The jukebox played some revelation from an eighties we were too young to remember. The oldest fool alive couldn’t even tell you the lyrics. The club was a mix of miseducated youth, crude geniuses, technical criminals and cyberspace junkies. Girls dressed in metallic styles courtesy of Keita Maruyama. Excited and fed up on designer drugs, their lip gloss was blinding in the blinking neon. Then there were the guys they partied with that just wanted to leave.

​

“Ayee Jace ya foolish coming in here. They ID!” Adam clipped arrogance to his words like earrings to an ear. A parlor trick he must’ve learned from drunk father-figures that did it better. I ignored his joke, his shades, and the black leather jacket that shadowed him under the Dawn Balloon’s electric colors. 

​

“Leave baby-face alone!” Jeanie said with a jab to Adam’s shoulder. Save for her platinum hair, she was just as much a shadow as he was. The white t-shirt that cut open the center of her crop top jacket the only thing preventing her total fade to black. I entered the booth and sat down in red cargos—realized I wasn’t supposed to have missed the funeral. 

​

“There goes your cut, Santa.” Adam joked. 

​

Guess I deserved that one. A smirking Jeanie seemed to agree. I sneaked a look at my phone. Shit. Right there, all bold and unread: “BIG JOB, WEAR BLACK!” 

​

My excuse was spending too much time in cyberspace. If it made him feel any better, all it got me was a headache. I wasn’t any good at jacking into the matrix—not like Rocky. He knew how to surf the code. The way he entered the matrix it might as well’ve been a door.

 

“Thought we were holding off on big jobs? Russians, Greek taverna—ring a bell?” I missed the dress code, but I didn’t miss being shot at. 

​

“We don’t have a lot of choice, money’s dried up—besides you’re o-for-one as it is.” Jeanie said gesturing to the sore thumb I decided to wear. I rolled my eyes at the low blow, but guess she had a point.  I took a sip from the tall glass of lavender that was sitting on the table, and then finished it off out of pettiness, because neither of them had offered me anything. And because it was sure to encourage some stupid decisions.

​

“You got the stuff?” I sat the glass back on the table with a shrug. 

​

Adam nodded as he brought a hand to the inside of his jacket. Searched his peripherals twice and twice again then leaned it back out. In his grip: 9 sheets of paper—more or less.   

​

“And their blank?” I asked.

​

“Blank.” 

​

Trees, like whatever the jukebox played, were things of the past. I mean maybe you caught the odd oak, but you weren’t missing a forest. Paper, its looseleaf successor, wasn’t just rare—it was illegal. Something about the trackless quality of it made it attractive to criminals, and supposedly only criminals. The truth was, in the age of information, everything needed to be traced. The second coming presented itself in the form of data harvesting and paper was very much anti-religious in that respect. Enough of the right people agreed. The rest didn’t care. But not everybody was down with emailing love letters. Providing for the hold outs became a business, one that put you behind bars—or got you paid, and when it paid? Man.

​

The outside sky was a grey departure from the Dawn Balloon’s flashing blues and pinks. Global warming had taken its toll on the world years ago in a serious way. Not like there was a lot to see:  just skyscrapers, some finished, some not, and a vacuum of Duracell-powered cars. Most cities were placed in a dome after Earth’s attempt at sweating us out. The kids of 2119 grew up in a jar of glitch clouds and synthetic white Christmases. Aside from that, Carbon Patrol Guards toured streets, equipped with fancy glasses that monitored the carbon footprint of society. Popping up red on their lenses was usually a death sentence. It was the type of response to global-catastrophe only anxiety’s mad men could’ve come up with—and it made for a steady answer to over-population.

​

Alita, Adam’s outdated and stolen JDM sports car, looked like a cherry-red anomaly, unwelcomed but brave to the grey around her. She was manufactured somewhere in the twenty-first century’s push for far gone aesthetics. In it, a desire to design the car after Giugiaro’s two-door pony and with it, an attack on touch-based screens in favor of the button and knob. Rocky lie on her hood like a satisfied lover, staring up at a domed world and counting holographic stars. The way he looked at those programmed constellations, you’d think he figured out some deck-less way to zoom into cyberspace. 

​

“It’s you tonight,” Adam said as he tossed the keys to me. He’d already entered and closed the passenger side door by the time I picked them off the ground. 

​

“You get in yet?” Rocky asked, referring to my cyberspace troubles.

​

“Nah, I’m not seeing nothing. Maybe it’s my deck.”

​

He sat up from the hood, his eyes still glued to fake stars, “It’s not your deck, bro. The information is there you just gotta swim in it. You’re looking for a screen, but the idea is interfacing. You gotta surf it, it’s like a wave.”

