Weary Traveler
Chapter 13

The outskirts of downtown Rosenfell descended into that eerie stasis of night. Darkness must have crawled over the city above the thick blanket of gray, swirling around with each frigid gust, blocking out the galaxy beyond.

Mitch’s nearly naked body shivered. His bare feet shuffled. Bones ached. Dried blood colored the gashes slashed across his face and head. The bruises on his body turned three shades darker. Goosebumps spread over every inch of his skin like a cheap forcefield had been erected around his body, blocking out the cold perils of the dead world.

He gazed ahead through the desolate streets beneath the dancing holograms and corporate skyscrapers of the Pearl District, underneath the endless rows of Rezi-Rizes that stretched high above and disappeared in the clouds. Each tower stuffed with thousands of nomads, tucked away, protected by their Rotech and CorpoMax surveillance and tech, sending their minds off to unvisited worlds, mysterious matrixes, and distant dimensions. Beyond this reality and that. Experienced by way of their biochips and implants jabbed into their brains, beaming electrical signals to warp their fantasies from the safety of their own prisons. Surveilled by the their tech-lords.

Mitch peered into the shadows. About thirty feet ahead on the left, a man’s head poked out from a broken down shack that looked like it had been invaded by squatters and turned into a bonzo den. He looked left, then right, locking eyes with Mitch.

The bum veered towards the right, out of the middle of the abandoned street, hugging close to the base of the buildings on the other side.

From the corner of his swollen eyes, Mitch watched the man burst from the shadows and strut into the flickering haze, whistling an annoying tune. His hands were stuffed into the hip pockets of a tailored, royal blue suit lined with thin pinstripes that glowed white. His oily, black, corpo hairdo slicked back over his bulbous forehead, topping off the extreme level of sleazy inauthenticity wafting off of him.

“Hello, there, Weary Traveler,” the man said.

Mitch kept his throbbing head focused on the road ahead.

“Where to in such a hurry? Ain’t no time like the present is what I always say.”

Mitch said nothing. He trudged on, stone-faced.

“I see you got some fresh tech in your dome,” he said, hurrying after Mitch. “You looking to plug in? Got a new prototype I’m testing. Free of charge. Real advanced shit. It’ll launch your mind through different dimensions of space and alternate timelines. I’d try it myself, but all the kinks aren’t worked out quite yet, might damage my brain if you know what I’m saying,” he said, elbowing Mitch’s shoulder.

Mitch grunted, flicked his left hand at the man, marched forward. But the man scurried after him, keeping a few feet of distance. Probably from the stench that erupted from the bum’s near-naked body.

“Yoo-hoo, anyone home in there? Said I got a new mod.”

“Fuck off,” Mitch growled, holding up a bloody middle finger.

“Whoa, take it easy,” the man said, holding up his hands. “Just saying that you look like you could use some help.”

Mitch quickened his pace, opened up a sizable gap between the salesman with his fake suit and douchebag face.

“Your favorite memory, Weary Traveler!” the salesman yelled at the escaping bum. “Think of your favorite memory and the Zox will take you straight there! Let you experience and even change it altogether if that’s what you want! Whataya say, friend?”

Mitch took a few more steps, slowed his pace to a slow walk, then stopped on his path. His naked body swayed in the icy wind blowing against his inflamed skin. He turned his feet so that he faced the salesman standing about twenty feet back.

“What kinda memory?” Mitch asked.

The man’s face lit up as bright as the neon lights and electric billboards lining the road.

“You tell me,” he said, jogging up to Mitch until the two were face to face. His bleached eyes were like polished white marbles without any trace of color. “Name’s Zoxillian. Zoxillian the Third,” he said, stretching out his pale hand.

Mitch stared at it, then looked deep into the man’s eyes, white within white.

“You got any bonzos?” Mitch asked.

“Bonzos? No. But if you like bonzos my mod can take you straight there. Brain won’t even be able to tell that its just a memory and not the real thing. How ’bout it? Join me in my lab?” Zoxillian said, swinging out his left arm from his chest, dipping into a shallow bow.

Mitch chewed on his stinky upper lip.

“Alright, let’s see it,” he said, shoving past the salesman.

“Yes!” Zoxillian said, jogging after Mitch. “You won’t regret it. What’s your name, friend?”

“Mitch,” the bum growled. “Mitch Henderson.”

“You, Weary Traveler, are in for one wild ride,” Zox said. “You’re the first to volunteer today. I’ve been here all day and night.”

“What’s the mod called?”

“We are calling the prototype, Memory Mod. My company might change it after the trail period ends.”

“You a corpo?”

“Of course. Isn’t everyone in Rosenfell?”

“Do I look like a stupid fucking corpo?”

