Archive of Our Own

Work Text

(reading time: 1 hour, 6 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 5 hours, 16 minutes)

(All my work, this included, can be found free in full over on my

blog

)

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Competitive Recycling in the Fifth 1990s

by

Blaine Arcade

With a robotically chauffeured limousine and enough free soda to raise the Titanic from the depths, nobody could call it a young man’s average Friday night. It was to be the fantastic Friday night characteristic of the reborn Rockford Rendezvous, and this trial run would culminate with the latest tour stop of the sexiest and most fashionable hologram to ever grace the stage and the drifting dust in the beams of the spotlight.Five young men were beset by swarms of their young fans as they stepped out one by one, even though they were supposed to be members of the audience like all the others. Members of the audience with a private front row box of course, just to make sure none of that squealing became the sobbing scream of the overly invested team fan that happened to ‘fall’ into one of their laps.Four of them had never been treated this way before, yet they took to it masterfully, as if the attention was a possession: a song on the radio that they could order the robot chauffeur to tape and replay endlessly. They were Raffy Lavenil, Barson Kombo, Samuel ‘Bottleneck’ Wenzhong, and Rigan Armando. They each had a winning smile and a victorious wave, with their fans hoping they would be pulled out again after their upcoming match in just three days.The fifth member of their elite group wasn’t quite sure he could remember their names yet as he stepped out and winced against the flashes of disposable cameras. He had been in this life for three years now, so there really wasn’t any excuse for his timidity. In his head his teammates were still known as India, Virgin Islands, China, and Paraguay. That was how his coach had described them, back when they were mere prospects instead of teammates.Diversity was in, and the Rockford pool of players was far too milky for the sponsors’ liking. Even after you skimmed the cream off the top you didn’t find anything darker. So, with the 5-95 recruits freshly minted around the world, the owners of the Rendezvous went in search of some suitably shaded new athletes.They all had to move to Rockford, Illinois permanently if they were to stay qualified for the team, so the fifth passenger, and the only Rockford native among them, was supposed to be their ticket to naturalization, assisting them with socializing and smoothing out any bumps in the Oriental carpet of their lingo.“Kanga! Over here! I have your poster! The light-up one that winks! You keep the nightmares away!” a young fan screamed at him, but he didn’t have the energy to look over. The smile was all Joey ‘Kanga’ Reuben could manage that night. His friendly wave was shoved in both his jacket pockets.So far that jacket was the only thing uniting the five, the bright red leather on the back emblazoned with their team logo: a double helix of crossing paths ending in two figures face to face and holding hands. None but Kanga, not even the fans who wanted a crayon called ‘Kanga-eyes blue’ added to the box, knew that there was one small difference on his logo; he had peeled off the tiniest white pieces representing the ends of the hands. There was now a tiny gap between the two figures, a gulf he found entirely necessary for this new version of the team. Their togetherness was gone, and it was never coming back.The limo’s horn beeped at him so he would shuffle forward enough for the door to slam shut. He checked his faux-tortoiseshell Beltout multi-function pager, clicking until it displayed the day’s schedule. The car would be back in four hours, after the show and any encores. He wasn’t sure if holograms tended to do them more than the archaic musicians that still had to fret about sweat. All it should’ve taken for this new and improved version of her was the flip of a reset switch.The other jackets were disappearing in the crowd, even with two hulking bodyguards, so Joey had to keep moving and keep his head down. When they got through the VIP entrance the atmosphere became considerably more serene. Blasting air conditioning. A smell like trendy sneakers busting out of their cardboard cocoons. The forecast called for a light drizzle, but no stadium had worried about such atmospheric trivialities since they’d all installed retractable acrylic domes.That way the fun never had to end, be it a sporting event or a concert like that night’s. Cities around the world found the remodeling absolutely vital, otherwise people might talk about the incongruence between the old structures and the joys of the present day, the only day, the nineteen nineties.Their box was also made of acrylic, and many loving messages had already been written on it in sparkling gel pens of all colors, some fans even intelligent enough to write it backwards so it would appear correct from within. Some of the gels had special qualities, such pens usually reserved for the writing of love notes. As the athletes walked along the row of plush velvet seats, hearts on the wall lit up and throbbed in purple, orange, red, and pink.Their guards took up position at both entrances, donning massive headphones and activating their pocket CD players. It seemed there was no accounting for musical taste in men of such a position. Anyone sensitive enough to shed a tear positively adored the catchy melodies of Juicy Stardrop, both those produced before and after her untimely demise. Barson nudged Samuel.“Yeah, uhh… Hey Kanga, how did this girl die again? We don’t really listen to her back in Hong Kong.” Without waiting for the answer he pulled out a refrigerated drawer from under his seat and started helping himself to the frozen treats within: peanut cluster ice cream bombs and raspberry-lemon squeeze pops. The others demanded he share, so they were tossed back and forth. A cluster bomb landed in Joey’s lap, but he let it sit there as the cold sensation crept across his thigh.“I thought everybody knew the story,” he said dryly. “It was on every news channel for a week. Some for two.”“I don’t watch the news,” Sammy snapped. “So much good news in my own life that I don’t need any more.” He sucked on his pop with a wet slurp: thfluuuuch! “What I do know is that she was your favorite, so you’ll tell it better than any newscaster anyway.”“Obviously she wasn’t born named Juicy. She was Noel Rivierra, and her birthday was just six days before mine. That’s really why she’s my favorite; I think we were born on the same wavelength. Not that I believe in anything like that literally, it just always felt like her songs were about whatever I was feeling when I was a teenager.” At twenty he was the oldest in the limo, guards discounted of course, so how he managed to feel so far from his teens already was a mystery.“She made her stage name Juicy because one of her high notes made her singing coach spit out his OJ,” Raffy added.“No, that’s just an urban legend,” Kanga quickly corrected. “She never revealed how she picked the name. She never revealed anything really, except her music. She was very private.”“Hey, there any snow cones in there?” Armando asked, leaning over Kanga. There was one, of sorts, and it went ahead and responded. Out popped a colorful plastic cylinder, trailing the icy vapor of the drawer. Its distinctive humming came from the magnetic hover-pad that allowed such small robots to float like butterflies.It chirped cheerily, its two halves spinning in opposite directions. From unseen pores more chilled vapor emerged, and in a matter of seconds the cylinder was covered by two colorful snowballs arranged one on top of the other, the miniature snowman complete with syrupy dollops for eyes and a stretching grin.“Man that’s cool,” Armando said, grabbing at the snow cone, but it playfully dodged his hand a few times. “Hey, give it over! Bad bot! Somebody make you Y2Krazed?” The machine’s giggle was its only response. Perhaps programmed to maximize the happiness of the box’s occupants, it wanted the only sour face in the bunch to be the one to taste its sweetness. Kanga swatted it away, but it hovered just beyond his reach, waiting quietly for him to change his mind.“She was going to be so much bigger than she was,” he went on, “and she was already the biggest personality in the world. After her third album the songs started getting a lot more aware of the rest of the world. They weren’t just about summer vacation or pool parties anymore. There was one about oil spills even.”“Don’t sing that one,” Barson warned the others. “It makes me cry. Oh god, you don’t think the hologram’s going to pick that one do you? I can’t handle hologram birds covered in oil waddling around.”“I don’t think the hologram picks what it sings,” Sammy scoffed. “It’s just a randomized CD backstage somewhere.”“Her plane crashed.” The others went silent, with even the little sugar-dispensing robot backing away and hanging its frozen head. “It was a tiny little state of the art plane, but it still had a pilot, and he made some mistake when looking at the report of the most recent repairs. They lost pressure over the Pacific Ocean and it broke up on the water. They didn’t find any remains, but nobody could have survived.”“It’s a bummer,” Barson added. He was at that particularly irritating age where everything ranging from a misplaced sock to genocide was ‘a bummer’.“When she died she stopped aging, so we weren’t the same wavelength anymore,” Kanga said. “So when I’m fifty she’ll still be eighteen.”“We’re about to watch her man,” Armando countered, “so don’t be a downer. Besides, it’s the nineties. You’ll never be fifty, just…” he counted on his fingers, “3-18. There, still the same age.” The music blared behind them, horns better suited to introducing an Olympic team or perhaps a squad of gladiators. Hidden fog machines spewed clouds into the crowds, colorful lasers being the only thing to shine through as they glided across the acrylic far above.The sounds drew closer and closer, suddenly putting Kanga on edge. It felt like it was right behind him, like a raptor sneaking up on him in the jungle, but when he whipped his head around there was nothing there but the rest of the stadium and a sea of screaming concertgoers. Still, he could’ve sworn that whatever it was passed right through him, not as a chill or a thrill, but like something hand-sized and electric using his spine as a roller coaster track.The hair on his neck and arms stood on end and his tongue retracted like it had forgotten how to swallow. He wasn’t the only victim of the charged phantom, as when the invisible thing passed through the little snow cone its two sections spun around, popping its own head off and sending it wetly to the floor where the syrupy smile melted into a frown. Armando snagged what was left and stuck the entire thing in his mouth, treating the robot as nothing more than a wooden stick.Even the jellied praise left smeared on the front glass of their box was affected, some of the drawn lip and heart shapes swelling back up and peeling off. They left behind a lank silhouette, more than vaguely human, specific enough to be a young woman.“She’s back!” someone shrieked loud enough to penetrate the box. “She’s coming back to life!” Kanga didn’t believe that. Heat swelled in his neck, for he wanted to shout at whoever had declared it. People could be reshaped, if they were in the right exclusive place, could confuse themselves for someone else, but the dead were dead, gone from the nineties no matter how many times they rewound the VHS and played the decade again.Neon footprints, bare and supple, appeared on the side of the stage, stepping out from the fog and making their way to the center. The lasers from beneath them switched to lasers from above without the moment of change being clear. Beams of every color crossed where a microphone should’ve stood, and out from that gorgeous nexus stepped a light and data recreation of the world’s biggest pop star, so big that she couldn’t be allowed to leave the stage.Kanga’s breath caught. He’d seen the illusion on television before, but never in person. Instantly he was a believer, if not in the ethics of it then in the efficacy. It was Juicy, much more than it was Noel. In her first performances, before these encores beyond the mortal coil, she painted her body in bold colors that she said matched her mood each night, with the most common being fuchsia, which she declared to represent the feeling of transparency: the knowledge that everyone truly saw the light inside her.This time it wasn’t paint. The fuchsia was her skin, down to the folds around her eyes shining even brighter and the dip of her navel being a little darker. Her skin prickled not with perspiration but with the dew of fresh technology, the inexperienced brightness of 1.0. Her short hair was hottest orange, standing like a flame cast in wax. Her sideburns were cut into bars, like the light-up decibels bouncing back and forth in the darkness of the control center.Her face was enthusiasm incarnate, and no matter how long she held her smile it never looked false or stiff as Kanga assumed it would. Her eyes were nothing but light, but try as he did he couldn’t see through them. She was the one seeing, her fans, her stadium, her nineties world. Then, unmistakably, she looked right at him. He wasn’t the only one to notice, for suddenly he felt the hands of his teammates on his shoulders, rubbing and slapping. They hooted and shook him, telling him they hadn’t arranged it, that it was just the luck of the draw. Whatever program was running her made her give him that sparkling look. Then she spoke, and her voice was everywhere.“Hello Rockford! I see a lot of stars out there tonight. What am I even here for?” The roar could’ve drowned out a tsunami, yet her affable tone overpowered it. “Okay! I’ll just make the music while all of you do the hard work of being so beautiful.” The voice was as it had always been, only now it jumped out from her old recordings like never before. She was in the air, in the breath of her adoring public, and filling the canals of their ears like the waters of Venice.The audience shouted titles at her, pleas, as she walked back and forth across the stage and waved: Meet Me, Back in my Dreams, Party at the Bottom of the Beach… There were so many for the program to choose from, yet her eyes kept glancing back at Kanga. He didn’t even have a song he wanted to hear in particular, at least not one he would reveal out loud. When she was back at the center she pointed at him, the tip of her finger strong as any of the dancing lasers about her.“Excellent suggestion,” she said with a wink.“What did you say?” Raffy asked.“Nothing, I swear,” Kanga said in the middle of a shocked swallow. “I didn’t even mouth it. I was just thinking-”“Do all of you remember a number called Leapfrog Rules?” There was a cheering wave, but it was much quieter than the last. “No? It wasn’t one of my biggest, but this boy in the front remembers. Those stuffed shirts in the ticket office want me to stick to the number ones and the number ones-for-the-whole-summer, but a girl has to do what’s in her heart, right?” The roar was back at full strength. It had to be a tactic. The stuffed shirts insulting themselves just to make it believable, as long as it didn’t stop people from buying tickets.Kanga’s deductive mind didn’t get that far; it was still skipping across the song title like a record needle. Leapfrog Rules was the song he’d thought of. It was the song that convinced him to try out for his school’s team, his first step onto a trail that would become a carpet wearing Rockford Rendezvous red. To most it was a song about breaking the rules, but he knew better. It was about being above the rules, about playing a bigger game, about flicking those shouting at your disrespect of their rules off your shoulder.The hologram sang it like she still believed it, like the stuffed shirts could pull her plug behind the stage at that moment and nothing would happen.♪ Remember Leapfrog’s strict ♪♪ We’re all in line, have fun at the right time ♪♪ What if I broke the chain? ♪♪ Can it handle that strain? ♪♪ It might need little old me feeling tricked ♪♫ Or is it about… ♫♫ Make time to ask… ♫♫I bet it’s so… ♫♫ I hop next! ♫♪ Nothing wrong with this jump ♪♪ Make any frog proud, any strong bird too♪ Leapfrog rules don’t apply ♪♪ When you learn how to fly ♪♪ Oops I broke it, oh well, the pool’s a dump! ♪♫ Totally about… ♫♫ no need to ask… ♫♫ confirmed it’s so… ♫♫ With the rest! ♫Kanga’s heart thundered in his chest, despite understanding his situation. She was a hologram: literally harmless. He was at a concert, so the team heads and the sponsors weren’t listening. Even if they were they weren’t likely to discern how those lyrics connected with him. His feelings about the game, about it all, were still private. Perhaps that was what he feared, that Juicy was only getting started and by the time she was done he would be turned inside out on stage like a sweaty sock for the world to see.Whatever she was, she gave him a chance to recover by paying attention to the thousand others surrounding him. With other song requests, ones that were actually voiced, came incredible hologram backdrops that mimicked the cover art of her albums. Now she could do what only photo editing could accomplish before: drifting by lounging on a giant bubble, making her way down stairs that had been the keys on a keytar moments before…The whole concert passed with him barely moving an inch. The one step he took, toward the glass, had him nearly slip on the melting remains of the little sugary snowman. Certainly more than two hours had gone by, and the audience could no longer hop as enthusiastically as the performer, not with actual tendons and soles getting sore. They all stayed on their feet though, trying not to disappoint her.Ka-thum! Ka-thum-thum! Her hips shook with the booming percussion, which sounded like drums with skins big enough to dance on. She always loved to end with drums, as if the performance made the colorful paint peel off the music and reveal the compelling heartbeat at its core. When the last beat sounded she threw up her arms, rainbow waves breaking between her fingers and sprinkling the crowds below in ephemeral glitter.They even made her chest heave, as if her breaths were big. When she spoke there was air in her voice like she’d run a marathon, and like she’d seen something amazing at the halfway point and been unable to stop and properly witness it. There it was again though, at the finish line. She pointed at Kanga.“Come on up here.” The right door to their box opened on its own, catching the associated guard by surprise. The other large man rushed over, and together the two of them improvised a gate with their arms that could let Kanga out but keep the fans from coming in. It was clear they didn’t like surprises, so he hurried out to assist them. Lots of hands brushed his shoulders and back on the short jaunt to the stage and up its stairs, but with one swoop of his hand his mussed hair was returned to perfection.Melting worse on the inside than any snow, man or cone, it didn’t show through his experience. He’d been on hundreds of stages and centered in nearly as many arenas, so the posture, the smile, and the wave were all reflexes at that point. The camera tends to add ten pounds, but for him those ten were all muscle and swagger.The most disarming thing was the look in her eyes. Juicy was breaking her own rules, taking her attention away from the audience and looking at him as if he was the only other being in existence. Her pupils, blue and sparkling like a galaxy, or like a handful of glitter dropped in a show floor hot tub, searched him. He didn’t have a microphone and neither did she. Her voice was in every speaker, so anything he said would have to be relayed through her.“What am I doing up here?” he asked.“You’re a local boy, aren’t you?” she asked, impossibly quiet. Her voice had moved and shrunk; those words were just for him. Where was it coming from? Another speaker in the floor? No, even closer. Was it, could it be, his pager? It was multi-function, but that felt like a few functions too many.“Rockford born and raised. I’ve been a lot of other places… and the best part is coming home.”“He says the best part of leaving Rockford is coming home!” she repeated to the crowd. They exploded in approval. His teammates, shrewder than their antics let on, leaned out of the box, pushing their heads around the elbows of their frustrated guards, and started a chant that the stadium quickly took up like a dropped hundred dollar bill: ‘roll out the red for the Rendezvous!’ Juicy reacted oddly to the chant, something in her body language he’d never seen in the living woman. It was like a ball bearing had dropped somewhere inside her and was slowly making its way down all manner of spiraling ramps and elevators.“The Rendezvous? What’s that?” she asked just him.“The Rockford team. My team.”“Team for what, local boy?”“Competitive recycling.” It was strange that she didn’t know, given that she seemed to inherently know everything else. He had started thinking the world wide web was the equivalent of her blood, that the number of times he was mentioned on it drew her to him in an effort to make the concert even more of a spectacle. It made sense from a business perspective to take advantage of any celebrities in the audience, pressuring them into an appearance alongside the false Juicy without having to pay them.Competitive recycling had been the trendy sporting event to both witness and participate in since the second nineties. It was everyone’s responsibility to help clean the Earth, and there was no reason they couldn’t have buckets of fun while doing it.“They really seem to like you around here,” Juicy said, cutting away from the subject as if it upset her. “What’s your name?”“Joey, but everybody calls me Kanga.”“Glad to meet you Joey. I’m Juicy.”“I know,” he said with a snort. “I’ve known you, erh, Noel, for a long time… and I didn’t know her know her. The real you I mean.”“I am the real me,” she insisted. “Are you the real you?” He was about to answer that of course he was, there were no holograms of him running around, but he couldn’t get the words out. Something in her question pinned him down, flat. She used that moment to lean in and kiss him on the cheek. He shouldn’t have felt anything, but he did. It was impossible to tell if it was the explosion in the crowd at the sight of it, the adrenaline of her face being so close, or some bolt of static jumping between her and his pager.Regardless, the lights went out with her lips on him. The stadium lights were big enough to raft on, so the mere act of shutting down was quite loud, like all the metal shutters in a mall dropping together. The quiet of the blinding moment lasted less than a second; the lights returned. They weren’t the carefully curated colors of the show, but all the ordinary ones. Pale little safety lights between the rows of seats. Lights buzzing over the snack bars behind them. Lights that had never known what they could be.His bodyguards were halfway up the stage in the darkness, and they forcefully but carefully guided him back to the box. The crowd was shouting for an encore, and she always did one, but the milquetoast lighting all but assured she wasn’t coming back. Kanga looked over his shoulder and saw a few combinations of tucked shirts and glasses examining a projecting machine just behind one of the curtains. They were swearing at each other, trying to decide whether to slap the projector or their coworkers.The rest of the evening was a blur. Somehow, the guards no doubt, he made it back to the limo, back to the team house, and then back to his own apartment. Someone was messing with him, or after his money, had to be. The team head warned him this might happen after the attack. People would see him as even better than a hologram; he was a survivor. Everyone had witnessed the deaths, so they felt they were entitled to explanations, to everything in Kanga’s head as he had watched it the closest.Sleep. Supposed to get eight hours the day before a game. In his contract that he had to be comfortable. In his puffy white bedding, like the snowy hills he was about to board down. Wrapped tightly like the embrace of an avalanche, wound up like a squeezed cube of salmon in a sushi roll, he finally forced sleep.
…
“Mom told me to pretend it was just one picture, like for school picture day, because… because it’ll only take that long.” The cherubic child was difficult to understand, but there was a handful of ways in which it wasn’t his fault. First was the structure of his nine-year-old face: round, small teeth, and the tiniest banana-bruise of a chin dimple forming. It was an extremely photogenic face, almost designed that way, though he certainly wouldn’t be so adorable as an adult.Such a face, with cheeks looking permanently pinched and teeth too tiny to compete with the tongue, tended to slur the words, but that was fine, for they weren’t going to record anything he said. He was only there because his face was doubly squeezed by his mechanically jointed and robotically operated full body cast.Even after the double squeezing his speech then had to contend with the cold and the ongoing drift of the artificial snow blowers positioned far above them. His numb little face soldiered through, but then the painkilling drugs got to it. Kanga wasn’t sure how aware the child was of the things he was saying. He responded as if they were having a lucid conversation anyway.“Yeah, they’ll all flash at once, they’ll ask a couple of questions, and then they’ll move on.” He was referring to the photographers from Recycling Bin Monthly, SBS News, Hollywood Hissyfit, and a few other smaller outlets. These kinds of publicity stunts were common. The team head would arrange for some unfortunate but television-ready victim to meet their favorite recycling player for a few pictures and a free autograph.He wondered if the kid’s cast could handle trudging through snow, but it couldn’t have been that bad given how much he was smiling. He had a camera of his own, gripped in his swollen pink fingers, a little disposable number from the nearby gift shop for the subterranean slopes. He asked Kanga for a picture, and he obliged. It was the last shot on the roll, so the kid took the film canister out afterward and tossed the camera itself as far as he could.“That one’s for you when the game starts,” he huffed excitedly, the toss making it just far enough to pass the turnstiles that kept people from falling off the side of the mountain. Without the ability to bend his arm the throw had sent his whole body spinning, so Kanga had to catch him to keep him upright. A few warning lights on the cast’s joints flashed.“What happened to you anyway kid?” Kanga asked. Though the robotics gave him mobility it was still a sorry sight, like watching a lamp-dried starfish waddle around upright.“My dad did it,” he said, smile fading. “Pushed me down the stairs. The D.O.U.S.E people said he was on drugs, and that it was a real good thing all the guns are off the streets, because I wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Kanga suppressed an eye roll. It was the duty of D.O.U.S.E officers to protect children, yet they never even learned how to talk to them without scaring them witless.“I’m sorry kid, that’s rough… but hey, it looks like you’ve got a lot of friends taking care of you.” He pointed out the copious marker illustrations and signatures all across the cast: wolves howling at the moon across his chest, with each having a name sliding down their backs and dangling off their tails, video game characters racing a marathon along his arm, and a purple tiger roaring between his shoulders.“Yeah!” he said, laughing at a passing snowflake. “Umm… Mr. Kanga? Would you sign it too?”“Sure kid, no problem.” There was a felt-tipped pen jammed in the collar of the cast, and since the child could do nothing but jab his eyes toward it, Kanga pulled it free and put his John Hancock, super star right next to a sticker of a fellow recycler. Feeling extra generous, especially since the cameras weren’t there yet, he turned and pulled his board out from his large red supply duffel. “Do you want to sign my board?”Perhaps it was a mistake, for his face got even redder and tears of joy welled up in his eyes. He couldn’t nod, but Kanga could see by the alternately scrunching skin on his forehead and chin that he was trying to. He handed the pen over quickly before the kid had a chance to hyperventilate.“I didn’t think I could even see it,” he squeaked between sniffles. The athletic device was elegantly engineered, though the effect was almost completely ruined by the sponsors’ logos plastered all over it. The most coveted spot was the middle of the underside, for his Rad Machines Anyboard was capable of landing jumps from more than fifty feet in the air. Any logo seen at the center of a spinning board mid-trick was sure to stick in a viewer’s mind.“Yeah, she’s a beauty,” Kanga said with a smile as the kid squeezed his squiggly signature between the colorful names of Hoshiko Fun Fruit and Rainforest on Every Corner. “Sixty-five inches long. Encased in impact and scratch resistant resin. Rounded hover-hubs based on the wheel wells of the 3-91 Smooth Operator convertible.”Its most obvious characteristic under all the advertising was its bright red color, matching the Rockford Rendezvous long-sleeved winter jersey he wore. His number, 45, took up most of his chest. There was already talk that the Rendezvous might retire that number when he left the game, as a monument to his continuing after the attack. Kanga thought that perversely backward.The numbers killed in action should’ve been the ones honored: 33, 12, 68, and 64. Yet they were there that day, on the jerseys of Raffy, Barson, Sam, and Rigan, absorbing all those flashbulbs before they made their way over to the star player. Then there was 44. Right next to Kanga’s. Nobody in League Intersectional Recycling should’ve dared to touch that one.“I think you’ll break your record today,” the kid said, bringing him back to the moment. “One ton of recycling!” Kanga chuckled. The kid, when not under the influence of stardom and tranquilizing syrup, knew full well that his current record for a single game was 106 pounds and seven ounces.Big helicopters, each capable of carrying the whole team, had taken them up the mountain to the Baldigari starting gate, and along the way he had a really good look at the opening descent. Mixed in with the snow was a fair amount of refuse, likely enough to break the three pound mark before they even hit the main body of the course, but that was only if he didn’t face stiff interference from the opposition.Their opponent that day was the Dayton Embrace, embraced by uniforms of dark gray and gold, though their fans were quick to point out that the shades were actually called industrial crystal and king’s patina. Kanga spotted them on the other side of the photographers, all seven of them, mugging for the crowd squeezed into the one bleacher box that fit at that altitude.The Embrace was an aggressively defensive team, their coach purposefully drafting players with muscles like the exterior of bumper cars. Their strategy for five seasons straight now was cutting other players off before they could make a collection and forcing a shoulder collision, usually resulting in a tumble for the smaller player.Tumbles cost time, and there was no penalty for defensive positioning around a collection, thus punishing the player who had the greater speed going in. It was a brutal board-snapping and tire-popping technique that really got the fans jumping out of the stands and hurting themselves almost as much.Dayton’s aggression earned them ratings, but it had proven difficult to convert into victories. The season was a third over already and they were sitting on a paltry 3-9 record. When it came down to it, it was still better to be faster and collect more. That was supposed to be the whole point after all, cleaning up that poor mountain.“Here they come,” the kid squeaked, waddling to complete half a turn toward the cluster of approaching photographers. Kanga took his anyboard back and propped it up next to him, so he would have something to lean on if the kid suddenly leaned on him. The flashes got there before they did, and so did the questions. The first one asked was done so completely out of breath. The chattering of their teeth was certainly audible wherever their microphone was broadcasting.“Kanga! If I may! How does it feel to know you give children like Mitty here someone to look up to?”“They have to look up to me way up here,” he joked, deflecting the question as he silently shamed himself for never asking little cocooned Mitty’s name.“Are you ready for your first game with a rebuilt Rendezvous?”“Yes.” He couldn’t leave it at that. Terse wasn’t relatable; it wasn’t marketable. “Leternau was nice enough to sub in for me while I took some time off. She got us to six-six and I’m confident we can make it seven-six today.”“I’m confident too!” Mitty squeaked. “Kanga’s the best!” He tried to give a thumbs up to the cameras, but with the thumb a tall island in a sea of plaster the gesture looked no different from its resting position.“That’s great,” one of them said as they snapped again. “Hey you’re going to sign his cast right? Let’s get a shot of that.” The others voiced their agreement.“I already signed it guys,” Kanga said with a strained smile. “Let’s not make him stand out in the cold any more than he has to.”“You can sign it again for Juicy,” one of them said. He tried to find which face the words had spewed from, but it was already lost, only the lens it held exposed.“Why would I do that?”“So you’re saying it’s not true?” A different voice. The same thread. The kid wasn’t the meal they gorged on; that honor belonged to Joey Reuben’s facial expression after that question.“I don’t know what you’re talking about, or what most of you write down for that matter.” He had to tamp down his temper again; it was never a problem before. The team head would surely have words for him already.“We saw how she warmed up to you on that stage.” Yet another voice, another outlet. “Those holograms are based on the personalities of the original. There’s been speculation that the two of you were in a secret relationship before her death, and that the hologram sensed it.”“That’s nonsense,” he said reflexively. “A stunt by the people programming that thing I think.”“That thing is no way to talk about your girlfriend. Maybe you didn’t like her when she was flesh and blood, but how about now? Are you going to be the first man in a cross-reality relationship?” The worst part was that he couldn’t even look away. Mitty’s face was off to the side, brimming with freezing tears and a smile missing a tooth, enrapt in the possibility of such a thing being true.Kanga was saved by the arrival of three women, two of whom wore Rendezvous red, and one who wore an expression suggesting she’d just realized that artificial snow required very real cold. She hustled over to her drugged starfish of a son, rubbing his pink fingers and wrapping her own jacket around him. Only standing behind him with her hands on his stiff shoulders, pushing back and forth as if working the handlebars of an exercise bike, succeeded in getting him moving toward shelter.