plastic container, screwed off the top, and—with his pudgy fingers—pulled out a green leaf bud covered in crystalline formations. It glittered like frost in the family’s freezer. The gamer packed the bowl and handed it to John. “You just press the button on the side.” 

John put the pipe to his lips and pressed the button with his thumb. The leaf inside withered. He breathed in, pulling the putrid smoke through the filthy water, and held it in his lungs. Though it wasn’t his first time smoking leaf, it burned like it was. In the stupidity of John’s youth, he thought stealing leaf from the lower caste was a fantastic idea. All hell would have broken loose if he had gotten caught, but a bit of risk was better than having the leaf show up on leadership caste kid’s record. That, and there wasn’t any fun in getting it through legal means.

The gamer held up the collection mask, its translucent plastic leading into a tube built into the desk. The white noise of the air intake edged into John’s perception. “You’re supposed to breathe into—”

John coughed the smoke into the open air.

The gamer stammered. “You, you could do that too, I guess.”

“You’ll get divorced.” The voice came from across the room, male, just loud enough to hear.

Heat rushed up through John’s chest, up to his cheeks. He grit his teeth. His hands balled into fists, the pain in his right launching his rage. “Who said that?” His bellowing reverberated off of the walls. “Which one of you divorcee losers said that?”

The gamers pulled themselves away from their screens, quieted, and took their headsets off. All eyes were on John, peering over the tops of the partitions. Each gamer, every one of them, was evaluating whether this artist meant them physical harm. From the frozen looks on their faces, it may have been the first time any of them had to deal with an actual threat.

The leaf high rolled over John’s neurons, the tsunami wave of dopamine pleasure. He swayed as if a weight of water washed over his body, stepped back, and stumbled.

Only their eyes moved. Each pair searched for answers in other’s faces, asking the silent question, “What do we do?”

Leaf did weird things to the mind, and it had been close to a decade since last time he smoked. He wasn’t used to getting high anymore. What if none of the gamers said it? What if that voice was in his head?

They watched him, and he watched them back.

With a snort, John turned on his heel and marched past the woman behind the counter. At least he embarrassed himself in front of a bunch of divorcees. It’s not like any of them would report him to Leadership. They knew their place.