Chasing Stars: Chapter 1

  An orange glow lit his face in the dimly lit bar as he pulled on the joint.  It had a citrus note to it.

  “What is this again?” Markus croaked as he held in the smoke.

  “Does it matter?”

  Markus flashed a mischievous grin before exhaling and taking another drag.

  “Super lemon haze, it’s on the uppers side,” Pardeep explained as Markus passed the joint back to him.  “It helps feel less sluggish when getting a good cross fade going.”

  “By the way,” Pardeep seemed to exclaim out of nowhere after taking a drag, “good Christ did you see what Ana was wearing tonight?”.  The mid-forties man’s tightly buzzed hair had balding corners at the corners of his forehead, but his brown skin otherwise obscured his lifetime of drug taking.  He wasn’t an addict, more of a connoisseur.  At least that’s what he’d claimed.  “I started humping the cutting board whenever she came to the pass through.   Fuck man, she bent over to grab a ketchup and you could see right down her shirt it was amazing!  I think I saw God…”

  Markus just laughed.  He’d noticed of course, but wouldn’t make a comment like that about her, at least not outside the privacy of his own head.  That didn’t stop him from being amused at the boorishness of his coworkers.  He enjoyed the simplicity of hanging out with them.  He didn’t feel like he had to censor himself or worry about how he was being perceived or judged.  He found their forthrightness relaxing; there was no pretense, no airs, no duplicity.   With so many other people he found he wasted a so much energy trying to interpret their meanings and intentions.

  Pardeep for example was pretty open about the fact that as much as working here helped provide for his family, he worked here to have time away from them.  He never really planned on having kids, but once he and his wife had accidentally had their first, there seemed little reason not to follow on and have the second.  Now he was here, and this was his life.  Markus figured that like most of the others who worked in the industry he’d be here forever, whether this or some other restaurant.  Pardeep was also pretty open about how horny he was for most of the wait staff, the articulation of which surely amused Markus, but as far as Markus was aware, the man had always been faithful to ‘his horrible wife’ as he affectionately put it.

  They had recently gotten off the evening shift in the kitchen of the Cheshire Cat Lounge, a drug bar in the basement of a mixed use downtown Vancouver high rise.   When all drugs became decriminalized, and then later legal to sell but not advertise, these kinds of places popped up pretty quickly.  This particular establishment was rather classy as far as these kinds of places went.   It had a striped purple and mauve colour scheme to match its name, a variety of gaming pods, sensory deprivation tanks, and a general bar area with good smoke extractors.  On the walls were images to appeal to trippers, bizarre visuals on screens, and odd idiosyncratic items to muse over.  The place was as much about providing a fun place to be high as it was about selling you the means to get there.

  Despite all working here, none of them necessarily had to work in the strictest sense.   The United Nation’s global baseline benefit provided them all with enough for modest survival, but it was limited to only that.  It was indexed to wherever you lived and what things costed around you, so the lifestyle it afforded you was somewhat universal wherever you lived.  If you wanted to support an expensive hobby like a   drug habit, or wanted some of the finer things in life, or really if you wanted to have any kind of fun that cost you money, you had to work.  The other angle though was the absence of a minimum wage.  Since you got the baseline anyways, work didn’t tend to pay much, but it was all extra anyways.

  The baseline didn’t come about because of any sort of inherently generous human spirit.   Once androids and simulants became economical enough, they replaced pretty much all human manual and low skilled labour.  After this there were simply not enough jobs to go around.  Riots and unrest became more and more violent and widespread until the baseline was instituted as a solution.  Rich people were still able to continue to get richer of course, but they were compelled to pay taxes on the profits their robots made them to subsidize the baseline.    

  Androids and simulants were already creeping into the more skilled areas, but the closer you got to the centres of power where decisions made dictated how the world turned, artificial minds were generally excluded.  It was more out of arrogance than any kind of fear or suspicion of the machines.  The masters of the universe had difficulty imagining something could be smarter than them, whatever that meant.  The question of how to define and measure intelligence hadn’t gotten any easier since humans had started creating new kinds of intelligence.

