Fractured Reality

"Hey, you! Stop right there. Number... where the hell’s your damn number?" Conrad Blake slapped his metal bat into his open hand as he marched toward Billy. If anyone had picked the wrong job, it was Blake, the brute. Everything about him screamed that he belonged in a blood-splattered MMA cage, smashing skulls or burning off his excess testosterone in some dirty, no-rules street fight. As long as he could make his victims suffer, he was fine. And he took that out on the production workers every day, poor guys like Billy.

He turned his back on the supervisor and started to run.

Big mistake.

Suddenly, he felt two small metal darts pierce his back. They were attached to long wires, over five meters long, connected to the stun gun Blake casually held in one hand as he pulled the trigger.

Electric shocks ripped through Billy’s muscles, sending him crashing stiffly to the ground like a toppled bowling pin.

Blake kept his finger on the trigger.

It wouldn’t have surprised anyone if smoke had started rising from Billy’s body.

"What the hell did you and those other sewer rats do?" Blake growled through his beard cover, finally releasing the trigger.

"Was just breaking up the fight, Mr. Blake," Billy said, lying on his stomach, his head turned to the side as drool dripped onto the floor.

"Spare me the crap. We’ve already ID’d you, you little rat. You think you could fool us?"

"You—what?"

Blake squeezed the trigger again, sending another thousand volts surging through Billy’s body. He screamed in agony.

He hadn’t known you could actually hear electricity shooting through your own body. But you could.

"I was just making sure everyone got back to work," Billy groaned. "Don’t need a damn medal, but stop torturing me already."

To his surprise, Blake planted a boot on his back, yanked out the metal darts and let Billy roll over.

"How do you even know who I am?"

"Facial recognition cameras. Got them from the Chinese."

Billy, still lying on the ground, massaged his temples in slow circles with his thumb and forefinger. "Listen, I can explain, I… I wasn’t sure if I’d oiled the conveyor belt after my shift. That’s why I came back to check."

"And?"

"I didn’t forget."

Blake looked down at him, leaning casually on his iron baseball bat.

"Can I go now? I… I swear I’ll never break up another fight."

The supervisor pursed his lips and nodded. "Alright. Get lost."

Billy hesitated. "Seriously?"

Then he saw it—the cruel smirk forming on Blake’s lips.

Of course. What now?

It felt like a bad omen, even though Billy didn’t believe in that kind of thing. That was more Vivian’s superstitious nonsense.

"Get lost, and don’t bother coming back," Blake said. "You’re fired."

"What?"

The last word echoed in Billy’s head like it was in slow motion: F-I-R-E-D.

Conrad Blake grinned, baring his teeth like he was waiting for someone to snap a picture of his moment of pure joy.

"But you… you can’t just fire me like that," Billy stammered, half defensive, half desperate. Completely desperate, really.

Blake waved an official letter from Thandros Corporation in his face, then practically laid it on his chest like a delicate gift. "Merry Christmas to you and your wife," he said.

In front of the entrance, a huge, decorated Christmas tree gleamed, though the season felt anything but Christmas-like. It was dark, and at a balmy 59 degrees, the weather was too mild, even for climate change, which had hit the world completely unexpectedly. There had been no time to react. Not at all. At least, that’s how the drunk, drugged, or simply brain-dead and greedy politicians acted.

Billy glanced at his watch and came to the conclusion that Vivian was going to kill him.

Or had she already?

Had she been slowly, silently killing him throughout all these years of marriage?

His years with Vivian had been disturbingly similar to the grueling hours in the factory. In both cases, it felt like a slow, painful suicide. Maybe he should have seen his firing as a sign, a chance to turn things around. A signal from fate to leave his wife as well and cut out the two main ingredients of his misery. But seeing the good in bad situations wasn’t Billy’s strength. Instead, he shook his head at how his life had turned out, then climbed into the baby-blue electric car—Vivian’s choice, though Billy had paid for it with his savings. He slid into the passenger seat, slammed the door shut, and opened the glove compartment. Inside was his beloved old Rubik’s Cube. Like every day after his shift, he fidgeted with it for a while. He’d managed to align three sides with the colors of their centerpieces, further than he’d ever gotten before.

