Weary Traveler
Chapter 17

“My name is Mitch… Mitch Henderson.”

“Hello, Mitch,” droned an audience of about twenty nomads from their cheap, plastic seats, scattered in front of a water-warped, wooden podium.

“I have been sober for…” Mitch said, checking his rubber, tech-watch, hidden just below the sleeve of his baggy, burnt-orange, dress shirt, “three months, four days, two hours, and… fifteen minutes.”

An unenthusiastic round of applause echoed from the dark corner of an abandoned high school gym, illuminated by a standing flood light. The anonymous gathering yawned, rubbed their sleepy eyes, tired faces looking like they could use a swig of booze or a pop of bonzos.

“At that time, I received one-thousand credits from the nicest woman I’ve ever met. She told me to use it for something good. Use it to turn my life around. You see,” Mitch said, peering out across the room, hands gripping the sides of the podium as if he was afraid to fall backwards off of the stage and tumble forever down into the pit of inescapable relapse, “I was in a horrible place in my life. Physically, spiritually, mentally, psychologically, any way you look at it. I was wandering around the streets of Rosenfell in my underwear, nearly beaten to death after an encounter with some mercenaries, a couple of real, gangster criminals. Eleanor took me in, cleaned me up, and gave me a job to do. She was the first person in my life that had ever asked for my help in doing something that was legal.”

Mitch searched the thoughts swirling within his brain, sifted through his memories. Faces, names, places, zipped through his mind like they rode beams of light. Back and forth, they raced. Moving too fast to reach out and grab without being pulled away by their power to transport him to some other place. Some other dimension. An alternate reality.

The crowd of booze-and-bonzo-addicted bums and nomads gazed everywhere except for Mitch at the podium. Their eyes wandered around the sockets like they followed a colony of synthetic butterflies floating in the air. Some stared at the back of the head of the person in front of them; others tilted their heads back and ogled at the shadows clinging to the high ceiling. Some stared at the floor and twirled their thumbs, awaiting their turn to divulge their secrets, their trauma, pain, and suffering from a life not lived. A life overtaken by addictive substances that pounded their souls into rotten pulp.

“There was this girl,” Mitch said, “a bartender. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. She had vibrant, purple hair with a small line of tech on the right side of her skull. Gorgeous, lime green eyes that glowed from their own mystical source of light. Tiny freckles of light dotted her cheeks. Full sleeves of tattoos on her arms and a black and gray tiger with white eyes covered her left shoulder blade. Her fingernails were illuminated with a white radiance. Nova Zion…” he said, smiling at the mental image that had been held at the forefront of his mind for three months.

A few of the men in the audience shifted in their seats. Their heads perked up, jaws dropped and mouths drooled. Their eyes sparkled at Mitch’s description of Nova. Minds more intrigued by the bum’s speech.

“I wanted to ask her out. I really did. But I looked at myself. My skinny arms and bony cheeks. My dirty hands, balding head, and rotten teeth… I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it! But I made a promise to her that in one year, I would ask her out and take her to the Rotech Ball. That I would treat her like a queen. Still got a ways to go though,” Mitch said, staring down his torso and smoothing out the wrinkles in his dress shirt. He straightened out his tie, cleared the phlegm in his throat, and gazed across the crowd. “My name is Mitch Henderson and I am three months, four days, two hours, and nineteen minutes sober, and I am in love with Nova Zion, the woman of my dreams. Thank you.”

He dismounted the podium to a lackluster round of applause. The energy in the room shifted, dropped from a dull, mindless haze, to a whimpering boredom from a lack of booze and bonzos to entertain the deteriorated minds of the sober crowd.

Mitch marched down the middle of the aisle of nomads. His black trousers, a few inches short, crept above his ankles with each kick. He pushed through the double doors at the back of the gym and burst onto a deserted road. A light drizzle of chrome rain descended from the depressing sky, sprinkled onto the abandoned homes, cracked sidewalks, and porous blacktops of Laurelhurst District.

The seasonal billboards and holographic advertisements now shone pastel colors to signify the recent, electric shift to the spring season. Bright blues, pinks, greens, and yellows displayed across the electric banners, one of the remaining signifiers of seasonal change beneath the gunmetal sky. Providing Rosenfell a tinge of pleasant color to help drag the population of bums and nomads out from the frigid, winter chill that wrapped its icy fingers around the city, shrouded their souls in a blanket of suffocating depression.

Mitch trudged across Burnside Bridge, glancing over the edge into the murky, brown waters of Rosenfell River. An infected concoction of steaming sewage and poisonous runoff from Rotech wafted up from the water and spread through the air, combining with the spoiled fumes of downtown.