  Some cults had already sprouted up based on the premise that we should be worshiping the machines.  They believed it was their purpose as human followers to help usher in machines capable of improving themselves.  True judgement according to them would come when our creations became our betters, and better able than us to judge the merits of our continued existence.   Markus figured it was inevitable we’d eventually get there anyways so why rush it.

  It had been a pretty typical night at The Cheshire Cat all things considered.   They’d had a pretty busy dinner rush, but nothing especially out of the ordinary happened outside of the normal frustrations of miscommunicated orders, finicky customers, and over or under cooked steaks.

  “Thinking about asking her out man, I’m pretty sure she’s been flirting back lately!”   Exclaimed Willis, a very large and overweight man who was surprisingly hard to pin down.  Whatever he said, it was difficult to ever know for sure if it was true or bullshit.  As many times as you’d think something couldn’t possibly be true (like that he was a paratrooper in the Peacekeepers) it would turn out to be true, and when you’d think it was probably true because there’d be no reason to make it up (like taking a Thai sex worker to Hawaii for Christmas) it would turn out to be a lie.   Sometimes you thought he had a heart of gold, but other times he seemed like he might be the guy with bodies in his freezer.  The latter impression was aided by his being quite physically intimidating and his occasional flash of unexpected rage when a server messed up an order or worse, errantly claimed it was his mistake.

  “You’re fucking high, bud…” Markus countered , amused but shaking his head.

  “I’m serious!” Willis exclaimed, wiping out the bead of grime which had again accumulated in the fold where the bottom of his head met the top of his chest.

  “So am I!” Markus laughed.  He drank the last half of his beer and then offered: “Go on then, go ask her out.  Do it before any of the rest of these chuds do,” Markus continued, gesturing to the rest of the cooks at the table.   “They’ve all been circling her since she broke up with her boyfriend.  Take your shot man, absolutely!  But how certain are you really that she’ll say yes? Because if you go ask her right now?   I’ll bet you this month’s basic she’ll say no; what do you say to that?”

  The other boys hooted at the challenge.  Markus didn’t expect the man to actually take him up on the bet, it was after all a lot of money for people like them.  Neither could he really afford to lose a whole month’s basic.  Markus had clearly underestimated either the man’s estimation of his chances, or the irrepressible lure of double his basic , or both.

  “Didn’t you two used to date?” Chan asked.  Chan was the youngest and most naive of them.  He was twenty or so, and working part time to afford nicer lodging that were provided while in university.  Markus knew that unlike the rest of them, he wouldn’t be here forever.   He’d seen several kids like him do their time in a place like this and then never be seen again.  He was a tall skinny Chinese kid with short black wiry hair.   His first name was something hard for the anglos to pronounce so they all just called him by his last name.  He didn’t seem to mind, but probably wouldn’t have protested if he did.

  “Yeah, a long time ago, but that’s how I know she’d never debase herself by going with a guy like Willis,” he laughed.  A flash of rage across the eyes and Markus worried for a moment that he’d overstepped.

  “You’re on,” Willis declared with unearned confidence as he took a shot and then compulsively slammed the tiny glass down on the table three times.  “You’re on, and you better be good for it.”  He said pointing to the others as he left, “You’re all witnesses!”

  “Come on Willis, no!” Markus tried to call him back with a laugh.  He didn’t want his friend to get hurt, and didn’t want the inevitable blowback from the humiliation.  Willis only turned around to give him the finger and to mime making it rain before turning back to his objective.  “Oh my God she’s going to rip his face off!” Markus exclaimed to the others.  “I can’t take the poor guy’s money after that!”

  “Hey, he’d sure as shit take yours in a heartbeat man,” Pardeep offered before swallowing the rest of his drink, “and you know it.”

  Markus acknowledged this truth with a shrug.  They watched as Willis approached and started talking to her.  They couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the fact that it seemed to be going well made Markus feel sick to his stomach.   He couldn’t lose this month’s basic.   His brother would hill him.  He’d only made the bet out of a certainty the guy wouldn’t even go for it.  But even if he did Markus was certain he'd get shot down!  Markus didn’t want to take the poor guy’s money, he’d offered the bet as more of a joke.  His other friend was absolutely correct though, Willis would definitely demand payment from him if given the opportunity.