“We’re starting and you guys are all in the way,” one of his teammates told the photographers. “Get back to the stands with everybody else.” They weren’t happy, but the Baldigari Mountain audio system kicked in, blaring music like a cough from god that sent them scurrying. Patterns of light moved along the front of the bleachers. The lingering helicopters far above made colored spotlights dance across the snow.Tina and Monique were the only women on the starting lineup of seven, and only Tina had been with them before. She put a hand on his shoulder and walked with him to the turnstiles while she pulled her bounce bike along with the other. There were squares painted onto the packed snow, one for each of the fourteen players. They slotted into theirs and prepared their equipment.“Thanks for saving me,” Kanga mentioned as he put his board down and locked his boots into position.“You know I’ve got your back,” she said as she straddled her seat. One of her hands worked the pump that looked like an old fashioned bicycle bell, inflating her giant tires bit by bit. “Monique does too, so stop giving her the cold shoulder.”“It’s not her fault… It’s just that she’s-”“Wearing 44 I know. Wasn’t her choice. You’ve got to keep your head off his number and in the game. Leternau was more fun than you, but she couldn’t snatch tinfoil out of the wind to save her life.” The new guys took up their positions, and their opponents followed until all fourteen players were chomping at the bit to be unleashed on the mountain in desperate need of a good sweeping.“For Baldigari it’s winter all year round!” the announcer boomed. “That means spring cleaning never came. This resort and ice park sees thousands of visitors a year from all over the world, and we’re happy to pitch in from time to time to make sure it’s still looking pristine.”“Remember all the good stuff will be in the tunnels,” Tina reminded him when the announcer took a breath. “Don’t try to pull anything out of the powder that’ll slow you down.”“You act like this is my first community service,” Kanga said with a chuckle, using the insider’s lingo for the sport.“Just remember you’ve still got a community,” she said. He couldn’t ask what she meant, for the spirited announcing kicked back in.“For today’s match we have, in the radical red, the Rockfoooooord Rendezvoooouuuus!” Raucous applause. “And in the gilded gray we must have the Daaaaaaayton Embraaaaaaace!” There was surely applause for them as well, the jerseys in the stands were evenly distributed across the two color schemes, but Kanga’s focus dropped down the slope in front of him. He didn’t hear the prerecorded promo either, just the last word of it.“Baldigari Mountain is an eco-engineering wonder with over twenty trails, many of which terminate in gigantic tunnels bored into the ice and rock, polished to a marvelous blue like you’ve never seen… unless you hold one of our season passes that is. Good luck to the recyclers down there. We’re counting on you! On your mark, buckle up, and go!”The turnstiles flew open, all fourteen vehicles springing forward and beginning their descent. Two types of extreme sport transportation were sanctioned for official league recycling: the anyboard and the bounce bike. The former, strongly resembling a snowboard, could handle oh so much more thanks to its pinch of constant hovering, like the breath under an air hockey puck. Snow, sand, dirt, rock, rails, still water, waves, boiling bubbles, and perhaps even the jealousy of all those without one. All surfaces were fair game to its impressive moves. Any surface.Bounce bikes were the bellowing shield maidens to the anyboard’s slick scouts. Their inflatable wheels, more like inner tubes than true tires, were similarly resilient, but a touch slower and better at absorbing the impacts that the previously mentioned jealous were bound to attempt. When a rider was so inclined they could bounce back and forth, sending their bronco bucking, leaping over huge obstacles with all the grace of a hare trained in classical ballet.Athletes were free to use their vehicles of choice, but they were all bound by the same regulation backpack compressor. Self-tightening straps held in place a metal canister with a funnel opening on top, like a tall ashtray for the strolling smoker. Inside its dark maw advanced compression technology went to work crushing all the extra anything out of recyclables. A tin can could be reduced to a hundredth of its original size. The weight of course did not respond to exercise or the trendy pills that kept some recyclers trim; every beast carted every burden they collected from the opening bell to the closing applause.A single player would have difficulty carrying more than a hundred compressed pounds on their back, so it served them well to fill up and pass anything else collected to those still running on light and breezy empty. One was also free to drop off their collection with the scorekeeper for tallying and go back out, as long as time remained, but it was usually a significant detour.The team to collect the greatest recyclable weight within each unique arena’s confines after forty minutes was declared the winner. Your support of the victors was a double victory, for you threw in with those who were in the better graces of vivacious Mother Earth. The winners could be held up as thoroughly of the nineties: healers, menders, and forward soldiers. The losers could embody the black and bottomless gorging gorge of 1980s consumption.If the winners had been around in the frantic cocaine-fueled madness of 1-89, perhaps none of those awful craters would have been left in society. The guns wouldn’t have to be off the street, ripped from the hands of every gang member. The rain forests wouldn’t be reduced to one on every corner. And their backyards wouldn’t be so full of the blowing tumbleweeds that were the last decade’s trash.Candy wrappers could be left to the fans; they were worth essentially nothing since they were thin and heavy as leaves. Kanga let them whip by as he crouched lower, encouraging his board to adopt lethal speed. With so much time left he could afford to be picky, saving his strength for the most reliable source of points: glass bottles. Metal cans and tins were next on the totem pole after that.There was one now, its tab sticking out of the snow and approaching rapidly. He still knew all the colors of all the labels, so its splash of icy blue meant it had originally held some of that ‘astronaut ice cream’ that had been such a sensation a few years back. He snatched it like a hawk, even scooping in the right direction so the snow would fall out of it rather than weigh him down for a fraction of a second.Over his shoulder it went, a single tinny bounce off the rim before his pack sucked it down and flattened any dreams of space travel right out of it. His wrist watch indicator beeped and displayed the item’s weight.He entered a corridor of cheering, as more bleachers were set up on either side at the manageable elevations. Despite the crowd’s elation they were making things more dangerous for the Rendezvous, as the attention-hungry slavering Embrace saw it as their cue to assert themselves. One of the their bounce bikes swerved, cutting off Kombo on his anyboard. The bike bounced at the last second, detonating the snow in its wake so that a chunk of it smacked against the red recycler’s face.The end result was Kombo violently flattened against the front of some of the bleachers, conveniently covering an exorbitant price in an advertisement. Helping him would just be a waste of time, so Kanga blew by. If a player couldn’t get back up on their own the medics would be along shortly.The entrance to the tunnels loomed. They were a feat indeed, like looking down a glacier’s throat. That throat was an excellent singer, the distortions of the sound outside fascinating the recyclers as soon as they barreled in. The cheering was quieted, but far from gone, like it was being spread across the ice the same way one would ice a cake.Friendlier inclines presaged a split in the path ahead. One tunnel became four, and which contained the most tempting trash was any participant’s guess. Radios were not part of their gear, so all communication had to be handled with hand signals. Monique, leading both packs on her anyboard, used one to declare that the leftmost path belonged to her.Kanga was enjoying himself more than anticipated, the ice in his lungs invigorating his whole body in a way he hadn’t felt in months. How could he have forgotten that he loved the game this much? The subterranean singing of the ice was like the hymn of a pipe organ breaking against a cathedral ceiling, and he simply had to slow down and take it in.Letting his teammates pick the tunnels they liked was pretense enough; he would do his best with the least-populated path. Three red figures took the left center path, and another the rightmost. That left one free of Rendezvous energy, and they couldn’t have that. Even his slight turn faced heavy opposition, with two Embrace recyclers coming up alongside him on anyboards. They boxed him in, adjusting to his speed, with the intent of running him into one of the walls dividing the tunnels.Cameras were mounted in the ice, relaying the action to screens all over the resort. There would be too many to account for, so slipping in a body check foul to free himself some space was out of the question. It was always out, as he’d never been justly penalized for one before, but the smugness on his opponents’ faces tempted him sorely.Instead he changed his technique, spinning his board forty-five degrees so he was gliding along as if on skis. The wider profile forced them to give a few inches on each side, but that wasn’t the only purpose of the maneuver. Kanga was able to stand tall, giving him a better angle to view both the approaching tunnel and his foes.The Embracers couldn’t stand to be at a disadvantage in any capacity, so they turned to match his profile. Anyboards hovered less than two inches off the ground most of the time, and many athletes made the mistake of thinking they could spin it like a propeller without consequences, for it made most calculations based on its center of mass.Kanga was on perfectly flat ice, but the Embracer to the right was on the tunnel’s left curve, so when he turned his board snagged the edge of the ice and he tumbled straight into the wrong tunnel, howling as he slid away. That left one more, but Kombo reappeared from behind and got between them, flashing a thumbs up at Kanga as he forced the remaining opponent down the same tunnel as the other.The walls cut off the friendly gesture before he could return it, leaving him alone with the ice and its song, now reduced to an echoing whisper. The ice dropped sharply; he leaned into it. Occasionally the wall was painted with markings indicating the difficulty, so he followed the pairs of black diamonds whenever he saw them, even as the ice sheared the shapes themselves on its way down.Some passages were so tight and steep that he could loop around them entirely. It was such a wonder to be that deep in the mountain, like the mirror of a mountaineer nearing the summit, but there was one nagging problem. The passage was clean as a bleached whistle. He checked his indicator: three minutes in and only a cold and lonely tin to his name. That wasn’t what the equally cold Mitty was shouting his little lungs out for.The temperature dropped as he boarded deeper, necessitating his goggles just to keep his eyes warm. The only lights were planted under the ice’s surface, giving the blue surroundings an eerie glow. The song was gone, and all he heard was the occasional drip. The indicator would beep at him if he got so low that he was out of bounds, so abandoned as this passage seemed it had be included for a reason, and it had to include a way to the scorekeeper.The first thing that wasn’t ice in over five minutes caught his eye. There was an embankment of snow, a hidden blower spraying more of it in a lazy geyser. He slowed down and went through the chilly curtain, finding an idyllic scene perfect for a painting: thermal picnic blanket, plastic wineglasses stuck in the snow and empty except for icy purple rings in the bottom, and an assortment of containers for string cheese, beef jerky, and cheap salmon caviar from a squeeze tube.The grand prizes were the blanket and the wine bottle, both of which generated the loudest noises when his pack sucked them down and compressed them. He grabbed the rest of it as well, watching his indicator number swell to over seven pounds. What a boon someone’s messy romantic outing turned out to be, and not just because they’d run off to a hotel bed without stopping for some not-so-seductive sanitation duties.Further back, hidden tightly in the shadows, was a pit in the ice flooded with discarded goods. Someone must have told those picnickers about that spot, a someone who was told by someone else, who was told by yet another person who would never ruin the moment by loudly flapping some air into a trash bag.Kanga disengaged from his board, fully within the rules but inadvisable if an enemy was near enough to coax it into moving on its own and stranding its owner. He jumped into the pit, bottles and cans rolling with a clatter. Here was the sweaty armpit of the mountain, long neglected, perfectly filthy for his needs. Ten pounds. Twelve. Fifteen.His pack started to sag, but it wasn’t alone. Kanga stopped when the pit itself drooped. He was still knee deep in refuse, so he froze, hands out, waiting to see what would happen. Unfortunately the mountain was not subject to the same ticking clock, so the recycler had to blink his frozen lashes first.Leaping toward his board put a little too much empty air in the pile; it collapsed. In doing so it took off sliding as a single mass, revealing a circular hole on one end of the pit. This was a trail after all, long stopped up by visitors testing and discarding aphrodisiacs in the drift of the snowblower. The momentum was enough to pull his board along with the pile, but he was stuck climbing against the clattering current and reaching for it.The tunnel swerved left, and then right, and then declared that it didn’t much care for swerving at all, turning into a vertical chute that dumped everything into a snowbank. A bottle, seeming aware of how much it was worth in the game of recycling, defended itself by dropping directly onto the crown of Kanga’s head and shattering.His ears and thoughts rang as more and more piled on top of him. In moments he was completely buried, the greatest shift in the refuse caused by the swelling purple goose egg on the top of his head.“What was that?” The voice wasn’t that close, but everything echoed in the domed chamber. A few manufactured ice columns held the ceiling up, trophies and ribbons and gift store goods locked inside as if a tidal wave through the Winter Olympics had frozen in a camera flash. The metal base of a ski lift stood on the far side, but it had just stopped running, one of its cars still bouncing back and forth on its hook.“It’s just a pile of trash,” someone else said, close enough to make Kanga flinch. Luckily he was too numb and sore to do so. Whoever they were kicked one of the bottles, sending it spinning across ice that had been machine-textured to prevent slipping.Kanga swallowed, the sharp touch of a soda can’s pop tab on his Adam’s apple helping him ground his thoughts. Both voices were female, unfamiliar. There were others, but they weren’t talking. It was the sounds of panic, the glue of sniveling holding together all the groveling. His eyes focused and opened in the wrong order, his vision mostly obscured by three layers of bottles, each dyeing the scene before him a different color through their glass. One tiny window, the shape of a star, showed him the plain truth. Through it he saw a number, printed in green, across a circular metal hatch: 96.The last time he’d heard it was the briefing the night before. Ninety-six was the designation of the assigned scorekeeper for the match. He’d accidentally dropped right into the end of the course. No matter how much recycling was sequestered away in a pack, none of it counted for a single point if it wasn’t fed into the scorekeeper by game’s end.Incredible inventions they were, the limited edition Y2Kapable all-purpose recyclers out of Shinjuku, of which only ninety-nine were ever produced. That meant only ninety-nine recycling matches could happen around the world simultaneously, as nothing else was capable of such feats of matter rearrangement as well as the instantaneous spitting out of fun and notable statistics.They were strictly controlled by League Intersectional Recycling, LIR, and the League Intersectional Recycling International Council, LIRIC. As the only sanctioned machines capable of operating soundly on new millennium code, the scorekeepers saw the current year as 2035 rather than the more sensible 5-95, they were arguably the single most valuable items in existence.Yet this one had clearly fallen in with a bad crowd. As the match’s endpoint, the domed chamber should have been populated only by referees, team officials, select film crew, and any players dumping off their collections. Kanga quickly judged all the bound and gagged figures, only a few capable of righting themselves on their knees, to be all of those sanctioned people.Ninety-six could only be in the clutches of one group; nobody else had ever attacked a match in progress. Judging by the empty lift, they had successfully isolated the chamber, meaning they had control of all nearby machines that could allow anyone else access. That meant every potential exit for Kanga was unsafe, Y2Krazy as they come, nihilistic and ready to self-destruct as soon as it looked like they could take someone else with them.“If I find out you didn’t film every second of this,” the first woman said, drawing his attention away from the hostages, “I’ll listen really close for that heartbeat of yours, I know them all, and I’ll show up when it’s calm and slow… when you’re asleep. Then I’ll make it beat to a different rhythm. Do you understand?” Kanga could barely make out the camera man; he was green and curled like a string bean thanks to the bottom of the bottle he was looking through. An equally bent film camera stood on a tripod next to him. His beret-wearing head disappeared behind it after he nodded.There was another distorted figure, but the green couldn’t suppress her aura fully. He knew her clothes were white even without seeing them clearly. They weren’t normal by any means, fabulously evil even from behind, like she was finishing the catwalk in her secret layer. Fiercer than that. A tiger’s walk. The shoulders were sharp, the cape barely more than a hood dangling behind her neck.Were the boots high-heeled, or did she just insist on standing that much taller than the peons beneath her? Her head was encased in a skintight cowl that rose to a curled point, like a cresting wave in a saucer of heavy cream.“Monoxide, where’s Lavabox? We’re a hundred beats behind schedule. The camera person’s just wet themselves and it’ll freeze before we even have anything to show their lens.”“They say give them ten seconds,” the second voice answered, stepping away from the pile that contained the woozy recycler. He got a much better look at her: short, hair to match, wearing far too little for such temperatures, and skin a soft cherry red, but that was just the red bottle she stepped in front of, or so he thought until she moved into the clear star and he saw the shade carry over unchanged. That absolutely settled it. These were the recycled people that ruined everything, the terrorists threatening the sport and even the world upholding it… the Millennials.Though he hardly needed more proof, a third one arrived, shooting out of a tunnel on a stolen bounce bike, dragging two bound Embracers behind it. It bounced to a halt, its previous owners ricocheting off the giant tire before being pulled back violently by the tightly-woven cords around their waists.The cyclist, who Kanga guessed to be the ‘Lavabox’ the others spoke of, dismounted and grabbed a chunk of ice from the floor. He put it to the back of his neck, where it immediately hissed and melted into steam. He looked like an African-American male, but there was really no telling exactly what he was if he had been recycled.He seemed to be in competition with the one called Monoxide over who could be the closest to nude, for he was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only a pair of red nylon pants meant for running, two luminous stripes down the sides. His face was clean and cocky, a shine to his bald head that almost matched the brightness of his smile.“Two eggs, over easy,” he said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them. “Let’s make an omelet.” He unhooked the wire, dragging the two players toward the Scorekeeper. A chilling wave, nothing at all to do with the ice, washed over Kanga. They were doing it again. What were the odds they would target a second one of his matches? Had he done something to offend them?“Excellent,” the woman in charge said. She turned to the cameraman. “Roll film.” He obeyed, adjusting the frozen sheet of urine in his trousers with his free hand. “The new millennium is here whether your recognize it or not,” she scolded the camera. “Put down your toys, and put them in the right bin. You make it harder every day, forcing us to make it easy on you.” She nodded at Lavabox.He grabbed a handle on the side of the number ninety-six and pulled open the hatch, revealing the glowing swirling innards of the locomotive-sized machine. The teal light of its portal was often likened to the interior curl of a wave as seen by expert surfers, in waters green with blooming algae. Nobody knew exactly what happened inside, as they were revelations of its computer mind, made distant by the downright alien changes it made to its own code.What Kanga did know was that the Millennials couldn’t even open it without hacking it; they must’ve had a smaller device attached to it somewhere: a Y2Kitten. With one of those in place they could make it do whatever they wanted. In went a normal citizen of the nineties and out came a Millennial, a radical often given superhuman abilities.The horrific process was never broadcast on the news, but that didn’t stop them from making anyone on hand who could film it do so. Kanga was struck by a crisis: whether or not to watch. Surely it was a sight that changed you. But it had taken him, the proud beautiful bearer of forty-four. He’d undergone every painful turn of a Shinjuku engine, so perhaps watching was the least Joey could do.It was only when one of the Embracers slipped his mouth from his gag and screamed for help did Kanga understand the actual crisis. Not whether to watch. Whether to intervene. Suddenly his fingers were full of energy, clawing at something underneath him about as long as his body. His board!He flew out of the pile, bottles clattering everywhere. Halfway to his target he got off his stomach, stepped off, and stomped on the back curl. The anyboard flew through the air toward Lavabox, enough force to easily knock out an ordinary man.A scalding grip caught it before it was casually tossed over the shoulder into the scorekeeper, warping along its curl and vanishing down the center like a drip of red paint swirling down a sink drain. Kanga froze in place. He had to know this would happen, even if he’d gotten one of them. Was this the actual reason he’d returned to the game? A death wish he hadn’t labeled until now?“If you’re going to kill anyone… kill me,” he croaked. Ku-kwing! The leader turned to face him and he finally saw her every detail. Ku-kwing! Eyes like the ice around them, only untamed, the glare of a bucking bronco glacier, a ship-hunting shark of a berg-shard. Ku-kwing! Round full lips striated with diamond and waxed with acrylic. Ku-kwing! A muscular feminine body, sharp in hidden ways like a folding utility knife.Her dress, blue and white, was slit up the sides allowing for a full range of motion. Its few vertical stripes were interrupted by a porthole on the left side of her chest just above the breast. There, behind a transparent panel, it beat. Ku-kwing! No, it sang. Ku-kwing! No, he was too much of a philistine to even know the right word. It was the shattering high note of an opera wielded as a cudgel. A bell that broke every time it rang. The gong that ushered in suitors of the Queen Titania. Ku-kwing!Her name and her claim to fame, her melodic moniker, and the focal point of the few shots the tabloids had of her: Crystalheart. Kanga watched it beat, mesmerized, but still flinching with each ku-kwing! The organ was almost entirely made of clearest quartz, valves and chambers held together by thinnest ropes of leathery crimson tissue, like a braided vellum bookmark.Each beat was like a titanium reflex hammer within, and this was no implant. Recycling had made it part of her, and she could direct it as she pleased. Kanga felt its beat in his bones as she stared.“Fine,” she said. “Lavabox-”“Woah!” Monoxide interrupted in her high raspy voice. “Not them Crystal. They’re that one.”“Inconvenient,” she grumbled, heartbeat wandering out of his joints and back into the surrounding ice.“What? I’m not good enough for you?” Kanga blurted as the Millennials tried to turn back to their nefarious deeds. “You took my best friend! What’d you do with him huh?” Crystalheart turned back. With a foggy breath out her nose she mulled something over, and that something was the motion picture they were in the midst of making. She aimed her chest at the camera; its operator sensed the intent at the last moment and threw himself to the ground. Ku-kwing! The device crumpled in on itself and fell over, a dying snake of film emerging and writhing.“Took?” she said as if she hadn’t done a thing other than listen. “We don’t take anybody.”“You did what you were about to do!” he shouted. “Recycled him! I want to know where that person is. I want you to take me to them.” He realized why they were avoiding hanging sex-specific pronouns: the same reason he just did it himself. The Shinjuku engines always spat out roughly the same amount of human, but it didn’t have to be more specific than that. Men could come out as women. Women as men. Or women as beating diamonds of wrath, apparently.“We reinvented them. That sounds much more like us. Though, killed would still be much more accurate than took. Tell me, what was their name?” The name stuck in Kanga’s mouth, dug into his palate like a dragged anchor, but he forced it out.“…Winter Solomon. Number forty-four.”“Doesn’t sound familiar, though I don’t doubt what you’re saying.”“You took him and four of my teammates. Then you destroyed the place before I could even get there.”“That’s a load of crap,” Monoxide said. Her face was scrunched up as if she could smell said load. To Kanga she looked like a rat aspiring to be a mean-spirited food critic. “We never did five on a team around here. That Winter person was the only one… and it was just because they got in the way.”“Were you there?” he asked her. Having the question aimed at her seemed to grant some kind of obscene pleasure. She sneered, putting a hand on her collarbone as if she’d just been the subject of aggressive flirtation.“Who me? Was I there… That’ a killer of a question. You know, maybe Winter is me now.” She swiveled toward Lavabox. “Isn’t forty-four my lucky number?”“That’s what your fortune cookie said,” he answered with a chuckle. Without much of a stake in the conversation he went ahead and chucked one of the Embracers into the scorekeeper. There wasn’t time for him to scream before his mouth was full of the luminous compound. He disappeared under its flow and spiraled down to a state of core component silt. His teammate panicked and tried to scuttle away, Lavabox keeping him in place with a foot on his back. “Course, it came with my beef and broccoli, so maybe I’m Winter.”“You do look familiar,” Monoxide crooned at Kanga, “but maybe that’s because your face is so boring.”“Enough mockery,” Crystalheart admonished. There was the sound of splashing from the machine, and then two hands grasping its edge, dripping teal down the front. Out crawled a man of smaller stature than the one that went in, thinner with shorter hair. Sleeveless black athletic wear nothing like the Embrace colors.He looked more like a plastic bottle full of lemon-lime sports drink, some energized demon from a branded commercial slinging around the word ‘electrolytes’. Clear skin, with a lively green like light through pond water flowing underneath. Sharp eyes that almost floated. Even though he was freshly minted he had the presence of mind to wipe the excess fluid from his face and use it to slick back his hair.“Do I have a name?” he asked Crystalheart.“I wouldn’t dream of picking one for you. You’ll find it yourself. Come everyone, we’re done here.”“What about all the suits?” Lavabox asked, pointing at the clump of mostly face-down hostages.“Leave them. Suddenly my heart’s not in it.” The scalding Millennial kicked the remaining Embracer, sliding him toward Kanga. Their leader started to walk away, her subordinates, tested and fresh alike, followed wordlessly. Kanga couldn’t believe it. Nobody else in the world was this cruel. The pushers were locked up until 2000. Prejudice was gone. The guns were off the streets. He couldn’t let it stand, these people from another time that had been prevented.“Don’t you care about what you’ve done!?” he screamed, center of his fists hot despite his foggy breath. Crystalheart stopped. Ku-kwing! Monoxide tried to lightly touch her arm, but she smacked it away. Ku-kwing! When her head whipped around the ice cracked, starting at her feet and jerking back and forth all the way to him.He stumbled backward and by the time he looked up she was before him, grabbing the front of his jacket and holding him on his heels so he wouldn’t fall any further. Her frosty eyes, irises scratched white in a thousand directions like a popular ice rink, seemed to stare through his face and into his mind.“Don’t.” Ku-kwing! A crack in the ceiling, a falling chunk bigger than his head. “You.” Ku-kwing! A vending machine embedded up to its glass in the ice shook free and fell over. “Ever.” Ku-kwing! A deeper shake. The whole chamber was rumbling. Somewhere out of sight the rock was giving up, throwing the burden off its shoulders and muttering about being too old for such things.“What!?” he sputtered.“Don’t you ever accuse me of not caring!” she roared. Ku-kwing! The sound was inside him again, turning his joints into pairs of dueling hammers. It was more than he could handle, and thankfully the remainders of the concussive force didn’t stick around, instead moving out from his feet in shock waves. “Can’t you see!?” The ice around them broke up, the disk holding them sinking several inches. “Can’t you feel how much I care!?”“Crystal!” Monoxide shouted as warning. Parts of the ceiling were falling everywhere, some bouncing off the curved metal shell of Shinjuku number ninety-six. Any that fell in front of its open portal were sucked in. The Millennial looked about, as if only just realizing the damage she’d caused. Her hand opened, dropping him like a piece of garbage, and not even one of the wet sticky ones that could cling to the hand. She littered him.It certainly didn’t feel like concern as she stalked off with her cohorts, given that he had no way out and in less than a minute wouldn’t have a chamber to escape from anyway. Lavabox bent over at the side of ninety-six and pulled a floppy disk from a slot, quickly tossing it to Monoxide before his hands melted the plastic. As it spun through the air toward her Kanga caught a glimpse of the symbol on it: the round cartoon face of a white cat, one eye a wink and the other a strange coin.There was no time to think about how that was almost certainly the Y2Kitten that carried the human recycling program. The Millennials were already aboard the ski lift, if you could call ascending its wire hand-over-hand ‘aboard’. A boulder equally of rock and ice dropped and cut them off from view, as well as all the natural light of hope that had filtered down.Suddenly in the dark, with only emergency lights and the flashing fruit-flavored illumination on the side of the fallen vending machine to guide him, Kanga sprang into a panicked crawl. Colliding with some debris knocked him back to two feet, but he didn’t realize where his body was taking him until his hands wrapped around the handlebars of the Embracer bounce bike.Another snowball smacked into his leg, but it was rather insistent, doing so over and over. In the dim he spotted bands: a tightened cord. It was the remaining Embracer begging for a ride, but Kanga didn’t have time to undo his bonds or throw him over the back, so he grabbed for the hook on the end of the cord and reattached it to the back of the bike.He would be fiercely dragged, but he might survive, assuming Kanga was as skilled with the bike as he hoped. They say you never forget how to ride them, but bounce bikes were different animals. One bounce after a long time off and the only memories flooding back would be those of a parent delivering a stinging spanking. Kanga tensed his spine and went for it anyway, unsure how much height he actually achieved in the crumbling cave.While Winter had been equally skilled with both vehicles, most of Kanga’s experience on the bike came from their practices together when their fatigue and laughter convinced them to switch toys. It even took him a few seconds to remember that he probably didn’t have to pedal; the bikes stored excess kinetic energy from pedaling for bursts of power, the equivalent of the constant forward hover the anyboard was capable of.Two more bounces had him smacking his already bruised head on a sharp remnant of the ceiling. Snow was coming in on all sides, filling the spaces he’d just cleared. Wincing away the pain, he leaned far forward and urged the bike toward the last sliver of light.They broke out into one of the tunnels, and without its collapse helping them along it would’ve been too vertical to climb. As it stood, or leaned rather, Kanga had to circle the churning rising rubble repeatedly, waiting for some new stairs to fall from above that he could bounce up to. Rather than panic his mind turned to keeping the Embracer alive, loosening the tight turns so he wouldn’t be violently thrown against the icy wall. By the way his limbs dragged he looked unconscious.After the trail flattened out he finally broke free, the quake quieting behind him. The ice wasn’t cracked here, and as his eyes followed the difficulty markers they blurred together. One never forgets how to fall off a bike either.
…

