SF in The City Anthology (11 page)

             
This is pseudo-science
; the ambitious student could see the goal of becoming a Dream Off champion start to fade away. He may have some amazing dreams on Saturday, but more likely than not, the bizarre VR worlds impressed on his mind would leave him brain dead (or was the expression “brain alive?”

             
Smoke began to pour out of the virtual reality device, and Dr. Schmid was forced to concede failure. The program stopped, and an unconscious Declan was laid out on a table for rest. His pulse was normal, yet his brainwave signature seemed a bit…altered.

***

              Saturday arrived, and beautiful weather accompanied it. Mr. Diop reluctantly brought Prolix with him to the Dream Off competition. He had not seen Declan since their last session, but he was sure the boy had taken his words to heart and practiced all he could before the day’s event. Still, the feeling of overzealous butterflies afflicted the old man’s abdomen.

             
The droach arrived an hour before the competition was slated to begin, eager to size up the competition and catch up with old friends. Nyx Penumbra’s haughty instructor, Oneiroy Lethe, had to show up and talk trash of course. Mr. Diop merely laughed off his fellow droach’s rude behavior and turned to his longtime friend Pyotr Villarreal for company.

             
Mr. Villarreal used to be a “city trotter,” visiting every prefecture he could manage. Though he just returned from a stint in Prefecture 102, the man still seemed to have lost the traveling spirit he once had.

             
“The CA has been locking up the borders between Prefectures, like they were cells in a prison. Getting between them takes a lot more ECUs than it used to,” Pyotr lamented.

             
“Do not fear my friend,” Mr. Diop put a comforting hand on one of the city trotter’s shoulders, “I’ll head over to one of our neighboring prefectures with you sometime, and we can split the cost. Speaking of ECUs, here comes my ace in the hole now.”     

             
Diop had forgotten the time, his conversations with old friends and verbal sparring with a few enemies had taken up most of his attention. He realized right away that something was wrong with Declan when the young man arrived. The competition would begin in five minutes, and it wasn’t like his student to arrive just before a meet.

             
The droach could see from the competition area’s padded bleachers that Declan’s eyes appeared glazed over. When his pupil stood in the lineup for the event, Nyx walked into place right beside him, taunting him. He just stared ahead, as if he couldn’t hear her. Even as the meet’s announcer told each of them to step forward and bow to the crowd, the fellow’s eyes barely blinked.

             
“At least he seems relaxed,” Diop said aloud as the competitors each reclined on their respective sleeping tables. Declan was the first to drift off into slumber.

             
Though audience members and judges would normally have to wait until REM sleep for the “good stuff,” Declan surprised them all right off the bat. A surreal landscape flashed onto his “dream monitor,” then it ran into another world, and another.

             
“He must have eaten a freakin’ lot of cheese,” Diop scratched his head.

             
By the competition’s end, everyone knew who had to be the winner. Mr. Diop could not help but cast a gloating glance at Oneiroy. Declan had an emotionless expression on his face. Did he not realize that he had the competition in the bag?

             
Each of the contest’s judges brought up holographic representations of the entrant’s scores. Declan only blinked rapidly when it was announced that he had received a score of ten from all three of the contest’s judges. No one in the history of the sport had ever earned a perfect 30! Mr. Diop felt tears welling up in his eyes, and he ran down to the competitors’ area. Grabbing his student in a forceful bear hug, he kept saying over and over, “you’re the man!”

             
Then he looked at Declan’s passive face and recoiled when the new Dream Off champion flatly said, “cool.”  The experienced droach knew that the boy’s mind had been altered somehow, but he had somehow passed the drug test. As the Dream Off trophy was placed into Declan’s hands, his droach observed his behavior and thought to himself,
we won, but at what cost
?

Episode 6: “
The Scent Out of Space”

“Employees! Smithson’s Ol’ Factory became the number one producer of artificial odors just an hour ago. We beat out PurliuScent this quarter. As a reward, one 20% off coupon for Damla’s Deli will be awarded to every one of you. Keep up the good work! This is your CEO Mnemon Ilektron signing off.”

             
Senior Fragrance Regulatory Toxicologist Taisei Mori looked up from the bottles of Purple Mūn, as if a voice had just passed through the air to his ears. He had only recently had nanotubes inserted into his brain tissue, and he hadn’t quite gotten used to telepathic communication. Taisei had spent his youth peddling homemade fragrances in a ghetto called the Furze. Needless to say, his sales had been poor, and he barely avoided starvation on several occasions. Telepathy was a new luxury for him.

             
A few months previously, a scent designer named Freja Hollingberry had found herself stuck overnight in the Furze. She had been traveling by motorcycle to the 45th Annual City Fragrance Conference when it had broken down on Peligro Street. The Pincoya gang arrived and offered her “assistance” only to steal her ECU cards and motorbike. Bruised and bloodied, the disparaged Freja had been rescued by the then homeless Taisei. While she would never have considered hiring a street urchin at Smithson’s Ol’ Factory before that fateful night, Freja saw potential in young man selling perfumes from his card board box home.

Everyone working at Smithson’s Ol’ Factory knew that Freja and the CEO were close. As a matter of fact, the shrewder of employees suspected that this scent designer, now promoted
to second in command at Smithson’s, made more of the company’s decisions than Ilektron would care to admit.    

