2: Abundance

The maroon-tinted passage pulsed dimly.

Maroon was the dominant color of Neg 12, Swan’s floor in the Cumulus, a twenty-nine-year-old upside-down skyscraper that was among the deepest in the city. It descended forty-five floors underground and ascended five above. Everything needed to sustain life was inside it. Besides hundreds of apartments, there was a store for buns, techs, apparel, utensils, medicinals, inebriants and religion. Most of these shops were on the floors closest to the surface, though luxury boutiques were said to exist in the deepest basements where Swan did not have the privileges to enter.

 It was 4:27:36 and he was unlikely to run into anyone. As he stepped from his room, maroon-tinted patterns began to dance across the walls. He lurched down the hall toward the elevators. Even these few steps exhausted him. His body was stiff. His knees ached from standing in the same position for many days.

Elevator 3 opened its doors.

“Mr Swan!” the watery male voice said as he stepped through the opening. “It’s been too long!” Elevator 3 was the chatty one.

“Sorry…” Swan mumbled. “Neg 2.”

His personal music began. Swan didn’t much care for elevator music. It varied by the day and was based on bio-cycles and body heat, his pulse, fluctuations in his irises and whatever he happened to be wearing. This morning, a chorus of female voices was chanting vowel sounds in sync with his heartbeat. For some reason, this made him remember how Ting Ting had so cheerlessly dissolved a few minutes earlier, and one by one the chanting voices that surrounded him began to weep.

A grid containing forty or fifty vids quickly spread across the walls. This emotage, as it was known, was made from the nearly limitless supply of videos left in the social media accounts of deceased people. They were displayed, montage style, in elevators and other public spaces to help preserve the illusion of a “vibrant human community.” It was hard for Swan not to be sucked into the scenes that played out all around him.

His eyes fell on a pretty woman in a long dress twirling, her blond hair sweeping across the sky. A few images away, he watched a hand spoon mush into a baby’s mouth. Slightly below that, a dewy eyed elk calf played in a puddle. Swan loved animals when he was a child. At least he thought he had. Perhaps he’d only loved the idea of them.

The elevator announced his arrival at Abundance.

“Have a bun time!” the elevator said with a little chortle as the doors opened on the bright yellow lobby. “Huntybuns! Still number one for eleven days running!”

The dominant feature of the Abundance lobby was a holographic bun that hovered just below the ceiling. Actual buns came in the form of human heads, animals, fruits, flowers, little buildings and other iconic objects. The hologram changed to reflect these styles as you strode beneath it. Swan passed through the one way passage that led into the store itself.

A pervasive yellow glow illuminated the heaps of bun sacks in the long bun bins. Buns—there were nothing but buns—were organized by flavor. The category labels glowed above each aisle: Meaty, Savory, Creamy, Fruity, Chewy, Grainy, Sweetie, Umami, Salty, Sour, Bitter and Hybrid. For Swan, whose body was in famine mode, any flavor should have sufficed. Still, he loved Moodbuns and he made a beeline for the Moodbun bin. Most of the sacks were spilled into the aisle, broken and crushed. The whole area was in disarray. There was no mechanical organizer to be seen. As time went on, Abundance, just like so many other places in the Cumulus, seemed more and more neglected.

As he reached for a bag that was still intact, he noticed the Immerzo logo on his sleeve and realized he was still wearing his FeelgoodSuit… And its front was open to his navel! He dropped the Moodbuns, quickly pulled it closed, and immediately wondered why he cared about how he looked. Nanowires, like translucent hairs, poked from little eyelets up and down his torso and a flowtube with its nipple trailed behind him, extending from his butt. The logo on his crotch port throbbed faintly.

And he wasn’t alone! Several other residents were shuffling among the bins. A woman stood quite close, cradling a bun bag as if it were a newborn. Her face, in conjunction with her bald head, reminded him of a fish…. And she was wearing animajammies with dancing horses! This incongruity made Swan’s heart rate quicken and he sensed a panic attack looming. When he turned the corner, another shopper lurched across the gap at the end of the aisle—a man dressed only in his flycoat.

This was exactly the sort of situation he found impossible to deal with! Even at four-something in the morning people were drifting about. They drifted through the aisles like cyphers, like the background people he was used to seeing in cities and towns of the Cloudscape. It seemed possible that these people in the aisles weren’t alive at all. They might be holographic images created to add vitality to the store. How could he know? There was no easy way to distinguish what was real from what was not.

The one thing that made the real world real was food. Food: until recently it had been deposited on his doorstep. Then—it was several weeks before—the mind of the Cumulus had suddenly curtailed deliveries and residents were forced, like bugs, to venture out from their rooms and carry their buns back to their underground nests.