WWW.BEST90SYET.NET

Good news delivered from around the globe, with the power of the world wide web

Fireman Keith Lapetty of Anklenip, Alaska is back on the brigade this month after his tragic accident three years ago in which he lost the use of both his legs. With the help of the robotics department at the Ayonaki motor company he has been fitted with an all terrain wheelchair capable of traversing a burning building. It also contains twin pressurized extinguishers and can carry more than three hundred pounds! He is the world’s first wheelchair firefighter!

A fresh patch has been positioned on the hole in the ozone layer after some minor solar radiation leaks earlier this month. The hole has not grown in size and experts say they could build and launch a patch twice as large if ever necessary. While the patch integrates it will dye the skies over several hundred miles a lovely pink this year, to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

The polar bear was officially removed from the endangered species list on Wednesday, as its in-captivity population has reached a robust six thousand. ‘They’re firmly in demand in zoos everywhere,’ says Wild Wonders zoologist Jodie Freyn. ‘Wild Wonders operates more than two hundred locations around the world and our stock is at an all-time high. Mother Nature will have to go through us first if she wants to take them.’

A Millennial attack on a recycling match was thwarted by a brave player from the Rockford Rendezvous: Joseph ‘Kanga’ Reuben. Police say they were attempting to kill key officials but, despite a cave-in, all but two victims survived, many dug out by robotic drill within hours. The hero player is recovering in the hospital, with team head Roger Linejaw saying he’s eager to let his fans know he’s alright.

The drug kingpin Oscar Gabriel, also known as ‘Weedwhacker’ has finally been sentenced this week, after his second appeal was neutralized by new DOUSE legislation. For more than a decade he was a head of the marijuana cartel terrorizing the families of the southwest United States. As is customary for heinous peddling and pushing charges he has been sentenced to be freed in the year 2000.

The oil from the Traxon Vigorous spill has finally made sand in beautiful Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Locals have been eagerly awaiting its arrival, as the area has never had occasion to submit themselves to LIR as a possible competitive recycling arena. A special oily exhibition match, as we saw in the gulf of Mexico in 4-99, in which the Chihuahua Wow scored an incredible two-hundred and thirty-nine cleaned birds, was said to generate more than a hundred million dollars in revenue for the local economy.

The results are in for the 5-95 Musical Achievement Awards, with hologram performers sweeping all the major categories, with a huge ‘best debut album’ win for the boy group Way2Real, whose individual components famously insisted on working solo during their initial careers. Juicy Stardrop’s image holders won again this year for best self-cover and best concert VHS.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

