Accompanying the amorphous promosurround, a spastic audio clash—like the simultaneous playback of infinite microphones placed at every point in time and space—whispered in Amon’s ears. Every second, distinct sounds would rise out of this faint infoblather and grow in volume—a syllable, a clack, a symphonic gasp—synched with the segments pelting the fringes of his vision. In the background, he could hear the people around him mumbling, and see them twitching their hands as they entered BodyBank commands, all engaged in some online diversion. Sometimes he felt their eyes on him too.
The frequent glances and occasional stares of strangers used to make Amon uncomfortable, but he was used to it now, having learned years ago to accept that he stood out, even amongst this edited crowd. This was partly because of his stature and exotic looks. Height was something difficult to fake without heels or platform shoes, since you had to pay by the millimeter to the company that owned the right to increase it, and his facial features would have been a fortune to render graphically if he hadn’t been born this way. Going on what he’d heard about his origin, and that wasn’t much, Amon was of Persian and Japanese descent. His dark hair buzzed short, his skin light brown, he had a softly-rounded, longish nose above a thin line of moustache. Most distinguishing of all was his combination of double-folded Asian eyelids and greenish-blue eyes, kindled with an acute, almost daring glint that contrasted with his serious demeanor. Enhanced with digimake—his joined eyebrows divided and elegantly arced, the stretched pores in his cheeks left by teenage acne filled in like potholes, his slightly off-kilter front teeth reoriented, the curvature of his cheeks streamlined for greater symmetry—Amon was undeniably intriguing.
But more than this, what most drew curious glances and sometimes stares was his uniform. Over his lithe torso and long but powerfully-toned limbs, he wore a gray suit with a gray shirt and a gray tie, as though tailored out of pure concrete. The letters “GATA” printed in jagged lavender font on the right breast. It was an oddly bland uniform for the most feared profession in the Free World, but the outfit made up for deficiencies in design with usefulness. From a distance it was inconspicuous, a shade of nethercolor the eye dismissed as irrelevant, a mere shadow of the city amidst the flood of images. Up close, when the spectator noticed that the gray was full body, it was immediately recognizable, instilling terror in those who took his presence as a sign their time had come. No one in the vicinity of Amon showed special deference, but they all knew what he was and Amon sensed their gut tension. A gray uniform meant Liquidators, and Liquidators meant…
An announcement politely gave the name of the next stop and the train began to slow. Amon glanced at his AT readout and had PennyPinch calculate his respiration rate. For the past several minutes it was below his average, and even approached his personal record. He was beginning to feel proud of himself for redeeming his earlier failure with blinking, when thinking about this failure reminded him of what had caused it and his mind turned again towards Rick. Anxious thoughts began to tug insistently on his focus, dragging it off his breathing.
When the image of a solar cowboy and a winged princess flickered into view, Amon turned his head up to look straight at its source, hoping that by losing himself in advertainment he might evade his worries. Emerging from a warped, asymmetrical octagon in the ceiling, the cowboy gazed at the horizon of a turquoise desert landscape as three red suns rose. He wore a leather vest over a dark green shirt, sunglasses with red transparent lenses, and a sleek blaster in a holster at each hip. The blonde-haired princess stood beside him and sprayed her bleach-white teeth with a lipstick-sized canister, the light glittering on the pink tinsel of her dress.
“I been all cross this galaxy,” drawled the cowboy. “From the Dragon Nebula to the Plasma Sea, and I’ve never seen anything sparkle like yer smile.” He looked the princess in the eyes and she smiled again, flapping her wings bashfully and giving her teeth another spray. A hyperlink for a website where the spray could be downloaded appeared in the sky above her head.
A flaming asteroid hurtled through the stars towards the turquoise planet…
He wouldn’t seriously… not today… Amon’s internal monologue interrupted. Despite his efforts to get entertained, it chattered on and on. In a last act of desperation, he tried to combine this monologue with the audio and visuals of the space opera, the sensation of cold air and warm bodies, the smell of perfume and bad breath, the feeling of eyes on him, the frustration at his failure, melding sensations and thoughts and emotions in his consciousness to create an incoherent synesthetic noise that could not interfere with the frugal task at hand. Don’t give in to the bankrupt mind! But it was no good. His attention refused to stay on his lungs.
Guilt welled up inside him and he sighed, then immediately regretted it, as the fear of a downward sigh spiral took hold. But before a second sigh came on, the train rolled to a stop, the doors opened, and Amon felt the crowd shift around him as spurts of passengers made their way off.
When a new load of passengers had squashed him into place and the train started forward again, Amon did a few rhythmic finger gestures to pull up his contact book. A list of names appeared as faint translucent text over the boxed headscape. He scrolled down and clicked on Rick Ferro. Ignoring his friend’s profile stills and description, Amon pulled up his map. When he saw where Rick was, his guilt and fear evaporated, and were immediately replaced by a new, stronger emotion: anger. On an abstract, bird’s-eye-view diagram of the city, a red dot blinked over one complex. It was Rick’s apartment building in Kiyosumi. He was still at home and would undoubtedly be late for work if he didn’t leave within a few seconds. The very idea was outrageous, and Amon clenched the handrail tight in his fists.
In his head, he tried to roughly calculate the cost of calling Rick, given the current level of inflation. He knew they were long overdue for a talk, but had been putting it off and putting it off and putting it off. Whenever he thought of the immense fees just for dialing and hanging up, not to mention all the speaking, he froze up. As the weeks and months passed, the problem had only worsened. Finally, the previous evening he had broken down and texted him, but it had been more than twelve hours and there was still no response. Amon didn’t like being ignored under regular circumstances, but today was an important day and he took this as an exceptional insult.
Amon had been waiting patiently long enough.
He traced a tiny circle in the air with his thumb and pointer finger. A keyboard appeared in front of him and he brought his right hand down from the pole to begin typing, his fingers striking air.
RCK. U THAIR? WI NEEED 2 TAWK.
When texting, Amon intentionally wrote in garbled Japanese, as the cost of proper writing was higher. All imaginable strings of text had been patented, with phrases in commonly used languages the most expensive, recognizable derivatives of these slightly less so, and gibberish the cheapest of all. To save money, Amon entered the wrong ideograms, omitted and reordered phonetic characters, mixed in Roman letters, and added redundant script as needed. Misspelling everything while still managing to create intelligible sentences required a certain knack, but was at least as fast as regular typing once it became habitual, and the cost of the occasional extra character was more than offset by the overall savings on words. Scrambling grammar too could be a bargain, but Amon usually didn’t go that far, except occasionally when he wanted to make up for a particularly discreditable day.