“I wasn’t referring to the bums,” Zoxillian said, shrugging. “No offense, Mitch.”

“Yeah, whatever. Nobody refers to the fucking bums. Who you work for?”

“Rotech.”

“Those fucking dweebs? Figures.”

“Virtual Reality Department ain’t so bad. Most of the criminals are up with the eggs.”

“Who?”

“The executive board,” Zoxillian said, stepping up to the door. “Hold on, need to enter my passcode. Got lots of tech operating in there. Don’t need one of these bum- excuse me, these drifters- sneaking in and snatching it all up.”

Mitch hitched up on his tiptoes, tried to peek over Zoxillian’s hunched shoulders, but the salesman shielded the panel as he poked his passcode.

The steel door’s hydraulic hinges hissed, unlocking the mechanism. Zox stepped aside, waved Mitch forward.

“Welcome to the Zox’s Memory Mod lab, Weary Traveler.”

Mitch shuffled inside, stopped in the entrance and scanned the room. Flickering yellow lights hung from cables strung across the deteriorated ceiling. They swung back and forth, cast moving shadows over cracked, red leather booths that wrapped around broken tables. Some tables were right side up, covered in coats of dust. Others had been ripped away from the black and white tile, dragged into bonzo dens and bum encampments throughout the city.

Most of the checkerboard tiles pulverized into bits of gravel, turned brown from the muck and sludge that trickled in and soaked the ground.

A dead, neon sign hung on the back wall: Roxy’s Diner.

“Right this way,” Zoxillian said, hustling past Mitch.

He stumbled after him, crept up to a collection of lab equipment and tech set up in a circle around an operating table. A half-dozen, holo-computer monitors shimmered in a blue glow. Machines churned. A sensory immersion rig rumbled. Generators revved their motors with a steady, rhythmic consistency like the purr of a synthetic beast in predatory wait.

“Lotta tech,” Mitch said.

“Rotech set me up real nice for my first assignment. They said to monitor and track all of the data from the prototype so they can adjust the settings and procedures before the Memory Mod hits the streets.”

“First assignment?” Mitch asked, bloody eyebrows raised, spreading deep wrinkles across his forehead.

“Sure is. No need to worry, though,” Zoxillian said. He plopped onto a rolling chair, spun, and rolled across the crumbled tile up to the side of the gurney. “Bosses assured me the prototype is perfectly safe.”

“Psh!” Mitch scoffed, pursing his lips. “Those fucking eggs don’t know shit about safety.”

“Step right up,” Zoxillian said, smacking the gurney. “I’ll strap you in so you don’t roll onto the floor when you’re moving through your memory.”

Mitch crawled across the rickety, metallic bed, flipped onto his back and nestled onto its rough, padded plastic veneer. The rusted bolts and hinges croaked and groaned beneath the weight of his frail body until he settled into position.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Zoxillian peeled two strips of sticky, white paper from a metal tray next to the gurney and strapped them to Mitch’s temples. The paper was connected by wires to thick cords that plugged into one of the generators.

“One more,” Zoxillian said, dangling a third strip in front of Mitch’s face. “Gotta open your mouth so I can put it on your tongue.”

“Hell no,” Mitch said, closing his lips and shaking his head.

“Mod won’t work without this one.”

“Then it’s a shitty fucking mod.”

“Like I said, it’s still a prototype. By the time this thing hits the streets you won’t need the mouth electrode and you probably won’t need the ones on your temples, either. Now… if you don’t mind,” Zoxillian said, shaking the electrode.

“I do fucking mind,” Mitch said, glaring at Zoxillian. “Give me that thing, I’ll do it.”

He swiped the wire out of Zoxillian’s hands and splayed the white tape onto his tongue, smoothed it out with his filthy thumb. The strip had a sterile, metallic taste like the drip after snorting a crushed up snapper.

“Let’s go,” Mitch said in a voice that sounded like his tongue was swollen.

“Keep the back of your head on the headrest and close your eyes. Relax your muscles and remain as still as possible, I need to plug this cable into your tech,” Zoxillian said.

Mitch’s restless body settled, tried to replace comfort on the hard bed digging into his broken back. He inhaled through his nose, exhaled out of his mouth, slowed his heartbeat down to a leisure pace. The boom boom, boom boom, boom boom, rumbled through his ears, filled his skull, overtaking the hum of the machines.

“Here we go,” Zox said, sliding the cable into the slab of metal pounded into the side of Mitch’s skull, filling his nerves with a sensation like a dull knife punctured his flesh, sending cold shivers across his body. “Alright, Weary Traveler. I need you to concentrate all of your energy, all of your conscious awareness, into your mind. Picture your favorite memory. One that you want to live over and over again. Something vivid. Something that you think about all of the time. Something that fills your waking life as well as your dreaming life.”

