Devils at Play

And never come down.

That’s the grand plan anyhow.  Stay juiced.  Amp it up past eleven.  Always maintain maximum wiredness.  No lying still except in uneasy sleep.  The devils’ credo.  Keep the excitement flowing, keep the droopy, deliberately dulled dopamine receptors full.  Try anything just to feel alive, to beat the creeping delusion of zombiehood. 

That’s just how society made us, after all, for their own uses. 

Excitement addicts, thrill seekers, daredevils and manic street creatures. 

Most of us are military vets, but a lot of us come from the ranks of first-responders, private security and mercenary firms, bodyguards. Possessors of “the world’s most dangerous jobs.”  The pharma industry used some of us to do hazardous ethnobotanical field work in the quest for new drug sources.  There’s even a few of us, believe it or not, who inflicted the tweak on themselves, for “fun.”  Just a little matter of tinkering with the DRD4 gene, the famous ADHD culprit, and with the amino suite that’s responsible for Cotard’s Syndrome (that’s the stick to make you pursue the carrot). 

End result:  nothing “normal” satisfies us, no simple pleasures persist.  Everyday living, common rewards, leave us cold.  And if we can’t get high, can’t feed the need, we feel like walking corpses.  No simple chemical fixes seem to work, just total kinesthetic and proprioceptic stimulation, with a side order of mental jazzing, in the form of flouting all norms, rebellion across the board.

The vanillas, the neurotypicals, have a lot of slang names for us.  The nicest is neophiles,  and it goes downhill from there:  derdefors, sensies, novaseeks, low-arses, hypodopes, space cadets and ditzes.  But the people I hang with, we call ourselves “tazzes.”  Short for good old cartoon Taz, angry whirlwind dervish, act before you think, slaver and growl.  Together, as a posse, we’re the Tazmanian Legion, with all due deference to the French Foreign.  No one asks your wherefor or whyfor, so long as you exhibit the shared symptoms and are in for the thrill ride.

My name is Sal Maundy:  say it loud, I’m taz and proud.

But not happy or content.  Never that.

* * *

The new major pain in the Tazmanian Legion’s collective butt called herself Anita Loose, and thought the moniker was the height of wit.  Typical of her shallow clade.  A few years back, the omnivorous, disposable global media had celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  The colorful incessant hype had spawned parallel fads:  neo-flappers from the era of the book’s origin; and, taking off from the famous cinematic version of the tale, faux-Eisenhowerians.  So even today, you were always bumping into mock Marilyns vieing with short-haired, rolled-stocking, gin-swilling demi-vierges; Men in Grey Flannel Suits contending with raccoon-coat-wearing uke-strummers.  As painfully self-aware hipster trends went, it was mildly amusing at first.  But now, nearly three years into the charade, it had gotten pretty old.

Anita Loose had throttled back the most egregious fashion signifiers.  When she first showed up at the Danger Palace, she wore a bootlegger’s moll’s hairband of synthetic eelskin that randomly emitted spatters of biolite; a few long strings of cultivated pearls over a tawny crepe de chine shirt; beaded chorus-girl short shorts straight out of Ziegfeld; and five-hundred-dollar designer replicas of the sloppy galoshes that had originally given the flappers their name.  In the days to come under our noses, she ran modifications of that basic look, sometimes sporting gauzy Isadora Duncan dresses open ventrally down the middle to her navel, combined with Grecian sandals laced up her calves.  She had the lissome body to pull it off, and I had to admit she was pretty sexy, from a vanilla POV.

I was one of the first to bump into her, outside the entrance to the former Michigan Central Station in Corktown, Detroit:  aka, the Tazmanian Legion’s Danger Palace.  A consortium of our richer members had purchased the ruin for a pittance five years ago, had marginally stabilized, weather-proofed, and rehabbed it with lots of spray-matrix, self-assembling Penrose tiles, and sunpower paint, and turned it into our clubhouse-cum-therapeutic hackspace.  The eighteen-story tower afforded ample living quarters—private bedrooms, communal areas, kitchens, showers, laundry facilities—with portions set aside for vertical activities.  The massive cathedralesque commuter depot at groundlevel had been tricked out into various arenas and gyms, parkour and brawl zones, and a reconfigurable labyrinth for paintgun wars and the like.