​

Rocky was a savant, the type of kid that could figure out anything if he was into it. He used to be one of the club’s miseducated youths. He was an orphan after Carbon Patrol Guards handled his parents. Then, we needed him as a hacker. Jeanie and Adam didn’t get it completely, but I knew why the virtual world made sense to him. I saw it as a way we could bond. Yeah, I wasn’t getting far, but it gave him something to get excited about. Either way, I should’ve punched him for that dog water answer. “Rocky…just get in the car, man.”

​

I pushed the leather seat up after Rocky made his way behind it and sat down in frustration. Adam might not have liked to be the bigger man, but he was certainly the taller one. Adjusting his driver side seat was always a pain.  

​

“Yo…” Adam said. I was prepared for a hurry up joke. Even had a comeback ready. Something about his feet not matching his inches in a bad way. But his index was pointed outside the car.

​

Two guys—one looked afraid, and the other looked like the remedy. They were posted by the Dawn Balloon. The scared one was looking everywhere. Until the calm one pulled something out for only the two of them to see, but we knew what it was. 

​

The scared buyer was in his sixties, dressed in whatever he thought a disguise looked like, but it was painfully obvious: he didn’t belong here. Maybe he liked origami. Or maybe he was a professor about to show the next class something of historical importance that shouldn’t leave the room. Didn’t matter. What mattered was the red nose mascot on the dealer’s back. 

​

“It’s the Clowns,” Adam said.

​

Niche as it was, selling paper was still lucrative and the four of us had no kinda monopoly on the business. We couldn’t exactly stop anybody from selling it. However, selling on our turf…meant something else.

​

“You know any other time I’d be with you, but we got a job tonight, right?” Jeanie couldn’t see Adam from my perspective: he had his hand clutched to something inside his jacket pocket. But from her comment, she probably knew what he was thinking. 

​

An uneasiness entered the car. A minute ran its course and it felt like it might run another one. Butterflies figured out supersonic speed in my stomach. Adam was letting his actions speak louder than words and I was letting him do it. I had the wheel. I could’ve hit the gas like it was nothing to it, yet some part of me was waiting, some part of me already accepted the consequences. 

​

“Adam!” Jeanie let out. 

​

Slowly, he removed his hand from his pocket—stubbornly empty. 

​

I sped off before he could doubt the decision. 

​

Some time passed and I couldn’t keep pretending like I knew where we were going: “We wasting night, or what?” 

​

Adam hadn’t said much since the would-be crime scene, then finally: “One Park Way, Public Sector 9.”

​

“That’s outside the dome!” Rocky was uncharacteristically geeked.

​

Big jobs always brought discretion, anybody wanting a ton of weight probably had leverage in higher places. Politicians, mafia—you name it. They kept it in the domes though. An alias and a fall guy were all you needed—they were usually setting us up anyway. That said, somebody trying to meet outside the dome was being extra careful. 

​

“Who’s the buyer?” Jeanie spoke for me.

​

Adam tossed up a look then spoke aloud: “Hey, Siri?” 

​

I waited for him to say something to the onboard AI—then it hit me. A couple horns swerved beside the car as I hit the breaks.

​

“Jace...Don’t start.”

​

“Apple! I thought we were clear on no companies?” 

​

“Drive.” 

​

“You wanna talk about a set-up?”

​

“Drive!” 

​

Rocky made his way between two brick walls: “Jace, you said we’re wasting night, right? So screw it.” 

​

I looked to the backseat, hoping Jeanie had a different opinion. She was more concerned about how much paper was in the trunk. A lot—a whole lot was Adam’s response. I got where her head was at: cops pull us over for stopping traffic and it won’t matter where we’re going. 

​

The streets were a catwalk rigged up to walls of graffiti steel and cardboard that imitated places to live in. You didn’t have the manufactured luxury of plastic grass here. Nobody could paint this desert well. Rocky may have hoped to see what real stars looked like, but Public Sectors weren’t fussy about light. This was where the neon died, in a permanent brown fog. Realizing how badly we stood out—being the only car on the street, I cut the headlights, and hoped the windshield wipers would be enough to make it through the haze.

 

Tic and tac sounds went from faint to obvious. I thought maybe it was debris picked up by dust winds and taken to dehydrated clouds—garbage rain. Seemed on brand. Until a brick ripped past the car and took out the passenger sideview mirror with unmistakable charisma. The situation was clear now, the people throwing trash at us even clearer. Their eyes were sunk into bone, clothes ragged. Some had tattoos, others didn’t have any arms to use. They made do with shooting spit—all chanting a single word. 

​

“What in the hell does ‘lo tek’ mean?” Adam asked, very obviously pissed about his sideview mirror. 

​

“Low technology,” Rocky said. “They’re not cool with the car. Cause it’s ‘hi tek,’ get it?” 

