Election Day
That day – that I met up with Jess, in the wooden rococo dive bar, was a good day. My broken implant was stuck in Botanicals: everything green had become alive, filled with freshness and chlorophyll. Jess, I remembered, used to volunteer in the green house – back when the Uni quad smelled like pot, not blood and police boots. We had been arrested together. Now, the implant made the bar floor resemble astroturf, even though it wasn’t.
Jess’s father expunged her criminal record, then hired her. She dealt pharmaceuticals for pin money: high-grade proprietary signal-killers that could grant me days of blissful numbness and quiet.
First though – Jess.
“I’ve spent all morning upgrading my bot filters to keep out the other bots that are selling me subscriptions to help keep out fraudulent bots, who are also selling bot-blocking services, which are only available by subscription,” she said, “Tony, you are so lucky that felons don’t get election commercials – “
Come on, Jess. Ask me how things are going. I will lie, say that I am busy. You will apologize, and we would exchange cigar tins under the table. Mine, with a chonker of cash, hastily withdrawn from a secret offshore account (bills have the texture of palm fronds). Yours, with vials full of signal-killers, packed tightly. That day, the cover of mine was a cartoon banana wearing sunglasses.
“– which, I mean, this is not, like, an ugly bridesmaid dress, or my dad’s constant arguments,” Jess hesitated, “This time, it is really serious.”
“I believe you.” I didn’t.
“Anabelle Hart is missing.”
“Who?”
Jess froze, in the darkness.
“Anabelle Hart. Celebrity social worker?”
The chatter around us became, briefly, the rustling of trees, the dull thud of rain falling onto damp soil. Anabelle Hart, Jess explained, had been in Uni, a few years behind us. She was a charity super star. Mutual aid, she called it, though it mostly flowed from her, to everyone else. She was Jess’s childhood friend in – whatever, book club, volunteering, and now –
On my tongue, the taste of rosemary and maple. The implant whispered of the Redwoods, the disappearing jungle, the cracks of grass making their way into abandoned highways. Who wouldn’t choose signal killers over this?
“It’s a free clinic, that’s all,” Jess said, “The thing is, Ana – Anabelle – she still believes in everything that we talked about, you and Oli and I, back then – ” In Jess’s green eyes, the implant projects the texture of intricate bonsai trees, trimmed to perfection. “And, she was being followed, before, she said –”
Even her employees hadn’t heard from her. No communication, save for a series of incomprehensible, cryptic texts at the end. Anabelle was sick. Anabelle had owed money to some bad people. Anabelle was afraid –
“– the world is people and small favors to them can make a big difference – “
Small favors like the cigar tin full of illegal vials, sold at cost.
“You have sources,” Jess said, “From your activist days, and you can ask them, right?”
She meant prison, not activism, she just didn’t want to say it.
“Please, as a favor?”
I had expected the cigar box to be lighter than usual, as an incentive, or heavier as a bribe. But it weighed the same as always; every last vial was there. So, just a favor then, between friends.
In the fifties, ten years ago, you had to inject signal killers right in the top of your spinal cord. The blood-brain barrier, the piercing noise in your ears, the tell-tale scarring, like a failed hanging, up around the neck. Nowadays, the left arm suffices: no traces, for those who do it right. Still takes a subjective eternity: longer than closing a bar tab, shorter than catching the bus.
I owed Jess, so I went searching, in the outer districts, for the most part.
“– patched me up, clean, too fancy –” her hair still in braids, trying to convince her mother that she works in a shop.
“– interminable wait, useless –” splatters of grease escaping perfect chunks of gruel from his sidewalk deep-fryer.
“”– let me mainline pornonets in the waiting room, so –,” and, just before boarding the bus, a furtive look, “That clinic’s meds have got same defects as Caesar’s–”
Doctor Rea Lu ran an hourly motel, back then, surrounded in her office by anti-Riegean smoke. Lu got the syndrome from a government nerve agent. Her implant still worked. Her body, not often, and rarely well enough.
