“We call it HappyTime. A reality skin that makes subtle adjustments when you talk or interact with people you know. It’s guaranteed to help you lead a happier and more stress-free life.”
“Sounds good,” said Sid. “So what does it do?”
“It makes slight changes in your perception so that you get the impression that you’re better off than your friends and family, diminishing the effects the further they are from you personally.”
Sid smiled. “And how does that work?”
“It doesn’t actually change anything, it just gives you the sense that your friend isn’t as happy with his new relationship as he really could be, or modifies how much you hear him telling you he makes at his new job,” Smarmsworth explained. “Little things, so that you still get the gist, but modified, so you feel like you’re doing better than they are.”
“And it works?”
“It works like a charm, proven by extensive research. You will lead a happier life, my friend, guaranteed or your money back.”
“Hey, Sid,” I asked Sid.
“Uh huh.”
“Am I actually getting paid big money for surfing and boozing all day while you slave away as a programmer at Solomon House?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, cool—I thought maybe I had HappyTime on already and I’d forgotten.”
“Fuck off, Bob.”
6
The glare off the hood of the ’67 Mustang made me squint, and the sweat beading down from my forehead stung my eyes as I tried to wipe it away. The police were just beyond the barricade, less than two hundred feet away, and I could hear them nervously loading their weapons and talking in short, staccato bursts into their walkie-talkies.
Waves of heat rose up from the tarmac that was melting the soles of my Converse. Hot rubber mixed with the smell of burned gunpowder and equal parts fear and body odor. Body odor.
Subtext—Bob to Sid: “Could you please dial down the BO?? I’m choking over here.” Sid looked over, sunglasses glinting, and cracked a smile as he pressed his back harder against the side of the car. He was soaked in sweat, too, but looked cool as a cucumber and totally in his element. Sid’s grin widened as he pulled out a ridiculously oversized handgun he had somehow hidden in the small of his back.
“What do you think, should we make a run for it?” I asked breathlessly.
“Hell yeah, little buddy,” came the reply as he magically produced a second cannon from somewhere on his person. “I’ll just crawl into the back and you squirm into the driver seat and get us going. We gotta meet up with the boys to have any chance at busting out of this one!”
“Okay, let’s do this.”
A voice came over a loudspeaker from the roadblock down between the derelict buildings and burned-out car shells up ahead. “Come on out with your hands up, we don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Rolling my eyes, I complained to Sid, who was already crawling cat-like into the back seat, “Can’t they come up with anything better than that?”
I immediately filed a request for snappier dialogue, and then stowed my anemic-feeling .357 into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. Reaching for the door handle, I squeaked the passenger side open, sliding in chest down across the stick shift, humping my body across.
A bullet ricocheted off the concrete.
“Hold your fire!” came the voice on the loudspeaker again. “Come on out, boys, we can still do this the easy way!”
“Bob,” Sid whispered urgently, “you ready?”
I rotated my body around, reaching down to test the pedals with one foot as I hunched over to put the key in. “You betcha, let’s hit it!”
With surging excitement, I turned the ignition to fire up the five hundred horses under the hood. Pushing down the clutch, I jammed it into first, and without looking over the dash, released it as I hit the accelerator. The unbridled power of the engine surged us forward, and we began peeling out in a cloud of vaporized rubber and exhaust.
I swerved wildly, trying to maintain some kind of control. The bullets started flying, and I could feel them hitting the car, punching through the windshield and shattering the glass, which rained over me. Sid was on his back, kicking upward with his feet, trying to knock out the sunroof.
We accelerated rapidly. I risked a peek over the dash through the destroyed windshield. An officer was walking out to crouch in the middle of the street, hoisting something onto his shoulder.
“Sid! Rocket launcher!”
“On it!” he screamed back over the roar of the engine.
I punched it into third.
With a final grunt, Sid kicked out the sunroof, sending it spinning out and away into space above us. In the same fluid motion, he popped up through the open roof with a lunatic grin. Swinging out both of his ridiculously oversized weapons, he began blasting away. Peeking out over the dash again, I saw the head of the cop holding the rocket launcher explode in a mist of red.
The rest of them ducked for cover.
The bullets were coming fast and furious as we neared the point of impact with the barricade. Sid rotated his body backward, jamming his back into the edge of the sunroof and bracing his legs underneath. He leaned out flat on the roof of the car, pointing both guns to each side. As we smashed through the barricade, Sid let go with a terrific volley of fire that took out four LAPD officers in an explosion of blood and guts as they looked up with surprise from their hiding places.
With a second crunching impact, we cleared the last of the cruisers, swerving hard to avoid the worst of the blow. Sid grunted in pain, but managed to lift himself upright as he swiveled around to face the gauntlet ahead of us.
Dozens of cop cruisers were parked on either side of the street, taking dead aim at us. I gunned us into fourth and slid as low as I could in the seat, reaching for my own feeble weapon.
The metallic tang of blood seeped into my mouth, and I looked down to see I was bleeding. I’d been hit, but the shock of the fight was staving off the pain, at least for now. This gameworld didn’t allow turning down your pain receptors—you just had to deal with it.
This was going to get messy.
Suddenly, one of the cop cruisers to our right exploded and lifted into the air, tumbling slowly back to earth in a fiery arc. Several cops ran out from behind the other cruisers, screaming in flames, wildly shooting their weapons. Sid picked them off as another cruiser exploded and incoming automatic-weapon fire began raining down on the police.
They all turned to look up the street.
Willy and Martin were hanging off a cherry red GTO, blazing away at the cops. Vicious was reloading what looked like a rocket launcher of his own. They waved at us merrily with their free hands. I gunned us into fifth and sat up higher in the driver seat, leaning forward to push some of the remains of the smashed windshield out of the way.
It was all about style points now, and Sid did a beautiful job double-fisting shots off both sides of the car. One after the other, he blew away police officers with geometric precision as he looked skyward and let loose with a deranged cackle.
Our audience stats started to spike way up. As one of the best crews in the world at this game, we had over four million people tuned in to watch our escape scene, and Sid was determined to put on a good performance for our fans.
Passing the last of the cruisers, he dragged a grenade out, pulled the pin with his teeth, and sent it sailing right into the open driver-side window. It exploded with a satisfying crunch, and a few uniformed body parts bounced off a nearby chain-link fence.
I congratulated him, “Nice work, Sid!”
Martin, Vicious, and Willy peeled off and followed closely behind in their GTO, and the low throaty growl of both engines mixed together in a bone-shaking symphony. By now they would have put a general call out to all the special weapons squads, so we’d have hundreds of cops chasing us down as we tried to leave the city.