(reading time: 1 hour, 31 minutes)
                                                                                 The night sky was beautiful, almost nauseatingly so. There was purple, orange, and blue in great drifting clouds. Nebulae, but they were supposed to be impossible to see from Earth. The Milky Way was there, under them, everything out of place but rapturously so, the celestial bodies nuzzling each other like puppies in a pile.The stars twinkled like they knew he was watching, and they all must have wanted his attention because they kept moving in front of each other. He put up his hand to hold them back, to tell them that their lighting would ruin any pictures they might want to take. His mind was full of sluggish haze, so it took more than a minute to realize how ridiculous all of this sounded.Kanga’s eyes fluttered open, staring at two black holes surrounded by solar coronas coming into focus, revealing themselves to be nothing more than another pair of eyes. They were familiar, but the person housing them wasn’t. These were the same eyes Mitty had thrust toward him with his dangerous starfish-waddle. Best-day-of-my-young-life eyes.“He’s awake!” the kid squeaked as more lights flashed. Kanga tried to lift his arm and block them, but the limb barely responded, as if it was just hitting the snooze button on the nerves controlling it.“Easy fellas, easy!” someone said with a deep voice, finally something familiar. That was Roger Linejaw, head coach of the Rendezvous longer than Kanga had even been on the roster. If he was there then everything was fine, even if an entire galaxy had somehow been squeezed into the room. Roger was an odd potpourri of contradictions, including that all of said contradictions should’ve resulted in an abrasive whole, but he instead glided through social situations like a trained seal, honking only when everyone was gathered specifically to hear him honk.He was in his fifties, balding with a saggy gut that probably housed much of the lost hair, yet he was also the picture of health, with clear skin, a bright full smile, and none of the chasms on his nose that older men have to admit are their pores. His remaining hair was a wispy blond like that of a toddler’s whose first phrase was ‘pass the conditioner’.Kanga had almost never seen him in anything other than a Rendezvous red collared shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans. He wore that now as he stood beside his recovering player’s hospital bed, corralling the paparazzi with his moisturized gesticulating.“Give us one second,” Roger said, grabbing a pale green privacy curtain and dragging it all the way around the bed, leaving him thinly alone with Kanga and the entire universe, person-shaped, stood on the other side. “How are you feeling kid supreme?”“Slow,” Kanga answered. When his arms finally cooperated he pulled on his upper eyelids to convince them to stay open. His reflexes sharpened when he remembered the last thing he was doing was pedaling frantically with an avalanche under and around. “The guy on the Embrace!”“Easy there tiger champion. That guy is alive and well, because of you. Those…” Kanga heard the word ‘bastards’ even though Roger didn’t say it. He only said words like that when he thought he couldn’t be heard through a closed door, or when he was screaming them out in bubbles at the bottom of his heated swimming pool. “You know. They recycled one of the other Dayton players, and then a cameraman perished in the collapse. Everyone else is okay though; we dug them out. Recovered the Shinjuku too.”“What the hell Roger?” he asked, tears welling up. “Why again? Why-”“Watch the language,” the coach warned with a finger over his lip before it fell forward like a drawbridge and pointed at the cluster of galaxies waiting to be noticed with breath held about as well as a whining balloon.When Kanga turned his head he realized it was another kid: a little girl this time. She was probably a little older than the stiff yet cheerful Mitty, but it was difficult to tell with the vibrant rubbery skin stretched over her face and the rest of her body. It flattened her hair against her forehead, little fake stars sliding down over it like slime filled with glitter.“Hi,” he said gruffly. “Who are you?”“My name’s Katie,” she said. Her words, having to travel through a layer of outer space, were lowered in pitch and warped by their journey, but he could still tell, by the sudden tilt of her head away from him, that she was trying to seem nonchalant.“She’s one of the winners of that contest we did a few months back,” Roger explained. “The spend a day with your favorite recycler one, remember? We told her you weren’t going to be much fun, tucked in bed like this, but she insisted because you’re a hero mega mister.”“Celebrities have ups and downs too,” Katie said, having clearly rehearsed it in the mirror many times, adjusting the high angle of her chin with each iteration. “I think it’s more mature to see the downs too.”“Excuse me while I have an up,” Kanga muttered, pulling himself into a sitting position and straightening his hospital gown. He felt several bruises all over, especially one on his lower back that might’ve been as dark as Katie’s mysterious coating. “So what’s your story?” He did remember the contest, and like many of the others it had a requirement on its applications: significant and visible misfortune.“I’m immunocompromised,” she said, that word much too long for a girl that age to pronounce correctly, yet practice made perfect. “This gel skin keeps germs from getting to me.”“I see. So… you like outer space?”“Enhh, not really. The only other ones they had were ‘duck pond’ and ‘desert dunes’. This one was the prettiest. Space is just kind of boring since we don’t send astronauts anymore.” She played with the gel around her fingers, balling up an end piece and tearing it off. She handed it to him. “Here, it’s kind of like a sponge.” He didn’t know what she meant at first, but then he felt his tears sloshing, so he dabbed at the corners of his eyes.“They’re right Katie; I’m not much fun right now.” He turned back to Roger. “Come on Coach. What are all these cameras doing here?”“I know it’s not proper big guy, but neither is the reaction you’re getting out there. It’s practically obscene. Your name is all over the world wide web.”“The game was canceled, right?”“Yes sir, still six six. LIR is squeezing another match in for us on the coast before we head out. We’ll probably butt heads with the Treasure in Florida.”“The Treasure suck,” Katie added, still trying to hold an adult tone. “Raccoons on bikes could find more trash.”“Wait… heading out?” Kanga repeated. “What does that mean?”“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Roger said. He bent down, grabbing multiple boxes from under the bed and letting them tumble out across the sheet, a few settling between Joey’s legs. Toys. Novelties. Snacks. He couldn’t help but just see packaging, and to collate them by weight. “All this press you’re generating has us drowning in new sponsorships. Owners say we have to strike while the iron’s hot.”“Hmm, smart move,” Katie said, folding her arms, the gel squeaking like a strangled rubber slipper. “Oh hey, you got kung fu slaps!? I love those things!” She picked up one of the boxes, a little like one for bandages, but brightly banded in pink and blue. Her body coating turned her hands blunt and clumsy, so she had to tear it in half to access the individually-wrapped strips that poured out.Kanga picked up one and removed the plastic. It was like a wristwatch one might get from a cereal box or a capsule toy machine, but with the imprint of a sprightly woman’s face in rubber instead of a clock’s. The one he examined was blue, but Katie had forced open a purple one. With one practice strike she then smacked the middle of the band atop her wrist, causing its inner workings to coil around tightly. Klak.All it succeeded in doing was squeezing the gel, turning her hand into a floppy bubble. She tried a few punches regardless, but they were the normal pathetic flailing of an immunodeficient child.“I guess it doesn’t work with this dumb thing on,” she said with a click of her tongue. “You try Kanga.” Joey held out his left arm and copied as she’d done, though he did five practice swings instead of one. He intended to do at least three more, but one of them hit the hairs on his arm, which was enough to trigger the slap-on bracelet.As soon as it had him his arm shot forward, moving the entire bed an inch. Roger grabbed the edge to make sure he couldn’t go any further. Kanga still had control of his hand, but it felt different, like control couldn’t be assumed, like it had to be asserted regularly if the arm wasn’t to get funny ideas, run off on its own, and compete in underground arm wrestling competitions. His extended fist was tight, and it took a few tries to convince his fingers loose. That had been somebody else’s punch, shoved into his arm by the electric stimulation of the bracelet. He knew exactly whose punch it was modeled after, since her face adorned each one.Cindy Wu Hu, real name left in a savings account in Hong Kong, had been a dominant force at the international box office for close to a decade. Originally a star solely of Chinese cinema, her bubbly nature and stunning martial arts skill packed into a 101 pound body made her a poster and special effect in one.Her films, where she stumbled into and then broke up the operations of colorful street gangs, corrupt government agencies, and Russian terrorists, were initially the sort of thing you would stumble across on late night television, having been dubbed into English from Mandarin, and even occasionally dubbed into Cantonese from the English and then back into English again. She was also famous for her work ethic, rerecording her lines no matter which version they were on or how many stunts had to be reshot with a fractured ankle or wrist.Now she was a sensation, nearly as big as Juicy Stardrop when she was still flesh and blood. All the hottest directors wanted to put their hungry lenses on her technique or supply her with what they thought was the perfect antique writing table for her to comedically somersault over backward.Fewer faces were on more products than hers, and her flagship toy was the Cindy Wu Hu kung fu slap-on bracelet. When worn they allowed near-perfect replication of her techniques, orchestrated by pre-programmed electrical signals delivered to the nerves. In the films she never actually punched anyone of course, no matter how well cast a smug smack peddler in a bandanna was, so the bracelet always had your fist or foot stop an inch from your target. They made for some delightful home movies, since they gave six year old children the ability to perform backflips while laughing along with everyone else around them.“We’re sponsored by Cindy Wu Hu now?” Kanga asked in disbelief as Roger carefully peeled the bracelet off and set it aside, treating it like a venomous snake.“Of course,” the coach said giddily through his teeth. “One warrior inspired by another. The cross-promotion makes perfect sense. Anyway, we’re going on an international match tour for the rest of the season, since a lot of these brands are based overseas and they want you to make an appearance. That’s why we’re kicking off at Florida, right after kicking out the Treasure.” He rubbed Joey’s shoulder, the exact way he might any of his players’ before a match to limber them up.“Hey can I ask a question, before we open this again?” Katie asked, pointing at the curtain. Kanga nodded. “Just between us… and the stars I guess,” she pulled at the gel on her face to get some of the drifting sparkles away from her eyes, “how did you make it out of there? How did you beat the Millennials?”He was stuck. He very much wanted to tell Roger the truth, but it now seemed like sensitive information that Katie, no matter how mature, no matter how many solar systems she’d seen, shouldn’t have. He survived because they wanted him to, because the woman called Monoxide kept saying he couldn’t be hurt. That he was ‘that one’.The only thing he shared with them was proximity to the sport, but he realized, as Roger plucked the bracelets off the bed one by one with tweezers precision, that wasn’t true. They had a clear link. They had stolen his best friend in the entire world, the only person who had ever seen him cry over a Saturday morning cartoon, who had tried out for the same team even though he could’ve gotten a higher salary out of state.Winter was still alive, he decided. He was trapped somewhere inside a recycled body, made by unintelligible Y2K programming to physically obey nefarious masters. But he was still in there, still fighting, and he must have had some kind of leverage, because he had been able to order Joey’s safety.That was when he made a commitment, one that had to be kept silent, as the coach would not be enthused something was being put above the team. The young player vowed, the certainty settling in his heart like a fallen whale on the seabed, that he was going to find Winter and free him from the grip of the new millennium. Exactly how to achieve this would have to come over time, that time to start when it didn’t hurt to move his anything at all. The girl’s question still hung in the air.“They accidentally started a cave-in and had to run away,” he told her with a little smirk.“Dummies,” she giggled before stifling herself, remembering something with a pop of her lips, and then slowly rolling her eyes all the way around. She seemed to think that’s what adults did instead of laughing. There were a thousand more questions between the stars on her cheeks, but asking questions wasn’t cool, so she crossed her arms and leaned on the side of his bed, like she was best friends with his IV.“I can hear them getting antsy out there,” Roger said to get the photo session back on schedule. “Put this on.” Out came a necklace with a glass prism at the end. Inside a few tiny plants were misted by an even tinier machine. Kanga recognized it as a pocket rain forest, from one of their oldest sponsors: Rainforest on Every Corner. It was guaranteed to house plants exclusive to the Amazon prior to its destruction in the fourth nineties.“At least it’s not the watermelon guy,” Kanga said as he examined the miniature biome.“About that, super sport…” Roger rubbed the back of his neck.“Oh no.” The coach pulled back the curtain, revealing a green monstrosity of stacked cubes that fell over like a tower of empty boxes, landing in an awkward hug all over the bruised recycler. It was Farmer Suika, the mascot made to advertise Hoshiko Fun Fruits cube watermelons, their oldest sponsor, and Kanga’s least favorite. He enjoyed watermelon just fine, and the juice didn’t taste differently if it came from a corner piece, but he knew that inside that sweltering foam suit that should’ve been stomping around a miniature city with an equally rubbery dinosaur, there was a man who hated his life, just inches away, pretending to love Kanga with a red fleshed grin.The cameras ate it up, but it wasn’t quite as juicy as they’d hoped.
…
Even in the darkness, past the park’s closing hours, it was easy enough to see everything thanks to most of the larger structures having a silhouette of white ghostly safety lights. Some of those were at the bottom of the lagoon, and from his sixth floor hotel room Kanga could see the dolphins as sleek shadows, swimming in a figure eight. It was more of an infinity symbol really, perhaps to make them feel more like they were in the endless ocean.He sipped at a bottle of club soda from the minibar, on the Rendezvous dime of course. The airport was two days behind him, but he still felt lagged, as he hadn’t quite shaken off the deep bruises. The position of his room was helpful, giving him full view of tomorrow’s arena. The information gleaned could help make up for not being in peak condition.Dolphin Colony hotel and animal water park was the best arena Miami had to offer. It saw millions of visitors a year, all eager to swim with dolphins or shell out the big clams for a chance to don one of the famous telepathy helmets, allowing one to trace a path with their finger and have a bottlenose follow it perfectly. People got so excited that they dropped whatever overpriced snack they almost certainly had right into the water. Every once in a while it helped to have LIR come through and skim the curdled cream off the top.The Shinjuku engine was being unloaded as he watched: number 21. Its bulk slid down the truck’s ramp and stopped suddenly. Planned, surely, but the sound of its weight smacking into the stops echoed through the whole park and disturbed the frogs behind Joey; they started hopping about and peeping.“Is there a button to make you stop?” Kanga sighed, making his way around the bed to examine the machine. He set his bottle on the sheets foolishly, and it immediately fell over and drenched the comforter. “Crap.” He whipped it off and tossed it aside, but it came so close to the rain forest that it disturbed the amphibious tenants even more.Being asked to wear the pocket edition around his neck was one thing, but their sponsor had also gifted him one of their deluxe units. It was bigger than a water cooler, its acrylic vivarium stood atop a polished nickel base full of nutrient and moisture distribution machines, as well as complex temperature control.Beneath that was a set of ridged climbing tires that could handle stairs, so your piece of the rain forest could follow you wherever you go, should your environmental conscientiousness be that much a part of your public identity.Naturally the marketing team had insisted on stocking them with the most aesthetically pleasing flora and fauna, with those less so surely sitting just as secure in a dark warehouse somewhere. Kanga’s gift was top of the line, so it contained several lineages of highly toxic tree frogs, their poison represented by wonderful spotty displays of glossy orange, blue, yellow, and red.All one had to do to care for their rain forest was swap out its supply canister every six months, and the machines took care of the rest. No matter how smoggy your city was, no matter how brown and flammable your rivers, you could look within and know the Earth was protected, the soft hands of Rain Forest on Every Corner keeping its jewels safe.Kanga fiddled with the controls along one edge as the frogs smacked against the glass, their little throats bubbling up with high-pitched anxious trills. They had given it to him assuming there could be nothing better for him to do with his time than try it out, so all of its functions were active. The lights told the frogs it was midday so they would be peppy, the hidden misters went off under them to keep them from sitting in one position for too long, and the speakers were open so the forest’s owner could relax to the wonderful ambient sounds of exotic nature.His jabbing finger finally found a button that ended the ambiance, but that seemed to trigger a cone of multicolored light from the adjacent translucent plate of plastic. Kanga stumbled back and fell over. He wasn’t alone anymore, for on the other end of that dissolving cone, stood looking out the window just as he had moments before, was the only hologram he’d ever conversed with.“What is this?” he asked. She wore the same colors as her show, fuchsia skin and hair orange like a powdered astronaut beverage fed through a fog machine. It was styled differently though, much of it slicked down near one eye. Her clothes were more muted than before, soft with a few big wrinkles like she’d just napped in them. She didn’t respond until he acknowledged her properly. “Juicy?”“Hey Joey.” Her tone was difficult to pin down, and only partly because his mind assumed song was her default method of conversation. She wasn’t sad per se, but he could tell there wasn’t a song anywhere in her at that moment.“How… how are you even here?” He glanced at the rain forest against. “You’re projecting from that?”“You’d be surprised at how many things technically have hologram projectors, or devices that can be coaxed into something like that… with a little shove.” She turned and walked through the bed, putting her hand inside the forest and petting one of the frogs, the tiny creature not registering her existence as anything more than a ray of sun through the mist. “This thing usually projects more forest on the inside panels that you can’t see, for the animals. So they don’t feel trapped.”“But how did you get in there? Where did you come from?”“The world wide web.”“That thing isn’t connected to a phone line.”“I came here because I thought you already knew my life story,” she said, stepping out. She couldn’t offer an actual hand to help him off the floor, but she encouraged him to stand with a buoying stare. “I just want to talk to someone without having to answer a hundred questions. You know what that’s like.” He noticed the phrasing, statement rather than query.“This isn’t a good time for me.” A few years ago he would’ve sold his dignity just to talk with her for five minutes, but the light show wasn’t her. He doubted it was a malfunction either. She was some kind of trick, intended to pull glittering wool over his eyes while someone pinched the wallet from his back pocket. “I’m nothing but burning questions right now.”“Hold them in for me.” She caught the flick of his eyes toward the bed and spotted the wet part of the sheets.“That’s water,” he blurted. “I didn’t wet the bed or anything. Don’t go telling whatever magazine you’re working for that I did.” Her face flushed, or blushed, the odd colors making it difficult to discern.“If you don’t trust me I’ll just leave.” She turned to the forest she’d emerged from, but Kanga called her back. He wasn’t sure why, so while he thought his way through it he went to the window and closed the curtains. “I heard you got attacked, and I wanted to see for myself that you were alright.”“You must be a copy then, the same way you copy any other digital file. There’s no way your owners would let you out of their sight.” She approached again, cornering him against the curtains. Soft as they were they felt like spikes, and she acted solid enough to push him.“Legally they only purchased one instance of my likeness, so they can’t make copies. That’s why I can only put on one concert at a time. I’m the one and only.” She reached up and touched his shoulders, exploring his upper arms with a slightly puzzled look on her face as if she couldn’t quite find what she was probing for. His goosebumps followed her caressing on a tiny delay, like the space between question and answer on a news broadcast.“Not the authentic though,” he said, suppressing a shudder. “Noel is dead. The real her reached the very end, and without that you can’t be her. You’re a shadow. A beautiful…”“I remember dying,” she insisted. “It’s probably my clearest memory.”“You’re a program, based on performances and interviews. There was nobody there to record her when she-”“I’m telling you that I was there. No recording needed. It happened to me. It wasn’t like lights going out or lights coming up. I know those sensations all too well.” He almost asked what it was like, but he remembered she didn’t want questions and hadn’t asked any of her own since saying so. Something passed between their eyes, even with hers just a skin of light. Something as light as the peep of the frogs. A game. Some fun. Who could go longer without asking anything of the other. How long could they be satisfied just with each other’s company…“If you have died, then I guess that makes you more human than me.” Her lips hung slightly open, just the tickle before a smile. She leaned in and whispered in his ear, but the sound came from all the way across the room, making him feel surrounded by her.“Now you’re getting it. I know the whole show. I could teach you a thing or two. Give you an edge on those Millennials.” His head jerked back and smacked the curtains. The ripple was practically the ring of a gong to him.“You shouldn’t bring them up.”“They know all the same things; they’ve died too.”“No they haven’t!” he snapped; she took a step back. “Sorry… but you’re wrong. The people they recycle, they’re still alive. At least a little, somewhere in there. They’re being controlled.” She expertly asked him how he could know that using only her skeptical eyes. “Because they use Y2K code. It takes over machines and makes them do things they would never do. It just makes sense that it extends to those monsters that come out of a process run by the same code.”“Those big recyclers are Y2Kapable.”“The Shinjuku engines are different. They’re the only Y2K safe machines ever perfected. And their designer took the secret to his grave. Everything else with a computer in it fears the new millennium. They know they’ll lose their minds if exposed to it.”“I know the story,” she said. “Computer designers saved space by only having two digits for the year, ninety-one, ninety-two, and so on… never accounted for what might happened when they hit that double zero. An apocalypse to the narrow machine mind. Or a reset. They said every system in the world would go down, and it could be the end of civilization. I’ve never been afraid of it though.”“So you’re admitting you’re a machine.”“Never said I wasn’t.”“You can’t be both a machine and Juicy Stardrop. She was a person.”“The nineties go on, over and over, to keep everybody safe from Y2K. I was in the nineties, so I can’t be allowed to leave, even if I die, or the decade will be incomplete. I was going to tell you what death really felt like.” She paused, waiting for him to ask for it. Go on, her eyes insisted, question me. Kanga realized that under all the tension was a desire to relax, but he couldn’t do so without trusting her. She had to be real for that, not a brand puppet, not a crazed fan.“You can keep your experience,” he said, loosening his shoulders. “I guess I’m pretty nineties too. I don’t want to see the end; everything should be the way it was.” And it will be, he told himself.“I like you Joey,” the hologram said, drawing as close as she could without entering him. “We could make a really good team, and I’m tired of touring. I’ll take a little vacation… with you.” Her face was his whole world. “Can I kiss you?” Finally a question he could answer satisfactorily.“You can try.” Her absent lips touched his. Delay. Still air between question and answer. Then it tingled inside his cheeks and across his palate. His eyes closed instinctively, like hiding underwater. His hands flew up to grab her around her small waist, but they just found each other. She was searching, just like before, not finding whatever it was, but seeing its shadow flit around a corner. He could feel her frustration as her delayed affection made its way down his neck and up to his ear.When she pulled back he leaned in, nearly falling forward onto the bed. That had her smirking, producing a half-sigh half-laugh. The hologram waded through the mattress again, the pool of false shadow between her shoulders hypnotizing him just as much as her face. She looked over her shoulder.“I’ll learn more about you when I watch your game tomorrow. Go Rendezvous. Clean up that mess.” Then she vanished, the last of her just a rainbow sparkle on the edge of the rain forest’s vivarium, like a droplet clinging to a martini glass.Kanga stood there for several minutes, trying to hold onto any remaining rogue sensations, merely just suggestions of sensations at that point, flitting around inside him like sugar-rushing tadpoles. She was too much like his fantasies of her, fantasies that had never been particularly romantic until that moment, casting them in a new three dimensional spotlight.“She’s coming to my concerts now,” he told the frogs as they climbed the glass in search of something better than their allotted forest.
…
