As soon as I was done with Dr. Derric, I dialed Heggy’s number. To my surprise—and unexpected pleasure—it seemed I’d caught Dr. Marteneiss during her own lunch break. Hearing her fumbling to get a hold of her PortaCon along with the food tray in her hands made me chuckle—the first time in a long while, it seemed. She set the console down on the food tray, leaving me looking straight up at her, like a face carved into a mountainside.
She looked at me with a queer eye as I wolfed the last bits of my food down.
“For Angel’s sake, Genneth, are you wagin’ a campaign against rice, or somethin’? Slow down! You’ll give yourself indigestion!”
Swallowing, I took a gulp of my sparkling lemonade. One more gulp, and it would be empty. Despite having eaten a lot, I was still quite hungry, but at least not painfully so.
“Sorry…” I said. “I haven’t eaten in a while.”
Heggy set her tray down on the counter.
“What Cafeteria are you in?” I asked.
“Two,” she said, placing her console down on her tray. “It’s almost like old times,” she said, “it’d be better if we were face-to-face,” she added. “We can’t share desserts otherwise.”
“Did you hear about the darkpox patients?” I asked.
“‘Course,” she answered, “everyone did. I had my hands full at the time, so I didn’t get to see any of the action.”
Heggy swept her arms back and forth above her screen as she set her chosen piping hot dishes onto the tray, which she then picked and took with her as she walked off to a table of her own.
I was about to bring up that I’d been one of the physicians called to attend to the darkpox patients when I nipped my own words in the bud. Seeing Dr. Marteneiss at peace like this made me suddenly feel reluctant to bring up what was bothering me. Talking about time travel possibly being real wasn’t exactly a light conversation topic.
“What did you get?” I asked, nervously.
“It’s my lucky day,” Heggy said, smiling behind her F-99 mask. “Pan-fried catfish. Just like momma used to make.”
“Well… I went first last time,” she said, “So, you’re up. Have at it.”
I blinked, caught off guard. For a moment, I even stopped eating. I had to rejigger my brain just to deal with the… normality of it all. After Brand, Heggy was my second most frequent lunchtime companion. During my first few years at WeElMed—before I’d met Brand—she’d reigned supreme as my favorite lunch partner. If I ignored the social distance created by the videophone call, or the fact that I’d eaten a napkin, was now dealing with the possibility of time travel, that I was turning into some sort of magical monster, and that I was likely going to be accosted by more ghosts now that I’d fed my body some much-needed nutrients to keep my gradual mental breakdown running on schedule, if I closed my eyes, things really did feel almost normal.
I sniffled.
“Is something wrong, Genneth?” Heggy asked, as she took a bite from her catfish.
“No, nothing,” I said, “just something in my eye.” I discreetly wiped the tears from my eyes.
I’d called Heggy because talking to her almost always made me feel better, and because I imagined Ani was still busy dealing with our potential time-travelers. I’d wanted to talk to Dr. Marteneiss about the time travel thing, but, now… I didn’t want to spoil the normalcy of the moment. So, instead, I tried something normal. Something told me normality was about to go right out the window. I could feel it in my gut.
And, honestly, the issue still weighed heavily on my mind.
“Heggy,” I said, “even you have to agree that it isn’t worth being a stickler for SPNs and insurance status in a time of crisis like this.”
She stared at me, promptly swallowing after stopping mid-chew.
“Making a direct attack on your opening volley, eh, Howle?” Heggy grinned. “How daring.” She took a sip of her drink—almost certainly peach ice tea. She smirked. “Is this because of Dr. Lokanok?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That is a specious accusation, Dr. Marteneiss,” I said, feigning umbrage.
Inside, I felt like I was breaking.
Heggy nodded. “Well… glad to see you’re not hangry, just hungry.”
I groaned. “Please don’t use that word.”
“What word?”
I stared her in the eye. “Now look who’s dodging the issue.” My expression turned grave. “I’ve tried putting myself in your shoes, but… I still can’t arrive at your conclusion, Heggy, least of all, during a pandemic. How can you look those people in the eyes and tell them they aren’t important enough—aren’t privileged enough—to get access to readily available treatment? You know it’s just for the sake of lining the industry’s pockets!”
Heggy sighed.