Arriving at the front entrance, keyed to members only, I came upon Anita Loose, waiting for someone among the arriving and departing Legionnaires to acknowledge her.  She had two hovering and flitting microdrones attending  her at shoulder height, slaved to her smartwatch, and that didn’t endear her to anyone.  None of us like being streamed for some online freakshow.

I don’t know why I bothered to interact with her.  Maybe it was some remnant tags of pity and guilt, just because she reminded me of the woman I had once caused to die.  And despite her obnoxiously trendy getup, she was somehow naively endearing.

“Are those things live?” I said, nodding at the buzzing drones.

“Yes, I just wanted—”

“Shut them down.”

“But I—”

I whirled and kicked both of them out of the air, before their collision-avoidance routines could even react, smashing their delicate guts.

“Now we can talk.”

Fright, anger, repentence and a smidgen of awe cascaded across her young face like dark cloud shadows over a virgin pasture.  She gained control of her emotions with admirable celerity.  Maybe she wasn’t as shallow as she looked.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “That was rude of me.  It’s just that I’m trying to get fresh subscribers to my channel.  I really need to pay off my student loans.”

“And you thought you’d give them a tour of the island of misfit toys.”

Now her expressive face displayed ire.  “My brother’s one of the Expendables.”

The Expendables—along with the Challengers of the Unknown, the Suicide Squad, the Dead End Kids, the Dirty Dozen, Easy Company, the Howling Commandos and other clubs—were a rival group to the Tazmanian Legion.

“What’s his name?”

“Bob Brewer.”

I knew the guy and he was okay.  “And you are—?”

“Anita Loose.”

I winced.  “Listen, Anita, I—”

“What’s your name?”

I told her, despite knowing she’d swiftly google up my notorious past.  Hell, her watch had probably already run my face through its recognition software and delivered my whole CV.  But if it had fed her any information through her earbuds, she didn’t acknowledge it.  Instead, she asked, “Why do you keep doing that thing with your wrist?”

Of course I hadn’t even realized I was reflexively snapping the thick rubber band cincturing my left wrist.  It’s just one of the self-stimulating technics I used whenever I had to stand still.

“Didn’t your brother ever do anything like that?”

“Bob’s much older than me, and he’s lived away from me and my folks ever since he went, uh, neophile for his job.  He’s employed by Halliburton.  So I don’t really know much about, um, your clade.”

I explained the uses of my rubber band and she leaned in to inspect it, then swiftly drew back.

“You’re all bruised there!”

I partially inverted the loop and showed her the metal cleat affixed on the underside.  “Just a little extra zest.  Don’t worry, though, I’ve got the usual mods.”

Her expression betrayed cluelessness. 

“We tazzes tend to sustain a lot of damage.  So most of us sport the enhanced healing suite.  Faster clotting, turbo osteoblast production, smarter cytokines, dialed-down pain receptors, that kind of stuff.  This bruise on my wrist would disappear in a few hours if I stopped aggravating it.”

“But—doesn’t it hurt?”

“Hurting’s just another word for living in my book, Anita.”

She remained silent for a minute.

“Listen,” I said, “let me take you inside and introduce you around.  If you can win over the rest of the Legion—prove you’re not out just to sensationalize us—maybe we’ll let you show the straights what we’re all about.  Good publicity is hard to come by for us.  What do you say?”

“Sure, of course, that sounds fair.”

Inside the Danger Palace, the first person we encountered was Little Musa.  I watched how Anita reacted to him.  That would be proof of her ability to grok us all.

Little Musa Saguaren, dark complected and half my size, resembled a gnarly pine exposed on some wind-battered cliff.  His limbs bent at all crazy angles, and his valiant attempts at sheer ambulation seemed a minor miracle.  An infantry veteran, Musa had been exposed to some militarized agent that induced ankylosing spondylitis during his service in the Tarim Basin.  Even the VA docs hadn’t been able to eradicate it from his system.  Those Uighur bioshamans were cruel and clever.  The most that treatments could do was slow down the progress of the syndrome.

