The Future Knows What the Past Holds

Always the criticized member of her tribe, Biker Girl endeavors to put every vesco who ever shaded in their place. On a quest from Old Man, an elder member of the tribe, she just might find something in the Blacked-Out City to bring back to her people and pull them together.

I had never been lost before. You can’t be lost if you don’t have anywhere to go.

Nobody went into the Blacked-Out. When the laser gates and all the tronics shut off, everyone knew it was cursed. The OG peeps had ghosted the place. Who knew what remained behind the concrete walls so high up in their boojee luxes? Maybe Old Man did. He was a kid when he lived in them, or so he said. Swore it was all facts, no cap. He just couldn’t ring-a-ding it up on his thinker. Made everyone jook.

How do you forget where you came from?

“Go to the Mall Center. Find the man who calls himself Master Server,” he’d told me. “Master Server used to put the old shows on the screens. He will have the viddies to bring the tribe together again. They’ll even stop shading you.”

“Master Server is dead. He was around when you were a kid.”But telling him that made him salty-malty.

“Master Server can’t die. My Mam told me so.” And because he was Old Man, the tribe listened, even when he picked me to go. O how that stirred them.

“Biker Girl never does her jobs.”

“Biker Girl’d rather go smashing and dashing.”

“Can’t count on Biker Girl, ‘cuz Biker Girl can’t count.”

Always cappin and shading me, those vescos. But not Old Man. If this was some trick to do me in, he wouldn’t have let me take my crocket (crotch rocket).

When we got inside the city, me and my bike followed Old Man’s words. “Go past the stashoon. The Mall Center had this viddie store. My Mam told me that Master Server put the viddies on these hollow cards somewhere.”

The tribe trusted Old Man, but we weren’t sure he was all right in the thinker. Nobody knew how a card could be hollow, or how it stored a viddie. And when we asked, all Old Man said was “they use data, of course.”

But I guess his Mam never told him what “data” was because he didn’t know.

I don’t know how he thought I could find those old viddies when he didn’t even know himself. That being just how it was, there was no choice but to give a little rev to my bike and push on quicker.

She grumbled like a mad bitch, my pretty little crocket. Bzrkrzrkrzrk. Yeah, same. The Blacked-Out gave the hella spooks, not like the hill howling doggos or the Motor Boys who’d smash you if you turned your back to ‘em. No, the Blacked-Out made you sick just standing near it. The air hits different and then you can’t breathe. Luxes were so tall they blocked out the sun. Old Man said there used to be lights up and down the luxes. Now it was just Blacked-Out.

“Looks for a place with no luxes,” was Old Man’s directions. “A big, daffy circle with lots of space for shops and parking lots, that’s the Mall Center.”

Of course Old Man didn’t have the real whereabouts for such a place, but he said he was sure I couldn’t miss it. Luckily, there were plenty of places to see the Blacked-Out, all I had to do was look up and find the tallest lux.

Not hard. The old peeps had paid lots for their lux to look hella boojee and tell everyone they had guap. Locked doors and shut windows were nothing to me and my crocket, and the peeps who lived here had paid more for boojee shiny glass on their doors than they did for something sturdy.

Then I had set aside my pretty crocket, at least for a moment. She would not go up the stairs, and the autolevs were no good. So I went up step-by-step, floor by floor, though the damn luxes were so tall that many many many more times than once I stopped to rest, for the air inside was like the outside: stale, dusty, and hard to breathe. There were no windows by the stairs so to get a sense of height I stepped out into the hallways of doors that filled every floor of the lux. Old Man called them apartments. So many doors were locked from when the peeps must’ve escaped, probably thinking they’d keep their stuff safe for when they came back. I shuddered to imagine living in them, those little boxes and their cheugy tronics that gave me the hella spooks, and was thankful that the hallways had windows of their own. Higher and higher I went, and further and further I could see.

I know I said the lux was the tallest, but I didn’t know the whole of it until I saw that faded number printed on the last door on the stairs: 162. I would have felt hella daffy about climbing the whole thing if my legs hadn’t been limper than after a night-long smash and dash, but I also didn’t feel like waiting longer to find that hollow card. Without working tronics the air was cold, and so high up it wasn’t just stale and dusty, but also so wispy thin I thought I was breathing nothing. When I saw that big green 162 I gave the door an eager pull, excited to be finished. But the door did not move.

This I thought was weird. The locks on the doors were tronic, but they couldn’t have been working because the Blacked-Out was cursed. It had no power. Now, I thought to myself that the floor below was just as good as the top, and all I needed was to see the city for myself and I could find the Mall Center, but the mystery made my thinker jook.