Mitch nodded, closed his eyes, and calmed his breath to a faint whisper that barely escaped from his lips.

Zoxillian’s chair rolled across the gritty tile. His fingers pecked at a keyboard, kicked on a second generator that filled the diner with a vibrating hum, shaking the room, rumbling through Mitch’s ringing eardrums.

“Let the memory flood your mind. Think of nothing else. When your mental picture is locked in, your consciousness will connect with the mod and recalibrate your brain waves until the memory becomes your true reality. Your senses and conscious awareness of this reality we are now in, will fade. Your memory will begin to take hold and…”

A sparkling beacon of color bubbled up from the center of Mitch’s mind like a budding, multidimensional flower of psychedelic light. A swirling rainbow cloud of dust, as if he had gobbled a handful of hyper-potent jellies that multiplied, expanded, until they consumed his mind, his reality. Swallowing his brain within a glowing matrix of mystical luminescence.

Mitch stared at the ground moving beneath his feet, watched it pass as his legs kicked forward by themselves like they had their own conscious awareness, their own free will.

He shuffled up to a wooden office door with a murky glass window. The letters had been scratched off and spray-painted over in dripping red with the word DANGER above a pathetic attempt at a skull and crossbones.

He grabbed the broken handle and pushed the door open. A collection of wooden, CorpoMax crates and barrels stacked in rows and columns across a small, square room, illuminated by a single light bulb hanging from the center of the moldy ceiling. A faint haze hung in the air. Mysterious mist like a fading dream just before the approaching dawn.

Mitch stepped up to the nearest crate on the left, lifted the lid and looked inside. His mouth dropped, eyelids jolted to the top of his forehead, palms perspired, heart raced and jumped through his throat, ignited within his brain like he had been zapped with electricity. Heart and mind joined as one.

His body flooded with a rush of excited chemicals and hormones at the sight of jellies, snappers, and jawbreakers packaged into CorpoMax prescription cases and vials.

He licked his chapped lips, traced his teeth several times with his tongue, tasted the grime. And then, his hands shot into the crate, ripped open one of the containers, scooped out a handful of jellies, tossed them into his mouth and chewed them until his teeth were covered in colorful globs of psychedelic goo. A euphoric sensation wrapped his body and mind in a soft, bonzo-induced blanket. The warm embrace swallowed his soul and welcomed him back into his preferred dimension of consciousness that traversed between worlds, traveled outside of time itself.

Dopamine zipped through his central nervous system, carrying the jellies’ hallucinogenic compounds across his body like they rode atop shooting stars underneath his skin. The memory warped, twisted, flashed. Illuminated by a swirling rainbow of dust that melted his awareness and dissolved it into a fractal soup of complex colors. Morphed into abstract patterns and geometric shapes that developed their own scent and taste. Synesthesia of the senses.

Mitch carved a path through the spectral mist, shuffled up to a wooden barrel. He patted his pockets, looked around the room, peeked around the-

His eyes ignited at the sight of a crowbar tilted against one of the barrels. He picked it up and tucked the curved end beneath the lid, bent his knees, and pulled down with the weight of his entire body. His feet kicked off of the floor, body dangled in the air, yanking on the crowbar with the feeble weight of his skinny figure.

And then, the lid popped off with a wood-splitting crack, sending his body clashing onto the floorboards. The eye-watering, throat-squeezing, sinus-pinching stench of synthetic whiskey filled the room, clawed across Mitch’s brain. He climbed onto his feet, hovered over the bronze liquid, wriggling his fingers like he was casting a spell at the phantoms floating through the treasure trove of booze and bonzos.

He tapped his foot and drummed his fingers against his leg while his frantic eyes scoured the room, discovering a synthetic sunflower swaying within a small pot on the windowsill of a blacked-out window.

He galloped to it, scooped it up, and hustled back to the barrel. Then turned the pot upside down and smacked the sides, sending small shockwaves from his hands that rippled through the colorful fabric of immateriality. Chunks of replenished, radioactive soil dribbled onto the floorboards, piled into a mound until only a faint trail of brown bits dropped. And then, he plunged the pot into the barrel, scooped up a flowerpot-full of the toxic liquor, and hefted it into the air.

A thin stream of whiskey squeezed from a hole in the bottom of the clay and trickled back into the barrel. Mitch tilted his head back and brought the pot to his dehydrated lips, gulped down the whiskey, gritty with bits of dirt. His pointy Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a jawbreaker had been lodged in his airway, trying to escape from the poisonous booze, only to climb back up his throat to flee from the contaminated contents of his rancid stomach.