“Gimme a quarter of their budget,” she mused, “I’d do more good with a quarter of the money, than Haven & Hart – ”
Same pathos that led an esteemed surgeon to anti-government work. Doctor Lu was the only one who tried to fix me, back then. Now, we were censored by the same government virus: unable to discuss the pass without blinding pain. Unless we were on signal killers, of course.
“Money, and the right to practice medicine,” Rea dreamed, “Could do it underground, I guess –”
We’d have to rob a bank, too, probably. Still, lots of people had been to Haven & Hart. It was better than nothing.
And – Anabelle’s holograms were everywhere, on the net that is. Nobody had met her in person, but then, why would they? A woman like that.
When Pillbox and Hardhat knocked on my door, it was the turn of the evening. Burned out streetlights of the outer districts chirped helplessly in the dusk. The two muscle kids worked for Caesar, who I had known as Lexxxie, once. Their eyes were the color of fog, and their contraband paralytic stunners were richly enameled with childhood memories. My signal-killers were still at full strength, and the world was a palatably flat, unadulterated reality.
“When Caesar calls, you answer, Anton.”
Fifteen years back, Lexxxie had bribed a hacker to piggy-back on the original censorship virus. Nobody remembers the details of my uprising, and nobody remembers Caesar’s childhood name. Mentioning it causes a sharp, disabling signal tone, but it is an easy topic to avoid.
“Signal killers,” I tapped my neck, rough as a python’s skin.
“Yeah, but come with,” Hardhat bit into a sugar cloud candy from DMart, ”Want a bite?”
Hardhat’s favorite snack cost less than an infant’s shoe, and had no real-taste flavor. On signal killers, it was white, with beige veins.
“It’s orange!”
The candy tasted like empty sugar, and cottonmouth.
“Mangos, and strawberries! You’re missing out.”
Pillbox had voted yesterday. Eighteen years, she had waited, and now her turbo-bike belonged to a Registered Voter; said so on the card. Got it done early, in case she finally got arrested.
Caesar’s mansion is at the edge of town; marble columns and headless statues. Formerly a museum, filled with exhibits on the debutante balls of torturers’ children. Caesar acquired compounds cheaply, and didn’t always redecorate. They had a feel for –
“Grand, isn’t it?” With a functional implant, Pillbox could see color on the regal sigils, and claimed that some of them moved. The two of them dragged me to the gardener’s shed.
I remembered that I really didn’t want to die for Anabelle Hart.
“Tell Caesar that I’ll do it, whatever this is.”
Pillbox shoved me into a metal lawn chair and locked the door anyway.
“I wouldn’t bring Hardy here, if Caesar wanted you dead,” Pillbox said.
Hardhat rolled his eyes. “Oliver Haven is one of Caesar’s most valued customers. Maybe a tenth of the revenue, some of the months.”
Favor they were doing for a customer, that’s all, Pillbox explained, coldly and patiently.
“Caesar provides drugs to the charity clinic?”
I had gotten my signal-killers from Jess, who had gotten them from somewhere. Anabelle? That would make sense.
“Wouldn’t Haven want his partner found?”
“Trieste wants a quiet forty eight hours,” Hardhat said, “That’s all.”
He tried to pat my shoulder approvingly, then remembered our current, unfortunate circumstances. Instead, he said, “Then you are free.”
“Haven,” Pillbox reminded him, “Oliver Haven.”
“Whatever.”
I should have remembered. I should have asked. Oli Haven-Trieste was a classmate, a former friend. Committed communist champion, maximal Marxist, heir to the world’s largest trustfund; the resume was as clean and untarnished as the abstract ideal of the working class. Oliver Haven-Trieste had always hated his family, he said so, anyway.
“Just – tell me about Anabelle, while we wait,” I pleaded, “Did you kill her?”
“There’s nobody to kill,” Hardhart sighed, “Anabelle Hart’s not real. She’s just a sim.”
“Entire thing’s a rich kid’s experiment.”