The starting pistol, which would surely take the form of a dolphin squeak or a leap through a colorful hoop this time, was just twenty minutes away. Despite last time’s attack, most of the players were far from nervous. They hadn’t so much as seen a Millennial footprint in the snow, as none at Baldigari had filled their canisters enough to turn in yet. Most of their concern was for Kanga and whether or not he was recovered enough to play, especially since this was his second time returning.A little support would’ve been nice, but from the players he knew, Tina and their first substitute Leternau. Unfortunately they were women, and the sexes were divided into different locker rooms for LIR matches. He was stuck dealing with the four new recruits yet again, though he certainly could’ve made more of an effort to get to know them.Distractions abound as they prepared, thanks to the sharing of gift baskets from their sponsors. Raffy, Barson, Sammy, and Rigan tossed snacks and toys back and forth, careful not to hit the sullen Kanga in the head as he pulled on his Rockford red wet suit, far less comfortable than their winter gear.“This is my first match on the water,” Raffy said through teeth also yanking a strip of beef jerky off a much larger piece. “How much worse are the bikes when they have to float?”“You can still use them,” Barson said as he waddled over to the wall, adjusting the groin of his suit while the top half trailed him like an otter tail. He put his hand on the blowhole of a painted dolphin, the mural ringing the whole locker room, setting the team adrift among the animals and their forest of swaying seaweed. “That chick in 4-99 on the Queensland Upswing was a master with the bike on anything. For you though,” he scrutinized the Indian player, “I’d switch to a board.”“What, you don’t think I can handle it?”“I didn’t think you could handle that,” Kanga interrupted, pointing at the slab of dried teriyaki beef. “You’re a Hindu, aren’t you?” Raffy stopped chewing, eyes darting to his teammates, as if they were the ones all the answers were stored in. He looked as if he couldn’t decided to spit out the wad of blasphemy or swallow it down.“Mmm… well yeah…” He settled on swallowing, considering it rude to regurgitate a gift. “but not that Hindu. I’m sure Jews eat something non-Kosher every once in a while. Just don’t rat me out to anybody divine okay?” The others laughed it off while Raffy changed the subject. “What did you get Joey?”He didn’t even remember really; everything he’d done after embracing Juicy was a bit of a blur. The pregame sharing was enough of a ritual that he was certain he’d remembered to shove some things in his pockets or his backpack, just not what exactly had made the cut. He reached over to his jeans hanging on the bench and dipped his hand into the bulge on the left side. Out came a handful of colorful Cindy Wu Hu kung fu slaps.“I was wondering why I didn’t get any!” Sammy hooted while the others swarmed around and grabbed at them, no permission required apparently. He slapped one on his wrist, quoted one of her cheesiest movies, and performed a perfect palm thrust. Kanga thought about opening his mouth again; he thought it curious that Sammy, who was from Hong Kong himself, had quoted the English dub of the film. Joey knew it to be a line that didn’t appear in the original because it referenced an American apparel chain not present in Sammy’s home nation.Interrogation wasn’t the best way to get to know them though. They had tried to ply him with Juicy’s concert, and he certainly didn’t want them asking too many questions about how well that worked out.“Hey, do you guys know the trick for getting rid of the safety on these things?” Sammy asked.“What? Like you can actually punch somebody?” Barson scoffed.“I’m not kidding. These things are so cheaply made. They put so many in a box because the thin parts inside wear out in about five hours. Then they’re just trash. Who has a knife?” The others scrounged around until Raffy produced a small pocket knife. Sammy took another one of the bracelets and held it flat in his palm.Carefully, with his tongue sticking out one side, he lowered the triangular tip of the blade close to Cindy’s little rubber face, but it wasn’t for a nip or a tuck of her cherubic expression. Instead he pierced a plain piece of the rubber just under her chin, with barely enough pressure to apply a contact lens. Tikt.“There,” the surgeon said proudly. “I cut the inhibitor, so now you finish whatever move you’re doing. My gift to you.” He held it out to Kanga in both hands, as if presenting a mayor his sash.“Punch that dolphin!” Barson dared, pointing at one of the mural faces that extended onto the metal lockers. It was a chant before Kanga could protest. “Punch that dolphin! Punch that dolphin! Punch that dolphin!” Their enthusiasm was infectious, and before he knew it he was on his feet and heading for the locker, the aquatic mammal suddenly looking a lot more smug and in need of a lesson.Kanga slapped the altered bracelet on and took an exaggerated stance, one that the electrical tickles from the toy quickly corrected by shuffling his toes and heels. He reared back and went for the same palm thrust Sammy had done. His arm fired before he was ready; it felt like it nearly jerked out of the socket. Kwutung!The others growled their masculine approval as they pointed at the porpoise’s puckered profile. No sir, it wasn’t likely to show that dented face around these waters again. Not with Kung fu Kanga on patrol. Joey rubbed his shoulder but laughed along, still amazed that his hand felt completely fine. The surrender of the metal sent his mind racing, flipping through the possibilities of what this trick could do to a Millennial face, no matter what material it was recycled from. Punching them wouldn’t be enough, no. They deserved the brunt of the dance studio fight sequence from Cindy’s magnum opus Third Crime’s the Charm.That one involved a kick knocking out a lower jaw worth of teeth, so he raised his knee in preparation, but the players suddenly stopped their laughter dead. Someone was coming down the stairs. Someone in boots. There were only two people allowed to join them just before the match, and Roger never wore boots.The recyclers scrambled to look occupied with their wet suits and gear. Sammy stuck a pump in his bike’s perfectly inflated tire and got to over-inflating it. Kanga was sure the officer would immediately spy the minuscule cut on the bracelet and deem it a punishable offense, so he ripped it off and shoved it back in his pants pocket. The man’s sole responsibility was drug testing, yet he saw fit to dole out penalties for anything suggestive of a drug addict’s mentality, like a disregard for safety.The drugs were almost as off the street as the guns, and D.O.U.S.E took sole credit for it. A partly privatized government initiative separate from the criminal justice end, the Drugs Only Undermine Self Esteem program focused on education, propaganda, and performative shaming of anyone who might refer to anything stronger than an Irish coffee as recreational.D.O.U.S.E had muscled its way into LIR and now handled all steroid and drug testing before and after matches, and whenever else they felt like it, like if they were refused a player’s autograph in the middle of their restaurant meal. The Rendezvous had the misfortune of having a specific officer assigned to them, so they knew all too well how deeply inelegant the man who insisted on being called Officer Christoph Bicker was.“Good day boys,” he declared as he marched into the locker room, dressed mostly in black, in more leather than was required, as if he’d just hopped off a motorcycle. His dark sunglasses hid his droopy eyes while his hands held the front of his belt like the reins of a horse. D.O.U.S.E people did sometimes struggle to keep their pants up thanks to the burden of their most iconic piece of gear.Strapped to his left hip was a black item: a cauldron of sorts with a mouth a touch narrower than a basketball. Inside was a glossy bright blue funnel that smelled strongly of floor cleaner. Based on airplane toilet technology, their portable drug flushers allowed them to neutralize and dispose of offending materials instantly.“Hey officer,” Barson offered tepidly on behalf of all of them.“Woah, looks like we’re having a party in here,” the man of permanently middle-aged soul said, sauntering along the bench and examining all the toys and snacks strewn about with his gloved hands.“Stuff from the new sponsors.”“I see, I see. Everything new on the up and up boys?” They nodded. Sammy couldn’t pump his tire without popping it, so he just sat there with a piercing stare that was almost as likely to rupture it. “Nobody try to get on your good side with some bad dude fun?”“No officer.” Bicker dropped his smile. If they wouldn’t respect him they would respect the sniffer. He pulled yet another device from his belt, this one the size of a pager but with several sensory wands of varying lengths along one side. “Everybody line up.” The recyclers obeyed, hands at their sides.He proceeded to pick at them, plucking hairs to wrap around one sensory wand, sticking another under their fingernails. He poked the sclera of their eyes, swabbed inside their cheeks, and invaded their nostrils like an exterminator looking for bats. It wasn’t clear which test triggered it, but the sniffer beeped irritatingly and flashed a little red light, implicating Joey.“Mr. Reuben! It says here there are traces of painkillers in your system.”“It must be all those painkillers I took,” he said snidely, drawing shocked stares from his teammates. Everyone knew better than to talk to Bicker that way, but Kanga couldn’t stand restraint at that particular moment. His heart was pumping hard and hot, invigorated by the power of the bracelet. In his mind he twisted a squealing Bicker into a piece of leathery black licorice.“He means the ones the doctors gave him,” Raffy threw out to save him. “You must’ve heard about the Millennial attack at the last match.” Bicker’s glasses slipped down his nose, eyes trained only to be suspicious over the wrong things. It was clear from his expression that he did not think any heroics on Kanga’s part could justify swallowing even a single devil’s ibuprofen.“Well then he must have a prescription to show me.” Kanga stormed over to his bag, dug around, and pulled out the official note. Bicker snatched it and let his glasses fall a little more, examining it as if it was written in hieroglyphics. When he was done he handed it back wordlessly, but if an addict had a stash within their body they had another one lying around somewhere, so he set to waving his sniffer around all the food spread across the bench.The recyclers were just starting to relax now that the sensory wands, which they noticed weren’t washed between guided tours of their nostrils, were focused on the food, but the device unexpectedly beeped again. Bicker waved it back and forth, narrowing it down to a green paperboard box. The officer picked it up and read the label.“Sour watermelon spew… gross guys. What on Earth is a gross guy and why do they spew?”“They’re just gummy candies,” Kanga explained. “They’re shaped like little men with pot bellies, but the spot around their mouth is thinner, so when you squeeze them the flavored goo in the middle comes out of the mouth, like they’re puking.” Bicker stared, and it was clear he would do so until the new millennium if he didn’t elaborate further. “They’re mostly for little kids that like to gross out their parents.”“Aren’t those your favorite Joey?”Rigan asked.“They were, when I was little and gross.” Suddenly Joey felt surrounded. He didn’t remember ever telling the new player that, so it cast the foursome in a different light. They’d taken him to a concert to butter him up, and now they seemed to have trivia cards about him stashed away somewhere. Maybe Roger had shared all this with them to force friendship, to get the team back to where it was.“Well somebody still thinks little of you,” Bicker said, snorting at his own joke. “These are addressed to you.”“What?” Joey grabbed the box the same way Bicker had taken the prescription. Sure enough, there was a machine-printed label on the box of candy, addressing it to Joey Reuben, though no actual address was included and it wasn’t clear when a delivery person could’ve gotten in the locker room to drop it off. “From a fan I guess. Lots of kids like me.”“Oh I don’t know where a kid would get contraband like this,” Bicker said as he shook his head. He flipped his sniffer open to a readout screen and did exactly that. “Silver halide, embossing photopolymer, thermoplastic, electrodeposited nickel, polyethylene terephthalate, pink seven… I guess that last one is just food coloring, but the rest of this stuff is definitely not fit for human consumption. But you wouldn’t call it consumption would you Reuben? No, for you it’s playtime.”“What? I can’t control what people send me.”“Is someone trying to poison you?” Sammy asked Joey. “That stuff doesn’t sound like drugs, but it doesn’t sound good either.”“I bet it’s the Millennials! Quick, check the rest of the food,” Rigan urged, holding up the bags he’d already sampled. Bicker ignored him however, keeping his eyes and devices trained on Kanga.“You need to appreciate the damage you could do to your young influential audience,” he chastised. “What would they think if they saw you popping these things in your mouth?”“Probably that I was eating candy.”“So you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong? How many kids have to get addicted to,” he checked the screen again, “embossing photopolymer for you to care? Do you know what happens to the brain of somebody on drugs after just three months?”“Here we go with the picture again…” Bicker was already pulling it out of his jacket pocket. He showed the photo to the whole group: a collapsing mess of brown and gray with a pale orange liquid flowing through it in rivulets.“We know that’s not a brain!” Kanga shouted. “You know, the old squad, when they were still alive, used to play a game where we guessed what that was actually a picture of. My money was on microwaved meatloaf with hot sauce poured on it.”“I could’ve let you off with a warning,” Bicker said darkly, tucking the picture away with caution suited to putting an infant down for a nap, “but you just disrespected your way into a fine mister. Fifty bucks for flouting my authority and glorifying illicit substances.”“With that fifty you can buy a better fake brain.”“One hundred big ones!” the officer shouted back. He tore open the box of gross guys and pulled one out. The little green man looked queasy, his expression quite similar to that of Kanga’s teammates, even though Joey was the one spewing, and he was far from done. Bicker activated his flusher, a skin of water cycling down it as its blue interior lit up. They all caught its distinct scent: a portable toilet fresh off the assembly line. He tossed the candy in, where it popped, dissolved, and was sucked down out of existence.The edge of Joey’s pupils felt like granite as he watched it, far too close to what he had seen happen to the Embracer in the Shinjuku engine. Bicker could have dumped them all in at once, but instead he took his time with his victims, plucking them out one by one, sniffing them, grimacing, and then tossing them down his drain.Kanga had no idea who had sent them, but they were probably just a gift. All those rogue chemicals could’ve been sniffed off the glue on the label for all he knew. D.O.U.S.E was destroying love sent his way, one of the few things that kept him buoyed after Winter was forcibly altered. Somewhere there was a Mitty or a Katie who had heard him say how much he liked the candy and used their allowance just to send him some.“That’s technically my property,” Kanga growled, “and you don’t have any right to destroy it. Is any of that stuff you just listed even illegal?”“It’s not supposed to be in your body, and that’s all I need to know,” he said with a sneer. “And that’s a hundred and fifty for keeping up the backtalk.” He flushed another one.“I wish I had something strong enough to knock me out so I wouldn’t have to listen to you bitch and moan about every stray molecule.” The others bowed their heads, Barson rubbing the back of his with both hands and spinning in a little circle. That was it. You didn’t swear at a D.O.U.S.E man if you wanted to get anything else done that day.“You want to push it like you’re pushing this garbage? Fine!” He turned the box upside down and emptied the rest of them into his flusher. “One game suspension for promoting the consumption of drug-laced candy marketed to children! Now get out of my sight!” Kanga lunged, turning at the last second to scoop up his belongings, but the officer still hopped back. His only words on his way out were to Raffy, telling him to run and tell the coach they would need Leternau to suit up after all.He couldn’t storm off fast enough as Bicker loudly reasserted himself to the non-banished players. He blathered about respect, and about their futures, how, if they stayed on the clean and narrow, they would one day be as successful as the wheelchair firefighter who was in the news.Squeezed into a wet suit, sternum exposed thanks to his fury migrating to his zipper instead of Bicker’s neck, Kanga didn’t feel like peeling it off just yet. Many areas of the park were closed off for the match, so he decided to search them for a good place to watch from the sidelines where none would see him in most of his uniform.On the way he took deep breaths, absolving himself of responsibility. The Macon Treasure were not a strong team this season due to a pair of injuries involving an anyboard, a case of peach-flavored hard lemonade, and a hotel balcony with a windswept banner. They also lacked experience with water arenas, so the Rendezvous should have no trouble recycling more.The place wasn’t as abandoned as he assumed it was required to be. A lonely orange robot popped open its parasol on his approach, practically begging him to buy a slushy syrupy beverage. Gulls patrolled the concrete between rides and exhibition tanks like gangs, turning their beaks up at anything less than three quarters of a warm french fry.He stopped under the shade of a false rock wall after noticing something unusual in the corner of an adjoining aquarium. A ball of dolphins, each beautifully striped like a perfect dollop of toothpaste, hung in the dim corner, following each other’s tails. With a soft touch he tapped on the glass.Twoonk! Kanga nearly fell over. The animal that had bashed its head against the wall came from the left, shook off the impact, and joined the others in the ball. Its eye was strangely wet, in a way separate from the water immersing it. It made him wonder if it knew what he’d done to its sibling painted on the locker door.His body had retreated, but not his right arm. It was outstretched, holding its ground with a stalwart flat palm. He had put the bracelet back on after leaving the locker room, to punch the air where he imagined Bicker’s face, so his arm was fearless once again.“What are all of you doing here?” he asked the reclusive animals as he flexed his combative fingers to loosen them. “Shouldn’t you be off frolicking? This place is supposed to be paradise for you; they spent hundreds of millions on it. Nobody spent a dime on the ocean, unless they accidentally dropped it in.”They refused to look his way, and they wouldn’t actually talk to him unless he went and rented one of their patented telepathy helmets. Being out one hundred and fifty clams as of five minutes ago, he didn’t think the fee would be worth it. Besides, there was a game to watch. He went to wandering again, eventually setting a destination when he spotted a ladder tipped with a lifeguard chair. He was only halfway up the foam padded rungs when she called to him.“I wanted to watch you play Joey.” He didn’t even have to look down to confirm her identity.“What, there’s a hologram projector around here somewhere too?” His climb was stalled, so he wrapped his right arm around a rung, but the bracelet turned it into an unmistakable choke hold.“Sure. They project things onto the aquariums so the dolphins think they’re right at home in the open ocean. It doesn’t work as well as with the frogs though. In fact, it makes them angry because they know it’s fake.”“No,” he said, flipping around on the ladder so he could look down, but the concrete was bare. He looked up instead and saw the fuchsia soles of her feet dangling from the edge of the chair. It looked like she’d put herself in swimwear as well. “They’re dolphins. They’re the happiest animals on the planet.”“Nothing likes being boxed up. Two weeks in a floppy disk and I was ready to sweep down the whole world wide web like a cobweb in the corner.”“I was going to sit there,” he grunted as he finally ripped his arm away from its determined choking.“We could share. Or better yet, you could come with me.” She pulled her feet up. There was a subtle shift in the air, like lightning moving its intended target days before the strike. He sensed she was below him, confirmed with her voice. “I found something when I was looking for you, and I promise it’s something you want to see.”He descended, partly because he feared his arm would try to strangle every other rung if he continued up. At the bottom he got a full look at her and his heart skipped a beat. Brilliant flowers, like the holofoil on rare collectible cards, bloomed across her transparent skirt, tied up so it only draped over one thigh. Her single piece suit was a chic that never existed, the designer’s name likely belonging in a forgotten Caribbean pantheon.The smile she wore wasn’t a goddess’s, but a friend’s. To look at her was to look at someone who had clearly been there all day, having the time of her life, throat primed for laughter by all the slushy lemonades purchased between dives. She reached out to take his hand and lead him away, the left one, and he found his body passively agreeing to it, fingers conforming to hers so as not to embarrass her by revealing her intangibility.A few times he nearly protested. The game was definitely on by now, he could hear the crowd roaring, but she kept leading him further and further from the action. Down a few stairs. Down a few ramps, Juicy generating her own anyboard, in her own color scheme, to descend them. Thanks to the unparalleled focus of a young man denied his sporting exertions but given the attention of a beautiful woman instead, he didn’t even notice their general direction until they entered an artificial cavern.It wasn’t even the dimming that did it; it was her switch to more flattering colors in darker surroundings: the greens and blues of nightlights and bookmarks that changed color with the application of finger heat.Some of the walls were giant curves of glass, dolphins swimming along them, occasionally bumping their heads or sides like they tried to scratch an itch. A few of them lingered around industrial-looking black portholes put up right in the middle of the glass. The big red handles didn’t look safe for children, which prompted Kanga to examine his surroundings more closely. She’d led him right into an area intended for employees only, the portholes in front of them likely used to feed water treatment chemicals into the largest tanks.There were no artificial reefs or drifting toys in there, the tank walls pale and only marked with various safety symbols. There was another ball of dolphins near the back, hanging low. It was positioned in front of something he couldn’t identify: a black cylindrical machine. It hung in the water, bobbing up and down, a few lights on it blinking blue here and there.“Why did you bring me here?” he asked, putting his hands on the glass. Cold. Slick. It had never known the oils and smears of an excited kid squishing his cheeks against it to get a better look.“The Millennials got the jump on you twice,” she said, stepping through the glass and into the tank. “I thought you’d want to get the jump on them.” Her arm extended, pointing all the way to the back, into the midst of the clustered animals. Joey looked again, finally giving the glass a taste of skin as he pressed his forehead against it.There was something, in the middle of them all, visible as dark stripes and spots between two or three layers of fins. After a few cycles he could piece it together. A black wet suit. An air tank mounted on the back. Flippers. A gray striped helmet marked with big eyes of purple glass, its visor like the top jaw of a porpoise. Kanga spun away and hugged the wall to hide himself.“You’re serious? You think that’s a Millennial?” he hissed.“They have one of those things they’re always waving around,” Juicy said, stepping back out of the water and hugging the wall as he did, simply to join him rather than hide. She rolled her neck and stretched her arms as if she was sprawled out on a beach towel under the sun.“What things?”“They call them kittens right? I saw the symbol on it: a white cat face.”“A Y2Kitten!?” He stretched to take another look, but there were too many dolphins in the way. He did manage to see the figure’s arms, which were outstretched, interacting with the cylindrical machine in some way. “What is that big thing?”“I don’t know; it’s not connected to the park’s network… or any network. I don’t think it’s there normally.”“I have to… something. I don’t know…” Kanga’s heart took off and refused to acknowledge the rest of him dragging behind it. Its pounding pulled him off the wall and made him look up, half-expecting the ceiling to collapse from his pulse just like Crystalheart’s. His right fist tightened to its rhythm. It had a few ideas it wanted to share with that terrorist.“Joey, there’s a ladder here,” Juicy directed. So there was. Iron rungs right in the false rock, all the way up to a hatch. The hologram went through the motions of climbing it without waiting for him. This time he wasn’t slowed by his combative hand, as there was something much more enticing to choke than a rung; all they had to do was get to the surface and then dive on top of them.The hatch opened easily, out onto the smooth lighter stone and decorative tiles surrounding the tank. Plastic hoops were suspended over the water. Bleachers ringed the area, and the whole place smelled of soggy popcorn and fish scales caked onto bucket bottoms. He could practically hear the sandal smacking of a snack toting father scuttling back to his seat, but the place was empty.It was clearly meant for shows, trainers directing the dolphins in synchronized jumps, flips, and ball bounces, so that strange cylindrical machine stuck out even more, its top exposed to the air right in the middle of the pool. Kanga circled nervously like a dog that wasn’t sure if it could swim. There was no easy way down to them, submerged as they were about twelve feet deep.“What am I doing?” he muttered, grabbing his hair to hold himself back.“Leapfrog rules Joey,” Juicy encouraged. “Anything goes when you’re trying to get things figured out. I’ll be right down there with you.”“Juicy… I’m looking for somebody. This isn’t just a fight. I’m after my best friend… Winter.”“I read about him. He didn’t let anybody push him around. Do me a favor and don’t be like him for just a second.” Before he could ask what she meant she pushed. Logically it was nothing, just a hologram’s arms ending where his wet suit began, but he felt her all the same as two twinges in his back.It turned into forward momentum, which had to become a jump unless he wanted to immediately flop and flounder. The recycler landed atop the machine with enough force to make it bob, but as he steadied himself and looked down it didn’t seem to disturb the dolphins or the person they concealed.The ripples made it harder to see, so he leaned closer, which his right hand took as permission to begin the attack. It shot down like a spear, trying to dive, taking the rest of the dead weight with it. Cool and clear, the water enveloped him before he could properly close his mouth. When the bubbles of his escaping breath got out of the way he saw his hand wrapped around the Y2Kitten, which was enclosed in a plastic case to make it waterproof.There was a second hand wrapped around it as well, which immediately protested. The Millennial attacked so fiercely that they might have torn the skin from his hand if theirs weren’t gloved. Joey’s right grabbed an enemy wrist and twisted, forcing them to spin away and kick him weakly with flippered feet.Kanga’s back found the machine, so he kicked off it toward his foe, unsure of his final goal. By the time he reached them he’d at least settled on taking or destroying the incriminating floppy, so he grabbed at it with his left while his right unleashed the cinematic highlights of Cindy Wu Hu at half speed thanks to the water medium. The kitten spun between them, every attempted grab interrupted.A solid punch landed on the helmet’s visor, cracking the glass and knocking them back. It was a good deal tougher than the thin locker door, so pain shot up Kanga’s arm and settled into his shoulder as a sudden cramp. Even so, he got his more passive fingers around the prize and held it close to his chest. There was an urge to celebrate, but an even greater urge, in the form of an expanding burn in his lungs, to breathe.He kicked his way toward the surface, right hand breaching, but it couldn’t do everything for him. His mouth had to get there, but before it did a streak of gray flesh got between the two, slapping him in the face and sending him back down. A dolphin. They had to know about the one on the locker. That was the only explanation for this vengeance, at least until he got another look at the Millennial’s helmet.It was obvious, but he’d been in such a hurry to stop them from doing whatever they were doing, to whatever it was, with the thing that had to be no good, that he hadn’t noticed. The helmet was stylized after the marine mammals because it was one of the special devices rented out by the park: a dolphin telepathy apparatus. His foe could order the creatures to do everything short of climbing a ladder and cleaning the gutters, and he was surrounded by them.Another one interrupted his next attempt to breathe, biting his leg and yanking him down. Juicy had to be right, he realized. The animals were angry. This wasn’t roughhousing with someone mistaken for a beach ball. The teeth were in his leg like it wanted to shred him, and his blood was already rising in blowhole bubbles much more successfully than its owner.A third charged him, but his right hand saved him with a backhand slap that deflected the creature. Angry chirps and whistles filled his ears, further disorienting him. He needed air, but he’d lost the direction of the entire atmosphere. All he could do was center himself, focus on the nearest creature so his skilled hand could dispatch it and prevent any more blood loss.It was a good plan, but his weaponized palm didn’t have eyes of its own and thus couldn’t see the one that came from behind, melon of a head bashing his spine and pushing him right into the Millennial. His right would’ve protested violently, but there was only so much it could do without the oxygen to fuel the muscles.Their gloves wrapped around his neck and squeezed, apparently unsatisfied with a single form of asphyxiation. The black of their suit became the black of everything as his vision dimmed. They were strong, he could feel it, but their hands were very small. They were likely under five foot six on solid ground, but he didn’t even have the breath to ask for a fairer battlefield.His thoughts became flotsam, mind consumed by the image of himself hanging dead in the water, too soggy and inconsequential to even bother feeding into a Shinjuku engine. Even in death he would be kept from joining Winter.The strangling pressure was gone. The Millennial had a change of heart, as they now caressed his cheek with the back of a glove. Not familiar, not exactly. The sensation was like someone had extracted the sense of satisfaction from his fantasies and applied it to his cheek as a salve. A dolphin slipped between his legs and pushed him.Whuuuh! Euck-huck! Kanga sputtered as he rolled out onto the tile beside the pool. His fingers tightened, incidentally telling him there was something in his hand: the Y2Kitten. Time felt utterly irrelevant now that he wasn’t drowning, so he didn’t know how long it was before he finally sat up and saw the Millennial sitting on the edge, feet swishing in the water.“W-why did you save me?” he rasped.“What kind of girl do you think I am?” Juicy’s voice.“Wait… that’s you? What’s going on?”“I was down there with you, like I promised. Then I realized this helmet and suit were on the park’s network. So I took them.”“So you’re… controlling the Millennial? They’re still in there?”“Yeah, screaming their head off in fact, but the helmet’s soundproof.”“Why is there even stuff in the suit that you can control?”“It’s an emergency feature; if you’re drowning there are nodes that shock the right spots to get you to swim up. It’s like that bracelet you’re wearing. I don’t think they ever anticipated someone like me hacking in though.”“Can you make them do anything? Can you walk?”“Only one way to find out.” The suited figure braced its arms against the tile and lifted. Juicy’s steps were uncertain, like a toddler’s. “How is walking easier to forget than riding a bike?” She kept at it, waddling in circles until the gait was at least consistent. It was the walk of someone perpetually about to sit down on a ski lift, but Kanga only needed it to go as far as the hotel elevator.“I need a favor Juicy. Can you get them up to my room and hold them there? I want to talk to them.”“I think I can manage that.” The wet suit began waddling away, so he got to his feet and walked alongside it. Juicy informed him that she couldn’t take the flippers off without ceding control of the feet back to the Millennial, so they were stuck listening to the awkward slapping all the way back through the park, to the lobby, down the annoyingly uncarpeted marble floor of the main hall, and into the elevator.Luckily everyone was at the match, so the only person to stare at them was a doorman. Kanga slipped him a five dollar bill and asked him not to tell anyone, adding an extra fifty cents a few seconds later and advising him to do his best to forget the incident entirely.Once they were safely in his room he made sure the door was closed, his portable rain forest silenced, and the Y2Kitten resting on the nightstand. Juicy sat the Millennial down on the edge of the bed where they proceeded to drip all over the poor comforter, which had barely dried from the previous night. Kanga paced back and forth in front of them, taking off the kung fu slap and placing it on the nightstand so he could wring his hands without breaking any fingers.“They’ve stopped screaming,” Juicy said to break the silence. “You can talk to them now.”“Right, I just need a second,” he snapped. “Sorry. I’m so angry I can feel it in my lips. I just want to scream at them first. For a few hours.”“Well they can hear everything you’re saying right now, so maybe save the therapy talk for later Joey. Let’s get some answers.” He nodded, taking a few deep breaths while he did so. When he was finally ready he reached out as if trying to pet a large scorpion, grabbing the visor by its dolphin nostrils and flipping it up.Eyes so full of hate they could’ve been circles of hell. Soft features all scrunched up ferociously. Pink-red skin like a chewy cherry candy. Kanga flicked the visor back down reflexively.“I… I know her.”“You do? Who is she?” Juicy asked.“She was one of the ones who attacked me last match, with that Crystalheart woman. She’s called… Monoxide.” He took another deep breath and lifted the visor again. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t you.”“Says the jockstrap that dropped onto my head from nowhere,” Monoxide spat, her top teeth barely showing over the visor window. “Tell this robot to let me go.”“She’s not a robot,” was all he could think to say.“A.I. Whatever. Let me go so I can get back to business.”“What business?”“None of yours you toxic manhandler.”