How many years had he owned that cube?

Long enough that it was completely worn out, with one of the stickers peeling off a corner piece. Solving the Rubik’s Cube had become a real-life mission for him.

His tongue rested on the corner of his mouth as he concentrated, rotating the left side three times horizontally, then twice vertically. He twisted it one way, then back again. Why had he even done that?

Why ask out the solar panel technician?

Why, you idiot?

He shook his head at himself, at his so-called "heroic" act. Then he looked up and gazed out the windshield, where the glow of the Brooklyn harbor lights danced on the rippling waters of the East River.

Everything he’d once loved about Vivian had turned into everything he now despised. She cared about nothing except her acting career. She was good at it (a damn good actress) but a damn terrible wife. She didn’t want kids. Didn’t want to get fat, didn’t want to trade her figure for a bunch of screaming brats. Vivian only wanted herself. Her time was the most precious thing on earth. Billy was still twisting the cube, but this time angrily, lost in thought. His gaze drifted somewhere over the dark waters of the East River. Vivian had denied him everything he truly longed for: a family, a home. To love and be loved. They weren’t such complicated things, he thought. So why was he letting a ring on his finger stop him from having them?

He sighed. Only when he lowered his gaze back to the cube did he realize that he had been mindlessly fiddling with it the whole time, undoing all the progress he'd made over the past few months. In a single moment of carelessness, he'd brought even more chaos into his life instead of order.

Shaking his head, he tossed the colorful Rubik's Cube back into the glove compartment, grabbed the steering wheel and slid over to the driver’s seat. If the play dragged on forever later, maybe he'd have enough time to catch up on his lost progress, he thought, reaching behind for his seatbelt, buckling up and starting the engine. He was already way too late.

Silently, he drove off the parking lot, while an angel atop the Christmas tree looked down at him with a sad expression. If the angel was excited about the holiday, he sure didn’t show it. He seemed more bored up there on the tree, as if he was tired of the endless wait for Christmas. Tired of everything, really.

He tossed the termination letter into the glove compartment next to the Rubik’s Cube, thinking to himself how eerily well the two things fit together, both symbolizing failure in their own way. But on the bumpy, rocky, unfair road of life, Billy hadn’t lost the key to success: perseverance. The stamina and courage to keep jumping over life’s hurdles, no matter how high. He'd have to find a new job, just like he’d eventually solve the Rubik’s Cube.

Only those who give up truly fail, Billy told himself as he rolled down the window. The car stopped right in front of a closed barrier.

"Howdy, Billy! How's it hanging?" Buzz, the gatekeeper, asked from the little booth beside the gate, tipping his old cowboy hat off his greasy head in greeting. "Done for the day?"

"For good. Got fired."

"Ah, don’t sweat it, kiddo! There’s a silver lining to everything. You just gotta look for it sometimes." Buzz ran his fingers through his copper-colored tobacco-stained beard and nervously scratched the skin under his chin. A few thick flakes of dandruff got caught in his beard, while others flaked off onto his thick cotton shirt. It was disgusting, really. His psoriasis looked downright nasty.

"Hey, check this out." Buzz poked a hand-rolled cigarette out the window and practically shoved it into Billy’s car. "My Quirley may look like crap, but it tastes amazing. Wanna try?"

Billy stifled a cough, waved the smoke away from his face and politely declined. "How much longer you gotta go, Buzzy?" he asked.

Gatekeeper Buzz took a slow, satisfied drag from his hand-rolled cigarette and blew the smoke out to the side. The bluish haze swirled around inside his small booth, clouding the view. On a shelf was an old coffee mug his daughter had painted and given him for his birthday, something he proudly mentioned almost every time they met. That memory was already over three years old now.

"Pah! How much longer I gotta go? Too long, if you ask me. With any luck, I’ll only make it another ten years an' with the way I smoke and drink, maybe a bit less!" The old geezer laughed, strings of spit stretching between his brown, rotting teeth. "Or are you asking how much longer I gotta work today? Well, they’ll keep me here for a few more hours, that’s for sure."