  It was all so incredibly silly anyways.  People didn’t just ‘ask out’ other people in the restaurant industry.  You got together by getting drunk and hooking up while barely coherent, and you saw where things went from there as God intended.

  The table stifled an eruption of cheers as their boy hugged the woman and made faces at them behind her back.  He beamed as he returned to the table with a big shit eating grin on his face.  “Boom bitch.  Proper movie date Tuesday night.  How ‘bout that hunh?”

  “You’re an asshole…” Markus teased as he picked up his scroll off the table and pulled it apart to transfer him the funds.  

  “Yeah, and you’re broke!” Willis winked at him as he lifted his glass.

  “What did you do, offer to split the money with her if she played along.”

  “Ahh, but a gentleman never tells,” he said with a wink.

  “Sure, so why can’t you tell me?” Markus asked and the boys laughed.  

  They were fun.

   

***   ***    ***

   

  Markus woke up the next day after ten in the morning on a couch in the back area of the bar.   It was for people tripping too hard who needed a quiet place to lie down.  Their servers were pretty good though, so this didn’t happen very often.   As a result, the owner didn’t mind if the staff crashed there every once in a while, so long as they vacated if a real patron needed the space.

  Looking way past the ceiling above him, he rubbed the stubble of his beard which was just starting to have the odd white hair mixed in to the red here and there.   He was not looking forward to what he needed to do next; he hated having to go to his brother for money.  He was certainly entitled to it, but he was sensitive about his brother thinking him a loser, and he hated having to do anything which supported this opinion.

  Ana came in and noticed that he was awake.  “You lived.”  She seemed neither relieved nor surprised.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” he grumbled.  

  She gave him a look which said ‘where did that come from?’.

  “Sorry…”

  She sighed as she turned around to continue looking for whatever she’d come into the back for on the shelves.  “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

  Ana was an interesting case.  They’d both started working here some ten years ago, but she was ten years younger than him.  They’d dated pretty soon after but it didn’t go anywhere.  It was a mark of frustration when he reflected on it, because at the time it felt like maybe it could have.

  At the time she was struggling to get into university.  It was free, but this made it extremely competitive to get into.   Despite her best efforts her high school grades were little better than middling, and when they’d dated she was struggling through upgrading courses in an attempt to scrape her way in, but it never went anywhere.  She was left just one of countless others who had the drive and will, but was unfortunate enough to lack the top tier natural ability one needed to propel themselves into the upper echelons. 

  It was backwards for Markus.  His brightness and natural talents had gotten him through high school and university with little effort, but his lack of ambition and ever-changing interests prevented him from putting those credentials to any meaningful use.  On the one hand, while difficult to get into university there were so many people that may had such credentials, and merely having them didn’t get you very far.  You needed that singular combination of drive, ambition, and passion to tunnel your way through.  Markus could never stay interested in any one thing long enough to get very far at anything.   It was an old story; what does one do when one can do anything?  Too often, nothing.

  And here Markus was, doing precisely that.  Working at a drug den, wasting a month’s pay on stupid bets.  Dead end job, no prospects, no real relationships.   It became more depressing the more he thought about it.

  “Willis?   Really?” he asked her as he sat up.

  She found the large parcel of napkins she was looking for and turned around once she’d pulled them down.  Her long sandy blond hair framed the mischievous smile on her round face.

  In response to the look, he asked: “So what, splitting the money with him?”

  “Money?” she asked with seemingly genuine innocence.  “No, he just told me it would piss you off if I agreed to go on a date with him.  It was a compelling pitch.  He offered a fun evening with no expectation of anything more so I agreed.”

  “Just to bug me.”

  “Seems to have worked,” she observed.

  “A little, yeah.”

  “Good,” she said with satisfaction.  “Always happy to take a mighty Bowland down a peg,” she derided as she turned and left.