I saw Anita take pause at Little Musa’s incongruous getup.  As always, he was wearing his Braille skin, what appeared to be a regular aquatic wetsuit, but subtly pulsating all over in seemingly random patterns.

“Little Musa, this is Anita Loose.  She wants to reveal our darkest secrets to the world.”

Little Musa grinned and peered up crookedly from canted head.  “Okay by me.  Maybe I’ll get more ticklers.”

“His suit,” I explained, “is a hugbox lined with addressable MEMS.  Velvety smooth.  He reads realtime messages from the net translated into Braille feed with his skin.  He can’t get the sanity-maintaining physical activity that the rest of us do, so this helps beat the torpor.”

“One hundred and fifty words per minute.  Fast as speech.”  Littla Musa leered then, and rubbed his nigh-perpetual erection outlined plainly under the smart skin.  His hard-on was the only uncrooked part of him.  I don’t think Anita had noticed it earlier, but now her eyes were locked on it.  “Course, it’s not all words coming down the wires.  I got lots of girlfriends.  Boyfriends too.  They feel me up me real nice.”

Anita smiled wanly.  “Um, okay, sure.”

“C’mon, there’s lots more to see than this sad wanker.”

“I love you too, Sal!”

Penetrating further into the Danger Palace, one of the big communal spaces, we encountered sensory overload—or, in other words, a taz’s baseline environment.  Lots of people bouncing off the walls, sometimes literally.  Knots and eddies of faces and bodies.  Conversation, music, whistles, sirens, crashes and bangings, overlaid with strobing colored lights and holograms, antique films projected on walls and freestanding liquid flowscreens running various images, abstract or narrative.

Anita seemed unruffled by the noise, and I figured her earbuds were filtering most of it out.  The visual chaos was another matter, and she swivelled her head around like a Vestal Virgin at a Neronic orgy.

I spotted Lorna across the fray, and figured she’d constitute my next test of Anita’s openness.  I steered our guest through the scrum, deft as a swallow flitting through clouds of bugs.  A frisbee sailed at me, I grabbed it and flung it onward.  Lorna saw us and hailed me.

Conversing with Shoggy—a round guy almost as wide as he was tall, endlessly flipping a yo-yo in balletic ways—the big woman wore as little as decently possible, the better to show off her panoply of chromed hardware.  Pierced in every conceivable place, and some inconceivable ones, Lorna sported rings and barbells, chains and horns, studs and plugs and even a zipper or two.

“Sal!  What’s decrypting?”

“Lorna, Shoggy, I’d like you to meet Anita Loose.  She wants to stream our madness for the general enlightenment of the human race.”

“With commentary, I assume.  What will you say about this, Anita?”

Lorna suddenly kissed Anita on the lips.

“Ouch!  Your metal’s hot!”

“Powered by ambient wireless traffic.   The higher the flow, the hotter I go.  Makes me really feel like I’m part of the conversation.”

“I don’t know, it seems—”

“Masochistic?  No such word in our vocabulary.”

I stepped in, feeling suddenly some irrational solicitousness toward the interloper.  That resemblance again to She Who Had Died.  “Anita just needs time to figure out our worldview.  I’m going to show her around some more.”

For the next hour or so, I guided Anita through our Tazmanian Inferno.  Most of the club members got off on her dewey-eyed reactions to our quirks and kinks, and no one raised any objections to her continuing presence.

We had climbed eighteen flights to the top floor.

 “Seems like you’ve gained admission, at least provisionally.  Of course, if people object to your stream, our acceptance could be revoked.”

“I won’t violate anyone’s trust,” she promised earnestly.

We walked down a corridor with several other folks, heading towards a destination whose nature must have puzzled Anita, for the corridor seemed to terminate in sheer vacuity:  dust-shot air.

Then we stood on the wide protruding unrailed bungee-jump platform.

An inner well or atrium nearly two-hundred-feet tall, occupying about half the core of the building, yawned beyond the tips of our shoes.  No one had gone over the edge at the moment, in spontaneous deference to our arrival.

“Around us tazzes, you just have to be prepared to experience the unexpected and not freak out,” I said.