His eyes drifted away from the sludge and towards the vintage, neon orange and fluorescent white sign that existed before the CyberTech War. The word Port flashed in orange letters. A deer appeared and disappeared at the top, illuminated by flickering white light. It gave the illusion that the animal was trying to leap off of the sign and escape from its luminous clutches, flee to some other land beyond the booze-and-bonzo-addicted abyss of the city.

Beyond the old town sign, the silhouette of the downtown Rosenfell skyline ignited in a murky, psychedelic glow. Rezi-Rizes climbed into the air, vanished in the clouds of smog and fog and smoke. Corpo advertisements lined the sides of buildings, shot up into the sky on holographic beams of light, reflected off of the ominous mirror of dense gray. A polluted backdrop for all things corpo. Marketing new tech-mods and fresh, hot, synth-food. Ads for railguns and plasma cannons. A ceaseless commercial trapping the population underneath a corpo-tech-prison.

Jagged skyscrapers, adorned with a veil of ghostly, glass windows, rose from the ground like a colossal graveyard. They vanished beyond the pollution, lost in the gray-black darkness like the chopped off limbs of wandering nomads, stumbling through the decrepit streets of downtown, hunting for their next implant.

Mitch reached the end of the draw bridge, turned right, and made the short trek back to Shack Town, tucked along the edge of the river beneath the bridge. His new home, encampment, tin hut, aluminum tent, whatever word signified the endless rows and columns of shacks for Rosenfell’s poverty class. Living off of the streets, but not completely on the streets. A level up on the social caste system. The hierarchal stratification that divided the population according to credits and material possessions. That monetary value of a stray soul, determined by their material worth and the amount of tech they were willing to subject their bodies and minds to. A twisted structure that preyed on the mentally insecure and physically downtrodden. Lost souls, drifting, seeking out the nearest bonzo party, fiending for a headful of booze.

The wretched stench from the town’s dysfunctional sewer system crept through Mitch’s nostrils, wrapped around his sober brain, strangled his senses, and filled him with a desire to flee. To replace a familiar alley, away from the noise and odorous people.

He clenched his jaw and pushed forward, deeper into the tin maze. Raging fire pits scattered across the entire sector of Shack Town, spewing plumes of smoke into the sky. Flames swayed and danced in the chilled air, blowing in the soft wind, casting shadows against the looming river fog.

There was a slight tug on his nervous system to slow his gait, to stop and search for the shack that was cooking up jellies and gumballs, snappers and jawbreakers. Burst through the nearest door and snatch up their bottle of synth-whiskey. He shook the thought from his mind and filled his third eye with the picture of Nova Zion.

Mitch grinned, embraced the warm, buzzing sensation that spread across his body. He peeked at the LOT 22 sign hanging on a dead lamp post, turned down the narrow street and trudged through the sludge between two long rows of rusted shacks and mud-splattered tents.

Some residents huddled around pits and garbage barrels, rubbed their hands over the flames churning within. Others cooked synth-food atop long grates set over the fires or dangled metal sticks jabbed with chunks of artificial meat, prepackaged in Rotech and CorpoMax pouches.

“Helllllooooo, Mitch!” shouted a bulbous man standing at the center of the path, blocking the way like a boulder wedged in-between two walls. He leaned backwards and cupped his hands around his lips to propel his nasally voice outward like a busted missile. “What news dost thou bring from the outer realm?”

“Hey, Patrick,” Mitch muttered, reaching his neighbor. “You know how it is. Same Rosenfell, different day.”

“Ain’t that the truth, my compadre in crime.”

Mitch slipped past the obese blob and squeezed into a small, rectangular opening cut into a sheet of aluminum. A collection of discolored sheets and water-repellant tarps draped overtop the hut, creating a room about the size of a family-sized outhouse.

“The Great and Mighty Mitch!” Patrick bellowed, poking his head through the shack’s opening.

Mitch ignited a small flame in a lantern sitting on top of a withered, wooden, bedside table tucked up against the back-right corner, illuminating the shack with a flickering, orange candlelight.

The ground was muddy, coated with layers of footprints like some kind of art gallery for impoverished nomad artists. The rusted, tin walls were caked with dried crud. A thin mattress pad sat atop a box spring tucked against the back-left corner.

In the front-left corner, was a plastic cargo container, overflowing with an assortment of ancient, tech-paraphernalia and high-speed cables, mixed in with tattered nomad costumes scavenged from abandoned warehouses and out of dumpsters.