  Markus shook his head at her as he brought his weary body to its feet.  He’d felt old since he was young.  After standing up and stretching out all of the various pops and creaks in the various joints throughout his relatively lean body, he made his way out through to the front and sat down at the bar. 

  “What can I get you?” Ana asked as though their previous conversation hadn’t happened.

  “A little harsh, don’t you think?” he asked.

  “So… coffee?” she asked, conspicuously side stepping the question.  There was after all little left to say about it.

  Markus signed and scratched his head.  He noticed little dried skin flakes falling down so he stopped.  “Yes please, and the two-egg breakfast with sausage and sourdough.”   She nodded as she thought his order to the red light on top of the main bar terminal.  It flashed green for a moment to show it had received the order.

  She was going to leave again but stopped short.  “Markus-” she began to say but paused for a heavy sigh.  “I hate to see you still here.”

  Markus looked at her with some confusion, but he figured he probably knew what she meant.

  “I’m… I’m stuck here.  All of the rest of us are.  Well maybe not Chan, but he’s just passing through.  The rest of us lifers, it’s… it’s an insult to us that you’re still here.   You have options.  You could be more, but you’re just… what, lazy?”

  Markus nervously looked around to see if they could be overheard by any of the other staff working this morning.

  Ana rolled her eyes.  “You swore me to secrecy and I agreed.  I won’t renege on that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But do you get how I feel?  Why I feel the way I do?  Do you get why every day we still work together here I get a little more dead inside and hate you a little more for still being here with us?”

  “Yes,” he offered apologetically.  She was frustrated, angry.  He had no other move than to just let her be so.  He realized listening to her talk that he probably couldn’t work here any longer.   The same thing happened at his last job.   Frighteningly exactly the same, actually.  He dated someone early on who aspired, this time while he was in school himself.  She bombed out and he just sputtered out afterwards.  Same story, she got ever more frustrated at him wasting the potential to be and have everything which she fought so hard for and lost.  In the end she failed to keep his secret, word got out about who he really was, and the resentment spread like a cancer.  He realized he couldn’t realistically expect her to keep his secret here much longer.  Even if she could it wasn’t fair to expect her to.

  “I’m sorry but there’s not much I can do about it at this point.”

  “That’s the thing Markus.  There is.   You could.  You just won’t.” she accused before turning to leave.

  It was the same guilt trip about not living up to his potential which he was sick of hearing from everyone else.  If he cared more about her he would have defended himself, or at least gotten angry enough to lash back.  But the simple fact was that he didn’t.  He really didn’t care about her, didn’t really care about this job or his other coworkers, didn’t really care about anything.  That part of him that cared about much at all died a long time ago, so long ago now that he was hard pressed to believe he’d ever really cared about anything.

  A short time later she brought him his breakfast and he pushed through the hangover’s nausea to eat it down.  After his second cup of coffee he thought his payment to the main bar terminal and headed for the door.  

  “Enjoy your date with Willis,” he passive aggressively offered Ana as he walked past her on his way out.  “Hope you don’t wind up in his freezer in pieces”.  She appropriately responded with just a disinterested middle finger.   Sometimes he wished he was a better person, but honestly it just felt like too much work.

  Oh his way out the door, he noticed Chan passed out in one of the booths towards the front door.  He kicked his feet to wake him up.

  After some grumbling and eye rubbing, Chan asked him what he wanted.

  “You live downtown right?  Want to split a pod?”

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “A bit after ten.”

  “Oh shit.   Yeah, I guess.”

  As the younger man groggily stood up and they left together, Markus asked: “What are you doing here anyways?  Don’t you have class today?”

  “Yeah, but just the one, I can watch it later.”

  Markus thought a command to the scroll in his pocket, and it called for a road pod for them.   When they were adolescents, they’d all had the brainchip system installed.  It was just three devices the size of a grain of rice implanted into key areas of the brain, and it allowed them to issue commands to technological devices around them by thought.  It was so natural for them that for Markus is was as natural as reaching out to press a button with his finger, and he marveled at it about as much.

