Fractured Reality

Once we start denying reality, we begin living in a false world. We quickly turn a truth into a lie. Even when a sudden loss of money means we need to cut back, we still overspend because we refuse to give up our lifestyle. Or we take every tiny, meaningless gesture in a fight for love as proof that he or she still has feelings for us. Fighting for a partner who's already filed for divorce. A holiday fling that, to us, is so much more than just a fling—but to them, that’s all it ever was.

The more desperate the situation, the harder we fight to avoid accepting the truth. We cling to the hopes we create for ourselves. And that’s exactly what Billy Jones did as he stood in front of the Elysian on Broadway, searching for Vivian, searching for his old life, searching for some explanation for everything that had happened to him.

It seemed so simple: show up here, tell Vivian he was still alive, and then his once-despised life—the one he now longed for—would just go back to normal. But instead, he stood there like a madman, yanking at the locked theater doors with all his strength. Not even the note behind the glass could convince him that Vivian wasn’t here. That she’d never be here again. The note read:

Permanently closed due to lack of public interest

The last theater on Broadway had fallen. The final avant-garde attempt to push back against the new world order had failed with the closing of the Elysian. In a world where efficiency reigned supreme, actors had become obsolete. Economic pressure, political instability, and an overwhelming flood of shallow digital content had wiped out society’s interest in art. Art still existed, but only as a degraded term used for influencer uploads, YouTube videos, or instant "art" generated by pseudo-AIs. All of this had led to Broadway’s downfall. Once the epitome of glamour, it was now a crumbling shadow of its former self. The grand theaters had long been converted into commercial buildings, casinos, warehouses, shopping malls.

A sigh of despair escaped his throat. His whole life had fallen apart in an instant, and now it felt like his mind was slipping too.

Had I imagined it all? Everything, my past, was it all just made up?

Above the entrance door, a half-torn poster announced the last play they had performed, The Woman From the Past, a show Billy suddenly found himself wishing for more than anything. It was the performance he’d missed the previous Monday.

Even though it seemed impossible, the present was starting to piece together one confusing puzzle after another, creating a grotesque picture of reality that he couldn’t even begin to understand. He couldn’t have just been swallowed by the earth for a week, suddenly reappeared, and been declared dead to the public. So what had happened?

"Ah!" Billy cried out suddenly. A sharp cramp twisted his stomach, forcing him to his knees. He watched as thousands of scuffed, worn-out shoes shuffled past him, his teeth clenched as he tried to focus on thinking straight through the pain. It felt like he’d swallowed a blade, and now his stomach was trying to digest it. One hand clutched his stomach, the other pressed into a dirty rain puddle as he looked up at the crowd, desperate for help. And then he saw him—a strange old man, short and hunched, wearing a trench coat and an old-fashioned hat. He stood directly under a streetlight, the shadow from his hat falling over his face, so Billy couldn’t see his eyes.

He forced himself to stand up. It must’ve looked agonizing, as if he were carrying two anvils on his shoulders. No sooner had he gotten back to his feet than he heard a voice behind him. "Hey, you!"

Billy froze and turned around. Out of the sea of nameless, worn-out faces, the face of a young, stunning woman emerged. Billy recognized her. The last thing she’d said to him was, "Shh!"

Now, she was saying, "Hey, stop!"

Billy wiped the confusion from his eyes with his knuckles. Yep, it was her—Number X-3-19 from the zero emissions factory. She stumbled toward him, nearly twisting her ankle in her high heels, almost slipping in a puddle of puke from a drunk. Was she looking through him? Her gaze was alarmingly vacant, unable to focus on a single point in his face. Then, she threw her arms around his neck, and he caught her. Where he found the strength to stay on his feet, he had no idea. Her hair tickled his face and nose. The whole time, Billy couldn’t stop thinking how horribly awkward it was to run into her right now, in this situation.

X-3-19 clung to him in a passionate hug. A small victory for Billy in the midst of a huge defeat.

"You dropped… something," she giggled, clearly drunk, covering her mouth with her hand. Then she poked the tip of his nose with her pinky finger for no apparent reason.

"Oh, right, thanks," he said, taking back his wallet, which he must’ve dropped somewhere in the red-light district at Times Square, New York’s notorious den of sin. Probably just now, when he’d collapsed in pain on the sidewalk. The memory briefly brought back the mysterious man in the trench coat. Billy spun around in a flash. But the old man who’d been watching him from a distance was no longer under the streetlight, nowhere to be seen.

"And what about my reward for finding it?" She held out her cheek, tapping it lightly with a perfectly manicured nail, clearly expecting a kiss from Billy.

He hesitated. "I was just about to—"

"You were just about to come with me, weren’t you?"

"What?"

"Oh my God, are you in pain?"

"I, well, yeah, I—" He took a deep breath, trying to gather his thoughts, trying to breathe through the stomach cramps. "I think I need a doctor," he finally said.