“Say… have you had a chance to give that repair mod a spin?” Patrick asked, pointing at a contraption sitting on top of the tech.

“Sorry, Patrick, haven’t had a chance. Been busy with this AA meeting stuff.”

“Good for you, Mitch. Good for you,” Patrick said, shaking his puffy fists. “Let me know when you do. It’s for my cousin. He’s a technician over in the Twilight. Told him I would get a few people to test out the mod before I pass it back to him.”

“What kinda technician?” Mitch asked, pausing his rifling search through the cargo container.

“Oh, all kinds of crazy stuff,” Patrick said, counting off on his fingers. “Tech implants, body augmentations, neural lace, biometric eyes, bionic limbs, synthetic skin, organ transplants. You name it, and my cousin Benny can fix you right up. Cost you a nice, pretty credit thought.”

“How about fixing my damn teeth?” Mitch asked, baring his gross chompers. His gums were a rotten, blackish-brown. The glow from the flickering lantern light highlighted the nasty discoloration even more. Gaps in his teeth appeared sporadically like shattered windows in an abandoned warehouse in the Pearl. The remaining teeth were dark yellow, shriveled like a dried, burnt sponge, and barely hanging on by the thin threads of their dead roots.

Patrick’s lips twisted into a snarl and his twitchy face scrunched towards his nose. He coughed into his hand, directed his frightened glare to an area past the left side of Mitch’s head.

“My apologies, neighbor,” Patrick said, catching his breath. “Yeah, easy. Benny can for sure repair those for you. What’cha thinking? You want some poisonous fangs? Oh! Maybe some metal incisors that can rip through flesh or-”

“Why the hell would I want to rip through flesh?”

“Well... I’m not saying that you do. Just saying that Benny could probably get you some that do.”

“I don’t need metal teeth or any metal body parts for that matter. Just some good, old-fashioned, human teeth. Or some synth-teeth that at least look real.”

“Sure, sure, no problemo, neighbor,” Patrick said, raising his open palms to plead his innocence for his suggestion.

“Need to fix my sinuses, too,” Mitch said, sniffling through his clogged nostrils. “Can’t smell right. Nostrils are all fucked up from snorting all those crushed up gumballs and snappers.”

“No bueno, my friend,” Patrick said. He turned his right hand over and poked at the squishy flesh on his chunky wrist. A mural of colorful lights flashed beneath his skin like a luminescent tattoo. “I’ll call Benny and see if he can squeeze an appointment in for you.”

Patrick turned away from Mitch, waddled out of the shack and wedged himself just outside the entrance. A ruby light flashed behind his right earlobe, paired with the tech implanted in his wrist.

“Helllllooooo, Benny!” Patrick yelled like a synthetic coyote in the night. His voice echoed through Shack Town loud enough to pierce through the drunken and stoned haze of the nomads wandering up and down the muddy paths. “How goes it, cousin?”

He poked his big head back into Mitch’s shack, leaned his burley shoulder against the flimsy, aluminum wall panel, testing its integrity.

“No, no, nothing for me, cousin. But I’ve got a good friend here, my neighbor, the Mighty Mitch!” he shouted, blessing Mitch with a single, firm nod. “He told me he needs some dental and sinus work done. Nothing crazy, he says. I told him I would give you a ringy-ding-ding and see if you got any openings.”

Patrick winked and threw up a chubby thumb.

“Credits?” he asked, glancing at Mitch. “Yeah, Mitch’s got credits. He’ll pay... No, no, it won’t be like the last time, I promise. Sorry, about that, cousin. I forgot about that... No, I’m sure you didn’t forget... Well, how was I supposed to know? She seemed like a nice, regular lady to me. I’m sure she meant- Yeah, I know, Benny, I know she wasn’t…” Patrick shrugged, raised his bushy eyebrows towards the bottom of his scraggly, greasy hairline.

“Great! We’ll see you soon, cousin,” Patrick said. He flipped his hand over and pressed his flabby flesh, turned towards Mitch seated on the edge of the mattress pad. “Benny can see you now. Sorry, neighbor, but he says I have to join on account of what happened to him last time.”

“That’s fine, Patrick.”

“Apparently the nice lady I sent him wasn’t nice after all.”

“That’s too bad, Patrick.”

“Sure was. Wasn’t a lady neither. Just some skinny guy in a wig with gigantic, synthetic breasts. Fooled me. Ha!” Patrick said, slapping his massive leg.