  The installation was rather invasive; they actually had to drill through the skull in three spots.  It sometimes got botched but such incidents were exceedingly rare.  Either way they generally kept you in the hospital for a few days until they were sure you were okay and had some basic training with it.   It took time to master, but most were able to.  It was suggested to wait until your mid teens to have it done, so it had become the modern equivalent of getting your driver’s license; some parents allowed it earlier, others later, some not at all.

  A road pod pulled up alongside them on the street and the two climbed in.  After they both issued thoughts of where they’d like to go, and the onboard computer calculated the most efficient route and they were underway.

  “You’re spending too much time here,” Markus told Chan as he watched the city go by out the window.

  “Yeah, okay Dad,” Chan said with contempt.  It surprised Markus, the kid was usually friendlier.

  “Don’t give me that shit,” Markus snapped back.  Chan shrugged.

  “What I mean is, when I look at the other people in that bar… most of them are lifers.   I don’t see that when I see you.   I don’t want that to change, but the more you hang out there in your free time, the more it soaks into you.”

  “Thanks I guess,” Chan offered with a shrug.

  “Take what you need from that place, but don’t become that place.  You can learn a lot there, earn some money, but don’t become like us.  You’re better than that.  You’ve got to be.”

  Chan flashed an anger at him which Markus had never seen from him before.  “Don’t tell me what I am or aren’t better than.  I get enough of that shit at home.”

  Markus pulled back.  “What do you mean?”

  Chan hesitated.  “You have siblings?”

  Markus then also hesitated.  He usually avoided talking about his personal situation with people from the bar, too much risk of letting something slip.  “Yeah.  An older brother.”

  “Well I don’t.   For me it’s just me.  My parents were never able to make anything of themselves, so they’ve turned all that frustration into pressure on me to make up for it.”

  “Ah.   Gotcha.  Believe it or not I do kind of get that in my own way.”  Markus shrugged.  “So sure, be a fuck up if you want to then.”

  “Fuck you.” the kid shot back.  Markus was surprised.  He wasn’t usually so aggressive.

  “Relax kid, I actually meant it.”

  “Oh?”   Chan seemed to believe him, if a little surprised.

  “I don’t want to get into it, but I can kind of sympathize.  I had a lot of the same kind of pressure put on me.  Luckily I had a brother who accomplished enough for both of us,” he explained with a roll of his eyes.

  “Stuck in his shadow then hunh?”

  “Yeah.   Something like that.”

  They rode in silence the rest of the way until the pod pulled up alongside one of the many mixed use towers in Vancouver.  The lower levels were all commercial, the middle floors were all aeroponics and schmeat farms, with the higher levels all residential.  

  “I guess this is you,” Markus observed.

  “Yeah,” Chan affirmed as he thought the door up and away.  

  “Hey Chan.” 

  The young man turned back to look at him after stepping out of the pod.

  “Don’t play their game.  Succeed or fail on your own terms.  Don’t fail to spite them, don’t succeed to satisfy them.  Do your own thing.”

  Chan nodded as he closed the door and headed into the building.  Markus wondered if he’d had any idea what he’d meant.   Probably not.  He realized how utterly lost such advice would have been to him at Chan’s age, despite how desperately he needed to have heard and understood it.  He shrugged it off as best as he could as the pod pulled away from the curb and continued on deeper into the heart of downtown.

  Road pods were the one of the backbones of the transportation infrastructure.  There were high speed trains going quickly from one area of the city to another, but once there you’d generally take a road pod if it was too far to walk.  The wealthier had their own private fancy pods, and some of the more eccentric insisted on driving them themselves.  Given that for the most part they all drove themselves and all communicated with each other, they could travel at quite high speeds most of the time.  Long trains of pods travelled hundreds of kilometers an hour in long bumper to bumper trains.  Markus imagined human piloted cars communicated to other pods with a sigh and an eyeroll that they should keep their distance from the human driver.

  Pricing was reasonable, but still somewhat pricey to use them yourself.  You could specify you wanted to travel alone, or choose carpool mode if not in as much of a hurry and save a bit of money.  During rush hour they were frequently full of passengers all funneling into downtown, and vice versa in the afternoon.  You could even set your priority level if you were willing to wait a bit to pay less, or were willing to pay more to get picked up sooner.