“Do you think I enjoy that, Genneth? Hell no!” She stomped her fist onto the tabletop. Do I wish the law were different? Heck yeah! But, it’s not my place to pick and choose right from wrong. That’s the Moonlight Queen’s business. As for us mere mortals, we’ve got this whole big system that keeps our society in ship-shape: elected representatives, the economy—in all its weird wisdom—and oodles of judges from coast to coast. And you know why we’ve got it,” she added, leaning forward eagerly, “we’ve got it because it works.” Heggy nodded her head in confidence. “We wouldn't use them if they didn't. People have tried to do things differently, and they've failed every time. Look at Odensk. After their revolution, everything went tits up, pardon my language. Point is,” she continued, “if everyone was free to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, it’d be chaos. That’s just how the pine cones fall.”
“Have you taken a look around, lately?” I said. To embellish my point, I actually did look around. “Things are pretty chaotic—and, I think they’re only just getting started,” I added. “But, aside from that… really, how would giving treatment to everyone cause chaos?”
“People have to learn self-reliance, Genneth.”
“I know self-reliance is an important quality,” I replied, with a nod. “It’s a virtue, one of many: diligence, responsibility, self-reflection,” I tilted my head, “time-management… they’re all vital parts of becoming a self-actualized adult. And yet,” I shook my head, “we can’t reduce society into atomized individualism. Egoism blows it all over the place. We have to look out for one another. That’s the glue; that’s what keeps society from tearing itself apart at the seams.”
Heggy nodded. “Well-said. And we do have to look out for one another; that’s what charity is for. That’s philanthropy. That’s alms; it’s part of why we tithe.”
“But, Heggy,” I said, “we’re not living in the Middle Ages anymore. Maybe that might have sufficed back then—though, personally, I doubt it ever did—but things are different now. The world has grown. Life is bigger, and faster; it’s more complex and interconnected than ever before. I think it makes sense for society to establish institutions to take care of things.”
I felt like a diver, only with food instead of air. I’d start to feel shaky if I spent too long talking without dipping back down to gobble up another bite of rice.
But there was so little left.
Heggy pursed her lips. “So… how would you run the ship of state?” she asked. “Would ya just have the government pay for everythin’?”
“Well… not everything,” I said, “but—”
Heggy furrowed her brow. “Once people get a new privilege from the state, the only way they’ll let it go is if you pry it from their cold, dead hands. Next thing you know, people’ll be demandin’ universal government-run healthcare, and then we all go on the government payroll, and once that happens, we might as well get nothing, and give it all to DAISHU instead. And then what, Genneth? Free cars?” She gestured flippantly. “How about free houses? Well it won't be free, it’ll be comin’ out of our taxes, and our children’s, and our children’s children’s. Eventually, you run out of other people’s money.”
“It would come out of everyone’s taxes, Heggy,” I said. “How much of your paycheck is a person’s life worth to you?”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“That’s hardly a fair question,” Heggy said, smirking gleefully, “but there’s somethin’ else you’re missin’. People gotta have an incentive to grow. If you spoonfeed ‘em everythin’, they’ll never learn to stand on their own two feet. People need to learn to take action, otherwise they’ll be left behind in the dust, and we’ll all be worse off because of it.”
It was strange: it was like my attention had bifurcated. I was completely focused on two things at once. One was Heggy’s argument; the other, the unsettling urge to eat my utensils and my meal’s plastic containers. That urge gnawed away at me like squeaking styrenofoam: spine-tingling and repugnant.
“Okay, okay,” I said, “but—forgive me for rehashing an old favorite—but… what about Gant? He wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the big, fat inheritance his media mogul father left for him.”
Walter Horatious Gant was probably the most unreasonably controversial person to ever walk the earth. He was a paragon of sleaze, repugnant by nearly every measure. He was tall, broad, overweight, with small extremities, a stooping posture, bald like a billiard—his scalp polished to a sheen—and with a cowcatcher chin that wouldn’t have been out of place up front on an old steam locomotive. He was charming, vile, smarmy, petty, fraudulently pious, and almost impossibly self-absorbed. Gant made Margaret almost pleasant by comparison. He was also the current duly-elected Chief Minister of Trenton, the head of my country’s government.
Whenever I thought of him, the first thing that popped into my mind was the unspeakable horror of watching him, a grown man, mocked a stuttering reporter by monstrously mimicking the journalist’s disability and intimidating him into silence. His cruelty was an abomination—anathema to all the virtues I held dear.
