“Wait!” Yeung-Sung shouted. “You’re just going to walk out into nowhere?”

The car door was half open. With one foot already out onto the ground, Simon stopped.

“I’m done. This isn’t the company I began working with. I wasn’t sure… until just now.”

He couldn’t decide whether to face the Korean or the night and panicked, jittering his neck between the two. It was warm inside and he was a generally sweaty man. His anxiety powered that further, resulting in a shimmering, moist mess of a man caught in the most personal conflict of his life.

“He always had ideas. I never thought much of them, but he would walk up to me and tell me -often- that he had a vision. That he had visions.” Simon took his hand off the door handle and heaved back into his seat. He wiped some of the beads from his bald head and Yeung-Sung saw him shivering in his skull.

His inhale was long and dry. “He never changed, and-and he went from being a stubborn co-worker to slowly becoming the crazy things he spoke of. Beginning to think of him as a visionary, I followed him, I listened to his ideas, accepted them without question.” He raised his head out of his hands. “But more than that, Pak, he was my closest friend.”

Yeung-Sung gasped. So it’s all your fault that Jordan has a God complex. You fed into it!” But after the Brit came back inside the car, he thought that maybe he should let him speak.

Then Simon continued, catches in his throat. “We respected each other’s opinions. We’ve argued about everything; priorities; method; what to order the crew for lunch; but the argument that was never solved between us, was how long it would take to implement progress.”

He turned away when a sob escaped him and pretended to clear his throat. But he did it with such force, such pain. Yet whenever he turned back to let out his next sentence, he had affixed that blasted smile back on himself. Yeung-Sung said nothing, listening.

He was finally getting some answers.

“I did manage to get him to admit-”. He coughed sharply, several times, becoming looser until Yeung-Sung realised that he was laughing.

“-I got him to admit that such a shift in society requires generations of conditioning. I remember waving the data in his face.”

He seized his body upright, splitting his lungs wide to let out every bit of breath he had. “I’m -I’m quite proud of that.”

Yeung-Sung, while quietly listening had taken his phone out and rubbed his thumb softly across its unlit screen. He imagined the figure of Jordan, the hologram version that had appeared by the hundreds, appearing ethereal and limitless; Wizard of Oz style. He crunched his face in a frown, but then imagined a young Simon facing up to that. Not the person he was, or what he might’ve been, but the two of them as they are now. Were they really once so similar?

His tongue slipped back from the walls of his mouth and he said, “You should. You should be proud”

“But,” Simon sighed, “he would always find some way to push the limits of that reasoning. He’d be constantly squeezing the time frame, pounding it over and over with new ideas of his, bolder and stronger built than before. He’s someone that wants to just ‘Go, go, go!’ doing no more preparation than absolutely necessary. Like when the crash happened. He dropped all of our projects and put everything into stabilizing the economy.”

I remember that. Strange to align that action with the image I have of Jordan, though.

“I think he must have thought that if he could hold up each nation just long enough, then they would rebuild quickly. -He also planned to take advantage of the position, but that’s beside the point.” Simon cocked his head and peered out the window.

“Of course, it was too much for even Jordan to do. Hah! Though he would never admit it.” His mouth was pinched for a moment, and he looked to Pak with guilt. “This country, this land is proof enough of that.”

“Don’t patronize me, this land is nothing,” Yeung-Sung spat “But… I have to admit, things could’ve been a lot of worse. Talk of war could’ve become a real and deadly thing.”

“They tried,” Simon cut in.

“What?”

“They tried starting a war. America; Russia; China. You don’t believe me? Don’t think they would?”

“But then-”

“He stopped it. Thermonuclear war.” Simon kept his cheeky grin and shrugged. “They launched their nukes,” he said, miming the motions, using his index finger as the rockets,” but he had GLI explode them at the height of their trajectory, suck it all up and contained the remnants into space.” He finished the demonstration with a flourish of his, turning mushroom-cloud fists into jazz hands and then clutching his belly in full-blown laughter.

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A cough cut into him then, and his expression went angry. “But it didn’t deter them. National conflict still raged on, in every nation, with those most in need falling through the cracks. Oh, Jordan -seeing the effects of his failure, he became more aggressive, less patient with us. With me.”

Simon stretched his arms out and smoothed them out across his lap.

Don’t stop there. Tell me everything you can about him.

“Go on”, Yeung-Sung said, keeping his voice smooth, trying not to spike forth any unwanted emotion.

“I saw the signs,” Simon said after another cavernous breath. His thick fingers cracked and he curled them into fists out over his bent knees. His words were coming out like icebergs, Yeung-Sung only seeing their tips.

“I saw them but, like the oblivious moron that I am, set it aside for a while.” He snapped around, his words leaping out again with sudden energy.

“We were making such good progress, you see. Yeung-Sung, I can’t explain it to you, but the gravity of some of our research results. Ahh…” He left his mouth open and went wide, white, like a titanic being was behind him and made a static, gargling noise.