  Before too long, Markus arrived at his destination.  It was yet another multi use tower, but this close to the downtown core, instead of residential at the top, it had office spaces, where he was headed.   He got out of the pod, after which it promptly debited his accounts and sped off to the next passenger.  The large glass entrance doors slid open for him and he made his way through the glossy, well-manicured lobby towards the elevators.

  Markus stepped into the first elevator that opened for him, and thought a command for one of the upper floors at the patiently waiting green light on the control panel.  Turning around, he withdrew aghast at the sight of himself in the mirror.  He straightened his clothes and did his best to smooth out the wrinkles.  He ran his fingers through his short brown hair trying to bring some order to it.   The bags under his eyes went down a little when he massaged them, and the medicated eye drops helped the redness of his eyes somewhat, but not enough. 

  Looking himself up and down he figured it was at least a slight improvement, but hardly a convincing lie.  The doors opened and welcomed him with his own last name ‘BOWLAND’ in big silver white letters backlit with electric blue light on the wall behind the receptionist.

  “Hello Markus,“ the receptionist greeted him.  

  “Janet.” Markus acknowledged back.

  She looked him up and down and sighed, then got up and led him away.  “Follow me”.  

  Markus knew Janet had affection for him, but she was happily married with children, and he figured it more pity with a bit of amusement; the regard you have for an animal with a surgery wound and neck cone.

  She led him to what was in theory his office, an out of the way private room towards the back of the floor.  He wasn’t formally an employee, but he was involved with the company enough to be able to have a private space at the offices for when he should need it.   Janet pulled clothes out of the closet and opened the toiletries drawer so he could see the toothbrush, toothpaste, and comb.

  “When you’ve cleaned yourself up, dm me and I’ll tell your brother you’re here.”

  “Thanks Janet, you’re too good to me,” Markus offered as he started to take off his shirt.

  “Don’t remind me,” she answered with the same sad but amused look before opening the door to leave.

  It wasn’t as impressive an office as his brother’s, but it did have a window facing towards the rest of the city.  It was snowing, and Markus reflected on how rarely it did so when he was young.  It was still a fairly infrequent occurrence, just a couple of few times a year anything would stick to the ground and accumulate in any meaningful volume, but it made him happy to see.  Climate change had still been such a huge concern when he was a child, but there was already a feeling they were getting a handle on it.

  It was no one big thing that solved anything, and it had taken this long just to slow the acceleration and they’d only just begun to reverse it in any meaningful way, but it was happening.  From his window he could see some of the vast global fields of ocean lungs, big meter by meter semipermeable plastic bags teeming with bacteria engineered to consume CO2 and excrete oxygen at an unnatural rate.  They were coded with a limited lifespan and unable to reproduce on their own, existing only in those plastic bag.  At some point in his past Markus had been interested enough to research them more intently than most thing, but that was a long time ago.

  It was everything else as well though.  The fusion breakthrough and later mass adoption, the extensive global reforestation effort, hyper urbanization and letting more former suburbs return to nature… it was a few big things and a thousand little things which were done once the threat really started to be taken seriously, one enough people died.

  After putting on his nicer clothes, brushing his teeth, and doing what he could with his hair, Markus emerged from the office.  Walking past Janet he held out his palms in a ‘how do you like me now?’ gesture, and she gave him an unenthusiastic thumbs up.  He couldn’t hear her sigh as she did so, but he thought he could see it.  He knocked on the large, heavy door of deeply stained wood before opening it and entering without waiting for a response.

  His brother Lucas waved at him to come in from behind his desk before turning back to the window.  He was clearly talking to someone on his PANEs, smart glasses with embedded communications systems which allowed two-way augmented reality communications along with pretty much anything else you could do with a conveniently portable virtual and augmented reality setup.  Markus imagined he was seeing whoever he was talking to hovering midair 70 floors up.

