Chp 6: Brick II

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Previously on Pirates of Appalachia… During Brick Breaker’s ten-year anniversary of working as a digital miner at A.S.S., his boss Ms. Barbie Woods ridicules him and tells him that none of his ideas matter because he is not properly credentialled.

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Steel Chrysanthemum Villas, Apartment #1904

Independent City of Pittsburgh, Mt. Washington

Thursday, October 24, 0026 P.C., 10:13 P.M.

~ STILL Brick Breaker’s ten-year anniversary at A.S.S.

Brick stood at the door to his apartment, his hand lingering over the sinister grey knob. He had no choice but to go inside; he knew that, but his heart was hammering as if he were about to enter a mama bear’s cave and his shin was throbbing as if warning him against questioning middle-management. Sweat poured down his neck as he tried to muster the courage to confront the bear, the muffled sounds of an especially boisterous Me Reel pulsing through the door, communicating through Morse Code to run away, you fool! He knew his wife wasn’t violent. He knew that. But she’d also taught him that there were myriad ways to devastate someone without violence. Disregard. Ridicule. General snarkiness. What new way would she teach him tonight before going to bed?

He sighed and danced a trembling finger along the knob. It was his apartment or a Muskutter shaft, and his back ached from the three-and-a-half-hour commute home. No, he could do this. He took a deep breath, the smell of sautéed onions, peppers and fried pork chops sticky in the air. Siri, his wife, must’ve doordashed Chinese. With the promise of hot food compelling him, he closed his eyes and lunged for the knob, twisting and stepping forward before he could lose his nerve. But once he crossed the threshold, his foot caught on something and he tumbled inside, slamming his uninjured shin against the doorframe. He’d forgotten about Siri’s prescription-ordered shoes: she would buy a pair, wear them once, then pile them by the door in a treatment her therapist called “walking a mile in everyone’s shoes.”

With a humiliating amount of effort, he rolled off the mound of footwear, rose to a knee, and began shuffling shoes out of the entranceway next to the hoard of cardboard boxes and plastic bins that constituted his life’s work. His eyes loitered on the top box labeled “On the Nose.” He knew the contents verbatim: lab notebooks, thumb drives stuffed with coding and drawings, a micro 3D printer, his laptop, and vials of cancer cells he’d used to train Chelsea to detect cancer. He’d gone to financially ruinous lengths to collect different types of cancer cells, and went even further to document and record his results for peer review, so he was gutted by how roundly and fiercely his research was ridiculed. But his passion for the project didn’t die until Siri twisted the knife in passing one afternoon, asking: “How’s that mutt supposed to smell cancer when she’s busy stuffing her nose up swamp-alley all morning?”

Ironically, the first cancer Chelsea diagnosed was colon cancer, but the thought that his own wife found his work so juvenile and pointless was enough to convince him to abandon the idea. In retrospect, he supposed it was a foolhardy escapade: why use a dog when there’s already a machine for the job?

There had been other dreams too, now mothballed in the time capsules Siri kept reminding him to throw out. There was a safe sex cream that anyone—male, female, or other—could spread on their genitals to prevent spreading or contracting sexually transmitted diseases. It had the serendipitous side effects of intensifying orgasms and eliminating back hair. After their son was born, Brick invented it so that they could continue to have an active sex life without contracting any more unexpected complications. Little did he know Siri had devised an even more effective solution—celibacy. It turned out to be a fortuitous turn of events, though, as little did he know the cream made you smell like a dog in heat, something he found out the hard way after a round of “self-testing” led to him being followed by a pack of stray dogs for the better part of a week.

And there was his final flameout, Brick’s grand attempt at creating “one product to rule them all.” The bin read “Tiny Nurses,” and inside were prototypes of nanobots that could be ingested via gummy vitamin to perform various medical functions, powered only by the electricity generated by the human body. They could buttress diseased or narrow veins, chew calcification into tiny particles that would dissolve into the bloodstream, and even identify and destroy cancer cells as soon as they materialized. But Tiny Nurses had proved impossible to commercialize—the bots worked too well, and every company he spoke to feared they would cannibalize their other products and put them out of the business of treating symptoms, since none were in the business of curing disease. And, as he was reminded again and again despite his attempts to market the bots as a means of cancer “contraception,” cancer had a “right to life.” Not only was his invention lacking in the spirit of capitalism, it was illegal.

He cracked open the lid and spied the colorful gummies. Maybe it was time to move to a different city. Hell, maybe a different continent. Somewhere that valued….

“Don’t tell me you’re inventing butt-lickers again,” Siri leered from across the room, her selfie drone circling her like a protective Chihuahua. “Or restarting your blog novel about bumping time-uglies. The world already has enough things that lick butts and fornicate.”

“I’m not inventing again,” he said, snapping the lid shut. “And that wasn’t a blog. It was my working treatise on time.” He knew better than to continue, but he couldn’t stop himself. “It’s based on the theory that time doesn’t exist until it’s measured, which means we are actively reliving history, and the secret to time travel and immortal freedom is to destroy every measuring device.”