When the last drop of whiskey and grain of dirt traveled down Mitch’s throat, he flung the clay pot against the wall on the left, shattering it, and then unloaded a memory-shaking belch into the jelly-induced ether.

He leaned against the barrel with a drooping head, hanging heavy with the memory… mind flooded with the suffocating weight of booze and bonzos. His lazy mouth sagged, drooled as his constricted lungs sucked in and blew out the musty air.

“What are you doing here?” an enormous voice shouted from the entrance to the booze and bonzo den.

Mitch’s torso inched upwards. He lifted his head, but it rolled back too far. His lazy eyes stared down his nose, squinted at a towering figure in a black robe with a hood slung over its head. Shadows blacked out the creature’s face except for the two points of piercing, scarlet light like it possessed lasers for eyes.

“How did you get here?” the creature asked.

Its thunderous voice was ominous, all-consuming. It reached beneath the flap of its robe and pulled a long blade that was illuminated by its own source of white light as if the creature grasped a bolt of lightning.

Mitch shrugged his shoulders. The sudden movement caused his head to flop forward, rolling aimlessly from his left shoulder to his right.

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” the black-robed figure said, pointing the tip of the lighting bolt at Mitch. It charged forward in a flash, cut through the colorful ether wrapped around Mitch’s wasted body, and plunged the blade of light through his chest.

Mitch gasped, bulging eyes jolted awake, limbs pulled against the restraints that trapped him against the gurney.

“Whoa! Easy there,” Zoxillian said, patting Mitch’s chest.

“What the fuck!” Mitch screamed. He was panting so loud that his voice sounded like a muffled whisper in his brain.

“Just take it easy,” Zox said. He tapped and slid his fingers over a holo-tab in his hands.

“Holy shit,” Mitch said, taking time to catch his breath. “That was intense.”

“What happened in there?”

“I could taste the booze on my tongue,” Mitch said, gazing back into his mind. “And feel my body buzz from the jellies.”

“Good. Good. That’s good,” Zox said, scribbling something on the tablet. “Your vitals were steady right up until the end. What happened? Describe it to the Zox.”

“Someone came into the room,” Mitch said, gazing within. “A fucking creature or a tall man in a demon costume.”

“What kind of creature?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. It was wearing a black robe. It had a hood that blacked-out its face. The only thing I could see were its red eyes. Like two sparks of fire or something,” Mitch said, staring into the distance. His heartbeat dropped back down several levels as the dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline settled throughout his body. “It stabbed me in the chest with this lightning blade… fucking killed me.”

Zoxillian clucked his tongue, shook his head, then adjusted the augmented reality, holo-goggles that covered the top half of his face.

“Other Memory Mod testers have reported encounters with these entities,” he said.

“What is it?”

“The identity of the creature is unknown. Scientists and engineers at Rotech are still collecting data and running diagnostics to replace that out.”

“Send me back in,” Mitch said, nestling back onto the gurney, “I got another memory.”

“Apologies, Weary Traveler,” Zoxillian said, unbuckling Mitch’s limbs from the restraints. “This mod only allows for one trial experience.”

“Fuck that bullshit!” Mitch yelled, sitting up on the gurney. “Send me back in, I can handle it.”

“Sorry, Mitch Henderson,” Zoxillian said, patting Mitch’s bare leg. “Safety protocol comes straight from the bosses on the Rotech Executive Board.”

“Rotech doesn’t give a shit about safety protocol. They fear death of the testers? Get me a waiver to sign.”

“How about this…” Zoxillian said, reaching into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a holographic business card and handed it to Mitch. It glimmered in his grubby, garbage-coated and blood-soaked hands. “You call me in a few weeks and we’ll see if we can get you set up for another trip on the mod. Some of the kinks and glitches should be worked out by then. In the meantime, send me some acquaintances and I might be able to get you some bonzos. How does that sound, my friend?”

“Oh, sure, sounds real great,” Mitch said. “I’ve got tons of acquaintances. I’ll send them straight here once I get back to my villa at Rotech Headquarters.”

“Fantastic! Let’s get you out of here, I’ve got to track down some more testers,” Zoxillian said, yanking Mitch off of the chair and ushering him through the front door. “See you around, Weary Traveler!”

The shockwave from the slammed door jumpstarted Mitch, pushed him into a maimed trot down the empty road. His scabbed feet picked up speed, shuffling back to his dark alley and his lonely tent.

His mouth mumbled and bumbled some babbling incoherence. Goosebumps prickled across his discolored flesh, while the spoiled stench of contaminated garbage wafted from his body like a permanent cloud of death surrounded him.

His heightened mind raced with memories long forgotten as the past crawled up from the depths of his unconscious, threatening to pull him down into the darkness once again.