  “Un hunh.   Un hunh.  Okay well if that’s what they need then get it done.  Anything else?  Okay thanks, I’ll check in again this afternoon.”  Lucas took the PANEs off and threw them down on the desk before collapsing into his large red leather chair, rubbing his eyes for a bit before opening them to look on his younger brother.  

  “Have you seen this?”  He swiveled one of his desk’s screens around to show Markus.  It was a series of three pictures starting with Markus entering the elevator, then exiting it, and concluding with him leaving his office after attempting to clean himself up.

  “Sure doesn’t take them long does it?” Markus observed as he looked at the pictures and then scrutinized them more closely.  Before and after the elevator didn’t yield much improvement, but when you compared entering the elevator against coming out of his office, he felt the improvement was actually pretty impressive.

  “No, and frankly I’m a little concerned that my IT department isn’t savvy enough to not pass this stuff around within the company network.  We’ll have to have another look at them maybe…  Anyways, what brings you by?”

  “Can’t I just come by to see how my dear brother and the family company are doing?”

  Lucas raised an eyebrow at him.  Despite being older, he took much better care of himself and arguably looked distinctly younger than Markus.  His hair was lighter and it was obvious he worked out and took care of himself.

  “Certainly.   You just don’t usually seem to care.”

  “Okay I’m going to level with you.”  Markus mocked like he was going to tell him a big secret, looking around the room before leaning in across the desk. “Now don’t be surprised, but I do need something.”

  “Un hunh.”   Lucas seemed mildly entertained but unmoved.  His amused smirk was not a smile.

  “I just need to cash out a bit of my stock.’

  “Again?”   The expression was more one of concern than anger or surprise.  “You can’t wait for the next dividend payment?  It’s only a couple month away.”

  Markus shrugged.  “I fucked up.”  He paused and shrugged in embarrassment.  “What do you want me to say?”  He was embarrassed but only a little.  He owed Lucas a lot, but there was still a bratty little shit of a younger brother inside him who balked at being made to feel like he owed anybody anything.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh… I made a stupid bet I didn’t really mean, but someone took me seriously and things got carried away.”

  “How much?”

  Markus looked at him, more embarrassed now.  “A month’s basic.”

  Lucas rolled his eyes and laughed.  “You’re crazy!  Is that how much you want then?”  There was no discussion about it, Markus was entitled to cash it all out at any time if he really wanted to, he just didn’t have as much left as he used to at this point.

  “Yes please.”

  “No problem, we’ll have that in your accounts within the hour.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I still don’t get why you bother though.  With the basic I mean, and with that job and those people when you know we could set you up with a do-nothing job here that would pay you so much more.”

  “Yeah…” Markus offered, thoughtfully rubbing the stubble on his chin.  “It’s the do-nothing part that’s the problem for me.”

  “Then fucking do something!” Lucas snapped back in exasperation with more force than he’d meant to let on.  He lowered his head and rubbed his temples.  “Sorry, I just mean…” he sighed.  “You’ve got the education; we can always use good people we can trust around here.   You can ‘do something’ here if you want,” using air quotes for emphasis.  “You coud do a lot.”

  Markus looked out the large window which made up a whole wall of his brother’s office.   He was CEO of Bowland Power Systems, the company which had grown out of the startup which had cracked sustainable fusion almost a hundred years ago.  The company was started by their great grandfather, and when they figured fusion out it changed the world and made their family rich.  Bowland Power Systems was still the top manufacturer of fusion reactors of all classes, from small enough to power your car, to large enough to power cities and starships, despite plenty of competition these days.   

  Out the window was Vancouver Harbour.  A sea plane happened to be taking off as Markus watched on.  The two brothers were both of this place.  They’d travelled a lot, seen much of the world and had had all sorts of adventures, but the wet lush greenery and heavy salty sea air of Vancouver was in their blood.  It would always be home wherever they went.

