Orbits: A Contemporary Fantasy of Pattern and Apocalypse (Part 4 of 4: Escape Velocity?)
Sarah and I did all right on the fringes of Boston. We had enough for a down payment on our own unit, and Sarah had a rare blood type, which meant she got good money selling her plasma, which she did every Tuesdays. We had about 300 square feet on a southern-facing unit, and the sunlight did a lot to brighten up the place.
She took a job as a virtual instructor, leasing a VR-Haptic-Suit and using it to lead international classes on English Composition for Business. I drifted into life insurance. It was a living. The only thing of value people had left to insure was themselves. Make this sacrifice now, and provide for your children when you're gone. It turns out decades of hawking frequent buyer programs and company credit cards gave me a decent grounding in pitching the intangible.
And the job provided an electric car! Selling life insurance requires empathy, and it's easier to project empathy when you're face to face. I could justify taking trips out to the suburbs to pursue the wealthier hold-outs, the ones living behind gates, with generators and solar panels to keep the lights on.
A year after the move I met up with Nancy and Reggie, and we drove out to the old mall.
A handwritten sign on the main entrance explained that Saturdays were market days. People with things to sell were to apply for a merchant's permit at the church (the old cinema). Also: Services on Sunday.
This was a Thursday. The parking lot was empty, except for a few rusting cars and drifting tumbleweeds of shredded plastic. Grass poked up around the lamp-posts cracked through the borders between sidewalk and asphalt. We walked to our store.
There they were.
They practically glowed in the darkness. They drifted through the old cafe, past the torn out registers. One wandered up in "make-out corner," the former haunt of dissatisfied teens and the homeless.
Nancy said, "I can't believe it."
We went in. I didn't need my key.
We cheered. We whooped. We hollered. "Guys! How you doing? Long time no see. What the hell are you doing, hanging around this dump?"
They didn't answer. That was fine with us. Nancy opened her picnic basket and we spread it out in front of the windows, where leather-bound journals and stationery used to be. We drank wine and ate sandwiches. The Planets drifted by. We argued about whether they followed their former patterns. Reggie thought they were moving around the places where the shelves used to be. I wasn't so sure. There were still some shadows on the floor from the old fixtures, but the carpet was so filthy it was hard to make them out. So we argued about the old layout too, remembering old times.
Reggie got tipsy and announced he was going to do something he'd always wanted to do. He took a running start and jumped up onto a Planet. He had to wrap his arm around its neck to hang on. He rode him towards the wreck of the old info counter, until the Planet's arm moved down and upset the grip he had with his legs.
"How was it?" I said.
Reggie shivered. "Kind of creepy, actually. Like riding around on a statue."
"Or a Golem," Nancy said. "Anyway, I think that was disrespectful. We should just be thankful they're still here."
Nancy read something in a news-feed about the mall's impending demolition. She wrote to tell me. It had been two years.
Life went on. It was okay, but -
But no. No, it wasn't. Sarah was gone. She decided she couldn't keep spending 12 hours a day wearing a suit that completely blocked out the natural world. Selling her blood was leaving her weak and making her sick. And she wanted a baby. A baby would give some meaning to our lives, at least.
I refused. Why condemn another human being to this? To give us meaning? Selfish.
So she took off. Farm labor, she said, would at least have some honesty to it.
I downsized to a singles apartment, ten by fifteen feet. I kept trying to sell people hope for their children's future and spent what little free time I had on porn and video games.
When insurance sales dried up, I was moved to claims and investigations. Now my job was to find ways of denying families the benefits I'd sold them years earlier. I was not a popular man. My company trained me in self-defense and issued a firearm. I remembered the night of the robbery and wondered what would have happened if I'd had a gun. The thought made me feel sick.
At least the car they gave me was bigger. Armor plated.
I answered Nancy. "We should see them one last time," I said. "We should warn them."
"I can't get the time off," Nancy said. "I just wanted to let you know."
I'd lost touch with Reggie and Ernie and the rest. So I went alone.
Some of the roads through the old shopping district were so cracked and overgrown with weeds, it was hard to believe they were ever paved. My car was sleek and out of place, an alien presence in this abandoned quarter. It was stupid to come this far alone, even in an armored car. I didn't care.
I arrived before sunset. Wreckers and bulldozers were already lined up around the building. The tang of grease and petroleum engines gave a primitive urgency to the atmosphere. I parked behind them and drew my gun as I crossed to the building where I'd spent so many years.
The door was locked, strangely. I took out my key. The mechanism was corroded so badly that it wouldn't turn. No matter. The windows were already smashed. I kicked aside shards of glass and hopped over, landing on the sun-bleached sign that promised free wi-fi.
The low sun cast long rectangles across the floor, catching on smashed bottles and fallen fluorescent bulbs. Plants were growing in here, and the ceiling tiles were black with mold. I crossed to the escalator and climbed it, slowly, laboriously. It was dimmer on the second floor, but I propped my flashlight over my gun to check the corners for lingering customers one last time. There was no one there. In the restrooms, I startled a family of raccoons from their nest on the baby-changing table. They scampered up through the drop ceiling. The restroom floors were littered with used condoms and syringes, and the wallpaper hung down in curling sheets. The offices and break-rooms were locked and the key-pad was long dead, but my key still worked. The safe was gone from the cash office, sold with the furniture. The shelves were still up in the manager's office. The operations manuals and merchandising bibles were still up there. The computers were gone but for some reason a keyboard remained. So did the cheap office chairs where I'd delivered performance reviews, and received them. A fifty-cent raise every year for two decades. I smiled at the patch of floor where Sarah and I misbehaved, back when I had to pull overnights. I wished I'd done that more often.
