THE FUTURENESS Ch14: I Need Something to Change Your Mind

“Hey, cartoon hand,” Xavier said. He prodded my shoulder with his phone. “Time to wake up.”

“What?”

Xavier waggled his fingers at me.

“Three fingers and a thumb. Cartoon hand.”

Gabbyella moved behind him, I guessed to answer a knock at the door. I’d fallen asleep or passed out again. As Gabby opened the door, the red-orange storm thrashed outside, bursts of fire and sparks lit the sky. A figure stepped up to block the view. Michelle’s long, white hair was unruffled by the raging winds, her cool face was unlit by the flaming skies. Gabby swung the door closed behind her, but in the moment before it shut, I saw a parking lot under a calm, blue sky. Air hissed at the door as it latched shut. I sat up on the desk.

Michelle was upon me in a moment.

“Are you okay?”

“How much did she tell you,” I said.

“She told me something completely impossible.”

“It is completely impossible.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t panic.”

“I will, if I want to.”

“Crackpots drugging me. Let’s go home.”

“Let’s go home.”

Before Michelle could get my right arm around her shoulder to help me off the motel room desk, Xavier appeared before us with a portable screen and wires on hooks cradled in his arms.

“Skrip doesn’t come from us,” he said quickly.

“Excuse me? What was that,” I said.

Gabby said, “We need to see his dongle. Right now.”

Michelle had edged near her breaking point. “His what?”

Gabby turned to me. “We got to see your dongle. It has the answers.”

Xavier held his gear and smirked like a second-day P.A.

“The skrip,” he said. “It wasn’t in your father’s medication bottles. He had some lower-strength painkillers. That’s what you liked to swipe.”

“Look at their surroundings as they sell you their bullshit,” I said to Michelle.

“You produce the skrip yourself. Endogenously. Inside you. Endo. In your back. The crystal circuit board produces a few molecules, at least a few that we’ve been able to detect. Not detect in you; I mean detect in the others. I think you know of two of the thousands of the others. From the store in the mall and the Post-it note that vowed secrecy.”

Gabby held up her right hand.

“Me,” she said. “I promised not to tell.”

“Written by that one,” Xavier said. “We’ve been here from the beginning. It was only you in solidarity with your promise to our imagined victims. Anyway, one of the molecules we found in an unfortunate soul like yourself was code-named skrip. You fit the profile, and we still believe that. Your back is producing and feeding you skrip.”

“It’s why you got the valuation you did,” Gabby said. “Skrip’s weird. And you make a lot of it.”

“Is it?”

“What?”

“Weird to you?”

“Hallucinations—”

“Everything hallucinates.”

“Shorty, who is we?” Xavier said.

Michelle let loose of my arm. I hunched back on the desk as she took a step on Xavier.

“Yes. Who is we?” Michelle asked.

Xavier stepped back, nodding down at his hands.

“It’s a dumb end of the boards. A lot of the bigger boards we’ve found on people have them. They aren’t the same tech as the rest of the array. The dongle’s dumb, primordial silicon, built, designed, I don’t know, it’s there at a level where, if for fuck’s sake I can take a look at Rich’s back, we can see what’s going on.”

“We really are begging you now,” Gabby said.

“What is a—”

“It’s a spot on the pattern on his back. Listen, Rich,” Xavier told me. “You’re going to have to turn over on your stomach on that desk and pull up your shirt and show us the dongle.”

“That blood,” I heard Michelle breathe.

In the end, the dongle was a point-two square centimeter patch on my right shoulder blade. Gabby tuned her camera on it and Xavier showed me his monitor. I thought of the cosmetics aisle mirror I used in the hospital to watch the nurses pluck glass from my back three months ago.

“That’s the theory we’re going with.”

“You’re all theory.”

“She is all theory. She puts the word theory in everything she writes. I message her, “lunch at 1?” She replies, “in theory.” I’m that, but money.”

“You weren’t losing bets after college, then,” I said.

“Lots! But also won. And got involved with some futurists who all want to remain nameless.”

“Got a Post-it for them?”

“Funny!”

“What’s a dongle for?”

“Apes like us. They’re a dumb interface with a simple message. We’d very much like to see yours. We think it ties into your experience with the skrip.”

“What are you on?” Michelle did now seem to reflect the apocalyptic light outside.

“I’ve been taking some of my dad’s oxies for my back,” I said.

“And possibly some alien meds produced by the pattern of crystals in his back,” Gabby added.

“In theory,” said Xavier.

“Lift my shirt. Again,” I said.

And there came on Xavier’s screen a wobbling, discombobulated image of some nightmarish cartoon figure.

“Damn,” Gabby said. “You got Felix. The first television broadcast. Felix, a paper maché doll rotating on a turntable for hours. Something caught it. It’s in the stupid end of your back. Best stupid end we’ve gotten in a long time.”

I saw him on the screen, Felix the Cat, his arms open in gentle supplication. More parts for more time. Did he eventually melt on those days he went in circles, the first TV, while he went out, straight as only light can, into the whatever. My back felt afire. It felt. Nothing had changed. It was saying things would.

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