“Dangerous time though, especially with Jessica Carmen Garnier-Ortegas poking around in it. She is clumsy, Anton.”
“Speaking of,” Pillbox added, “Who would you vote for, if you could?”
“Felons can’t vote,” I said.
One of Oli’s college experiments was a political study group. We met every day for weeks; read books that the university library wouldn’t dare to stock. Breathlessly, we shared rumors of minor successes – a bill passed abroad, foreign protests leading to foreign reform. Learned about historical victories; memorized songs in languages that our implants refused to translate; drank his father’s expensive gin.
“But – if you could?”
“I don’t follow the news anymore.”
“You should, though,” Hardhat said, “News can be fun. There is the screaming woman –”
Oli said that the government was fragile, bound by inertia. It would take a single, well-intentioned push to stop them. He told us that we were heroes; and we forgot that, for revolutionaries, the title only comes post-mortem. With his sparkling eyes, and chiseled collegiate shoulders, he was with us. He said. All the way.
“ – and that guy who punches puppets, he is fun too.”
“What happens to the clinic after the election?”
“Rich kid’s experiment ends.”
Oli seemed to know the future, sometimes. It made us trust him, even the wilder predictions, because he was right so often. For the first time in my life, I was more than just a token scholarship kid or a nerdy ochkarik or a charity case.
“Just tell me how,” I whined, “I’m stuck here anyway.”
The truth is, news circulates before the mass-market newscasters mold it. At Oliver’s family dinners, with porcelain plates heaping with real-taste food, he heard everything. He always knew how it would end. He had to have.
Pillbox sighed.
“Anabelle dies. Crime, disease, whatever, Haven shuts the clinics, new government –”
“– makes a speech,” Hardhat said, “New censorship laws. If we are lucky.”
Pillbox shrugged.
“Fake girl becomes a martyr, either way.”
Oli Trieste had learned from his first experiment. He had never graced the front lines again; and I had never seen the inside of a classroom, or a legal job, or anything else that does drug testing or requires a functional implant.
“Lexxie can’t possibly trust Oliver Trieste to protect them,” I said, and Pillbox pointed the stunner at me, as they both winced at the name.
“You teach them Latin on Tuesdays,” Hardhat said, “What do you think?”
Lexxxie has grown teeth, yes, but even sharks must swim in the ocean. Going up against the Trieste family is hardly a risk worth taking.
“Are you going to shoot me, or not?”
The blast of the paralytic latched on to the implant, sending freeze commands to all the muscles in my limbs. Do not move; hold. Unfortunately, for Pillbox, my implant had been off since that morning. That’s why Caesar couldn’t reach me. Hardhat should have remembered.
“Oli Trieste,” I said to nobody in particular, “I hate him so much, and I bet that Lexxxie does too.”
“Hey,” Hardhat winced at the name.
“We last saw each other in the fall, in ‘49,” I continued, “The leaves had just turned orange, and were starting to brown. The nights had been getting colder, as the temporary parliament, passed, illegally without quorum –”
Forbidden history. Pillbox winced, and fired, and missed. I wouldn’t remember any of this without the signal killers; I would certainly be unable to say it without suffering a stroke.
“Our uprising was all over the news. Camera drones replaced the migrating birds. Armed troops, sent in by the Prime Minister, black lines, like writing against the highlighter foliage. We joked that their visors fogged up, in the rain. Parliament’s popularity, dropping quickly. We had skipped the semifinals, but the professors changed the grading rubric, somehow all of us passed – ”
“It was early November and Oliver Haven-Trieste’s sweater cost half a year of my undergraduate’s stipend. On the rooftops, before the flocking cameras, giving up the microphone – to me – “
“Foreign agents,” Hardhard hissed, “You must have been –”
“Me? Foreign agent? Come on – “
I stood there, press drones circling me; I was the news; I was everywhere; looking at the paper with the list of demands (we did not trust the implants); I inhaled deep of crisp autumn air; I spoke shakingly, into the crowd –
“You’ve seen the videos, when you were children – ”
“– You’ve seen the clouds of gas rolling in; you’ve seen the armed black lines advance, unprovoked.”