All gone tomorrow.
I went back out to the floor. The sun was setting. Almost pitch black. There was no power to the building any more, and the streetlights in the parking lot had all toppled or been shot out. I'd never seen the building so dark.
"Please come," I said. "One more time. Nothing ever stopped you. Come and see me. Show me what you'll do tomorrow, when this is gone. Show me how to go on!"
I waited all night.
A fantastic allegory about human behaviors, beliefs, and tendencies. Like the Planets, all the characters continue to persist in fixed behaviors and beliefs, when the reality has shifted beyond the representational model of the belief system and adaptability of the behaviors. The Planets' apparent autistic existence mirrors the humanity's blind stubbornness in persisting within the bubble of their cultural and social belief matrix.
With the entire economy collapsed, the drones in the story continue to seek "jobs" from organizations that continue to operate in the very system that caused the collapse. The infinite expansion model of retail and sales, the constant mortgaging of man's future via insurance and interest-based lending, continued reliance on government despite the obvious inability of legal enforcement are elegantly represented in the Planets drifting through an abandoned bookstore, following pre-determined patterns.
It is also apt that the bookstore - a places that sells information and concepts - is the venue, in which the Planets continue their patters, as to indicate that the very information we consume locks humanity into predictable and immutable patterns.
Yes! Thank you for this thoughtful comment!
The beginning the story came to me in a dream and I just followed where it led. But these were all issues that troubled me at the time, and still do today.
Aaahhh a beautiful ending, very fitting to the whole series. Though due to the title, I was actually expecting a big apocalypse kind of event happening ... like the falling and bankruptcy of the store represents the whole humanity's failing and the Planets who are actually alien in disguise decide to nuke the whole earth lol.
I am wondering why none of these people ever bother to investigate more about the Planets, following them home or attach a camera with them. Even when they can fend off bullets, the workers are unfazed about it. Don't they wonder that they might be mutants or aliens, or at least try to cash in about them in some way? I know it's not the spirit of the story though ^^.
All in all, very nice story, Winston. Though the story tells about the failure of a store and its inhabitants, it's not too depressing and the scifi elements make it exciting for me to find out what's next :).
@scrawly, it means so much that you took the time to read my story and I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Yeah, I didn't want to go too far-out with the conclusion. Like, there were so many absurdities to that job that we just got used to and didn't question. Would the Planets have been so much stranger?
I'm also fascinated by disasters that happen gradually - and that aren't recognized as such until long after they're over. I'm convinced that this is how the majority of loss occurs in the world.
Very Ballard-esque.
I can't say I enjoy this kind of writing any more, but I still read it critically with a recognition of its value...pretty much the same way, reading it since the 1980's including everything he wrote earlier, I feel about Ballard the past few decades.
I hadn't thought of Ballard as an influence for this piece, but I do relate to his vision - so I appreciate the comparison.
I appreciate your reading. What sort of writing do you usually read for plasure?
Lovely series, you captured the sense of desolation and decline beautifully. How we take what we have for granted.
Loved your story. Brutally sad and quite captivating. I couldn't wait to finally sit down to read the ending.
Went to a bookstore this morning and I thought of your Planets. There weren't any...
Thanks so much for reading. I'm so flattered that you thought of my story while you were at the bookstore!
This is an entertaining story. Even up until the end of part 4, I wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen. I'm looking forward to reading more of your fiction! Most often, I read non-fiction and this was a nice change of pace.
Thanks for uploading your work here too! ☺☺
Thank you, @enternamehere! I've got a few ideas kicking around but I can't seem to produce fiction as readily as nonfiction. I'm going to try my best though because I've found this to be a fun experience on here!
Fun is important. I'm looking forward to what you have in store next!
Well-written.
This is a weird world you've build, made even weirder by the fact that I haven't read parts 1, 2, and 3!
First time I've heard about Wattpad. Can you tell me more about it? I mean, I could google, but you got personal experience. How difficult is it to secure a following for instance? What is its purpose exactly?
Wattpad is a fiction sharing/social media site. It encourages people to publish serially. The folks who do best there set themselves a schedule for publishing chapters and stick with it, and make a point of interacting with their audience. (Sound familiar?)
There's great features for commenting (paragraph by paragraph!) that foster discussion between readers and authors. A lot of times I'd find myself reading through some digression and thinking, "Hmm... I would have cut that paragraph," and then discovering in the comments that all the fans loved it. Shows you what I know.
There's a ton of good stuff on there (and following Sturgeon's Law, there's ten tons of crap). The mobile apps is slicker and more interactive than Kindle, too. All for free. The writers tend to be on the younger side and there's no barrier to entry. But Margaret Atwood writes on there, so it's attracting some pros looking to grow their fan-base as well.
Only downside - absolutely no payment mechanism. To be honest, I didn't spend that much time on there, since I was turned on to Steemit shortly after finding Wattpad and have found I'm a more consistent essayist than storyteller.
Interesting. We often have false ideas about what people will like, even in our own writing.
Great post and very informative. @winstonalden Have learnt a lot from it.
Glad to be a service. Can you tell me what you've learned from it?