Swan liked this bug analogy. He found himself thinking about bugs frequently. Bugs had been plentiful in the days he’d first come to the city with his mommy. There’d been an explosion of bugs just before there were none to be seen anywhere, and he recalled standing in the kitchen, flipping the light on and off so he could watch them skitter. It had been one of his favorite childhood activities.

At Abundance, you were allowed to take only as much as you could carry. That was the rule. Swan had managed to collect nine bags. That was a lot even for him. Swan’s arms were long and spindly and they encircled the bags he balanced on his loosened belt. He craned his thin neck to see over the topmost sack as he shuffled toward the checkout. It dismayed him to find several people lined up waiting.

The exit was a funnel-like arrangement of walls that narrowed as you approached the sackometer where you were supposed to scan your bun sacks before you continued to the lobby. This was a way to track supplies Swan guessed, or maybe there was some sort of monthly limit, though he didn’t know what it was.

As he waited, he was besieged by high-spirited voices. This was Fungab, recordings of upbeat chitchat left from an era when it was common for people to talk to one another. In an effort to raise mental well being, Fungab had been installed in many public spaces. The voices were beamed to each individual and they sounded as if they were right inside your head.

“Little Leo’s back!” a bright female voice announced in Swan’s right ear.

“I just love little Leo! Love him!” another lady-voice responded in the left one.

The bubbly voices danced back and forth.

“Today’s Leo’s birthday!”

“He’s sooo adorable!”

“Such a little darling!”

Swan was five shoppers away from the machine. A girl was holding everything up. The first thing Swan noticed about her was her hairdo, a 360° dome of perfectly formed bangs that even covered her face. Her hair was like a single object, like a mushroom-shaped hat or the cap on a decorative bottle. The bottom edge had been sliced off, laser-like, just above her jawline. She wore a shimmery dress that reminded him of an upside-down flower that opened a few inches above her skinny knees. From there, her bright green stockings disappeared into a pair of oversized platform boots.

Her buns lay on the sackometer. The light beneath them pulsed green which was the signal that she should pick them up and move on. Although her face was invisible, Swan could tell the girl was close to his own age. Like Swan, she was extremely gaunt, with an erect posture that reminded him of a dancer. Her chin—he could see the tip of it beneath her hair—was trembling. She appeared to be crying.

Or, perhaps she was silently laughing. The man behind her in line did not intervene, nor did anyone. Everyone waited passively. Only one person showed any awareness of what was happening. Two removed from the girl, the fish-faced woman in the dancing horse pajamas was glancing toward Swan and the others with an annoyed expression. Finding no allies, she went back to shifting from side to side on her stick-like legs. No one was willing to act. They all stood listening to the voices that jabbered in their ears. They shuffled their feet and crinkled their packages. Another minute went by, the only change being that the girl had slumped. Bent over the machine, she held her palms pressed against the sides of her perfect hairdo. She was not laughing.

“Honeybee’s number one!” the woman in Swan’s left ear sang out.

“Oh goody, the babies!” the right ear said.

“Drake is tops for boys. No surprises there!”

“Names move up like battle drones!”

“They’re naming babies for disappearing beasties!”

The fish-faced woman suddenly stepped around the man ahead of her. She took a position close beside the girl and then, with a kind of angry shuffling, leaned her hip harder and harder against her.

The voices babbled on.

“Fawn, Fox, Tigre. The top ten baby names are all extinct!”

“Hector, Kitty, Corbin —”

“What, pray tell, was a corbin?”

“I think it was a kind of bird —”

Only when the weeping girl was about to fall, about to topple over, did she finally lurch a little bit away. At this, the woman who’d displaced her swept the girl’s buns to the floor and set her own buns down. The machine flashed green. She gathered them up and rushed away. The man behind her did the same. All of them, Swan included, moved forward to tally their goods. Everyone stepped over the bags that belonged to the weeping girl as they hurried to the exit. The girl remained in place, shoulders shaking. Swan tried to see her face as he raced past, but her wall of hair was impenetrable.

The scene disturbed him. He sensed the girl’s sadness. She must have been paralyzed by the awfulness of everything, something that had happened to Swan more than once as well. Also, based on her attire, he intuited that she lived a rich private life. It was obvious she was a very sensitive person, and her hair was a shiny brown. It was an oxy-hydroxide sort of brown he would say, clean and healthy-looking, something he rarely saw anymore. Swan wondered how it would feel to touch it. She seemed to be using her shiny hair to construct a wall around herself…like a cocoon. Maybe it was because her face was ugly, or because some accident had scarred it. Maybe the bones of her skull had become exposed, making her face too frightening to look at and, as a result, she’d pulled closed the curtain of hair around herself, shhhhhh— like that.