I bent down and grabbed an amorphous black coiled mass off the floor.  “Here, catch!”

The smart harness eluded Anita’s attempt to grab it, instead configuring itself expertly around her torso like a fast python, under her arms and through her crotch and around her legs.  It took only seconds to lock into place.

Then I pushed her backwards off the edge.

Her screams dopplered down amidst the laughter of the observers on the platform with me.

By the time she had ceased bouncing and been winched up, all traces of fear and surprise and anger had been erased from her face, to be replaced by sheer bravado.  Back on her feet, she glared at me and said coolly, “Do it again, I dare you.”

I figured she might just be able to handle us after all.

* * *

The mecha rumble between the Tazmanian Legion and the Expendables was on for tomorrow afternoon.  I was going over my homebrewed rack in one of the Danger Palace garages when Anita tracked me down.  I could tell she was fuming.  I lowered the volume on the dangdut music blaring from the speakers running the feed from my watch.  Without polite prelude, she laid out her gripe.

“Goro says I can’t come to cover the rumble.  Too dangerous.”

Goro was as much of a president as the Legion allowed.  As the only taz who had ever free-climbed the Burj Khalifa, he had massive whuff—even if that building wasn’t the world’s highest any longer.

“That’s true.”

“Bullshit!  It’s not like I have to embed myself in the middle of the carnage.  My drones can capture it all, while I stand back.  And how could it be any more dangerous than this place itself? I needed antibiotics and a tetanus shot after my first full day among you maniacs.  I go home covered in fresh bruises every night.  And I can’t count how many times I’ve jammed a finger catching randomly flung objects.”

“Pfft!  That’s nothing.  This is different.  People in powered suits that can powder a brick wall, careening around and bashing each other.  Sharp shards go flying left and right.  Order of magnitude more perilous.”

“But I’m not going to participate!  I’m just going to stream it.”

I paused.  “Maybe Goro’s got another reason for keeping you away.”

“What could that be?”

“You brother.  He’s an Expendable.  There’s no bad feelings between the Legion and that outfit, but the rivalry between the clubs is real.  Massive amounts of whuff are riding on this rumble.  How loyal to us are you gonna be?  You’ll spin your coverage to make us look crap.”

“I would never!  I told you I hardly know my own brother.  My loyalty is to the Tazmanian Legion.”  She stopped, and gave me a soulful look.  “My loyalty is to you, Sal.”

A sigh was my only equivocal response to the romantic implications of her words. 

For the past month now, ever since Anita’s arrival, I could tell she was developing feelings for me.  But I could never reciprocate them, never give her what she seemed to want—raptors mating with prey, and all that—but there was no kind way I could see to really turn her off either.  So I had just ignored her.  Still seemed like a good plan today.

“Oh, so I’m your mentor, your patron, huh?  Just because I picked the little kitten up off the doorstep that first day, I have to keep feeding it forever, right?”

She choose not to take offense at my rough jabs.  “Something like that.”

“Okay, okay, damn it, I’ll talk to Goro about letting you cover the rumble.  Now, either go away or be useful and hand me that wrench.”

She handed me the tool, and I fussed with the joints on my openwork exoskeletal rack for a while.  Then I checked the attachment points of the tensile nanotube musculature.  All that time I could feel Anita’s gaze on my face.

“Did you love her very much?” she said.

“Love who?”

“Val.  Valquiria Furtado.  Your partner in your act.”

Small and retro, the Circo Atlas roamed a seasonal circuit through Spain and Portugal in a caravan of beat hydrogen-powered vehicles.  A single big smart-patched tent, various games of chance, food stands redolent of delicious frango no churrasco, some mangy beasts, including a re-wilded auroch, and a tight family of performers.  All such archaic live shows attracted lots of neophiles, and the Atlas was no exception.  But we had some oldschool baseline folks too.

I had stumbled on the circus after I had lost my job as a steeplejack in Germany, once the last of Europe’s antique and obsolescent wind turbines got decommissioned, and after bumming around the continent for a month,.  Turned out my old skills translated nicely to the high wire.  Soon, after an apprenticeship, I was getting top billing over Val, who had been holding down that spot alone.  But instead of resenting me, she taught me everything she knew, and we became lovers.