             
Taisei returned his focus to the task at hand. As dozens of robotic arms combined the chemicals necessary to make hundreds of scents, Purple Mūn was the company’s most lucrative product at the moment; Taisei took samples to insure that the machines were not contaminating the chemicals (a task he normally wasn’t asked to perform). Purple Mūn was popular enough that men and women no longer sought the fragrance only as cologne and perfume (its scent transcended gender factors), but also as an ambient odor for their homes. When Taisei had left the room, hundreds of aerosol cans continued to be filled up with the aroma.

             
“How were your results?” Freja’s voice sounded in Taisei’s head.

             
“There is a 0.01% contamination per liter of Purple Mūn,” Taisei thought back to his boss. “It’s not enough to warrant nanoid scrubbers. We still have the purest scents on the market.”

             
“And you still have the purest record amongst our employees,” Freja said. “I would like to have supper with you at Böhm’s Sushi House tonight. A stellar employee deserves a reward. There is a new scent I want to discuss with you anyway. We’ll meet at 7:00 PM.”

             
“Wow, um, I appreciate this,” even in his mind Taisei  stammered when he communicated.

             
On his way to the bicycle parking lot, the regulatory toxicologist was surprised to run into an old friend from the Furze – Howin Oong. This woman was even younger than Taisei, having just celebrated her 22nd birthday a week ago. Once, Howin had been carrying newly appropriated plum seeds, they weren’t even genetically modified, to her grandmother’s house when two violent boys from her school attacked her. By Furze denizen standards, those seeds were worth a small fortune.

             
By pure coincidence, Taisei had been passing the alleyway, and he broke a bottle of homemade cologne over one of the boy’s heads before chasing the other away. He had never considered himself a heroic type of person, but like many young men, he secretly desired to protect women from the dangerous members of his own gender. The day he valued a human life more highly than a bottle of chemicals meant a great deal to him, especially since most Furzers in his shoes would not have made the sacrifice.

             
“When did you start working here?” Taisei happily shook hands with his old friend.

             
“Just a couple of weeks ago,” Howin was not surprised to see Taisei working at Smithson’s, as he had told her of his new job just before leaving the old neighborhood. “I was hoping I would see you at some point. I work in the advertising department now.”

             
“Good for you,” Taisei said with a smile. “We’ll have to get dinner sometime.”

             
The toxicologist had always possessed a romantic interest in Howin, though he had never told her so himself. He would much rather spend an evening with her than Freja, but business always won out over pleasure in Taisei’s mental priority list. He secretly suspected that Freja felt attracted to him, especially when one considered that she had numerous boyfriends and love interests at any given moment. Of course, he was probably just reading too deeply into their relationship. Like most residents of The City, he had been exposed to enough mawkish love triangle narratives to impose the formula on the story of his own life.

             
“I can’t go tonight,” Howin said with unhidden disappointment. “I have a promotional campaign to run for Azul Wind, so I’ll be busy all week. Maybe next week will work?”

             
“That’s alright,” Taisei sighed inwardly.

             
“How has your job been treating you,” Howin asked innocently. “I’m grateful for finally landing a
real job
, though I think that our health benefits are not what they should be. Many of the chemicals in this factory are flammable. How would the company pay our families if we went up in flames?”

             
“I’d rather not think about the dangers of the workplace,” Taisei chuckled nervously. He had forgotten how pessimistic a person his friend could be at times. “But my job has been going well.”

             
“You’re right. I’m sorry for being a downer. I can always annoy you about it at dinner,” the young woman laughed.

             
“If someone as beautiful as you annoyed me all the time, I would be a happy man.” Taisei immediately kicked himself for the corny pick up line. Where he excelled in toxicology he lacked in communication skills.

***

              Just as the toxicologist suspected, Freja was rather aggressive that evening. For a woman of forty, she was still very involved in the local dating scene. Wearing a thin black dress that left less to the imagination than Taisei would have liked, the scent designer already had a booth reserved in the busy establishment, and she was waiting for her employee in the window side seat when he arrived.

             
“I thought you said 7:00?” Taisei laughed nervously.

             
“Well this is a nice restaurant, and I wanted to be sure no one bribed my reservation out from under me,” Freja replied.

             
Sliding into the booth, Taisei stared at the incredible city scape below them. Located on the ninetieth floor of the Albero Forte Tower, Böhm’s Sushi House provided an amazing view of the horizon. The Naifeh dunes, a couple of oversized sand hills preserved in a glass museum, could be seen from Taisei’s seat. He had never laid eyes on them until this evening, but then again, he had never been invited to such a luxurious dining tower before.

             
“I hope you had a safe drive,” Freja said as she took a sip from her glass of water.

             
“It was certainly a scenic trip,” Taisei downloaded the restaurant’s menu into his head. “I had trouble finding a space to park my bike.”

             
“You rode a bicycle to Albero Forte?” Freja laughed a little too loudly.

             
“Well, yes…” Taisei could not understand what was so funny.

             
“Good grief,” Freja wiped a single tear from her eye. “You should have
splurged
and rented a motorcycle taxi at the least. Riding a bike, how ridiculous! I’m paying for your meal anyway.” Another round of laughter made Taisei blush. He apparently hadn’t fully adapted to upper-class, or even middle-class, living as of yet.

             
“I’ll remember to leave my Foudre de Feu at home next time,” Taisei said shortly. He didn’t know why he name dropped the brand of his bicycle. To someone with Freja’s salary, an expensive bicycle did not leave much of an impression. “What do you recommend?” he asked softly.