Even Siri’s selfie drone seemed to groan at his explanation. With a coiled lip, she asked: “Aren’t we measuring devices? Is your ‘invention’”—aggressive air quotes—“mass suicide?”

Brick had never thought of it that way. It was a working treatise, after all.

“Whatever. Help me arrange the lights so I can get this shot.”

Siri was standing next to the dinner table, which she’d commandeered and fashioned into a miniature photography studio, complete with umbrella lighting, a green screen, and more camera lenses than made functional sense. At the center was an immaculately white stand where she’d set her plate as if it were to be served to the gods. As if attesting to this, she circled the plate, fussing over the placement of every grain of rice, the arrangement of the pork chops, the “splash” of color from the peppers. Brick adjusted the lighting as instructed for the next fifteen minutes while Siri perfected the tableau; then with the concentration of a saint she hovered her iAm directly over the plate, slowly dipped it to a forty-five-degree angle, and snapped one picture.

Happy with her handiwork, she left the plate on the table and strutted back to the couch. “What the eff happened to you? You look like you were hit in the face with a shovel. Like, more than once.”

Sometimes Brick wondered if the MatchMaker app’s algorithm was flawed and Siri wasn’t his “forever flame,” but he’d done some convert digging and reviewed the algo himself, along with some insider results, and it looked legit. “This is how I look, dear,” he said, rearranging the lights and umbrellas so he could sit at the table. Scooping up some rice with a spork, he asked,” Are you sure you don’t want any? It smells great.”

“Jagoff, you know my therapist diagnosed me with Instagramorexia. Pictures of food provide far more nutrients than eating ever could. As the Beard says, ‘I post therefore I ate.’”

Since Siri’s “diagnosis,” Brick had watched her transform from woman to hangry skeleton. Although her body looked frail and emaciated, there was an almost supernatural quality to her wrath that belied the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything except Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for months. Brick shoveled food into his mouth, suddenly feeling famished. Although the rice was dry and hard, the peppers bland and soggy, and the pork chops best described as salt slabs, they satisfied him in a way he could never imagine a post doing.

“A little Instagramorexia wouldn’t hurt you,” she said, squinting at his belly. “Maybe it would thin out your face and get rid of the onions and garlic odor.”

This was another complication of her Instagramorexia—she still ordered for two, and Brick hated to waste food. He was left eating by himself, surrounded by lost dreams. He glanced at the high chair in the corner, now redispositioned as a shelf for filters and other camera accessories. After he polished off the Chinese food, he plopped down next to Siri on the couch. “Where is our son?” he asked, fiddling idly with his iAm.

“At school,” she snorted, narrowing her eyes and scrunching her nose. “Where else would he be?”

Brick didn’t have an answer. He had no idea where his son would be. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he knew what the boy looked like anymore. He hadn’t seen him since the day Siri went into labor prematurely and Brick II was taken to an isolation nursery for reasons that were never made clear. Brick wasn’t allowed to touch him—his condition was too precarious, and the hospital feared Brick could infect him with Commuter Shaft Disease. All he could do was watch him from the other side of a glass wall, trying to concentrate on anything other than the unsightly lightning bolt-shaped birthmark on the boy’s temple, which oddly matched a scar behind Brick’s ear. To cover the copays, Brick sold Chelsea to a Crispy who paid double when he heard of her cancer-detecting abilities. The next day he was ordered back to work, and he went because what else was he going to do? Teach a dog to smell cancer? Create nanotechnology to help regulate the human body from within? The light burnt out in his shaft that day, and as he rode to work he knew that light would never shine on him again.

With sigh number two of the evening, Brick fired up his iAm. The twenty-four-inch display ignited like a jet engine, then blocky, three-dimensional holograms spread out around him. This was the latest enhancement to the iAm, the ability to turn the RL into holograms. The technology was still new, though, and the people looked like they were made of digital Legos. They had flat faces with painted-on expressions and moved as if they didn’t have joints in their arms and legs. Still, it was pretty neat to see them prancing about the room, going about their day. Each iAm was set to default to the user’s Me Reel, content specifically catered to each individual. Brick’s reel featured a socially awkward dope with a tubby belly and no apparent backbone, who was routinely tormented by his condescending witch of a boss. At present, the dope was sleeping at his desk as numbers teetered down his computer monitor. Although he knew the show had been curated for him, he had no idea how the algo had come up with this: it was implausible, the characters droll, and nothing ever happened. “This is boring,” he lamented. “I’ll never understand why this jerk doesn’t just stick it to his boss—I mean really stick it to her.”

“Here, watch mine!”

She handed him her iAm, submerging Brick into a scene featuring a severely drunk woman cussing and gesticulating at a grey-haired block woman hunched over by a crosswalk. The drunken woman’s body was so poorly rendered she looked pixelated and two-dimensional, like she had more than a few bits loose, and Brick couldn’t tell if the glitch was her appearance or her behavior. Maybe both? It wasn’t clear what Glitchy was enraged about— in Brick’s opinion it was never clear what women were angry about. As she yelled, the iAm rumbled and the eerily familiar scent of cheap gin and Flaming Hot Cheetos wafted through the room. The elderly Lego kept moaning “oh dear, oh dear” and rummaging through a bag of groceries until she unsheathed a loaf of bread and set the bag down.