But Val was not a neophile, and she didn’t exhibit the mad enhanced chops and the ambition to push things the way I did.  She blanched when I insisted we give up the safety net, but she went along anyhow.  And when I insisted on adding mid-wire stunts to our act, she compiled.  And when one of us slipped and plunged downward to the soon-to-be-bloodied sawdust, it was her, not me.

Anita patiently awaited my answer.

“I loved her not enough, and she loved me too much.  That’s why I’m alive and she’s dead.  Now, fuck off.”

She was smart enough not to say another word before she left.

I could hardly wait until tomorrow, when I could punch something with all my augmented might.  So I went to see my beautiful little sad Wren.  Wren liked to cut herself, and had become expert at the art.  That wasn’t one of my usual sanity-preserving technics, but somehow today I felt blood might sate and quell the savage things I was trying to feel and not feel.

And so it did.

* * *

The once-blighted Brightmoor neighborhood of our depopulated-then-modestly-repopulated fair city had been rewilded a long time ago, and nowadays hosted several small farms, noisy ATV trails, a bird sanctuary, and the big deep sand pit, several acres in extent, where we staged our brawls with civic approval.  Today, as we augie doggies clanked and squelched and stomped across the turf toward our arena, the rim of the pit was ringed with onlookers in a holiday mood.  I spotted Anita and her AV drones, and felt again the wrong and inactionable feelings that her unwanted devotion inspired.  I tried to parlay them into a brawling rage, and they carried me partway toward that goal.

Half-sliding, half-stumbling down the sandy slope of the pit, I focused on the Expendables in their club colors (ours were black and red, theirs gold and blue, manifest on a nice big badge that could be ripped off and claimed as coup).  Without even waiting for any of my teammates to back me up, I let out an amplified roar and launched myself at them.

I smashed and clanged against an Expendable, and we strained our nanotube ligaments, each seeking to toss his opponent to the sandy floor.  Evenly matched, we got nowhere—until I suddenly relented and sidestepped, sending my opponent off-balance and into the dirt.  I let out a bellow of victory, kicked his metal shank savagely (sand and sharp flinders went flying toward the pit’s rim, causing spectators to duck), and looked around the titanic melee for another fight.

I recognized Bob Brewer, Anita’s brother, and hurled my amplified frame at him.  I started tossing punches with my mecha pummel gloves against the quilted kevlar padding protecting his body where it hungs like a ripe fruit inside the rack.  He seemed taken aback by my ferocity.

“Hey, taz, what the—”

I didn’t let up though, and finally had him down on his back.  I switched my grip to a different handle and deployed a smaller waldo with finesse, snipping his ligaments, rendering him limbless and helpless, unmanned.  Then I ripped off his club badge and held my trophy high, roaring and letting Anita’s drones have a good look at my victory over her sibling.

I was sure she’d hate me, as I wished.

Back at the Danger Palace, amidst the wild partying, Anita never left my side, even putting her arm in mine, and I somehow let her, because, down from my berserker high, I was weak and she looked like Val

* * *

Weather prediction still isn’t an exact science, even in this oh-so-stochastic decade of the 2030s, but it’s pretty hard for even an amateur weather hacker, especially in this blighted region, to miss the signs of a tornado birthing, never mind the nigh-omniscient noahs with their wetware models of the whole planet’s lungs and oceanic heart.  And so we had plenty of notice at the Danger Palace that a flock of cyclones was heading our way.

Can you imagine anything more alluring to a taz?  The news acted on us like a three-alarm bell to a station dalmatian, or word of a fresh shipment of scopoxi among an alleyful of junkies.

Ever since the Great Detroit Tornado Outbreak of 1997, when a magnificent thirteen storms wreaked havoc in the city, Michigan had lost its historical immunity to these Tornado Alley killers, formerly thought to be mainly the scourge of trailer parks across the land.  The Anthropocene anomalies of climate change had sown dragon’s teeth everywhere.

The Tazmanian Legion possessed a fleet of five storm-hardened Land Rovers (I said we had some rich members, right?) used for tornado chasing, and it was first-come, first-served as to who got to ride them into exalting peril.