“We had been singing the National anthem when the bullets started to fly.”
Their implants short-circuited, the kids fired their stunners at random. I fled, into the dark.
Crashed out at Rea’s motel and called Jess from the pile of sanitized pillows, on a heart-shaped bed. Signal killers had started to run out, the dregs of paralysis kicked in, the steady and quiet ceiling fan began to recreate the battles of the First Democracy. Under the table lamp, next to the jar of condoms, someone had slipped in a voting guide.
When Jess arrived, finally, her hair had been pinned back and her black jacket set off the crimson tie, embroidered with the Garnier-Ortegas emblem. She curled up in the fake-leather sling, like an overgrown child in an antique armchair. I told her everything, in halting whispers.
Hart and Haven, the drug trade, Rea. About Caesar, formerly L—, whose name only they and I can remember. Hardhat and Pillbox, eager to vote. Oli’s plan, or at least its outlines. Interspersed with historical facts: the three wives of the First President, and the boats capsizing at Quinteron. Paralyzed, and damaged, I struggled to filter out the implant’s whispers.
By the end of it, Jess uncharacteristically silent, stared straight ahead.
“I can assure you, Tony,” she said finally, “Anabelle is very, very real.”
“Because she supplied you?” On the ceiling, the elected parliament had been dissolved for the thirteenth, and nearly-final time, “Have you even met her in person?”
“Ana is not my supplier,” Jess said, “For six whole months, she was the love of my life.”
They had been friends for years, at first, before the secret affair. Anabelle liked privacy, in personal matters. Besides, Jess wanted nothing to do with Oliver Haven-Trieste, but she struggled to explain it. Implant censorship. Hart left her eventually; torn with the tension between the girlfriend and the business partner. Anabelle chose –
“The clinic helps people, Tony. I should never have gotten between them.”
“Trieste builds things just to watch them fall,” I said.
“If you say so.”
“He is going to shut it all down anyway, a few days from now. It was all a stunt.”
Jess was never giving up on Anabelle. Not like this, not over this.
“We should talk to him,” I said, “Tonight, before the elections are over.”
On the ceiling, the military stormed the legislative chambers. I got out the tin.
“Tony. You are developing a tolerance.”
“I really don’t care,” I said.
“You took them in the morning, remember?”
I remembered, but it wasn’t important.
“But,” Jess said, “I do care.”
The ceiling moved and the building whispered to me, of all the wars that we had fought and all the failures that we had elected and all the revolutions that have been broken and lost. Eventually, Rea sent me some mods; small and illegal one-liner scripts that made the dregs of the paralytic retreat forever.
“Oli still hangs out in the TriCorp headquarters,” Jess said, “Same as always, back from your internship days.”
For the two of us, Jess called a taxi downtown, past the open bars and the closed offices. Tall, stately, the retrofitted TriCorp building lit up, ostentatiously, with visible electronics, real-light numbers cascading like waterfalls upon its facade.
The doorman on duty could not refuse the daughter of the Ortegas consortium. Her bribe was small, and efficient. Waiting for the faux-historical elevator, we watched the grayscale letters and digits sliding around on the pale walls.
“Stock tickers. They would be green, if they go up,” Jess said, “Red for down. Everyone is holding. Everyone is waiting for election results.”
To me, they had become dates, years, statistics. Fifteen days of the siege of the capital. The Second Parliament’s founding. The violent death toll, and the post-war population doom. Eighty percent of the marriages during the Twelfth Parliament had ended in less than five years; only a fifth of those had been in divorce.
“I still love her,” Jess said, sullenly, “I guess. I shouldn’t have lied to you.”
“Lovers can be friends,” I said.
“But, Anabelle was one,” Jess said, “Not the other.”