“Uahhhhhh…

“Oh, Yeung-Sung, if only you were there. It would have consumed you too. All of us were certain that we could change everything, and we thought we could control Jordan. That he was irreplaceable -and he was irreplaceable like, hmm, Uranium isotopes are irreplaceable.” He went quiet a moment, waiting to see Yeung-Sung’s reaction.

What? Am I supposed to understand know what he meant by that?

He shook his head at Simon. “I don’t get it but okay. Sure. Like uranium,” he said. “I’m guessing Jordan wasn’t the type to be tamed?”

“Trying to contain Jordan wasn’t just harder than war. It was like trying to keep a separate world and its global crises aloft.” Simon continued to fidget. He winced, rubbing his thumb into the meat of his shoulder. His voice was breathy with relief when he said, “I’m no Atlas.”

He was without his excited smile. He looked tired. Yeung-Sung traced his eyes along the lines in his face, along the Brit’s hollow, pouched cheeks. There’s more. Tell me, Simon. We’re almost there.

Simon pushed off his hands. He bent upright and was almost out the door before Yeung-Sung could shout, “You can’t go!”

Yeung-Sung lunged with his arms, barricading the way out. Simon pushed and bent his body but he remained strapped around his body like a human seatbelt.

Their faces almost touching, Simon said, “Pak, this is not up for discussion.”

Yeung-Sung pushed back. “There’s nothing out there! Jordan’s a fucking prick-”

“Hah! Well-”

“But you’re right”. Yeung-Sung grimaced as he said it. It really is a reversal, isn’t it?

He tried again, saying, “GLI has the technology, the resources. This is the opportunity our world needs to fix itself! And all is not lost. Airgead is failing itself. A new reset could be just around the corner; it’s your chance! Who else has the history that you do with Jordan? You can still control him; you can keep him on track.”

“Pak, let me go!”

The two struggled against each other out in the perimeter, the boundary of the colony. Night had fully set, a long day for the both of them, but neither relented. Simon was the bigger of the two, as well as the stronger. He gained ground, standing slowly up. After a point, all Yeung-Sung could do was use his height advantage to press down on him as dead weight.

I can’t beat him. He’s going…I’ve lost another one.

Simon threw Yeung-Sung against the back of the front seat. As he slid down, he stepped out firmly. Then looked back.

“Maybe Airgead is a bust, but there’s no going back. Not for me. And not for Jordan, either.”

. Wheezing through the pain, Yeung-Sung experienced it more as delirium than anything else. “But he needs someomes to give hims new ideas,” he said with a bashed lip. Pulling himself up with effort, Yeung-Sung looked around side to side, as if those were words that came from someone else.

No. That was me. I’m agreeing. I’m a traitor to myself.

Simon kept his feet stomped upon on the first blades of grass that were by the roadside. He wanted to go further, Yeung-Sung could see it in his fists and throughout every pulsing piece of skin.

But Simon did not take another step.

“He doesn’t listen to me anymore.” He turned around, climbing back in the car and grabbing Yeung-Sung by the collar.

“I have to get out before it gets uglier. I can’t handle it, seeing him this way.”

“And what? Wheth athe you going, whath will you do?” Yeung-Sung asked with a driftwood expression.

Simon chuckled, letting him go. “Don’t laugh, alright -I know I’m laughing but,” he swung a fake punch, “Don’t.” He cupped something in his pockets. His smile suddenly elevating to a new level, he whipped out a handheld console. “I…am going to find a serene place, and play this till I die.”

He wasn’t expecting that it would be immediately familiar to Yeung-Sung. He didn’t expect the bruised coloner to knock the thing away, and he definitely never thought that a games console would bounce off pavement so many times. He watched in despair as the purple casing broke open, piece by piece in a trail away from the road.

“You…” he roared.

Yeung-Sung licked up the blood off his lips. Calmly, he told him, “You’re going to sit and enjoy yourself while you let everyone here who fails at Jordan’s game die?”

Simon spread his arms out. He squared his shoulders and tightened his jaw. In his bulging grey coat, he looked like a territorial hippo. “Don’t. Be. Ridiculous. He is not going to kill innocent people out of his own anxiety.”

I’ve got you now. “You think he won’t?” Yeung-Sung retorted. He wagged his finger like Simon did earlier and his bottom lip became wet as he spread it open. “What about our lack of rights? -The UN ones, remember? The ones you told me we don’t have? And just now, what you said about Jordan’s aggressiveness?” He saw Simon begin to squirm.

He approached him with his final blow, saying, “Look at me one more time -try to tell me that the Jordan you once knew would beat me half to death…Well?”

Simon, to his credit, kept his mouth shut. Though his anger crackled, popping out as goose bumps on his skin, Simon walked quietly back to the car, sat and kept his fists down, pressing them into the seat leather. When he unstuck them, Yeung-Sung took notice of the deep, thick imprint of it, like a bite torn from a cushion.

“What’s the use?” Simon asked him, once the car door had been shut.

Oh!

Yeung-Sung paled. I can’t believe I never thought of this before. He took out his phone, fumbling it he was so excited.

“I believe I have someone who might help us,” he told Simon. “Or maybe I should say some-thing -I’m not sure what’s correct to say.”