"Well, you’re in luck," X-3-19 chirped, completely oblivious to how serious the situation was. "Us girls always carry an emergency pharmacy in our bags." She reached into her black purse, pulled out a blister pack of pills, popped one out, and didn’t even offer it to him. In a blink, the pill was already on his tongue. She helpfully closed his jaw for him, patting his cheek and smiling kindly with those big blue eyes of hers. "You’ll have to swallow it yourself," she said.

He looked at her. Then gulped down the bitter pill. It scratched all the way down, feeling like it got stuck in his throat.

"Better now?"

"Not yet," he groaned.

"Oh, but you will be in no time. Come on, I’ll take you home."

Home, Billy thought.

If the whole thing weren’t such a complete mess, he might’ve burst out laughing right then and there.

At the entry points to New York’s most notorious side street, squads of corporate police stood guard, checking the passes of red-light visitors at random and patting down every single person for weapons or explosives. With checkpoints, officers on constant duty, and massive sandbags set up as barricades, the government was doing its best to prevent a fourth attack on Times Square. But Billy was sure a fourth was coming, and then a fifth and sixth after that. Terror always found a way—except into people’s hearts. Maybe they just had too many other problems to be afraid anymore.

Right by the checkpoint, officers were selling face masks. Billy had left his old one in the car, and the car was long gone, so he bought a new one from a uniformed cop for five bucks. Winter was plague season. Last year it had been dengue fever and West Nile virus, brought by migratory birds and swarms of tropical mosquitoes. This year, infected ticks spread the TBE virus, giving thousands of New Yorkers meningitis. Every year, a new epidemic—whether it was Zika, flu, coronaviruses, salmonella, or typhoid. At work, people placed bets on which exotic disease would make it here next. No one had expected the return of the plague from 2044 to 2048. The long-thought-extinct pathogen had slept for centuries in the world’s permafrost and glaciers, only to reemerge when global warming melted the ice.

Anyway, when it came to new diseases, people had grown used to it—the old horrors became the new normal—and no one cared anymore that hospitals were overflowing and people were dying in the streets like strays or alley cats. The generation after Billy’s didn’t even know anything different. He slipped the fresh, chemical-smelling mask over his face and only then did the police let him pass through the checkpoint.

Hookers stood shivering in the rain, their offers making it clear what "freedom" meant here. It was fleeting and expensive. Neon arches flashed the names of clubs and red-light bars above the crowd. Sex sells. There wasn’t any need for creativity anymore, and the brothels, which had once been theaters, had unimaginative names to match. A myriad of colorful laser beams crisscrossed in the steamy, rain-soaked air, and higher up in the sky, the logos of the world’s biggest brands lit up like new constellations in the urban jungle. Powerful searchlights on nearby rooftops projected the logos onto the clouds like massive, omnipotent guardians. As if these were the heroes sent from above that the chaos-ridden city so desperately needed. But the corporations were the opposite. They were the chaos itself. The grotesque tumors of a deadly disease called greed.

"If you’d stop moping for a second, maybe we could finally have some fun," the solar tech said, shouting over the noise and music of the strip. Billy had actually been enjoying the quiet inside his own head, tuning everything else out for a moment.

"Sorry, today’s just not my day," he said.

"Then let’s make it your day," X-3-19 replied in a carefree tone, like a girl without a worry in the world. "All you have to do is forget everything behind you."

He shot her a critical, almost cynical, glance from the side.

"Already done that," he said.

"Then you’ve already passed the hardest part. Now you just have to live in the moment. Be happy," she said with a soft yet firm voice, more like an order than friendly advice. Be happy. Be happy. Billy snorted. Like he didn’t want to be. Like it was that easy.

"Being happy is something almost no one in this world manages," he said.

"And what do you even know about the world?" she shot back. "The best things in life are simple and always there if you know where to look. Take me for example, I’m the perfect case. Simple and… available."

Music blared out of cheap speakers from the clubs on either side of them. In his left ear, he heard the monotonous beats of modern electronic music. In his right, hardcore rock. Towering holographic dancers swayed in front of the grimy façades of the clubs, making eye contact with passing men. Crowds of red-light visitors gathered at the entrances, some stood around, some argued, while others just stared down at their phones, too drunk to stand still but somehow still able to send cryptic texts to their hookups for the night.

"Did you know Thandros Corporation is the biggest cloud service provider in the world?" X-3-19 asked. "The largest server farms on the planet are owned by Thandros. All the major social media and streaming platforms use Thandros for data storage. Private photos, videos, contact info, messages—Thandros Corporation holds all of our data. Globally. They even provide servers for the government and the federal intelligence agencies to store their information. Tell me, could there be a more powerful weapon than owning all of humanity’s secrets?"

"I..." Billy had no answer for that.

"Thandros devours everything. From pharmaceutical companies to food giants, it swallows them whole. They’ve even taken over the duties of our useless government, privatizing the police. Thandros has become the ultimate control system. Whether that’s good or bad? All we can do is hope they really are the world-saving company they claim to be all over the media."

"Yeah, the company they claim to be," Billy said thoughtfully.