Past the thirteenth floor, I tapped the button for the 18th and the 6th and then the 8th. They flashed, twice, and I double tapped the emergency stop and no alarm had sounded. I had set this up, during my internship here. In rudimentary German, I began to intone –
“The spectre is haunting the streets –”
Jess snickered. The doors hissed open to a dark corridor, wallpapered with old posters and newer legislative affiches. Foreign prints that I couldn’t read, without sliding too far into the implant’s history notes. I didn’t even try.
“Brings back memories,” Jess said neutrally.
“You’d think that they would change the password.”
“I wouldn’t think that.”
We walked down, towards the room at the end of the hallway, filled with movement and noise.
Blinding arrays of real, physical monitors, and harsh lighting to make up for the lack of windows. And in the center, Oliver Jarvis Haven-Trieste, holding court, staring at the enormous display of poll numbers, prophesying the arc of history. His clothing had changed with the fashions, but his explosive charisma remained.
I had imagined this day for fifteen years. I had seen his sneer and indignation; I dreamt of punching, fracturing his perfect grin into billions of shards. I never thought through the details of it.. Even in my nightmares, he was a symbol of a long-term betrayal.
Jess and I stood there, long enough for the shadows to flicker at the edges of my vision. The building, rewinding its lush marble back to its founding, the post-Quinteron reconstruction. Then, going forward in time again, through the retrofit project in the forties. I was there, I thought, though the implant ignored this.
“Wait, have we met?” a pretty youth said, “Do you want coffee? I’m –”
“Anton,” I said in return.
Oli lit up, like celebration fireworks on Parliament day. His smile warmly embraced his eyes; the explosion of true longing rang in his voice. Later, I would realize that, perhaps, he meant every syllable.
“Jess, Tony!” he exclaimed, “It has been so long. Too long.”
“It absolutely has not,” Jess said.
I waved back. Locked in his gaze, we were the center of the entire world, the second most important people to ever have lived.
“Welcome home,” Oliver said.
The monitors burned with the saturated colors of autumnal leaves. We haven’t seen each other since ‘49, I thought, when a foreign plot to destabilize the country culminated in a student uprising. It fell apart peacefully, with no bloodshed. (Sometimes, the implant lies.)
“I want my girlfriend back,” Jess said.
“Irene? Claudia?”
“No. Don’t be like that, Oliver Jarvis.”
“Jessica-Carmen. I can’t possibly keep track of –”
“This isn’t about your memory loss, Oli –”
“Well, excuse me for caring about the country instead of –”
“Instead of what? True love –”
“Maybe, we should talk in private,” I suggested.
“There are no secrets between comrades,” Oliver snapped.
“You sent a crime boss after me –”
Surrounded by onlookers, Oli Haven flickered his eyes, his implant burning overtime.
“You will agree with me, when you understand,” he said, “You always have, remember?”
“We will disagree on this, Oliver.”
“We have a past,” he said, “We are friends. Aren’t we?”
His eyes were glassy, empty. Whatever he remembered, he couldn’t say; but – mainlining the implant to keep up with political games, how much could he really remember?
Oliver had never reached out to me, not after everything.
The second son of the Triest family. The country’s self-appointed savior. So much on his shoulders.
He and Jess had never discussed the events of ‘49. She was too scared to ask. Then, the censorship virus kicked in. Oliver Trieste could not be seen using. Those drugs were illegal. It would jeopardize everything.
I thought about tearing off my shirt, showcasing the ridges along my neck. Showing the damage that Oli wouldn’t remember or understand.
“If we talk in private, Anton will help you change the password,” Jess said
Perhaps, I was not the only one that he was willing to sacrifice. Perhaps, even then.
“Yeah,” I told them, “I am here to help with that.”
Oli Haven-Trieste headquartered himself in a storage closet, between a metal school desk and a vestigial maintenance window. I watched the city through its bars; an ocean of lights, the mountains of darkness; saw through time to its founding next to a river; its growth through fires and conquest.
“Hart and Haven,” Oliver Trieste sighed.
“Tony’s friends are convinced that Ana doesn’t exist,” Jess said, “Why?”
I was no longer sure, I reflected, that Pillbox and I were friends. Maybe Hardhat would some day forgive me.