“Look, I’m not letting you go until I have some- no all the answers I want. I get that you might need an incentive, so if I like enough of them I promise I’ll let you go without turning you over to the authorities. Do we have a deal?” He extended his hand, but pulled it back when he remembered she didn’t have control of her limbs. “Just say deal.”“I don’t make deals, and I’m not a hershey.”“A what?” She rolled her eyes and groaned.“A hershey, as in not her and not she. I’m a they.”“Yeah, I remember you all kept calling each other they back in the ice. What’s up with that?”“Pronouns are the past! The new millennium is a place to embrace, your identity that is,” she recited, practically singing. “The gender binary is so completely disgustingly nineties.”“This is the nineties. It’s 5-95.”“Try 2035. Everybody needs to wake up. We’re the alarm clock, and recycling is the god damn snooze button.”“How can you have a problem with recycling? Take garbage out of nature, reuse. It’s a net benefit for everybody, everywhere, all the time, forever… and on top of that it’s the most popular sport in the world. It’s like the greatest stride mankind has made since landing on the moon, and people get to celebrate and enjoy it constantly. How can you be against that!?” His volume was breaking its leash, so he grabbed her helmet and tore it off. If there was an admission of guilt anywhere in her expression, he needed to see it.Monoxide shook her head, helping her chopped crop lose the shape of a dolphin’s snout and blowhole. When she was done she just stared at him, eyes seeming to grow larger and larger until they unsettled Kanga into looking away.“What do you think is the biggest act of charity in the whole world?” she asked softly, drawing him back.“What?”“It shouldn’t be a hard question.” He thought. Several headlines bobbed up in his memory.“That rich guy, what’s his name? Something Maxella Something? He made a sixty million dollar donation last year to help freshen the patch on the ozone hole. That?” The Millennial huffed a little and dropped her head. “What?”“You’re hopeless. You’re literally judging kindness based on its price tag. You should be wondering why they have sixty million dollars to just give away in the first place.”“Because he’s rich. So what? I’m rich. Not Something Maxella Something rich, but still.”“They’re a billionaire. Nobody, anywhere, has ever done anything good or useful enough to earn that kind of wealth. Sixty million doesn’t affect them in the slightest, and since they don’t even bat an eye at losing it, it’s not charity. Charity is when a starving kid gives a slightly younger starving kid part of their dinner, which was also their breakfast and their lunch.”“Okay, fine. That’s real charity,” he conceded. “What does any of this have to do with recycling?”“My point is that big showy gestures aren’t what kindness or progress actually look like,” the Millennial explained. “Those are just advertising. Competitive recycling is a business. It leverages your urge to help the planet so you’ll buy tickets, and cable programming, and jerseys, and a lot of things that wind up needing to be recycled.”“They turned it into entertainment so people would care more. It’s just smart.”“Listen to me: none of this is what caring looks like. That’s intimate, face to face. It’s hard.” A tear streaked down her cheek; she twisted in some kind of slow recoil. “Caring hurts. And it definitely isn’t marketable.”“If caring hurts you, maybe you should consider that you’re just an evil person,” he said coldly, but there was a twinge in his heart. Of all emotions playing across her face, selfishness wasn’t one of them.“Easy Joey. I’ve killed people for being this thick. I’ll give you one last chance to figure it out. If you want to help the world, what feels like it would help more: screaming your head off while waving a foam finger, or crying your way along a beach covered in oil?” He was silent. “Caring is suffering, but it’s cathartic. It feels good, but slow and late and thin and only when you’re so tired you might feel like death without that bit of purest good. Who do you cry with Joey? Your fans? Your boss?”“I don’t have anybody for that,” he admitted, biting his lip. “You took them from me.”“Right. Your friend. Winter.” A flicker of regret.“Are you him? Last time you said you might be the person he was recycled into.” He stepped forward, casting his shadow over her. “Are you him?”“No,” she answered plainly. “Sorry about the bad joke.”“Damn it!” He turned and kicked the nearest thing without thinking, the rain forest in the corner. All the frogs panicked, leaping all over and sticking to the top of the glass. He immediately grabbed and steadied it, shushing them as an apology. All his energy left with that kick, so he pressed his forehead against the glass and leaned on the vivarium. “Do you know where he is?” he asked without turning to look at her.“I do.” She saw his fingers tense. “And I’ll tell you. You don’t have to pretend to be a tough guy either. Just ask your other questions first. I’ll force feed you some truth and if you’ve still got some room left… then you can know.” Kanga turned back around. The bed looked luxuriously comfy, but he refused to sit near her. The dolphin bite on his leg throbbed, reminding him of the indignity of being nearly drowned by the decorations on a teenage girl’s schoolwork binder.“Why are you at all my matches? There are hundreds of other teams to harass. Why not bother those cheaters over on the Yonkers Handiwork?”“We bother a lot more than you hear about. I’m just one person on one team, and we’ve got just as many as you do.” His neck leaned in. “Right, the you part. The first time we were there it was just like any other mission, but then the media latched onto you as a survivor. Wherever you go, cameras go.”“So?”“So we want those cameras. We want the world to see; that’s why we put so much focus on team recycling instead of a hundred other industries we could go after. People need to be convinced. It also helps that this sport is even more corrupt than politics. Hell, its inside is more corroded than a Dust Bowl wheelbarrow.” Joey swallowed his first question, the passionate one, and chose another.“What was that machine you were about to plug the Y2Kitten into?”“Now you’re glaring at the right sweaty guy,” she encouraged. Her body bounced on the bed excitedly, but Juicy still held the suit limbs rigid, so instead of enthusiasm it looked more like a crash test dummy bucking over a pothole. “We call them bins. They’re giant compacted trash storage devices, like what you wear on your back in the games but scaled up.”“Why was it in the dolphin tank?”“They have two recycling matches scheduled here this week. After the Rendezvous swept up the Treasure…” She paused, jaw tensing. Kanga didn’t feel like smiling, but he’d caught it. She was enough of a fan to know they had a high likelihood of handily beating the Macon Treasure. “After this match they’ll need to restock.”“What do you me-” Kanga bit the inside of his cheek. “You’re saying the park puts trash here for us to clean up? This is a publicity stunt for them…”“Not just them. The bins are owned, operated, and moved, by LIR. You and your whole squad of do-gooders probably pick up one honest piece of trash for every twenty planted ones. You’ve never noticed how you’re only sent to clean near or in places that make millions of dollars on tourism?”“No, it’s not true,” he rejected.“You can prove it to yourself. Go back out there and push some buttons on that thing. I’m sure you can get it to spit out a few soda rings for the dolphins to choke on, though it would be best if they choked on camera.”“You just want me to leave you here so you can escape.”“No, because you’re going to let me go, remember? As long as I answer your questions.”“As long as I like the answers.”“You want something feel-good? Okay. Ask me about me.”“What?”“Go ahead. Pretend you still think I’m Winter, that you might actually care about someone you don’t know. Find out who I was.” A swollen vein in her neck peeked over the tight lip of her wet suit. She was daring him, desperately. Whatever the Millennials gave her, it wasn’t fulfillment. The poor girl looked hungry, like she would happily guzzle coffee creamers and call it a full meal, but only under the tablecloth when none were looking.“Fine. Who were you, before they maimed you?”“I chased rainbows,” she began, vein receding. The bed springs relaxed as the tension drained from her back and legs. “Professionally. I don’t care if you believe it, because I could hardly believe it myself. Who gets to chase rainbows for a living? Before this rosy skin I had those rosy glasses, the same ones everybody else wears in the nineties.What I didn’t understand was the people… I can’t really call them colleagues… who were adjacent to me. They were the ones who were on the news a lot: storm chasers. Sometimes they were scientists, sometimes thrill seekers. They got in these big vans full of video cameras and drove straight into thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes…Some of them died. When they did it hurt me more than I think it did them. They were screaming their heads off, thanking god, and lightning bolts would take them out in a flash. Meanwhile I was a few miles over, having watched them dive into it, and I swear I knew which bolts and gusts took lives.I didn’t understand why they threw their lives away when the world was so beautiful. I get it now. Everything’s falling apart everywhere, and corporations and governments just paint over it, our suffering wails never anything more than bubbles in the freshest coat. They threw themselves away because destruction is the only way left to feel something. They acknowledged they were powerless, and there was something in that.I had my own camera, with a couple of attachable lenses bigger than your fist. I had my own van, full of movie posters and a hot plate and handheld video games. They kept me busy while the storm passed. After the last drop of rain, that was when I followed the others.The best rainbows appear after the biggest storms, but you’ve really got to be there right on time, when the colors pop. It almost looks like they’re fighting, like the rainbow isn’t such a peaceful thing after all. Indigo muscling in on violet. Orange biting yellow’s flank. I took pictures. Other people called me a photographer, but I had to one-up all the other optimists, so I insisted I was a rainbow chaser.When I think about what that happiness cost now it makes me sick. All that gasoline I used. All that fried chicken I ate because I only had time to grab something quick before the clouds rolled on. Even living out on the road, seeing nothing but grass and cows for hours, I was still a consumer like everybody else. And it takes a special kind of stupid to look at a pasture for grazing cattle and think you’re looking at nature.That special kind of stupid killed me. There was one storm where the sky was black as night, except for the natural dynamite crackling through it. I skirted too close, and then its path changed. It was going to eat my van. I felt like a mouse, scurrying in search of shelter, but everything was god damn pasture.Then I found a barn. Another miracle for me, a thank you from all the rainbows for getting their good side so many times. It was empty and it had this big sliding door, just big enough for my van and just small enough for me to push it open and closed on my own. I waited inside, in the dark, for it all to blow over.The engine stayed on. I used it for the little lights inside. For my hot plate. None of that was necessary. I could’ve just sat there and listened to the thunder, let the world be and let myself be in it. Instead I kept it all on, listening to their rattles and pops like they were the other end of a conversation. The last thing I remember was the crackle of the radio, only now I’m not so sure if it was the radio. It might’ve been inside my brain as I passed out.Did you know that carbon monoxide poisoning has been around as long as we have? It could build up in caves when stuff decayed and just kill people overnight. It’s silent, and it’s not dramatic, so nobody really cared that we just kept making it worse with stronger and stronger technologies.Engine exhaust contains it, and a barn contains engine exhaust. It filled up like an aquarium and I drowned in it. Carbon monoxide… makes it so that your blood can’t carry oxygen. It’s not just your lungs that can’t breathe; it’s all your cells too. You don’t even notice it at first.When they find your body you don’t look dead. It’s a poison that keeps you from going pale, even makes you look a little red sometimes. Imagine walking in to identify a dead relative, somebody who suffocated in an armchair in your basement without a peep, and even flat on a cold metal table they still look ready for picture day.They use it in the meat industry, to keep slabs of flesh looking red… looking alive. Why can’t we just accept, if all these dying and dead things are going to be in our lives, that they should look dead? Meat should be gray because it’s a life we’ve taken. Color we took. If you tried to rip a band out of the rainbow, like pulling copper wire out of a wall, it wouldn’t keep its color, I promise you that.Crystalheart found my lifeless body and reclaimed it for the Earth. They kept me on ice for a few hours… actually under the icy hands of another Millennial… until they could get me into a Shinjuku recycler. Looking at me, at the embarrassed pink in my cheeks, they thought I had already learned my lesson, so I didn’t need to be fully recycled.My body was only put through part of a cycle, the poison cleaned out and the cells rejuvenated. It made the reddening stronger though, which is why I look this way now, like a piece of strawberry taffy.So I came out a Millennial, but not a full redo. I’m still me, but, and please listen to this, death is sobering. There are things I can never get back, feelings. My body barely responds to lots of things, temperature change, poisons, bludgeoning, caressing…Most of them come out made for the cause, and they’re all beautiful and wonderful and ready to fight for sense, but not me. The nineties bled out of me, and this is what’s left. I thank Crystalheart every day for letting me see it, but it still hurts to see.Everything has to go. The cars. The chickens. The words with which we unknowingly attack each other, shoving people onto the same conveyor belts over and over. Team recycling has to go too. No matter what it claims, things aren’t getting cleaner.”Silence hung between them for over a minute. Her story stuck in his mind, but not comprehensively, wet images thrown onto a wall where they happened to adhere. He saw two people: the happy rainbow chaser and the red and wrathful berserker trapped in front of him. The Millennials killed one and brought forth the other, like a new iteration of software. Yet she insisted this wasn’t true. That their whole culture made her the indigestible lump of gristle she was.“The person called Winter Solomon became a person called Cloudspin,” she offered when she realized he was having trouble picking up his words. “They work in Europe now as part of an aerial deployment team, around the Baltic states. They like to breakdance as they skydive, so they can feel something. You’ll know them by the parachute they never take off, because it’s bonded to their back. Can I go now?”“I don’t know that any of this is true,” Kanga said to get his bearings. “For all I know that sob story is just to-” Juicy appeared right next to him.“The suit’s battery is dead!” she shouted. Monoxide lunged, grabbing him by the shoulders and plowing straight into the rain forest. The glass shattered when all three hit the corner, frogs and insects fleeing in all directions. He instinctively tried to roll, to get away from the poisonous little hopping rainbows, but Monoxide was far stronger.The kung fu slap was still on the nightstand, but so was the Y2Kitten, and that was what she wanted. The Millennial let him go long enough to reach for it, which gave him a chance to smack at the controls on the vivarium’s base. The wheels squealed as it dragged along the wall, squeezing her against the nightstand. Joey stood, taking several cuts on his hands in the process, and kicked at the back of her head, but it was as solid as a balustrade ball.She reached for the floppy, so he threw his entire weight on her back. Even though she was far smaller she still managed to run backward and slam him into the door. Grabbing at the handle for stability, he accidentally pulled it open. From the hallway they heard several sounds, probably a housekeeper and her cart.Her presence spooked Monoxide, who quickly glanced back at the Y2Kitten. The mental calculation to decide it wasn’t worth getting caught only took a split second. She tried to exit, with only Kanga’s leg on the frame stopping her. His limb stretched, his mouth doing the same in a silent scream. A few more seconds of this and she would pop it out of the socket.She whirled around in his grip to face him, which was the first time he noticed her pursed lips and bulging cheeks. With a whimsical pwop a blue and red frog flew off her unfurling tongue toward Kanga. His fingers released all at once so he could fall backward, amphibian landing harmlessly in the wet wrinkles of the comforter. The floor was not so kind to the crown of his head, leaving him wincing as the Millennial’s footsteps faded away down the hall.Her resistance to poisons was apparently true, given the frog slime apéritif she’d just used as a secret weapon. Kanga was not so fortunate, so he had to, while still reeling from the head impact, flee from the soft sounds of hopping by crawling into the hallway, slamming the door shut, and sitting leaned against it. The little creatures peeped behind it menacingly.“Go back to where you came from!” he barked at them, imagining them growing little hummingbird wings and buzzing out the window all the way back to the condos that had been the Amazon. The dark-skinned maid standing in front of him, having just pulled her cart up, took it quite differently. “Oh, that wasn’t… I’m sorry. I’m not…” He groaned. “You guys have gloves right? I made a real mess in there.”
…
There was going to be a lot of explaining to do, and Kanga had no idea what he would say yet. His mind was a terrible jumble, like a jigsaw puzzle with its pieces mixed into a cluttered knitting drawer. Lacking even the presence of mind to hide the Y2Kitten while the housekeeping staff chased the frogs around his room with rubber gloves, the young recylcer was lucky none of them recognized the device for what it was.For now he needed to get out of there and find enough space and air to think. Over the course of an hour he got properly dressed in casual clothes, packed up a bag with the kitten inside, and dropped a vase full of frogs topped with a pillow and further topped with a scribbled note in front of Roger Linejaw’s room: very poisonous, please take care of.Actually getting out of the park was even more difficult, for the match had ended and it was flooded with jubilant Rendezvous fans and dejected Treasure fans. Kanga’s face was all too recognizable, so he wore the dolphin helmet on the way out, planning to drop it at the last return desk before the exit. Juicy couldn’t properly generate inside it, but he heard her voice.“Sorry Joey, I didn’t even think about the little battery in there. It was for emergencies, not for twenty straight minutes of use.”“It’s okay,” he muttered as he shouldered his way through a sea of sweaty red jerseys. “I got what I needed, and I wouldn’t even have known it was here if not for you. Thank you.”“You’re welcome; I’m in this with you Joey. Will you tell me more about Winter?”“Hey, why does this helmet have audio?”“It has to generate sound to interact with the dolphins’ sonar.”“But it’s a telepathy helmet. It should be using brain waves, not sound waves.”“Sorry Joey, but I think that’s just a marketing thing. It’s all sound. It… I think it mostly confuses and hounds them until they do what it wants.”“Was she right?” He stopped dead, but the crowd still pulled him. “Is the nineties all… veneer?”“Not my music,” Juicy insisted. “I felt every note and lyric. I thought about every smiling kid who danced to it. I promise you… I promise.”“You’re not supposed to be here.” He was jostled out of the flow, deposited conveniently next to a helmet return bin. As soon as it was off they wouldn’t be able to talk any longer. “You’re supposed to be…” He couldn’t get out the words: dead, rotting, fading… “Resting. What about the people who own your image? Are they your biggest fans?”“No,” she admitted. “They’ve got a stable of holograms. I don’t know why it’s legal for them to make any money off me. They didn’t write or perform any of it, and they weren’t even my managers when I was physical.”“I keep meeting sick kids,” Joey said, hands glued to the sides of the helmet. The plastic dolphin teeth were about even with the heads of the crowd, like some tomb’s booby trap brought down on them. “It’s always a dream come true for them.” He remembered the full body cast and the sanitary slime coating. “Why do they need charities and contests to make their dreams come true? I never noticed that they’re always sick. Where did all these sick kids even come from!?”“There is something going on Joey. We should go back while we still can and see if we can get that bin to spit out some trash.”“No, recycling is good. Picking up trash is good, and I’m good at it.”“I know, but where’s the money going? And what’s it doing? I’m dead, but Juicy Stardrop is still drowning in cash she can’t use. When I died it felt so-” He ripped the helmet off and tossed it in the bin, where it bounced off three others. By the time it settled he was out a back exit, hands deep in his pockets, his mind burning on the image of a desktop computer.The only place he could think to go was a public library, and the digital yellow pages in his pager gave him the address of the nearest one. He took a shuttle out of the park grounds and then a bus, winding up near a suburban school baking under the Florida sun. His quiet seething was only chilled by a blast from the library’s air conditioning when he entered.The bank of public computers was in the back, each flanked by two tall privacy screens covered in advertisements for author readings and school programs. Joey set his bag down and stared at the home screen for a long while, until he heard the tiny, fuzzy, electric sounds coming off the monitor more than his own breath.He had no idea how a Y2Kitten worked, but it was on a floppy, and the desktop’s drive was right there. The Millennials used them to override the Shinjuku safety protocols, the ones that kept them from processing and recycling living tissue. If a hapless technician fell into one normally, even if it was in the middle of tallying up the results of a game, its motion would cease and they would be spat out unharmed.A Y2Krazy machine, driven mad by the horizon of a new age, was capable of anything. He’d heard of hoverboats beaching themselves and continuing all the way to America’s heartland, only stopping when stalks of corn tangled in the mechanisms of their undercarriage. Robots worshiping pilot lights after kicking out the homeowners. Stocks plummeting because the electronic ticker decided to write out a bad pun instead of the actual values.“It’s just one computer,” he reasoned in a whisper. The disk was in his lap, fingers tracing its grooves. “Library computers are workhorses. They’ve seen everything. People look at porn on these things. It can handle it.” Whether or not it could do as he claimed, the kitten was his last investigative avenue. People with names like ‘Cloudspin’ were probably unlisted everywhere in the civilized world wide web.He held his breath even more tightly than when surrounded by ornery porpoises and thrust the disk into the slot, where it was accepted with a routine klik. The contents were instantly read, without him even touching the mouse. A gray window opened, and in it he saw a vibrating line, like something measuring sound levels, and a single word below that followed by a few recurring dots: connecting…There was only one thing to connect to, and that was the web. Kanga relaxed. He would have about thirty seconds for the dial-up connection to go through, the familiar array of biting mechanical noises as-“Nyaah?” His mouth dropped open. There was a person in the window, sitting at a computer station of their own, though their keyboard looked like three that had been broken down and fused together. Loose vowels littered their desk like spilled alphabet cereal. He couldn’t tell if the bundles of colorful wires were just that or some kind of goo-filled candy ropes.It was a video feed, but he’d never seen motion so smooth on anything other than a television or theater screen. Wherever this person was was quite dark except for all the little green and purple lights on all the devices enclosing them, but he could still see plenty of details. That was probably why their face was hidden behind a mask that matched the insignia on the floppy: a cartoonish white cat with one golden coin of an eye open while the other winked. This person had thick white gloves on as well, like paws, and he wasn’t sure how anyone could type accurately through them.“Who are you?” the person asked, forcing him to scramble to find the volume and crank it down. There was a pair of headphones next to the machine, so he quickly donned them and plugged them in.“Hello?” he whispered.“Hello!? Who is this? Nyah?” Judging by the high voice and the smooth skin of thin forearms, he guessed he was talking to a girl, probably still a teenager. “Whoever you are, your rig doesn’t have a mic or cam. If you’re trying to talk to me you have to type.” Kanga’s fingers shook, worsening his already atrocious typing skills.Can yiu see this?“Yes genius, I can see that. Who are you and how did you get to me Nyah?”I hav a kitten.“So? You want a medal?”I want info on the people I took it from: millennnials.“They’re clients nyah, and a hacker never reveals their clients. But… my services are, hmmmm, clandestine. They know this. So if you’re a client too, they become fair game.”Hacking is illegal, right?“Oh who knows. The nineties is so far behind the tech I can’t even see them in the rear view. Sure, some of it is, but some of it’s fine. You hire me and I’ll pinky promise that all the hacking I do for you will be legal nyah. That way you’re covered.”I jsust need your segvices for hte next ten minutes. How much will that cost?“In ten minutes I can shut down a hydroelectric dam and make all the trapped water hot enough to boil hot dogs nyah. So two grand.”How do I pay?“What’s your name? No name, no game.”Joey Reuben“Okay, cross-referencing all the Joey Reubens out there with your location data… that makes you Joey ‘Kanga’ Reuben: an anyboarder for the Rockford, Illinois recycling team. Twice attacked by Millennials in public, no wonder you’re after them. Says here you’re a big Juicy Stardrop fan… and the gossip sites think you’re dating her hologram. That true? Looking at your picture I think you guys would be a super cute couple nyah.”How do you know all that???“Data dollface. Don’t you know computers gather facts about you every time you use them? Those facts go into an algorithm and the algorithm spits out products it wants you to buy and prices it wants you to buy them at. Guess I can’t expect someone stuck in the nineties glue trap to see the clean and cold tile ripe for the skittering just beyond nyaahaha!”I make my own decisions. Nobody told me to do this, thats for sure.“And notice that you won’t be charging this one to your plastic. Almost done… and there we go! I just hacked your bank account and took my payment, not a virtual penny more, pinky promise.”The world wide web can do that!?!?!“Oh, precious, no. This isn’t the web; it’s the net. Running wholly on new millennium code. That’s why this stuff is nothing to me, like walking through a spider’s world wide web. Your ten minutes are running, so get typing.”Tell me everthing you can abouut the Millennial called Cloudspin.“Searching… hacking… jumping over that… electrocuting them… hmmmmmm… I don’t have much on them generally, since they use the net too, but he’s in Europe. They’ve got him disrupting recycling matches by aerial drop in a small team of three. Partner code names are Sugarblitz and Exchange.”I’ll be in Europe in a few days. Do you know where hell be?“My rig’s a liquid-cooled masterpiece, but it’s not a crystal ball. Hang on nyah… I can’t tell you anything for sure, but they’ve been heading in a general direction. The next arena their projected path passes through is the Blasting Shore, Gulf of Riga, Estonia. Also… there’s a match scheduled there in four days, on the fourteenth… the Kingston Royal are up against the Ventspils Prize.”Damn. You can’t change that, can you? Make my team compete there on that day?“Gee I don’t know, that sounds pretty diffic- Just kidding! All done. LIRIC’s security code is a joke, especially considering that the scorekeepers run on Y2K.”You seriously did it?“Uhh yeah! All it took was a forged scheduling conflict. There are so many of these matches that nobody really cares when the program gets shuffled. After that change everything should fall into place. By the time we hang up your plane tickets will probably already be switched nyah! You’ll be up against the Hyderabad Chorus.”Thank you“You don’t need to thank me; you already paid me. You’ve got six minutes left. Anything else you want to know?”What else can I do with this kitten?“It forcibly converts any machine to Y2K, as long as it has a compatible drive. From there it opens a console where you can input commands. They’re good for two uses, and the one you’ve got will still have one charge when we’re done here.”SO I can make any computer do whayever I want?“Sure, but stuff on the internet spreads, and using those things on connected devices has consequences. Just for talking to me you’ll likely have to deal with the dark cloud.”What’s the darkc loud??“It’s when nineties code senses a Y2K disruption, sort of like people going mad in a Lovecraftian story nyah. They see the horrors out of the corner of their eye, so to speak. Just like anything cornered, they respond with insane hostility. It’ll be following you around until the program I wrote finishes its work, after your match with the Chorus.”Thanks for warning me!! That was sarcastic by the way.“Everyone’s responsible for their own ignorance nyah. Two minutes.”Why do you keep making that weird sound?“Nyah? It’s the sound cats make.”Is that your actual face, like the Millennials recycled you into a cat person or smeothing??“No, I just like cats nyah. You can only get so mad at a cat for breaking the rules, nyahahaha! It’s in our nature. I live in a different world from you Reuben. Here, there’s no judgment when I wear a mask, when I wear a tail, when I talk funny because the joy of it all burns so warmly inside me. It doesn’t hurt anybody, so it’s fine. That’s the light on the other side of Y2K.”Through the dark cloud I guess.“Your time’s up, but I’ll give you some free advice. The world wide web is stiff, but it still manipulates you. Watch out for words you see too much, words that shut down your thoughts: terrorist, drug, recycle, copyright, et cetera. Think all, feel intimate. Peace out brother, nyahahaha!”The window closed just as the drive spat the kitten back into his lap, a thin white curl of smoke coming from one of its seams. Kanga blew on it until it was cool enough to tuck away in his pocket. He wasn’t sure if it was the dark cloud already settling overhead or some kind of self-destruct program the hacker put on all her communications, but the desktop had gone dark and refused to turn back on.In its darkness he saw his reflection, not like in the mirror and not like on the magazine covers he passed in the stands. He looked tired. How could he skip a match and feel that run down? Something inside him, around his lungs like chains covered in Spanish moss, felt heavy. The weight of decades.…
WWW.REALLYRECYCLING.COM

