He shakes his head. Can’t deny them the distraction, he understands that. Damn, it’s carnival day, distraction is what it’s all about. Come down and get distracted. Smoke some bud, shake your ass. Escape. Forget the relentless fucking daily battle to stay alive that this city has become.
But he knows this is different. He’s seen this before. Escape to him was getting away from this. Sure, he tore College and Anika off a strip for their idealism, for not having some plan for the aftermath—but really, to him it felt like the chains had come off when it all got ripped down. That world—the one behind those glasses, the one that beamed itself directly into your fucking retinas—he was pleased to see it fall, to see it burn. To see it stripped of its value, its systems, its endless fake fucking battles. Its baked-in hierarchies and structures. He didn’t build it, it wasn’t built for him—it was built by some cunts in some other country, built by some rich white motherfuckers that just wanted to get richer. That wanted to make money off him, by occupying his headspace, by taking his credit, by turning him into spectacle and entertainment, content for their advertising vectors.
He shakes his head again and remembers the crazy shit they did as kids. Cars on fire, shoe shops looking like a bulldozer had been through them, carpets compacted hard with crushed plastic and glass. The sound it made beneath his feet. Was fun back then, before he understood who it was for. Who he was really doing it for, who was really benefiting. Who was turning him and his postcode’s dramas and daily struggles into prime-time entertainment. Trending topics on the timelines. Algorithmically curated. The filler between the ad breaks.
College understood that, that’s why he came down to the Croft and got with those guys all them years ago.
Melody got it too.
Melody got it more than anyone.
He reaches into his inside jacket pocket and pulls out the spex Mary gave him. Laughs to himself. She picked him out a nice pair, some old Nikes. Of course. Dirty and busted up, sure. Tinted lenses, not too scratched. Check mark logo on the arm. He touches it and it glows a dull green. Charged.
He turns them over in his hands, looks out at the crowd. Sighs and slips them onto his face.
The air around him fills with windows and doorways, images and words, rumors and opinions, music and politics. Lies nestle with facts, jokes with atrocities, the exotic with the mundane. As his eyes fall across any spex wearer in the crowd the air around them explodes with data, tiny blinkable squares orbiting their heads like unswattable flies. Most of them have only been on the network for a few hours max, but already they’re broadcasting their own insignificance, filling their profiles with the trivial facets of their lives, transmitting their half-formed thoughts and feelings, insisting on becoming their own self-important nodes in the network. Bubbles float up from skulls and hang above the crowd, trailing their owners like unwanted odors, filled with soundbites, video clips, unrequested proclamations. A never-ending spewing of content. It’s too much for Grids, too much static, too much noise, already threatening to drown out what matters, what he’s built—to distract these people from the stark reality he knows they need to face. It’s almost like he can feel the radio signals being bounced between the wearers, see them polluting the air with triviality, like background radiation silently eating away at the order he’s brought to the Croft. Too much insignificance, and it’s contagious.
He rips them from his face, rubs his eyes, curses quietly to himself.
Fuck.
From down the street he hears music start up, a slo-mo dub rhythm. Synthetic bass rumbles, the tick of ancient, processed drums. Detuned 808 hits vibrate up through Grids’s shins. Full-on nostalgia rush, threatening to sweep his legs from under him. Ghosts in the crowd, then he’s back there, in the brutalist shadows of Barton Hill, waiting for her to call him, to yell his name. For a second he closes his eyes and lets himself drift, reverse vertigo, as the towers circle and sway around him, synced to the distant filtered breaks that ebb from unseen speakers.
He slips the spex back onto his face.
Avoiding looking at the crowd of insignificance, he instead pulls menus down from his periphery. Deep-diving options, it takes a few blinks to find what he wants. Dials in the day and time Mary told him.
The world around him starts to shimmer and flex. Architecture shifts, graffiti murals washing across walls, geometries shattered by stray tank shells fading back into existence, regrowing like lizard limbs. The crowd morphs, grows stronger, even more spex on faces that are smeared with that look everyone had those few, short days down in the Croft. A mix of confusion and relief, panic and liberation. Significance. He remembers it well, he’d seen it on everyone flooding in. He’d come down here with his crew to see what the fuck was going on, to see if the rumors were true.
Of course they were true. Of course she was already gone by then.
And then the sound comes in, that reverse-suck rush, like air refilling a vacuum. Sirens, distorted police announcements from orbiting quadcopters, the crowd chanting, air horns.
And then the beat hits, that first sub-bass analog kick, and in the long-drawn-out space filled with sampled air before the snare hits he knows it’s her. It couldn’t be anyone else. Nobody else could ever craft melancholy out of reverb like that, breathe that much soul into ping-pong echoes. And then her voice is here, not full words—never full words—just cut-up vowels and breaths, stutters and sighs. The crowd moves with her, hands in the air, ghost faces he recognizes between the raised limbs. Anika dancing, College nodding his head, joint hanging from his lips, stoned grin on his face.
Just not Melody, because by then Melody had already gone.
He lets it play out, the DJ slipping into another rhythm, and he reaches out for the nonexistent jog wheel. Rewind.
He lets it wash over him again, and for the first time that day he feels a smile crack across his face, the kind of smile he hasn’t flexed in years. The smile he used to save for her. Involuntary, real. Like when he’d catch her looking at him, or when he’d tell a joke and she’d laugh. He can hear that now, her laughter, echoing through the waves of white-noise dub, the spaces between the beats. And for a few long minutes it’s like she wasn’t gone, like she was there, standing behind him, like she’s got his back, and he feels one mile tall.
He finds himself drifting away from the crowd, drawn toward the secrets he has buried, toward the lies he’s told. Toward the truth he’s hidden for a decade, hidden from College and Mary and the whole city.
He stops in an alleyway, alone, the sound of the party almost fading away.
It was here, he tells himself.
He blinks in a date two days after that final show.
And then he can see himself, his own back to him now, hurrying up the alleyway. He glances back at himself, looking to make sure he’s not being followed. He looks scared, worried, and young.
So very young.
He’s got an arm around a shorter figure, a hood fully covering the head and face, as he guides them up the alleyway, to a parked car. He opens the rear door, takes a bag from the still-anonymous figure, throws it in.
Grids is standing behind them both now, close, struggling to breathe.
She’s about to get in the car, when she pauses, turns back to young Grids, and pulls back her hood.
It’s her, looking exactly like that last day, exactly like he remembers her. Tired, scared. But still alive.
It takes all Grids’s strength to not pause it there, to not just stand and stare into her eyes.