​

A protest against technology made sense here. Hate for anything that came from inside the dome did too. Despite their actions, these weren’t terrible people. They were abandoned. Public Sectors were governments’ blind eye, a fine consequence for cutting spending when it came to saving humanity. 

​

“They’re gonna have a field day with Jen,” I said, smirking back at her. She greeted me with her pearl silver cybernetic eyes and a middle finger. You wouldn’t know from looking, but underneath that crop top jacket were embedded lines of chrome. Her fingers could release glossy micro-blades. Yeah, she was bad news in a fight. It wasn’t always like that. 

​

Adam and I met Jeanie as a couple of dropout freshman that decided joining the marines made more sense than studying. Our first tour was to some manufacturing city on the outskirts of Asia. When we got there we realized the job wasn’t to be soldiers, but glorified guards to weirdos. Rich guys liked being secretive and manufacturing cities were mostly populated with robots—minus the odd engineers. The perfect place to hide if you could afford the company’s silence. This particular guy we were ordered to protect liked to collect people and do what he wanted with them. One day, this girl caught Adam’s attention. She was bone-skinny and bruised, way too accustomed to the involuntary fantasy of guys that could pay for it. Adam started communicating with her in secret. The two kinda clicked. He decided he didn’t want to do the marine thing anymore, said something about a CO that did business in the black market—he’d get us started selling paper. Fuck this shit. I remember those words vividly. The three of us took a cargo plane out of there. Ran into some trouble when the girl said she’d forgotten her name. Too accustomed to the involuntary fantasy. Her handlers called her whatever they wanted. She admitted to a love for old American movies, her favorite being Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She named herself Jeanie. It made sense.

 

Jeanie didn’t like being helpless, she didn’t want to be in that world again, or more specifically, be weak enough to be pushed back into it. So, she made herself stronger. Not just through cybernetics; she also became a blackbelt. I think some part of her now wouldn’t mind being pushed again, just so she could cut their hands off. 

​

“Pull in here.” Adam pointed to an alley hosted by gangs and drug addicts. He reached into a plastic bag and pulled out gas masks: “Gonna need it.” 

​

The air cut something serious. If you weren’t careful it turned into a knife. Why those people throwing trash at us had bandages on started to make sense. I sliced my finger through the flowing dirt while Adam carefully took suitcases out of the trunk, handing one to each of us. Jeanie had her duffel bag around her. I wondered how serious everyone thought this could get. 

​

We moved inside one of the vacant buildings, stepping over broken glass, following behind Adam to an out of place sewer. He crouched down, and maneuvered the manhole cover from the ground: “Ladies first.” 

​

One by one we dropped into a tunnel that might’ve been better defined as a maze. Adam pulled out a ball shaped device that projected a holographic map. We walked through waste, over a decaying body that couldn’t have been human, and a parade of rats and cockroaches having more fun than us. The walls were covered in initials, crude drawings, and threats. The strangest part was imagining why so many people had been here. Left, Left, then another ladder down—until we reached a cylinder slit that went on for infinity. 

​

“You’re gonna hate me for this, but we gotta crawl through that hole,” Adam said to groans. 

​

“Killing me, man.” Kept getting repeated by everybody in different ways, like some evolution of “Are we there, yet?” We were all covered in mud. Jeanie stabbed me in the back. 

​

“Guess you did wear black after all, baby-face.” 

​

Adam started laughing. Rocky didn’t get the joke. I thought about turning back. 

​

Finally, we reached a door. Too perfect to have been built by anybody that lived here. It lacked the rest of the maze’s rust. And it was certainly hi tek.

 

Before we could knock or press anything, the door opened. Four sleekly armored men quickly took our suitcases. Rocky made a joke about washing their hands that didn’t land for them. To his credit, nothing probably would’ve. A less armored, but bigger man came to the front, and said Adam was the only one allowed in. 

​

A few seconds became a minute. Then it became an hour. For all we knew, Adam was dead and we were just waiting for a ghost or a bodybag. Patience was a virtue in these situations. I knew that, but big jobs were usually set-ups. I remembered that. Just like I remembered our agreement: no companies. There was a difference between some politician that wanted a few things off the record and a company whose business secrets lived and died by it. The difference was thin, yeah, but one of them was doing it for profit and keeping up reputations. You find out a politician is corrupt; you wonder what the weather’s like tomorrow. But you find out where some of these companies get their funding from? Back at that manufacturing city in Asia we realized that there was, in fact, a difference.  A politician cut a loose end with a knife. A company took you out of the dome. Rocky mumbled optimistically about Schrodinger’s Cat.

​

I countered: “I put that cat in a box, right? With a pulled grenade…Then I don’t exactly need to open the lid, do I?” 

​

“Not necessarily.” 

​

“Come on, Rock!” 