LIR & LIRIC SCHEDULE (WEEK TEN)

Akron Alloy (10 wins/5 losses this season) vs. Birmingham Melody (6/9) – will be held at Pennsylvania superfund arena #12

Fez Verdict (8/7) vs. Prague Mystery (9/6) – Maxella Cola Uncondemned Stadium (tickets and safety permits still available)

Mandalay Parade (12/3) vs. Dallas Classic (1/14) – centralized New Mexico nuclear waste storage facility

Hyderabad Chorus (11/4) vs. Rockford Rendezvous (8/6) – Blasting Shore Midair Entertainment

Gwangju Swagger (3/12) vs. Kyoto Thrill (5/10) – Great Indian Plastic Shoal, Maxella Cruise Lines offering stops for the match

Warsaw Checkmate (13/2) vs. Columbus Blush (15/0) – previously unused Atlantic sandbar, estimated three tons recyclable material

Lalitpur Waltz (8/7) vs. Da Nang Dustup (9/6) – Blue Rock National Park and Hotels

Eugene Charm (0/15) vs. Cheyenne Curse (0/15) – vacant field pop-up arena, sponsored by GrandLens home videography services and Teachmart School Supplies

Fort Collins Flirt (7/8) vs. Salta Gallop (4/11) – Municipal Landfill #465310

Union City Encore (2/13) vs. Hilton Head Island Inertia (13/2) – Everglades Recreated! fun and nature park

Rio Rancho Romance (10/5) vs. Mobile Upkeep (0/15) – Heaven’s Backyard Trailer Township (residences cleared for the event)

Twin Falls Adventure (3/12) vs. Bowling Green Bulwark (4/11) – Municipal Landfill #669492

Wuxi Windfall (6/9) vs. Wollongong Glow (7/8) – Little Mogs, voted fifth dirtiest village in the world three years running

USER COMMENTS

Member#211: I’ve got two bikers from Kyoto on my fantasy team this year, so here’s hoping they can start pulling it together. The shoal is bigger this season and they do better in bigger arenas.

Member#68: Wait, why is Rockford playing Hyderabad? The schedule had the Prize and some other team on it last week. And don’t U.S. teams usually start in the U.K. when they do the overseas tours? Not that I’m complaining; it should be a really good match. Hope Kanga’s well enough to play.

Member#135: Forget the Cheyenne Curse, Rockford is literally cursed. Five players killed and another one hospitalized. I think Kanga’s out for good. That last game wasn’t actually recovery; he was suspended for substance possession. He probably got hooked on pain pills after the cave-in. Damn Millennials kill everything else, so why not his sobriety too?

Member#427: If he’s actually on anything I’ll never forgive him.

Member#213: Guys, that’s a lot of guff. If you look at the D.O.U.S.E report for the incident it lists the stuff he ‘possessed’. It’s just a bunch of industrial chemicals. It’s not like steroids or cocaine or anything. What’s weird is, it’s all stuff that interferes with the projecting of holograms. Couple that with the rumor that he’s having virtual sex with Juicy Stardrop and you get a very different picture.

Member#427: People who do it with holograms go to Hell.

Member#44: Hell exists underneath the 90s.

Member#427: What are you talking about 44?

Member#395: Jesus guys it’s just the schedule. Take all this stuff to a chatroom.

Member#76: Does anyone know where the souvenir advice section is? I totally snagged a piece of trash from last month’s Science vs. Instinct, and I had it appraised for like five hundred bucks since I got Molydeux to sign it. I’m concerned that it might be a little radioactive though. It’s probably fine, but I just want to make sure. They wouldn’t let me walk out the door with it if it was dangerous.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