If there was power enough to keep a cheugy tronic door alive, maybe not all the Blacked-Out was cursed. I scurried to the floor below and tried the door. It opened, and I could step inside the lux. Easy, yeah? Enough to make me ded and weak. I thought I’d take a looky-look at the Blacked-Out first and then sus out why the tronic lock was still working, but I couldn’t even do that. The sun was low but I could still see everything, all the way to the dead laser gates and beyond, and yet there was no flat circle that could have been the Mall Center. There was nothing but the dark tops of the other buildings.

It started to occur to me then that I really had to find where that power was coming from, because of something Old Man said, something stuck at the back of my thinker that I had forgotten because I didn’t think it was real.

Master Server can’t die. If he had the viddies which Old Man watched on a tronic screen, he must have had some tronics still working. But this place wasn’t the Mall Center, at least it wasn’t how Old Man ring-a-dinged it. The Mall Center was this big daffy circle with buildings that were wider than they were tall. But then again, how good was Old Man’s thinker, anyway?

Maybe Master Server was here all along, in the tallest boojee lux. If I couldn’t die, that’s where I’d want to live. But if I wanted to find out for sure I had to find the autolev shaft.

Naturally, the tronic switches on the autolev were just as cursed up top as down below, and I couldn’t call the lev. But thick, ropey wires still ran down the side of the shaft, waiting for the curse to lift and for power to flow through them again. I grabbed one and gave a jerk, pulling myself up slowly to the next floor. It didn’t look any different at first, the dusty halls were just as cheugy as the rest, with locked apartment doors and ghosted peeps. No, I couldn’t see any sign of working tronics. But I could hear them, a hella loud brzz brzz. I followed it to an apartment just down the hall from the staircase where a wire ran out from its door and to the tronic lock. I could see the faint glow of some spooky blue light through the cracks.

If I were some kind of daffy adventuring rider I would have rushed inside, but that light had hella spooks I tell ya. Not bright like some shining light, but dim and flickering. But turning back meant listening to the viscose back home shading me for failing again and letting Old Man down. I could hear it already, and so completely did I hate it that I kicked open the door.

O how I wish I could say more of what I saw, but no place outside the cities had that kind of tronics and my thinker hurt just looking at it.

There in the middle of the apartment was a big glass tube filled with what had the look of water, though from the slow-moving bubbles inside I could tell it was something thicker. The blue was from the tronic lights inside and out, all blinky blinky like, each connected to some small tronic screen that read out numbers and letters I couldn’t understand. And inside, O inside! It was the most spook of all. Inside was a man, all pale-skinned like a ghost with a metal cap on his head. It covered his whole face, except the eyes and some tubes running into his nozy and mouth.

Was this what laid in waiting behind every locked door? Were all the luxes filled with empty glass tubes, waiting for their old peeps to come back and fill them? Even worse, were there more peeps like him, peeps who never ghosted the luxes?

Above it all this power wire, like the one in the autolev shaft, that ran down the side of the tube and then out the window, stretching back up again. I did not know how these city peeps made such daffy tronics, and I did not know how they used them either, but everyone knew the curse had made the Blacked-Out when it stopped the power running through all the luxes. So my thinker got real jook: if the Blacked-Out had made all the tronic locks broken and all the doors open, then surely Pale Man’s tube would open just the same if it had no power, and I could ask him if he was Master Server or whether he knew how to find him.

The blue light turned red the moment I pulled the plug, and I am ashamed to say I did scream a whole hella lot when the loud wop wop siren noise started coming from the tube. The blue lights turned red and the fluid emptied into pipes that ran into the walls. Then I got hella spooks when a lady’s voice started speaking from nowhere.

“Low power detected. Emergency venting initiated. Please remain calm while your malfunction is reported.”

I was so shook I didn’t even see Pale Man fall out, his arms and legs looking thinner than thin. The vesco could’ve fooled me into thinking he was dead until he started gasping and retching like a doggo that ate too much.

“What?” was his first word, before he rolled his glassy eyes at me. “Who are you?” He looked down at my hands, still holding the wires, and quickly gave a shout. “Hey, put that back! Get me back in my vitapod!” He retched more and squirmed on the floor, but his thin legs wouldn’t stand him up.

“You sick or something?” I asked him.

And that got him real salty-malty, because the peep started clapping back and dripping spit from the tube in his mouth. “I already had my pod retrofitted, I didn’t ask for you. Who’s your supervisor, huh? I swear, when I tell them you tampered with my pod, you’ll never work again, you hear me? Now put me back!”