​

Jeanie didn’t bother herself with theories. From the glimpse I got of her, she was squatted down, duffle bag empty on the muddy floor, disassembling and reassembling the parts of her sniper gun. Recounting the bullets, blowing sweet whispers through the muzzle and checking everything twice like Santa. If her sniper ever jammed, it was on purpose. You didn’t need to be a genius to know where her mind was at. Her crystal-cyber eyes hit me: “We don’t leave people behind, you know that Jace.” 

​

“That’s not—that’s not what I’m saying, it’s just—” 

​

“Let’s go,” Adam said, exiting the door empty handed. 

​

The trek back to the car was silent. Rocky wanted to know something about the inside, but Adam didn’t give him an answer. 

​

Making our way to the car, Adam took out a smoke, flicked it, then removed the ball shaped device from his jacket and smashed it to pieces with his foot, little shards of silver running across the ground. “I’m driving.” 

​

An uneasiness entered the car. Adam waited before pressing the ignition, he had something to say. 

​

“Look, back at the Dawn Balloon. That’s my bad, shit just pissed me off, you know? The Clowns are an army and its just the four of us, I saw them taking our set—I dunno, money’s getting thin—” 

​

“It’s good, man. We’ll figure it out.” I stopped him. 

​

“Yeah,” he said, pressing the ignition and flashing the headlights. “Yeah.” 

​

A bullet zipped through the windshield, destroying his shades and blinding his eyes with glass and blood. 

​

“Shit!” I yelled. 

​

“Get out of the car,” Adam said to all of us. Blood lining his lips and cheeks. 

​

“Wha—”

​

“Get out of the car!” 

​

“Attention. will the passengers of this vehicle please step out? You have been spared.” A voice asserted through a megaphone past the sky. 

“You were right, man,” Adam whispered.

​

“Hit the gas,” I said. 

​

“We say again, will the passengers of this vehicle please step out!” 

​

“Guys—” 

​

“Hit the gas!” Jeanie and Rocky shouted. 

​

“I’ll be your eyes; I know how we got here. Jen you got sunroof, Rock, jack in.” 

​

“Which way?” Adam asked. 

​

“Back,” I said.

​

The car spun out of the alley in a J-turn. Part of the profit from selling paper went towards keeping Alita happy. Adam sped off on the straightaway, switching from first gear to second with a roar that scared doors off hinges. Yeah, Alita was happy.

​

Unmarked patrol cars started sending bullets across Alita’s cherry-red frame, bits of car paint confetti spread across cracked windows. Jeanie’s sniper sent one of the patrol cars into a gymnastic fit, blue and red sirens flipping over us. 

​

“Left!” I directed to Adam. 

​

Silver-tipped whistles went back and forth, popping holes into the hood. Looking out the window, Jeanie was zoned in. A patrol car took a twisted turn into some nearby dumpsters. One more was following us.

​

“Keep straight, right in three seconds!” I tried to say above the sound of sirens and bullets. “Turn right!” 

​

The front of Alita swerved a corner her rear-end wanted no part of, spinning us around in a half-circle. 

​

“Reverse, reverse!” 

​

“Guys!” Jeanie yelled; specks of blood evident across her face. “Ammo?” 

​

I tossed a magazine up to her. Alita sped backwards for little more than a breath before I took the wheel and spun her nose back in front. Adam hit the brake and shifted back into drive like it was nobody’s business. 

​

The patrol car lost our tail, a helicopter flashed its searchlight above us.

 

I looked towards Rocky, he was jacked into his deck and already smirking. I couldn’t tell you how he did it, but knowing how to surf the matrix made you little less than a god. He tried explaining it once, that it’s like imagining a pipe, the water that comes out of it is information, it’ll flow constantly if you let it, but you can turn it off. You connect to the right pipe, the right lattice of code, and you can do a lot. The helicopter started turning around in crooked circles, making a bad balancing act against the wind, until it fell behind a group of unfinished buildings. 

​

Day was breaking soon. Maybe those little stars were too far away to see in the fog sky, but the sun didn’t care. It fired all the smoke away and made itself obvious. For a moment, you could see nature clearly. It wasn’t green, there weren’t any trees, but it was real. As we entered the tubed-highways that led into the dome, I thought about that word: lo tek. I thought about envy, and if inhabitants of Public Sectors really had any of it for us. Maybe they didn’t. In that brief frame of real sky, I realized being in the dome provided you with the luxury of familiarity, but that was it. There wasn’t any magic in that jar, it was all code. Give Rocky enough time and he could turn those holographic stars into pigs. The sky out there was different. You couldn’t buy that light, it was endless. Jeanie made a joke about her and Adam needing matching pairs of eyes now. Adam tried to rub off a blush. Rocky said they should just get a room and wondered why the hell Adam was still driving. We laughed. 

​

Endless.