I was down in the main garage before the last words of the first emergency warning to batten down all hatches had even ceased.

Anita Loose trailed me by only a few seconds.

“You’re not—” I said.

“I am,” she said.

That had been more or less the same dialogue Val and I had exchanged, when she had faltered during lofty rehearsal the day of her death plunge.

I grabbed her roughly by the arm and hurled her into the cab and slammed the door behind her.  Sensate harness englobed her.  I had cut her out from her bladed attendants so fast that her separated drones got left outside the cab.  Then I vaulted myself right over the roof of the Rover and leaped behind the wheel, letting safety straps and belts enshroud me too.

Camaraderie and club ethics called for me to wait and fill the vehicle with as many Legionairres as could fit.  But instead I peeled out with just the two of us inside, leaving gawping slower arrivals behind with the other four cars.

Anita’s drones couldn’t keep up.  Even following Anita’s GPS coordinates, they would lag far behind.  And if they caught up and flew with us into the high winds, that would be the end of them.

We were off her damn stream, at last.

Tires screeching as we blazed through the otherwise buttoning-down, huddling-inward city, I could feel happy madness beginning to raise my zest and zeal, like an avatar in some game accumulating hit points, until I felt almost normal.  I  began to sing an old favorite song in a fondly farenheit tenor.

“His daughter was slated for becoming divine!  He taught her, oh he taught her how to split and define!  But if you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line!  So it’s much more realistic to abandon such ballistics and resign to be trapped on a leaf in a vine!”

Anita said nothing, but just shivered, despite the humid summer heat.  Too late to reconsider her folly.

My watch told me one or more of the tornadoes were most likely to touch down in Westwood Park, another rewilded zone.

Under dour, louring skies, we crossed the border into the factitious arcadia, and I could see the bloated funnel shape ahead.  I pressed down further on the accelerator.  Our harnesses hugged us maternally against the speed.

The air began to fill with whirling debris of all sizes, and the famous ferocious jet engine whine and rumble of the storm stuffed itself the cab like a grumbling giant.

A flying two-by-four suddenly hove into sight, heading straight at our windshield.

Anita shrieked.

The beam hit us, rocked us, but bounced off without leaving so much as a dimple or star.

“Diamond is a girl’s best friend, Anita!”

Then the black foot of the twister stomped us, and its brawny grey arms lifted us up.

I was so very much alive—until I lost all consciousness.

The Land Rover lay on its roof on scoured turf, and we hung upside down from our harnesses, with the hiss of deflating airbags now the loudest noise.  I caused the gear to furl itself away and got myself and unaware Anita outside the cab.  I found an unexploded bottle of water, and used it to bring her around.

Once awake, she threw herself into my arms.

“Oh, Sal, we’re alive!  You took me with you, and now I know!”

I could feel myself falling down off the peak of aliveness, back down into the perpetual valley of the Tazmanian damned, where you had to strain for just a glimpse of sunshine.  “You know what exactly?”

“How you experience life.”

“You think you know.  But you really don’t.”

In answer to my demurral, she kissed me with a passion that was foreign to me.  Nevertheless, I kissed bitterly back.

In the wilderness, shielded momentarily from the sight of any rescuers by the overturned car, fueled by survivor’s lust, she ran her hands all over me, pressed hard against the length of my body.

“You want this?  You want me?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

“Then you’ve got me.  As I am.”

And I took her the only way I knew how, the only way that worked for me, the only way two devils ever mated.

Not pretty, but mercifully short.

I stepped away from Anita’s unconscious form.

With blood leaking out, she resembled Val on the circus’s ground.

Bruises livid as the post-storm sky were dawning across her face and throat.  EMTs would be here soon, and they’d patch her up okay.  I hadn’t broken anything vital.  She’d recover all right.  If she ever found it in her shattered self to tell them the truth about what had happened, my watch and hers would reveal her consent.  But I had a hunch she’d claim the tornado had inflicted the harm on her body, blame some failure of the Rover’s gear.  I couldn’t see her wanting to admit how naïve she had been, couldn’t imagine her wanting to continue with her foolish dream of me loving her like normal people loved.

Although now both of us were broken, one of us could still heal.