When it came to Gant, no news was the best news, and any news was almost certainly bad news. I’d abhorred the man long before he’d shocked the world by deciding to thrust himself into politics, and everything he had done since that fateful announcement had only hardened my view against him. The people that lead us ought to be the best of us. Not bullies, and, certainly, not whatever Gant’s behavior constituted. The morning after the election, when it was clear Gant’s victory wasn’t a fluke, I’d been late to work because I spent a quarter hour sobbing in my car, scared to death of what the future held for everything from immigration policy to the future of the National Endowment for the Arts.
If you asked the talking heads on VOL, they’d have said I had Gant Derangement Syndrome, that being the refusal (and possibly, inability) to react rationally toward Gant’s political positions and his administration’s accomplishments and judge them on their merits as a result of a ferocious, all-consuming antipathy toward the man himself.
In this case, I completely agreed with them. Our only hope in this world or any other was to cultivate virtues within ourselves. We had to be good in order to do good, otherwise turpitude would grab hold of us and steer us toward evil. For me, it was honestly a matter of religion. Though much of the Church shamed me, I would always feel reverence and pride for its teachings on the importance of virtue in our lives and actions. The lesser of two evils was still evil.
Was some of the criticisms lobbed at Gant shrill and neurotic? I suppose so. Then again, wasn’t goading the opposition—i.e., people like me—into fits of pique a major part of why the man had gotten elected in the first place? As such, I suspected GDS was more justified than not. However, at the moment, all that mattered was its ability to take my mind off of salivating over pieces of plastic.
“Ah ah ah,” Heggy said, “you know the rule: you don’t get to blame all your problems on Walter Gant just because you don’t like the man. How many times do I have to tell you: as much as I hate how he comports himself, and his… repulsive… speech and behavior, policy speaks louder than words.”
Now you’ve done it, Heggy Marteneiss.
Lifting the plastic container off the tray, I pressed it against my face, corralling the rest of my food into my mouth with strokes of my fork.
I needed the fuel.
“Look at what he’s said about healthcare providers, about public health experts, about the plague,” I said, “or about the military!” I set the container down and bore into Dr. Marteneiss’ eyes. “Heggy: discourse is connected to meaning and intent. We become our virtues, or our lack thereof; we become our priorities. A price worth paying quickly becomes a regular moral deductible that we keep on paying without so much as breaking a sweat. What ‘law and order’ is there in telling people that the system itself is the enemy? That’s nihilism. The responsibility of being an authority is to have the sense of duty to look your mistakes in the eye, call them by their names, and commit to self-reform. And when those denials become common currency, that’s how you get chaos.”
“It may very well be,” Heggy said, pursing her lips and nodding solemnly. “But Gen, out there in the urban wilds, there’s nothin’ like these ideals of yours. Do you think the Prelatory woulda peacefully ended on its own? Those folks? The ones that threw reformers in jail and put peacemakers in concentration camps? No. Pragmatism won the day. Pragmatism sent a team of assassins to slit the leadership’s god-forsaken throats.”
Oh God. I was thinking about breaking the styrenofoam into chunks and stuffing them down my throat like so much popcorn.
“Isn’t,” I began, but my words got caught on my tongue. I tapped my fingers against the tabletop, trying not to look at the sauce-drizzled plastic containers and utensils in front of me.
“Isn’t pragmatism itself an ideal?” I said, steadying my nerves with a deep breath.
“You got your set of facts from the talking heads you listened to, just like I got mine from mine,” Heggy said. “You won’t be able to come to a meaningful conclusion if you let other people fill your heads with their arguments. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Someone needs to teach lil’ Ms. Rambone to know her place.” She smirked. “Things aren’t as cut and dry as she makes them out to be. She’s got her set of facts that tell her my family’s full of war criminals. Well, I got my set of facts that tell me otherwise.”
I lowered my gaze and muttered under my breath. “I think we might have too many facts for our own good.”
“You say somethin’?” Heggy asked.
I shook my head. I was starting to drool again.
But I just ate?
I twitched my hand, clenching it into a fist. “You know what?” I said, hastily, “I think you were right. It just isn’t the same when we’re not face-to-face.”
“Damn right,” she said.
“See you… see you soon, then,” I said, ending the call before Heggy got a chance to drag it out any further.
Without a moment to lose, I picked up my tray, rose from my seat, and walked over to the nearest trash receptacle, thrusting the tray through the swinging door. I emptied its contents into the receptacle before the plastic could tempt me again.