Now he was being a real pita and I didn’t like his fancy boojee talk, so I told him exactly that. “I don’t like your fancy boojee talk, so you better answer me real quick. I’m looking for a man named Master Server, is that you?”

“Master… what the fuck are you talking about? That’s not a real person’s name.”

“Old Man says he is, and he used to live here like you. He has a hollow card with viddies that Old Man says will fix my tribe, so you better start talking.”

His face turned a shade more pale, which I didn’t think was possible. He had the look of snow. “Oh fuck. Oh shit! You’re one of those sick fucks from outside, aren’t you? Look, I don’t know what you want, but whatever treasure you think we have, it’s not worth it.”

And then I lost my chill and gripped Pale Man tight in his tronic metal helmet, yanking and pulling the wires attached like hairs. I was real salty then, real salty because I had told him what I wanted.

“Hollow cards!” I yawped. “Master Server has hollow cards with viddies in them!”

“Damn your stupid tribal dialect!” He spat the tube out of his mouth. “I don’t know what a viddie is. And I don’t think you know what a hollow card is. For starters, it’s called a holocard, you dumb animal. Get it? Holocard!”

“Oh,” I sucked that cold, thin air through my teeth, “oh I see you now, no different from my own vescos then? Cappin at me, shading me, calling me some dumb animal. Hollow card, holocard, what’s the difference then if you’re so clever?”

“A holocard stores data perfectly. Documents, applications, anything you want, it can store that information for hundreds of years.”

“And viddies?”

The man scowled. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Viddies!” I pointed at my eyes. “You look at them on your big boojee screens. How can you not know? Even Old Man calls them viddies.”

“Do you mean videos? You came all this way for videos?” Pale Man shook his head. “For fuck’s sake. I don’t know who this ‘Old Man’ is to you, but he’s probably traumatized. Master Server isn’t a person, it’s what the city stores its data on. A master server, like a massive holocard.”

Now that made me jook and thinking about what else Old Man could have forgotten. “Then how do you get to this server?”

Pale Man pointed a weak finger at his tube. “Put me back in. I’ll download whatever files you want and you can take your damn ‘hollow card’ back to your tribe. Just leave me alone.”

“Old Man wanted a bunch of viddies, something called a series with many many of them all together. How will you know which ones to give?”

Pale Man sighed and I did not like his tone, but he pointed again, now to a screen on his tube, before his hand fell down to the floor. “I know you don’t know what virtual reality is, but you’ll see what I see on that screen. Just tell me what you want and I’ll download it onto a holocard. I have plenty of spares.”

I did not know how Pale Man would be seeing anything in that tube, but I did as he said and stuffed his body into the tube, turning all its lights on just by plugging it. There was a button by the screen Pale Man had said to use and I pressed that too, bringing up nothing but a grey screen at first before images of grassy fields and thick clusters of trees started to play, until it stopped changing and I saw a bright sunny city full of peeps on the street.

I was jook immediately. “Where is this?” I wanted to know.

“Minerva Crystal,” said Pale Man’s voice through the tube, same as the lady’s voice before. “That’s the name of the server my avatar’s on. But that’s not important. Here, let me bring up the search engine.”

And then I saw a hand come up, touching the air and creating a floating screen out of nothing. I gasped and awed but by now I had become numb to amazement, accepting that I could not know what kind of daffy tronics this was anymore. Servers stored data, he said, but he also said he was on a server, even if I could see him there inside the pod. It was all too much.

“Don’t you have to go to the Mall Center?”

“You’re joking.”

“Joking? Nuh-uh, I’m no capping vesco. Old Man said he’d visit the Mall Center with his Mam and get My Little Pony viddies from the Master Server.”

“Virtual Dissociation,” the screen wobbled as if Pale Man had nodded, but he made no movement in his pod. “Your Old Man can’t tell the difference between his real and virtual memories. No wonder he gets along with your tribe.”

“Don’t shade me,” I punched the glass tube. “I’ll unplug you if you do.”

“Fine. I don’t even know what ‘shading’ is, but I don’t care. I’ll assume your tribe has an old TV to watch videos. If not, just take any old computer lying around the city, they all have holocard ports. But whatever you do, don’t ever come back to my apartment. You’ll be facing security drones if you do.”

“I warned you not to shade me, Pale Man. Just do what you need to, and I won’t have to come back to your whacked-out boojee lux.”

“My name’s not— whatever. What video series am I downloading?”

I paused for a moment, trying to ring-a-ding it up on my thinker. “My Little Pony,” I told him when I was sure, “Friendship is Magic.”