  While Lucas was Markus’ brother, he often acted more like his father.  He’d felt responsible for his little brother ever since both their parents had died when their orbital shuttle broke up on re-entry when Markus was three and Lucas was eight.  It was a stupid, meaningless accident, the kind of thing that just happens sometimes.  It was a small but understood risk of flights to and from orbit.  A century of commercial flights to and from orbit had gone as safe as humanly possible, but accidents still happened.  One just never thought it was going to happen to them with odds that small, but when it happened it had to happen to somebody, just bad luck.

  Lucas was old enough at the time to at least somewhat understand what had happened.   Hurt as much as he was, he did eventually recover and thrive.  He committed himself to taking over the family company and leading it into the future in his parent’s name.  Markus was much younger though, and not grown enough to be able to really understand what had happened.  All he understood was that his mother and father, his worlds, his Gods, his sense of safety and home, were just suddenly just gone one day, and that there was a long period where everyone he encountered was miserable for reasons he couldn’t understand.  

  This shaped him in a particular way.  It was like something broke in him.  It left him with an unconscious sense that attachment was pointless since it would inevitably just be taken away, that love was pain.  The wound ultimately healed over for the most part (depending on who you asked), but there would always be an eternal pit of sadness in his core.  All the niceties and luxuries of living amongst the upper class felt like so many house of cards built on top of the absurdity of human existence.

  Markus had dutifully gotten a business degree when he was still naive enough to play along with the life assigned to him, but after his first philosophy class he decided he needed to make the subject his minor and dig deeper into it.  What he learned opened his mind, allowed him to process a lot of his childhood, and led to a lot of changes in him.  He wasn’t really ever angry or depressed anymore, he was just challenged to care about anything more generally because nothing seemed to matter.  That’s why he didn’t just want to do busy work for the company for more money, to just help them accumulate more wealth (happy as he was to live off of it when he needed to).  The work made him sad because of how disconnected and futile the work ultimately felt.  Cooking at The Cheshire Cat though, at least there was an immediacy to his purpose there.   People were hungry so he made food for them to eat.  There was a direct connection, the reason for his work was immediate and unambiguous.

  “There is actually one thing I need you to do for me though, for the company.”

  Lucas was considerate enough of Markus to not ask him to do things too often, so he tried to serve whenever he did need to ask.  He never asked too much, and usually all that was asked of him was making appearances and being seen at highbrow social events along with the rest of the company and family.  The music usually sucked, but there was at least usually pretty good food and drink.  Hell sometimes he even got laid.

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a fundraiser gala tomorrow night for that new generational starship project.   The new ‘New Horizon’ class reactors were designed around the requirements for their ship.  We hope to sell a whole line of them, but the launch of this first one has to go well.”

  “Fundraiser?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas laughed, “Sengupta actually ran out of money funding the project, can you believe it?”

  “Wasn’t she like, the richest person in the world?”

  “One of, I mean used to be,” Lucas mused.  “But whatever, she’s not going to need any of it after they launch but god damn, trillions of dollars gone just like that,” he said with a snap of his fingers.

  “Aren’t they leaving like, next week?”

  “Twelve days actually.  They’ve already taken delivery of the core though.  It’s too important for us or them to hold up their schedule, but it’s the last thing they need to pay for and they’re coming up short.”

  “Well that’s rude,” Markus derided.

  “Yeah, but on the quarter trillion-dollar price tag for the prototype core they’re only down thirty billion.  We’ve agreed that they’ll hold a fundraiser to try to make up the difference.  We’ve invited industry people, philanthropists, the wealthier crew members and their families…  The deal we made with them is that Bowland will keep the pot whether over or under.”

  “Ah, so it’s a squeeze.”

  “Yeah, they won’t know that until they get there,” he mused, “but yeah, a squeeze.   Little more than just showing the flag this time I’m afraid, I’ll need you to actually schmooze and, well…” he trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Don’t make me say it?” his brother pleaded with a half serious, half joking cringe.

  “Ah.   Right.  Sure, I’ll be there.  And yeah, sure.  I’ll be sober.  I don’t mind playing the rich prick every once in a while if it keeps the world turning.”

  “There you go,” Lucas said as he clapped him on the back before turning back around to his desk.  “It’s tomorrow night at the sails.  I’ll see you there.”