“Because running her simulation is hard,” Oli said, “The rumors started spreading after two months.”
“What happened,” Jess asked.
“Anabelle started graduate school. In Milan.”
“Call her. Please – I mean, now.”
Oli dialed a number, then texted and then dialed again and then typed more frantically. Ana’s face appeared on his screen. She had changed, she looked simpler, she cut her hair. Jess broke out into delighted sobs – and then, politely, they talked.
“Can’t believe you are doing this,” Anabelle Hart said.
Hart was glad to be done; plea deal and a packet of cash and perpetual exile, courtesy of the Garnier-Ortegas Consortium.
Jess was unhappy to hear about her father’s meddling.
Anabelle had taken Emille Garnier’s money. Half to the clinic. Half to her, to stay away from his daughter. Enough to leave the country, forever.
Oliver Haven-Trieste was fomenting a revolution, not managing her charity work.
Jess asked if the bribe was why Anabelle dumped her.
“It wasn’t,” Ana said, but she was rather flippant about it.
Oliver Haven-Trieste had no use for a co-opted charity.
Anabelle had a new, better life; she had no regrets at all.
Oli was going to use the money to try to save the country from itself, again.
“I really did love you, you know,” Jessica said indignantly.
Ana wasn’t sure what Oli would do exactly, but it was probably dumb.
Jess was also curious, in a really belligerent way.
Outside, a dozen police drones swarmed onto downtown like the pigeons on corpses, then scattered again. Not unlike platinum coins, falling from the hand of the Roman ambassador in the ‘09 coup.
“Honestly, talking to you now,” Oliver confessed, “I don’t really remember. Tony, everything jumbles together when I look at you.”
“We have been through some bad ideas,” I said.
“Like what?”
For years, I imagined strangling Oliver with an expensive tie that I was sure he must have owned. I knew that I wouldn’t do it.
“They were your devious plans,” I said, “You owe me, Trieste.”
“Feels like it,” Oliver said, “It is not just for the crime boss, is it?”
Anabelle hung up on us.
“I forget things, sometimes,” Oliver confessed, “I feel like I have done so much, before, and it hadn’t worked, exactly, but we must hold true to our values, shouldn’t we?”
Neck pressure reminded him of gallows, Oliver told me, once. He never wore ties, if he could help it.
“Yes,” I said, “I think that’s probably true.”
“There was something important – ?”
That famous sketch of the First Democracy, hanging in the National Gallery; the symbol of the revolution, eating its children.
“Half the money,” Jess said, “Then, we leave. Your secret’s safe.”
“I’m done with the clinic,” Oliver said.
“That’s fine.”
“And – we are done with Anabelle Hart.”
We all pretended that the decision was ours.
He sent the money to my offshore account. Rea would figure this out, I thought. We would have almost as much cashflow as Caesar, though less than a percent of Jess’s trust fund.
Jess changed his entry key to the opening of the Third Constitution, the call to arms and to victory. And then – we left. On the way down, the gray elevator played the muzak version of “Quinteron, Remembered”.
“Take a taxi,” Jess suggested, “You can afford it.”
As we were leaving, reds and greens lit up the Trieste atrium. Like neon shades of a poisonous jungle, blood upon military camouflage. The stock market had heard the news.
“He actually won!” the doorman broke his practiced reticence, “Can you believe it?”
On the sidewalk, a rumpled businessman threw up in the wine bar gutter; a gaggle of youths ran, laughing, into the neon-lit D-Mart. Motorcyclists maneuvered through taxis, rushing the intersection. I stepped into the historical subway station, built 98 years ago, by the Garnier-Haven Consortium. The midnight train was coming. Outside, the first drops of rain started to fall.
Elim Geary (they/he) is deeply in love with friendship, electricity, motorcycles, the mutability of history, trans biohacking, bridled optimism and going forward, forever. They live in San Francisco with a void-dark cat. This is their first publication. Elim can be found on BlueSky & Instagram as @gothraccoon.