“Jesus…”

“Benny says the guy chased him down with a scalpel after my cousin refused to... he refused to, ahh…” Patrick said, scratching his sweaty temple and breaking eye contact with Mitch, “well, to put it bluntly, my cousin refused to chop the guy’s wiener off and implant a bionic one or something along those lines. If I understood the gist of it.”

“Sounds traumatic.”

“Sure does. Benny says he doesn’t do any of that robo-eunuch shit. Says he’s a serious medical professional.”

Mitch stared at Patrick through tiny slits in his eyelids, trying to analyze whether or not he was fucking with him.

Patrick stood in the doorway, silent. And then, he leaned in and whispered across the small gap of mud separating him from Mitch.

“You need anything like that done?”

“No, Patrick,” Mitch said in a monotone voice. An emotionless expression spread across his face. “I don’t need anything like that done.”

“Good! Let’s get moving, then. Time’s a wasting.”

Mitch peeled himself off of the mattress pad, ducked through the opening, and followed Patrick down the path between the rows of shacks.

“We can squeeze through a hole in the side of Shack Town’s fence,” Patrick said, hitching up on his tiptoes and aiming his mitten into the air. “Or we can head through the front entrance, but we will have to swing back around. Add some time to our trip.”

“Don’t matter, lead the way.”

They hustled down the backside of the trail, turned left, and trudged down one of Shack Town’s main roads. A row of outhouses lined the right side; on the left, was a collection of food trucks and canopies where members of the town sold their arts and crafts, gadgets and trinkets. They hawked their archaic, low-tech items, long outdated and dysfunctional; and swindled their own wicked concoctions of shack-made bonzos and poisonous, but potent, elixirs of booze. “How ’bout a quick bite to eat, neighbor?” Patrick asked, motioning to the food carts. “You could probably use something in your stomach if you’re going to be getting some work done.”

“Alright, fine,” Mitch said, turning towards the carts. Pungent steam rose from the vents, spewed synthetic odors into the evening air.

He scanned the unappetizing options from left to right: Synth-Sushi; Tico’s Taco’s; Burger Truck; Tex’s BBQ.

“How about some barbecue?” Mitch asked.

“You read my mind, neighbor,” Patrick said, rubbing his bulbous belly.

They joined the other nomads in the short line, stared up at the menu hanging above the window.

“Did I tell ya I was thinking of selling my scarves and toe socks at one of these little canopies?” Patrick asked, nodding towards the row of tarps down the left side of the food carts. “Make some extra creds. Whataya think, neighbor?”

“Sure,” Mitch said, “if you’ve got scarves I’m sure some people will buy or trade for ’em.”

“Oh! I’ve got tons! Been knitting for a few years now. Keeps my mind occupied while living in this shit hole. Have you got any hobbies?”

“Hobbies?”

“You know, stuff to escape from the typical nomad life.”

“Don’t do much other than attend the AA meetings. Just been trying to get my life together after a lifetime of booze and bonzos rotting my body and brain. Maybe try to replace a job one of these days so I can save up and move out of Shack Town for good. Ain’t much better than living off the streets.”

“Good for you, neighbor. Only one direction to go when you’ve hit the bottom. And I can tell that you, sir, are on the up and up. Making moves and throwing out the booze!” Patrick said, slapping his thigh and releasing a booming chuckle at his own rhyme. “You go first.”

Mitch stepped up to the counter, analyzed the colorful, chalk scribbles handwritten on the menu above the window.

“What’s it gonna be?” the attendant asked. His face and arms were covered in cheap tattoos like he had drawn them on with a family of permanent markers.

“It’s all synth?” Mitch asked.

“Of course it’s all synth. What the hell kind of question is that?” the tattoo-clown said.

“Not down with the synth, eh, neighbor?” Patrick whispered from behind.

“It’s fine,” Mitch said, shooing Patrick away from his ear.

“What?” the attendant asked. “You some big-shot corpo player? Can’t eat no synth-food? Don’t want to fill your little belly with this peasant gruel?”

“Just give me the turkey leg and rack of ribs,” Mitch said.

“You got it. One synth turkey leg and one synth rack of ribs. That’ll be fifteen C’s,” the clown said, pushing a credit scanner across the counter. “Or would the corpo man like to pay more?”

Mitch dug into his right pant pocket, grabbed his credit disk, and held it over the scanner until it dinged and flashed a green light. He turned the disk over and stared at the screen. 572C flashed three times and then disappeared.

“Step aside, corpo. Fat boy behind you’s ready to pounce. Pick up your order at the side window.”