“I reckon you’d better leave me alone,” the kindly-looking block said, her voice both grandmotherly and ominous before turning as cold as a polar bear’s teat in January—“or I’ll put you down like the feral bitch you are.”

The iAm grew so hot in Brick’s lap he almost wet himself.

“Oh. Hell. Nah!” Glitchy roared.

Then she was out cold. Put down like the feral bitch she’d proven to be. The point of view on the holographic screen shifted to the vantage point of Glitchy flat on her back, staring up at a square sun. Standing over her, the grey-haired woman held the loaf of bread like a bat. Her painted wrinkles and oversized face had been replaced by a sneer so cartoonish it was terrifying. “I don’t suffer fools or stale bread,” she said, ripping off an edge of the bread and tossing it onto her fallen foe. Then she reached into the loaf and withdrew a metal rod. “Corked bread. Meemaw’s recipe. This is how we kept those damned Crispies out of our shop during the war. Never leave home without it.”

The camera angle swept upwards, providing a clear shot of mean granny patiently waiting as Glitchy staggered to her feet, swaying and stumbling as if she were caught in a hurricane. There was a welt on her face that looked like a baboon’s ass. Granny hoisted the metal rod over her shoulder, kicked her leg, and then swung so violently she could’ve inspired the Pirates baseball team to a pennant run. Glitchy flipped backward, her pixels exploding as if every one and zero had been disarranged.

A toast to job security—Brick could guess the ones and zeros he’d be sorting tomorrow.

“I love it when that bitch gets smacked!” Siri chortled. “You got knocked out, fool!”

The iAm grew so frigid in Brick’s lap he feared it would freeze off his seldom-used bits, so he handed it back to Siri where the artic chill wouldn’t be noticed. Granted, her reel had more action, but it still bored him. What happened to stories with characters who loved and cared for each other—whose actions had echoes and consequences outside of the moment? He reached for his iAm, then hesitated. Was he bored with the Me Reelz, or bored with his life?

“Do you think he wants to come home?”

“Who?”

“Our son.”

“The second Brick?”

“Yes—our son.”

“Why would he want to come home?” Siri asked, grinding her teeth as she fixated on the next episode of her reel, this one featuring Glitchy vandalizing a bathroom and licking doorknobs.

“To be with us?” Brick said uncertainly. “His familia?”

“Familia?” Siri stopped grinding her teeth to grimace. It was then Brick noticed that not only was her face sallow and hollow, but the left side was severely bruised as well. “What are you, Mexican?”

“Of course, I’ve told you that. You know that.”

“I think I’d remember a thing like that.”

Brick’s heart sputtered and he was struck by the desire to review MatchMaker’s algo again.

“So, are you going to speak Mexican now?”

“Mexican? No, it’s Spanish… and, no, I only know a couple words.”

“Good, ’cause Godgle translated that as—you’re an idiot.”

And there it was. A fresh way to undermine him—rambling stupidity. “About our son…?”

“Ugh—he’s learning to be taller,” she groaned, shaking her hands at him as if he were an old woman carrying groceries. “We couldn’t have a short stack stinking up the place. Besides, it’s a good school. He wasn’t born a Crispy—he just never learned how to grow. And that takes time, and pulleys.”

“Our son’s a Crispy?” The realization hit him like a brick to the nose. “Brick II is a Crispy….”

“Duh—that’s why he had to stay in the hospital so long.” She flicked her wrist as if swatting away a fly, then returned her attention to her reel. “They were doing tests, trying to figure out why. I doubt those numbskulls ever figured it out. You should try paying attention sometimes.”

“That was his condition?” Brick tried to imagine that infant in the basinet on the other side of the glass. Nothing about him seemed small, square, or off-puttingly aggressive. “Then he was born a Crispy.”

“No duh? That’s why we sent him to tall school as soon as his condition stabilized.”

“If he was just a Crispy, why couldn’t we take him home?”

“They said it was a bigger problem than we knew, no pun intended. Not my joke—that’s how they said it.” She made her swatting motion again, Glitchy reflecting in her eyes like a captured Tinkerbell. “Now can you get off it? I’m starting to miss the days of your affair with fleabag’s snout.”

Brick leaned back into the couch, the room, the world, reality itself, shrinking around him like a fading Me Reel hologram. He didn’t know much about Crispies, only that they were warmongers and lived on abandoned bridges, but he had seen a few posts about how “the Growth” was ravaging their encampments, wreaking untold devastation upon their lives. His heart pixelated, stuttering codelessly, and suddenly he felt so empty he could hardly breathe. An advert for DroneStrike overtook the projection, turning the room into a sea of wildflowers so vivid he was certain he was drowning, his lifeless body sinking to the bottom of the ocean to be swallowed by the anemone and skewered by the sea urchin, while the grave yet somewhat whimsical voice of an unseen narrator continued to advertise as the air left his lungs…