Buzz finally raised the gate, and Billy reached out of the car window for a quick high-five as he drove past. He thought about what the old man had said about finding the silver lining. It was exactly what Billy himself had been blind to: seeing the good in the bad.

Ahead of him stretched the metallic landscape of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a world of steel and concrete. From a distance, the countless containers in dull, washed-out colors looked like a pile of oversized building blocks, faded and worn with age. The still-intact, heavily guarded Williamsburg Bridge curved like a ribbon against the light-polluted evening sky. Traffic had ground to a halt, with trucks crawling over the bridge like ants. Ever since the Stranded had occupied the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge collapsed in last month’s terrorist attack, two of the main routes for factory workers had been wiped out. The overcrowded buses still ran all day, shuttling the exhausted workers across the river.

Far beyond the harbor cranes, old factory smokestacks lay dormant in their eternal sleep. Fifteen years ago, they had puffed out their last clouds of white smog into the air, thick with gasoline and oil. Now, thanks to Thandro’s energy revolution, there were no more coal plants—just clean energy for a completely polluted world.

As an old Christmas classic blared from the speakers, glorifying love as an everlasting bond, Billy drove through the bleak industrial zone of Williamsburg. Along the river, the massive cranes of the Thandros empire stood in an endless row, reaching out day in and day out to the containers on the anchored cargo ships.

"I’ll never get used to that sight," Billy whispered. Maybe he had leaned too far forward, because his stomach pain suddenly returned, sharp like a knife. He dropped one hand from the steering wheel and pressed it against his stomach for warmth. Maybe it hadn’t just been the excitement earlier, he thought. Did he eat something bad? Then he remembered that all he’d had today was coffee and a banana.

He switched off the car radio. The clouds thickened quickly, and soon, the first drops of rain began to fall, heavy and loud, drumming against the steel exterior of his baby-blue car. Billy rolled down the driver’s side window and took out the business card from that idiot named Isaac. A few raindrops splashed coolly onto his skin. Unlike that nutcase, Billy didn’t believe the Thandros Corporation was hiding anything shady. Still, he had to admit: the fenced-off harbor area, with its armed corporate guards, did look more like a secret military base than a world-saving company. But with all the crazies in New York and beyond, these security measures weren’t surprising. Billy turned the business card over in his hand as the rain blew in at an angle.

"You said the card was waterproof. For the ladies. Well, let’s find out."

Billy flicked the card out the window and watched it in the rearview mirror. Lit up by the taillights, he could clearly see it swirling through the air before it landed somewhere near the abandoned railroad tracks, ending its dance. At that moment, Vivian sent a short message (in every sense of the word), expressing her disappointment that Billy had missed the meeting with the theater director and that the play was about to start.

"Unreliable asshole," she wrote.

Billy sighed, flicked on the left blinker, and took a shortcut, since traffic on the main road at this hour was crawling as slowly as it did on the Williamsburg Bridge. It was a typical industrial street, lined with big logistics centers, truck parking lots and office buildings with charming concrete facades.

He set the navigation system to take him straight to the Elysian on Broadway. Deeply focused on the little dashboard screen, it was no wonder he didn’t notice the strange figure darting into the road.

Until it was too late.

"Shit!" Billy shouted, slamming the brakes.

For a split second, he thought the thing in front of him was an alien. The emaciated figure froze in the middle of the street, wide-eyed like a terrified deer.

The low beams revealed it to be a horribly disfigured woman.

Completely naked.

Billy jerked the steering wheel, the car skidded, and the rear end clipped her, knocking her to the ground.

"Shit! Shit! Shit!"

Even though it all happened in an instant, the details of her tortured body seared into his memory: her hair had fallen out in patches, ulcers covered her neck, pus-filled boils festered on her chest, and thick, fleshy scars from countless surgeries crisscrossed her flat belly and bony sternum, all the way up to her throat.

He could still see her in his mind, even as the car rattled over the railroad tracks and slammed head-on into a streetlamp.

Then everything went black.