Mitch shuffled around the side, swiped his basket of synthetic garbage from the window, stepped off to the side and waited for Patrick to grab his food.

He nibbled on the turkey leg. It tasted like a grilled chunk of cardboard with barbecue seasoning and a charred glaze that looked like it had been spray-painted on.

“Secret exit’s just over there,” Patrick said with a mouth full of food, pointing with his own turkey leg.

They slogged through the muck, slowed as they approached the fence. It towered high into the air like it was meant to trap the Shack Town residents in, rather than act as a form of protection from the outside streets of Rosenfell. A veil to separate one land of addiction and misery from another of poverty and suffering. Two gulags, one city.

In the distance, a blinding, neon glow illuminated Twilight District, bright enough to pierce through the smog. Skyscrapers and Rezi-Rizes climbed high into the sky, spread out across downtown like a maze of giant castles trapping all of the bums and nomads inside.

Holograms danced in the air, reflected off of the polluted clouds. A constant ceiling for corpo advertisements for synthetic food, body augmentations, brain modifications. Promoting Rosenfell’s bonzo dens, its bars and clubs, speakeasies promising copious amounts of booze. Anything required to operate as a successful nomad in the hedonistic city.

A light, spring drizzle sprinkled from the sky, glistened atop the cracked concrete sidewalks and crumbled blacktop roads oozing gunk from the earth below. The thin film of muddy water reflected the electric neon shining down like a synthetic rainbow had been projected onto the ground.

Mitch kicked on, hugged the buildings on the right side of the street, nudging through the flow of nomads. His wandering eyes zoned-in on a crumbled body slouched against a virtual reality center. A middle-aged man in a tattered shirt and ripped pants that had turned into shorts. His lifeless face stared at something across the road. Nomads bumped against him, stepped over him as if he wasn’t even there. A nuisance. An apparition. A forgotten memory. Just a simulated relic of the virtual reality game center dragged there to attract people’s attention and get them inside the building.

Mitch’s memories ignited. They zipped across the withered synapses of his recovering brain, carrying images back and forth, dragged from his unconscious. The mental picture of himself stuck at the center of his mind. His bloody, beaten body. Lonely. Shuffling through the cold streets in his underwear. Stumbling into Zoxillian’s lab. Meeting Eleanor… Nova…

A faint smile crept across his face as a spark of conscious awareness bubbled up from behind his eyes. He looked down at the basket of synth-food clutched in his right hand, and then at the bum on the ground.

“Excuse me, sir?” Mitch said, kneeling beside him.

The homeless man peeked at Mitch from the top of his eye sockets, head still pointed straight ahead. Hurried nomads tripped over Mitch, mumbled profanities at him for intruding on their path and keeping them from their destination for a few extra, unforgivable seconds.

“Out of my way!” a nomad yelled, kneeing Mitch’s back so hard that he grunted, posted his hand to keep from tipping.

“Uhh… what are ya doin’, neighbor?” Patrick asked, head swiveling to look away from the passerby’s gnarled faces.

“Excuse me, sir?” Mitch repeated to the man, louder than the first. “I just purchased this turkey leg and rack of ribs. It’s synth, so doesn’t taste the best. I thought that you might like it… What do you say, interested in some barbecue?”

The man blinked a few times, leaned his head back and stared into Mitch’s eyes. The two bums locked into each other’s gaze for a long moment. The eternal time of the present, communicated in the silent language of the homeless and downtrodden. The unspeakable truth of misery and despair of a life trapped at the bottom of a corrupt, corporate system predicated on evil. Preying on the souls of the poor and the sick.

The corners of the bum’s mouth twitched, slowly crept upwards into a shaky smile that revealed a set of decayed teeth. Mitch placed the basket of food on the bum’s lap, reflected the man’s rotten smile with a yellow, gap-toothed grin of his own. It was like peering into a wormhole that crossed dimensions, warped reality of space and time. Mitch and the bum at the very center of it all. An electric city and a dead planet swirling around them.

“Thank you, kind sir,” the bum muttered, choked by his scratchy throat. He reached up with a grimy palm, gripped and shook Mitch’s hand.

“You’re welcome,” Mitch said. “We all need to look out for each other. Just need to replace the ones worth saving.”

The bum munched on the food with a smile stretched across his face. His crumbled body seemed to grow in size and strength with each bite. An aura of peaceful energy dispersed outwards like a forcefield of light protected the fallen creature. Revived at least for the present moment by the kindness of another.

“And the ones worth saving are often the ones we overlook the most,” Mitch said. “See you around, friend.”