Is this what murderers feel like when they’re disposing of their victims’ bodies?
I skittered back to my seat, still feeling hungry, but I stopped just short of sitting down. I realized I’d forgotten something: I’d left my empty bottle of sparkling lemonade on the table, along with a handful of unused napkins.
To my gut, the trash might as well have been freshly baked cupcakes.
“No…” I panted, softly. “Please, no…”
Not again.
But there was no use denying it. My brain—not to mention my stomach—was saying it loud and clear: eat it.
Sitting down, I hunched over the table, surrounding the bottle and napkins with my arms, like I was a wild animal hiding my kill. With a trembling, unwilling arm, I grabbed the bottle. I started to squeeze it, hoping to make it small enough to fit, but I stopped, flinching at the loudness of the crunching plastic, worrying it would draw eyes. I tried again, wrapping it up in my coat, but that didn’t make it any quieter.
My thoughts flit back to the night before, back to the bottle I’d sent flying across the room with my powers. Right on cue—with my fuel tanks refilled, my hallucinations came back to me in full force. I watched a literal thought bubble appear above the tabletop. It looked like a blurry-edged console screen, on which my memory of the night before playing out like a movie. When I stared at the thought bubble’s screen, the playback flooded into all my other senses. I could smell the cheese powder from the chips I’d had. I could taste the leftover residue of the spicy-sweet tofu and vegetable stir-fry. As I watched the bottle clatter to the floor after I’d launched it with my magic psychokinetic powers, I noticed that the invisible impact that had sent it flying in the first place hadn’t made any noise.
Could I use my powers to silently crush it?
There was only one way to find out.
I imagined my hand and arm were the core of a limb of much greater size: the ghost of a giant glove. A thick glove, and good for… muffling stuff. A moment later, my imagining took on a life of its own as a mitten of blue and gold wrapped around my hand and the bottle. I squeezed them with my thoughts. It was like pressing down keys on a piano to play a chord.
God…
I’m sorry Jim, I’m so sorry.
Or was it too late for apologies?
Only time would tell.
The bottle seemed to quiver as psychokinetic force pulverized it into a crooked stick of crumpled plastic. There was barely any noise—only soft, muffled clicks, too many to count. It was as if I was watching through a faint mirage.
I stuck the plastic in my mouth, my hands shaking. I had to lift it up, what with my head hunched down between my wide-spread shoulders. I didn’t bother to chew; I just shoved it down. About two-thirds of the way through, I started to gag.
I couldn’t breathe.
I started to panic, but then it… dissolved. The bottom half of the plastic dissolved in my throat, breaking up into powdery chunks that tickled my esophagus as they rained down. It was like there was a tongue in my throat.
Glancing up in paranoia, I looked around.
No one was watching.
I pushed the rest of the plastic down in one go. It, too, dissolved. I coughed after swallowing, rubbing my tongue against my teeth to scrape off the remaining grains. The grains seemed to crawl from inside my flesh—my throat, and upper chest—before I lost track of them and the sensations they produced.
The taste and aftertaste was… sweet?
I tingled… in a good way.
Before I could dissuade myself, I stuffed the napkins into my mouth. The dryness of napkin paper pressing against the inside of my mouth made me gag. I had to push the paper bolus into my throat with my fingertips. For a moment, my body was in a contest with itself to see which it would do first: choke or dry heave. But then, as the napkins passed down my throat… it melted like cotton candy, just like the first one had. On instinct, I cleared my throat, but there weren’t any obstructions to be cleared, only the tickling tingle of non-food getting absorbed by the walls of my throat and my esophagus.
I took several deep breaths, and then noticed I’d now made a genuine dent in my hunger, and that just made me take even deeper breaths. And then… I noticed my gaze drifting over to the trash bin.
No. I thought. “No,” I said—aloud—trying to drill the thought into my subconscious. “I am not going to eat garbage,” I added, in a whisper.
I had to draw the line somewhere.
I went back to my table, grabbed my exquisitely empty red food tray. The hunger wasn’t gone, but it was bearable, now. I probably could have kept eating all day long, but I didn’t want to push my luck any further. There was no telling what more food would do to me.
I lifted the tray the To Be Cleaned chute in the wall, and—
—I froze.
Something was crawling under my skin. Wriggling. Wormlike. The plastic tray fell from my grasp. The sharp clatter it made as it struck the cafeteria’s linoleum floor drew eyes from every direction.
Something was happening to me.