Of course, that was idiotic, a series of fantasies which Swan immediately recanted. He was quite sure this girl had a beautiful face. She was very possibly the most beautiful girl in the whole building. The question was not: Is she beautiful? The question was: What does this beauty do? How does she spend her days? He had the feeling that she was waiting for someone, anyone, to reach out to her.

In the lobby, where the Fungab had thankfully faded, Swan stood as far away as he could from the shoppers who’d preceded him, among them the fish-faced woman. He would need to suppress his hunger just a little longer so he could take the next elevator.

As he waited, he continued to think about the girl and wondered where she liked to go in the Cloudscape. He thought how much he’d like to meet her there and find out what kind of person was behind the hair. But how? How could he locate her? The Cloudscape was even vaster than the real world now, since the habitable part of the real world had shrunk so drastically. People took on all sorts of personas in the Cloudscape too. They changed their names. They changed their sexes. They became characters in their own customized adventures, or engaged in elaborate games without any obvious rules or meaning. They became animals, fairies, sprites, monsters; there were some who preferred to exist as clouds, as tiny insects that flew in the wind. There were people who simply lived as waves or stones beneath the sea….

He ought to go ask this girl what her name was and where he could find her. But that was something he couldn’t bring himself to do. He didn’t know how to talk to a girl, or any other kind of person for that matter. And, he suddenly remembered, he was in his FeelgoodSuit. He remembered his physical decline, his matted hair. To speak to a beautiful girl was impossible. Swan felt the gray air press against his skin. He was losing his grasp. The lowest sack of buns slid from his belt to the top of his thighs and from the top of his thighs to the floor. Now his wrists were cocked against his knees. He supported the remaining sacks with the tips of his fingers while applying pressure against the topmost sack with his chin. These opposing forces pressed against each other as he leaned forward to examine the fallen bag.

The only way to retrieve it, without putting everything down, was to grasp it with his mouth. If he could squat down and lean forward far enough, he might be able to snag it. It was a simple mechanical operation—he could see it in his mind—but he didn’t want to attempt it while people were watching. He hovered in his uncomfortable position waiting for the rabble to go its way. He didn’t want to look at them. He was too exhausted and hungry. He was too timid. And besides, they were not the sort of people with whom he would ever be able to communicate.

After a minute he heard the elevator doors swoosh shut and he sensed he was alone. He leaned forward with his weight on the balls of his feet. The exertion made him tremble. Even his eyebrows were trembling for some reason. He squatted and leaned so that his mouth was less than a foot away from the wayward bag while the bags he still held became even more compressed. He bent forward a tiny bit more and he thought how amazing it was, considering his weakened state, that he might actually succeed. The flattened, sealed end of the bag had landed with its corner pointed up. So far he’d barely breathed. If he fully exhaled he might be able to just…get…close…enough—

As the middle bags popped out, he collapsed forward. Everything flew in different directions as Swan went down uttering, “Ah!” His knees smacked against the floor and he threw out his hands to break his fall. Had his face not landed on a sack of Boozoobuns, it would have smashed against the tiles.

Swan rolled onto his back where he lay with one arm stretched above his head and the other tucked between his thighs. How cool the floor felt! He was just beginning to consider the physical process that would be necessary to get up and collect his things when he saw her:

The grief-stricken girl, the one with the perfect hair, was crossing the lobby towards him. He watched as she hesitated and then, with one long graceful stride of her thick platform boots, stepped over his prostrate body.

As she passed above him she canted her head downwards and Swan caught a glimpse of her face. It was shaded by her hair but, for an instant, it was partially visible. In just the way he’d imagined before, she had a lovely mouth with thick full lips, a pretty pinched nose with long nostrils. Her eyes, as they flashed before him (it was unlikely that he could, in actuality, have seen her eyes), had tiny contracted pupils set off against glowing irises. Her eyes were brown, the color of liquified amber he decided, with little specks, almost incandescent, like the eyes of some extinct animal.

He remained frozen. The girl boarded the elevator and turned to face the lobby, holding her bun bags with her ultrafeminine fingers. Swan knew he looked ridiculous and wanted to leap to his feet. He wanted to call out to her. He wanted to say something to convey that he too was an intelligent and sensitive person, but of course this was impossible.

He was in the midst of a panic attack. Swan’s body was paralyzed and his speech center had seized. He knew that all he could do was lie on the floor and wait it out. All he could do was watch the beautiful, never-seen-before-today, hyper-desirable girl with 360° hair disappear behind the sliding elevator doors.