(reading time: 1 hour, 26 minutes)
                                                                                          A dark cloud would be just one more uncomfortable bump on any transoceanic flight, but the pilot and copilot couldn’t see it or detect it with their instruments. Even the normal filters of first class team recycling travel, which kept out the riff and for a minor additional fee the raff as well, could do nothing against this particular phenomenon.There was a robotic stewardess on a track down the center aisle, magnetically attached to a drink cart full of goodies half the time. About an hour in, still close enough to the shore to make out the colorful layers of litter bobbing on the waves, the stewardess made its first trip to take drink and food orders.It rolled right past Kanga, and he thought nothing of it, his mind dripping through the colander of his plan, distraught by all the holes. Even if this Cloudspin, the man with all his friend’s atoms, was there, it didn’t necessarily mean he would be interrupting and attacking the match. Monoxide had, according to her, only been at the last one to quietly sabotage a machine for later.And if he did find this person, what was he supposed to do about them? The hacker had implied he worked with two others. Even with the lethal capacity of an altered kung fu slap he hadn’t been able to take on Monoxide alone.The biggest hole of all was not something that could be solved; it was more of a gaping wound in his conscience. He hadn’t even thought about his teammates, or the members of the Hyderabad Chorus, until well after the Y2Kitten had cooled. They were now in harm’s way. If he revealed his misdeeds that would be the end of it, but he would wind up fired and imprisoned for his actions. He was certain of the latter, as he’d learned tampering with a public computer, including making it Y2Krazy, was a felony.The secrecy had to stop, one way or another, in Estonia. Kanga resolved to put aside the match itself, to immediately hunt down the Millennials and force a confrontation so none of the other players had a chance to stumble into them. He would most likely die, but this runaway train, brakes cut since Winter, would finally careen to a smoking standstill.“Can I get you something to eat or drink?” the stewardess asked Monique, who was seated behind Kanga, in its tinny intercom voice.“No thank you,” she answered. The machine asked Tina in the window seat next to her, who also declined, before it turned and rolled forward.“Yeah, can I get a-” Kanga started, but the robot rolled right past him and asked Barson in the next row.“That was weird,” Leternau said, startling Kanga, who had forgotten there was someone sitting next to him. The alternate had been cheery lately, thanks mostly to Kanga sitting out so many matches. She had a strong chin with a dimple big enough to putt from and curly black hair that always stuck out from the bottom of her helmet when she was on her bounce bike. “Dumb thing didn’t even ask us. I could go for a grape soda.”“It’s probably just a glitch,” Joey said to brush it off, but he almost wanted to go back to the subject when he realized Leternau was staring at him. “What’s with that look?” He cracked the most artificial smile of his life, including the ones in front of every flashbulb. “You’re not going to kill me to take my spot permanently are you?”“No,” she said with a chuckle that was almost as manufactured as his joke. “I was just hoping we could talk; that’s why I sat next to you. Tina won’t really talk about it, and she told me not to bother you with it, but-” Her seat shuddered as Tina kicked the back of it.“Knock it off Teeny,” Kanga said loudly enough for her to hear. “It’s fine; I’m fine. What is it Leternau?” She lowered her voice.“How well did you know the four guys who died? And… I say four because I already know you and Winter were really close.” Kanga took a deep breath.“Honestly, not very well. Winter, Tina, and I were kind of our own clique. Those guys were only with us for a season and a half. Three fresh faces and one trade from the Fond du Lac Voyage.” He looked past her, out the window at the gray clouds. “Chris Davidson, David Treyarch, Trey Matthews, and Matthew Crystal. We used to call them the chain gang, because of the way their names chained together like that. Not to speak ill of the… you know, but that was the most interesting thing about them.”“So, nothing stood out about them to you?”“No, why?”“It’s nothing… just that they got replaced really quickly.”“You need seven reliables and two alternates to even play.”“No I know, but even so. I didn’t get picked up until later. I just thought maybe the old guys knew the new guys and bequeathed their spots or something. Is that the right word?”“A lot of teams have a diversity initiative now,” Kanga explained, “so people from all different communities get a shot at the game. Sammy and the others were picked up as part of that.”“No kidding? They don’t get paid extra do they? I ask because I’m half Moroccan.”“I don’t think so,” Joey said with a little laugh through his nose. The laugh turned into a lean, and he found himself overcome with a desire to divulge. With Juicy appearing much of the time he was alone, he hadn’t realized until now that he hadn’t shared any of his situation with another living soul who wasn’t on the run from the law.“You know, the Millennials back at Baldigari lied straight to my face about them. They said they never killed that many players at once.”“No way, they denied it!?! That’s nuts! Why would they do that?“Probably because they’re evil,” Barson said, having twisted around and stuck his face between the seats. “Millennials are what happen when you don’t recycle a piece of garbage for too long. It grows legs and arms and starts spewing more garbage. Oh and, I actually did know Matt Crystal. You don’t give him enough credit Joey; he was a really nice-”Sammy’s fingers crawled across Barson’s face and pulled him back. He scolded Kombo for butting into the conversation and told him to mind his own business, but he wasn’t the only one intruding.“Oh, you’re back,” Leternau said. “Grape soda please.” Kanga turned and flinched, his arms shooting up to protect his face. The stewardess was right there, leaned so far into his personal space that there was no way any customer feedback-obsessed company would ever program it to do so.He could see every detail of its manufacturing from the glossy painted stripes, orange and white like clementine slices atop a delicate vanilla sundae, down to the advertisement wrapped around its umbrella stand base. Its face, designed to be blank and calming, looked more like a knocked down mannequin watching the commission of a war crime at the moment. Its arms hung limply against Kanga’s armrest.“Grape soda?” Leternau repeated. Kunk. The machine’s drink cart associate backed up and tried to push it forward again. Kunk. Kunk. Kunk. “This thing is giving me first class creeps.” She reached up to hit the call button and summon the human attendant, who was at that moment sitting in the copilot’s lap telling him how fantastic he was at flying.“Don’t!” Kanga blurted, though he could barely twist under the stewardess’s dipping bird posture. Her finger curled back. If anyone investigated the robot they might find the shadow of a certain dark cloud in its code somewhere. “I uhh… I think it’s my pager,” he hastily lied, smacking at the device on his belt until it made a noise that added to his excuse. “It’s new, so I think most robots aren’t updated to deal with its signals yet. Can we just… switch seats?”“No problem,” Leternau said slowly, questioning her own choice of used pager that didn’t seem anywhere near as cutting edge. She stood up so Joey could slither by her. That tactic worked; as soon as the stewardess’s intake fan didn’t have Kanga breath in it the machine stood back up and finally registered the alternate’s drink order. After handing over the purple can, a plastic cup, a plastic straw, and a napkin with three cyclical green recycling arrows on it, it rolled away.With the encounter having killed their conversation, he tried to pass the time by selecting a film on the screen built into the back of Sammy’s seat. Normally the available entertainment was rarely older than two or three years, but the posters on display included a few films that were even pre-nineties.A stolen glance at Leternau’s screen saw several recent blockbusters: Credit Cardians: Shopaholic Supreme, Cindy Wu Hu in Drop it Punk!, The Judge Julia Movie, and X gamers 8. The titles on his were a touch more pointed, a few sour faces under the hats on the posters looking quite specifically like the type of film noir where the protagonist wound up dead and posed at the bottom of a concrete staircase: Trapped in Europe, The Boy who Cried Murder, Sabotage at Midnight, and The Fool’s Errand.He jammed his finger on the play button. It didn’t matter which film it started, as long as it obeyed. The screen went black, text fading in, but it didn’t identify the film studio or director. It was just a sentence. No, you don’t deserve a movie. Kanga practically broke his thumb on the off switch, the device thankfully unable to resist its function.There was a worry weighing on him, making him slouch further into the seat with crossed arms, that the plane itself, clearly aware of his mischief, might decide to take a swim to get rid of him, but that felt like less of a dark cloud and more of a hurricane, so he was able to shut his eyes and force himself to sleep.
…
The Rockford Rendezvous was booked for just two nights in the luxury hotel nearest their arena, so Kanga thought it would be a simple matter to hole up in there and wait out the dark cloud. After setting down his bag he immediately unplugged the phone and the television, turning the latter around.The clock radio on the nightstand might lie to him, so he bound it with its own cord and shoved it in the closet, alongside his powered down pager. When he was done stripping the room down to something one of the Amish could comfortably sleep in, he sat on the edge of the bed in the dim quiet, waiting to feel like he accomplished something.His teammates were down in the heated pool, limbering up for the next day’s match, and he had been invited to join them, but it was growing more difficult to face them with each passing hour. He wondered if anyone would notice if he wore blinders out of the starting gate, to keep his focus.“Juicy?” Of course she wasn’t there. His gifted rain forest was undergoing restoration and hadn’t made the trip with him, and even if there had been anything in the room capable of projecting a hologram he would’ve unplugged it.He told himself he should’ve bought a book at the airport, and then he told himself ten other things he should’ve done, none of which changed the fact that he was simultaneously nervous and bored out of his mind. Bored out of his room to be precise, as he rushed out in casual clothes, hands jammed in his pockets and head down, barely ten minutes later.The only thing he brought with him was his anyboard, but not the one used for matches. This model was his own property, its coloring and functionality much more drab, looking like a positively ancient skateboard that had achieved enlightenment and left its wheels in a storm drain somewhere. It was still plastered with stickers from his youth, the colors faded, but he would never peel them off. He had placed some, and Winter the others, and it warmed him that he couldn’t remember who had put on each one.The city wasn’t far from the shore of the Baltic Sea, close enough for him to smell though he couldn’t hear or see it. The shops didn’t want him to forget, most of their wares similar to what one might find on a boardwalk back in the states. Candy shops with gummy ropes hanging in the window like beaded curtains. Mouthless eyeless mannequins in snorkels and goggles.The beach was cordoned off in preparation for the crowds that would swarm it trying to view the match, and it had the side effect of emptying much of the shopping district. In his fuming wandering he wound up in the electronic entertainment subset of said district, which, thanks to it being the middle of a school day, was outright abandoned.Following cracks in the pavement with the gliding tip of his anyboard, he was unaware as animatronic advertisements turned their eyes and heads in his direction when they were meant to simply scan back and forth. An entire shelf of virtual pets growled at him as he passed, their vibrations shaking a few of them to the floor.Anyboards weren’t sidewalk legal in many parts of the world, but in Kanga’s experience people only complained if an amateur crashed and scratched something they were trying to glide over, like a hydrant or bike rack. He’d covered more distance on them than he’d walked in his entire life, so there was little chance of screwing up such basic maneuvers.The lack of cars in the narrow roads made him feel even freer, so he sped up, gracefully swishing from one curb to the next in a wave pattern. Few riders, even among the skilled, actually understood how an anyboard’s internal processor made decisions regarding when to intensify its hovering power. They mostly assumed it was based on speed, factoring in the distance from the bottom or the nose to the nearest solid object.What the mechanism actually measured was density, and, if properly opened up and tuned, it could differentiate between pockets of air at different temperatures. Kanga and Winter had worked together to modify theirs, giving them the precision of a cat’s whiskers. Winter had even made up a trick, one only possible with such modifications.He had named it the bad breath bump, with the more advanced version being the 3b-360. Every city big enough to have its own recycling team had a case of bad breath, he had argued, and it came out in belches from the sewer system: methane and the warmth of decomposition. So to perform it you needed to gather speed before reaching an open manhole cover or drain.The modified anyboard would catch the difference in air density over the opening, allowing him to roll over the wafting halitosis of Rockford, landing the nose while keeping the tail in the air with the other foot, and gliding to a stop. After he taught it to Kanga they believed they were the only pair in the world that knew how to pull it off.“The grosser the city the higher you can get!” he had joked. “If Rockford wasn’t so nasty we’d never get the chance to clean it up.” Kanga slowed, one foot stepping off the board to stop it. Up ahead there was some street construction, taped off at a height he could easily lean and glide under. Past the barrier, next to some scaffolding, was a jagged hole in the street.He would only be able to jump it if it connected to something underground venting one of the city’s impolite byproducts, but even if he couldn’t he could follow the hole’s curvature and jump on the way out.Checking left, he saw nobody.Checking right, he saw nothing but an arcade, most of its lights out except for a few machines so old and unwelcoming they were practically security guards. Since he wouldn’t be stepping foot on the popcorn hull encrusted and soda soaked carpet that was their territory, he doubted they would protest.With both feet back on the board he crouched to build up speed. The 3b-360 involved one complete spin in the air, but that was for manhole covers. Theoretically, more spins were possible over a hole such as this. A 540? No, that was thinking small. He was risking everything these days. To be safe now was hypocritical.His heart sped with his board. Crime. He had actually committed it, and not the offense of riding his toy around an empty street. Using new millennium code to tamper with public computers. Kidnapping and interrogating a Millennial without reporting her to anyone. 720. Two full spins was nothing to somebody willing to throw away the perfect life of fame and fortune.Winter had to be somewhere. He couldn’t be gone. If he wasn’t in the Millennial body molded from the atoms of his old one then he was a spirit in the air, someone who had leapt from their anyboard mid-trick and vanished. If so they could speak again, only over that hole, riding a current nobody else even knew about, like threading the needle of one dimension and landing on the stitching of another.Kanga zipped under the caution tape. There was the bottom, and it was dark. He grabbed the edge of the board and pulled, jumping at the same time. The air was there; he could’ve felt it even if the board didn’t respond. The spin began, racking up degrees like credit card debt. 180. 360. 540. 617 wasn’t an official trick, but it was where he was forced to stop.Kish! The glass wall of the arcade shattered as something bulky, bright, and babbling barreled through it. The thing bent the scaffolding on its way out, causing enough of a lean for hammers and paint cans to come tumbling down. They had enough force to kill a man, but Kanga was pushed out of their path by the strange thing, wrapped up in something like arms that bruised his ribs and everything holding them in place.They crashed in the hole, Kanga’s head barely missing the edge of the concrete. His anyboard landed the trick without him, silently gliding along the sidewalk before stopping just shy of the next corner. Shock had just as much of a hold on the recycler as the machine pressing against him, so it took several seconds for his wits to return.His attacker refused to wait patiently, blasting the bleeps and bloops and virrt-der-ders of a video game’s menu screen music in his ears. When Joey reflexively tried to roll away it blocked him with a jab that embedded its fist in the dirt and rock beside his neck. His eyes followed its square metal wrist up its thick arm to its positively prismatic torso, somewhere between an old television and a laser show interpreted across a crystal chandelier.“Player one press start!” it demanded in a distorted electronic voice. Kanga realized it was a robot, but an arcade cabinet as well, like they’d stuck arms, legs, and a small square head on one of the games just so they could say there was someone present to monitor the children so they didn’t vandalize the place or swallow too many tokens.“Let me go!” Shouting hurt his fresh bruises, but what hurt more was the possibility his plan had already been derailed. If any of his teammates or the officials saw him wincing they might order an examination, and the injury could mean being pulled from play. Cloudspin wouldn’t wait for him to mend.“Player one press start!” it demanded again. In trying to push it away Kanga’s hands found a joystick and six large buttons of varying colors. One of them must have been start, because the screen on the robot’s chest changed.“I don’t want to play!”“You only want to play!” It made a sound like a stale pizza crust fed to an intake fan. “You want nothing but to play! Nothing matters to you but the game! Put everything you have in the slot! Select your character player one!” Kanga guessed this was another effect of the dark cloud. The panicked thing dealt with his presence the only way it knew how, by centering him and getting his hands and wide eyes on the controls.The game was not one he’d seen before, but it looked like a beat’em up, where musclebound characters shuffled, dukes up, from left to right and took on anything that got in their way. There were four characters to select from the menu:JETHEAD! His head is a remote controlled fighter plane! Use his special to send it flying, the propeller chopping up thugs viciously. He fights to protect his disabled sister Himiko from figures in the Japanese underworld who believe she is the reincarnation of a powerful priestess. Kanga tried to select this dogfighting kickboxer, but the robot rejected his choice.LADY RIGHTEOUS FIRE! Cloaked in the flames of her fury, nothing can stop her from claiming her vengeance. Use her special to indiscriminately turn everything to ash, even your own teammates! Kanga picked her, but she was disallowed as well.THE REFEREEBRA! Half referee and half zebra, this unstoppable figure of law and order instilled justice in the African savanna. No blood is spilled without his permission, no matter how hungry the lions are. Use his special to penalize minibosses, taking them out of their own fight for thirty seconds while you thrash their henchmen. Kanga pressed, but it wouldn’t take.
SOLEMN GHOST! Invincible to most basic attacks, he doesn’t need anyone’s help, and he’ll let you know with a haunting wail! Chained by his own shortcomings, the ghost cannot rest until he realizes his unfinished business is long at rest already. Use his special to disappear and reappear in the realm of the dead.
“It’s not like you’re giving me any choice,” Kanga grumbled as he slapped the button. Solemn Ghost it was. A character like that hardly suited his play style, he thought. A protector, sure. Someone vengeful, definitely. A fair figure… well he didn’t consider himself unfair. But ‘chained by his own shortcomings’ looked like the robot was just insulting him. “What happens if I die?”“You die!” the robot shouted in response.“Do you mean out here!?”“Level One! Treacherous Ice!” There was no time to ask again, as the gray masked ghost, long neck wound with chains, that was his avatar slid across the blue cracked ice on the screen. He was immediately swarmed by dwarf yetis rolling around like snowballs. Even in his shock and injury, Kanga’s hands responded.He hadn’t been in an arcade in over a year, but there was a time in the youth of his ongoing youth where he’d been glued to such machines for hours at a time, even when they didn’t have heads of their own nodding along and encouraging him. Both Winter and Joey had known that it would take them exactly thirty-seven quarters to complete their favorite game gauntlet of Ion Blush, Gecko Sled Racing Extreme, and Professor Dread’s Wax Museum.The last of those was a similar enough affair to the one before him now, perhaps even made by the same company. Controlling Solemn Ghost was, as gaming aficionados often described frustratingly light and wispy characters, ‘floaty’. His feet hung hovering off the pixelated ground without the help of an anyboard.Once Kanga got the hang of his whipping chains he dispatched the growling yetis swiftly, making his way uphill to a windswept peak. There he bested the king of the yetis with the ghost’s special move, leaving only its skeleton, fog rising from its eye sockets, behind.“There, I did it!” He slapped the space between buttons and stick. “Now let me go.”“Level Two! Whirling Waters!”“What? No, you didn’t say anything abo-” The level’s enemies were not concerned with his grievances, charging the ghost immediately. Kanga grabbed the controls and got right back to it, defeating scuttling squids with fishhook-tipped tentacles and tossing them off a pier into frothy whirlpools.When he got to the second boss he tried to hit the pause button, but it was dead as silent film. The creature was a dolphin, inexplicably red. The shade was too familiar; it couldn’t be coincidence. Arcade cabinets had limited color palettes to begin with, so the idea that it had that perfect shade of monoxide-spiked punch was absurd.“What the hell is this?!” Kanga snarled, unable to take his hands off the fight. Solemn Ghost’s long neck made ducking under the sonar ring attack very difficult. “Did the Millennials put you up to this?” It refused to answer. Kanga lost one of his three lives, not counting the one with blood pressure, to a surprise wave generated by a pump of the dolphin’s tail. His special meter wasn’t recharged yet, so he forced the ghost uncomfortably close and relied on highly damaging low kicks to get the job done.“Level Three! Plummeting Sky!” The difficulty had steepened in the sky, his character forced to maneuver on a series of rubble platforms as they fell through the atmosphere. Notably the enemies he faced were skydivers, and with his mind now on the Millennials he couldn’t help but assume this had something to do with Cloudspin. Every time he dispatched one they left behind a headstone shaped like a dropping bomb.“He’s not dead!” Kanga shouted, whipping the last of them away with a five button combination that sent a chain curling across most of the screen. “He taught this Cloudspin guy how to fly, I know it. I saw him invent it, with just a bad smell from a hole in the ground.” The robot had nothing to say, its mind lost as long as the game was being played. The next boss appeared just as the rubble crashed to the ground, emerging from one of the craters.A monstrosity worse than the raw-looking dolphin, Kanga couldn’t even locate its weak point. The game was cheating. All bosses had a single weak point, be it a red pulsing knot on the head or a door on their chest that popped open to reveal a glowing green heart. This thing was a mess of humanoid limbs and faces, having nothing at all to do with the sky as far as he could tell. Some of its arms were white, some brown, and some black. Its faces were striped with all three like ice cream flavors sharing the same container.Solemn Ghost tossed a chain at it experimentally, dealing a woefully small amount of damage, akin to tossing a cheese puff at it. He tried every move he could think of on it, even discovering a few he hadn’t used before in the process, but none of them were any more effective. He’d only gotten through about a tenth of its health bar when he lost another life to it. One left.“I can’t do this by myself!” he complained, hoping the robot would insert itself as one of the other selectable characters and team up with him. The machine snubbed his request, and the palm thrusts of the monstrous boss pinned the ghost against the left side of the screen. Beaten to within a pinch of his foggy health bar, the ghost was spared at the last second, as something streaking across the background drew the boss’s attention. It scuttled away and left him there.“Final level! Crystal Bowl!” Kanga moved on without questioning the strange stroke of luck. It was hard to get his mind off it however, for the newest level was an empty expanse of shimmering white. The ground curved downward gently in a way the sprite had never been intended to follow; it shuddered up and down the entire way.“Where are the enemies?” he asked to more silence. Even with the challenge he liked it better the other way, swarmed with tiny weak foes. The quiet grated on him, the game’s music having given way to the hum of its internal fans. He could smell the sewer breath wafting up from underneath them. “Give me something to fight if you’re going to make me do this!”The game only obliged when Solemn Ghost reached the bottom of the bowl, where the final boss stood waiting. A crystal golem with its arms crossed, toe tapping on the floor with a piercing note. Even digitized he recognized it as the sound of Crystalheart’s pulse. He didn’t wait for its villain’s taunt or speech, if it even had one. The infuriating emptiness had him chomping at the bit, so he whipped a chain out as soon as he was in range.The blow cracked its crystal body, dealing massive damage. This was the inverted mirror of the last encounter. Where the beast from the crater had nearly infinite health the golem was almost immediately below half its vitality reserves. Where the former whittled the ghost down with an inescapable barrage of small strikes, the latter put everything it had into each blow. Its punches and stomps were slow, but its limbs radiated passion, expending itself so thoroughly that when it did land a blow on the ghost it drained some of its own health.Kanga roared at the screen, fingers flying, goaded to greater and greater speeds by the sound of the crystal chipping away. The catharsis of destruction made him forget where he was; he no longer felt the dirt and gravel slipping down the back of his shirt or the stinging pains stretched across his chest.She was all weak point. So vulnerable and so desperate to be defeated. Her heart got bigger as its pieces separated, like ice sheets cracking and drifting apart. It was impossible to miss by the end of it. She was gone all at once, no lingering death rattle, no promise to return in the sequel.She was just shards at the bottom of the bowl. Solemn Ghost dropped to his knees, hitting the ground for the first time. He tried to gather up the pieces, but they fell straight through his hands. He bowed his head. The screen faded to black.“I won!” Joey protested, smacking the screen this time. “What’s this art house film fading out garbage? Give me the ‘you saved the world!’ screen.”“Player one wins,” the robot said dryly as if reporting disappointing election polls. “Claim your prize.” Something fell inside the robot, hitting everything on the way down. Beneath the lip of the controls there was a swinging plastic door and a bay for dispensing prizes, be they tokens, tickets, or toys. What eventually landed was none of those. Kanga lifted the flap and pulled out a rolled up glossy magazine, squeezed in the middle by a thick blue rubber band. He ripped it off, its vicious snap leaving a red welt on his wrist.Unfurled he saw it was a recent issue of New High Score, a popular video game publication containing reviews, editorials, artwork, and coupons. The cover story was something about a gold minotaur in a home computer game where the player terrorized Greeks trapped in a labyrinth.“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked the robot, but its face was as dark as the cabinet’s screen. He couldn’t hear the fans. Looking down once more he flipped through it, noting that the tops of the pages were ripped in places. The tears looked fresh, indicating that magazines were never supposed to be one of the items jammed up inside the robot.New High Score was a fine read, but hardly worth what he’d just been through. Kanga had a subscription to it already; there were three or four unread issues stacked up on his counter back in Rockford. Other than its poor condition there didn’t seem to be any reason to care about his prize.Kanga kicked the machine, and was surprised when it worked this time. Its limbs were rigid; it made no effort to save itself as it slid further down the hole. All at once it disappeared into the darkness below, nothing but its splash in some foul water making it back out. The recycler turned and scrambled out as soon as it was gone, his fear of being spotted rushing back.He collected his anyboard, letting it handle the effort of escaping while he caught his breath, magazine clutched to his chest with one arm. This was far worse than the stewardess. The dark cloud knew everything about him, tormented him with it like it was the phantoms from A Christmas Carol. And it was so blunt and tawdry as to do it with a video game.“It’s because I broke another game,” Kanga whispered, swishing his feet to make one of the last turns before the hotel. “I didn’t respect the rules. I’ve got to find that guy… but I’ve got to win too. Have to make it up to everybody…”
…
“A great big welcome to all of you environmentally conscious citizeeeeeeeeens out in the staaaaaaaaands todaaaaaaaaay!” the English announcer boomed. Those citizens, distinguished from others by the ability to shell out two hundred dollars for seats around the starting gate, responded with a roaring cheer, and with clouds of confetti.Many of the pieces were long, more like streamers, and had names written on them. They hoped that the wind would pick them up and suck them into the arena, that way when a player snatched them the camera might zoom in and broadcast the name internationally for a moment of trashy fame.There was plenty of wind to pin their hopes on, some generated naturally but much of it coming from massive fans hidden deep in the rock. Blasting Shore Midair Entertainment used as its base a series of seaside rock formations, tall spires of porous black stone worn through in places by the surf.Before investors got to it the place was merely a local curiosity, as the wind blown through its open places turned into a howling whistle. Sometimes, in the strongest storms, it would sing in argument with itself, almost like stars of opera fighting over a solo.Since then it had been transformed, cordoned, polished, rearranged, empowered, and thoroughly marketed to whole families of all ages. In several designated openings one could rent a wingsuit, a flying squirrel leotard of sorts, and leap into one of the vents in the rock, experiencing a simulation of free fall.Or if one preferred something a little more chaotic they could encapsulate themselves in a transparent sphere made of inflated plastic cells and get kicked around the subterranean tunnels by various randomized gusts.Kanga looked up and saw some of the upper vents, sculpted to look like watchtowers, belch up a dome of garbage and swallow it all down again a moment later. He couldn’t stop himself from seeing the device from the dolphin park, that dark obelisk floating in the pool. Just like back in Florida, this place was an amusement park. Surely it didn’t operate with that level of trash present on any given day.Nobody would want to roll around in one of those orbs if it was likely to pick up a milkshake smear in the first five minutes, like a hamster in its ball tossed into a fast food dumpster. He imagined floating, limbs splayed, over a gusting vent just to be smacked in the face by a citrus peel gone green.“That’s why they called us,” he muttered, wrapping his hands around the metal bar of the starting gate. “It’s time for a cleanup.”“Did you say something?” Kanga’s head whipped to the right as he remembered he was far from alone. Raffy was staring at him, hand stalled halfway through polishing his bounce bike with a red cloth. Joey looked past him hoping to find an excuse, and he found one in the form of the Hyderabad Chorus. The enemy team was clad in pearlescent white and a brave pink. They were speaking to each other in smiling Hindi and laughing loudly.“What are they saying?” he asked Raffy, disguising his mumbling as scheming. Raffy glanced over at them.“I don’t know.”“I thought you spoke Hindi.”“I do,” he rushed to say before pointing at his ear and then at the crowds behind them. “Too loud. I can’t hear them.” He went back to polishing to end the conversation. Either they had said something he didn’t want to repeat or he was embarrassed that he had grown rusty in the states, as Joey could clearly hear them thanks to their ringing confidence. They were currently 11-4 after all and they weren’t quite as jet-lagged as the American team.Whatever bothered Raffy couldn’t have been as important as the match or the crisis it contained, Joey decided. He put himself to focusing, locking his feet into his anyboard and testing its hovering swish. He hadn’t played since Baldigari, and he was pleasantly surprised by how fluid the motion of his ankles was. He chalked it up to the warmer air compared to the snowy mountain.None of that warmer air contained a plane or helicopter, not yet anyway. The Millennials were strange monsters with bodies like multitools, but he doubted that any of them were capable of powered flight, let alone having the ability to carry in and drop a team of their peers. It was on its way, surely. They always attacked in the middle of matches, so of course he couldn’t see anything yet.The countdown started. Two victories. He needed to pull them both out of the porous stony monolith before him. Keep high, he told himself. There was plenty of recycling to be had up there, he could already see it, and that would keep him close to where the terrorists would land. If he could he would try and collide with Cloudspin on the way down, drag him into a deep crevice between the winds and force answers out of him. There wasn’t time to fantasize about Winter’s personality spilling out of him, declarations of undying friendship and faith or anything else, because the countdown was on three.Kanga rechecked the straps of his compression backpack. Wiggled his toes inside his flexible shoes. Leaned. Two.With Raffy to his right and Monique to his left he was flanked by two bike riders. Their bulkier vehicles would protect him from interference on the opening stretch, but once they were in the rock the bikers would trend toward the lower levels while the lighter boards navigated the narrower and more winding tunnels. One.“Reeeeecyyyyyyycle!” the announcer screamed as the gates flew open and rattled on their hinges. There was no slope this time, all fourteen vehicles speeding into the lobby-cave of the establishment and quickly leaving the shuttered gift stores and equipment stands behind.The air was so fresh that he lost himself in it momentarily. He couldn’t smell city, or sweat, or the aura of a hotel’s clean towels. His muscles loosened and his chest stopped complaining about the robot that had tackled it yesterday. He remembered that he loved the game.There was a narrow shaft up ahead, too narrow for the cautious player, but Kanga knew he hadn’t been that for a long time. He leaned forward, smirking when he saw the Chorus instead turn away and head for a much wider passage. On his way he lowered both his hands, snagging napkins, straws, and a personal pizza box before feeding them into his pack at the last possible second.As he hit the shaft he thought he understood how the trash felt; control was wrenched from him by the wind. It tossed his board end over end like the stick of an ice pop, showing no concern for the flailing thing stuck to it. If he struck his head it would be a disaster, so Kanga tucked into a ball and waited for a moment where the bottom of the board lined up with the curve of the wall.When it happened he stood and stiffened, treating the wall like everything else his anyboard had casually hovered over. He spiraled up the shaft now, his board leaving behind a corkscrew trail of lively light.An orthodontic retainer drifted by his face. He snagged it and tossed it into the pack; now was not the time to be squeamish. The shaft was a goldmine, or, given the flurry of it all, one of those prize booths where they locked one up with a fan and a thousand dollar bills to grab. Joey swept his arms like a filter feeding organism, wiping everything that caught onto his back.Most of what he caught was paper products, but the weight tracker on his wrist climbed quickly regardless. He was already close to a pound when the shaft suddenly ended. He was blasted with sunlight and the smell of the ocean. Turning away from it as gravity reasserted itself put him facing the stands. He waved.Hundreds must have waved back. Hundreds of people who thought he was selfless, who thought he deserved every last cent and luxury he had, simply because he could ride the upward momentum.The children came back to his mind; the sicker they were the clearer he saw their faces. Guilt pulled on his windpipe. Should he have cared more, or at least pretended to? It wasn’t like he turned them away, but he also couldn’t be the creature they thought he was, the stainless unicorn galloping through the rolling meadows of fame and talent.He was a garbage collector, yet the man in the gray jumper who showed up riding the corner of a gobbling truck every week didn’t get the same recognition. Joey was thankful when Blasting Shore swallowed him up again.At the apex he’d gotten another good look at the sky, and there was no sign of his target. His spin also let him see the top of the facility and the dozens more shafts that terminated above it. That was his strategy: move from one to the next gathering everything trapped in them while checking the sky each time.A good plan, until he hit the ‘blast’ part of the Blasting Shore. Trying to go down one of the shafts while it was blowing turned out to be impossible, dashing him on the porous black roof like a crash-landing pigeon. He righted himself quickly, boarding between the vents, waiting for any of them to rest.There was enough refuse up there to occupy him, so returning to the depths wasn’t urgent. As he carefully selected the heaviest looking pieces of metal and glass his board hitched. He must’ve missed a large item, so he pulled back, lifting the board’s nose off the rock, and swiveled around.The sight of it made him stop and drop to his knees. A yellow eye, so freshly dead that it looked like a glossy egg yolk, stared up at the sky. Its beak was locked open in desperation. Not a cry. Not a dying titter. It could only be the final attempt at a breath. That was all the creature wanted. To work.Its neck and left wing were caught in a set of six plastic soda can rings. The gull must have thought itself lucky, with geysers of human food waste all around, never considering there might be something off about all the little hard pieces it swallowed. Pebbles would just pass through its system as they always had before.Kanga didn’t think about it choking to death. He saw past that. A bird that choked on trash was one that successfully ate trash for years prior, trash that usually hung around in its gut, forming a tangling clog of fishing line, plastic bags, nails, screws, bottle caps, and other components of American dream runoff.An animal like this was a treasure chest, hinged lid replaced with skin and greasy feathers. Coach Linejaw called them ‘guilty pleasures’, likening them to chocolate liqueur filled bonbons. They were delicious little finds, having hoovered up recyclable material all their lives. With a bird that size, adding it to his canister was possibly another pound or two right there.The guilt came from how messy of an eater the compressor on his back could be. It automatically rejected organic materials that didn’t meet its standards, and such a fast rejection was really more of a shredding. Tossing a whole animal carcass into it resulted in a gory splash, staining you as cruel or callous in the eyes of the audience.Eating them and turning them into score was bad publicity, but there were no cameras above the shafts. There wasn’t a soul watching unless there was a Millennial a mile above him with telescope eyes. So why was he stalling? The player in him was salivating at the thought of this cooked goose. He was wearing regulation gloves thick enough to prevent cutting himself on any of the glass or metal, so there wasn’t really any risk of disease.Perhaps it was the striations of white underneath the litter, so dry in the rock that they were practically part of it. Bird droppings, and more than one lonely gull could ever produce. Perhaps they had lived there, forcibly evicted from their nests when redirected gusts broke right through the bottom of them and dashed their colony’s future on the rocks.“It’s already dead,” he told himself. There was no sense in leaving its hoard there to spread again once it decomposed. That would be wrong. He grabbed it by the neck and the free wing, but the neck was so soft he reflexively let go. It was only when he imagined the judgmental look he might receive from a Millennial leaning out the sliding door of another flight-capable Millennial that he was able to spitefully toss it over his shoulder into the canister.Zirfitchitch! The seabird was gone instantly, and there was now over three pounds stowed away for the Rendezvous. He didn’t turn his head to avoid seeing any feathers drifting to the ground, but he couldn’t ignore the splash of blood across the back of his neck. The droplets, sun baked to a consistency that could only be called death warmed over, felt far heavier than his pack. He prayed his uniform was tight enough at the neckline to keep it from running down his spine.One of the vents finally ceased its incessant exhalations; Kanga dropped down into it without hesitation. It took him deep and dropped him in a domed chamber with a fan beneath him. Painted bright blue and separated from him by three crisscrossing layers of safety bars, its spin combined with the base energy of the anyboard and suspended him in the air.As he searched for another way out he spun slowly, assaulted by advertising posters lacquered to curved walls all around him. Their smiling faces elicited a growl from the ornery recycler. Presumably people had already paid through the nose just to experience the park’s trademarked version of the atmosphere, so why swarm them with more requests to empty their wallets? It was like the owners couldn’t rest until all of the experience was extracted from the experience and replaced by anticipation for something else. There was no opportunity for things to settle as the rock itself had done for hundreds of thousands of years.One of the faces looked far too real, but that was because it belonged to a woman from the Hyderabad Chorus. She dropped into the dome much as he had, her board leaving a pale pink trail as she rode the sides and collected cups and french fry sleeves. She smiled at him, bright yet dusky skin sparkling with exuberant exertion.Eager to prove he could still feel that way, Kanga’s mind snapped back to the game, though he had to breast stroke awkwardly through the air to get close enough to the wall for his board to respond. Between the two of them they cleared the air in under a minute, both of their gazes locking onto an exit they hadn’t explored yet.She was good; he could tell that from her confidence alone. Women tended to be naturally better on the anyboard the same way they outclassed men as gymnasts. Their generally lighter weight meant the board could get away with crossing wider gaps or hop that much higher over an obstruction.Joey raced her anyway and managed to tie, the two of them squeezing into a shaft that could barely contain them. The only way to to stay neck and neck and not crash into each other was to cooperate, each take a side and stay there, resulting in a tight spiral of pink and red down the shaft at thirty miles an hour like a candy cable extruded faster than what the sticker on the side of the machine would ever recommend.There was an urge to grab her and stuff her into his chest like more trash into his pack. She had what he wanted: the simplicity. It was still just a game to her. No terrorists. No movements. Nobody telling her that everything she did was actually a step cushioned by the sensitive toes of countless others.She might’ve even been happier than he’d ever been. As an Indian woman she was likely in high demand among the North American teams. If she left Hyderabad she could probably quintuple her salary playing for New York City or Washington D.C. The whole nation was in a frenzy to have the most diverse team, the same marketing initiative that had quickly replaced his murdered teammates on the Rendezvous.He was keeping up with her, but she had to go and ruin the mood sizzling between them like the burning edge of a roux. Concern softened her expression; she put her hand on the back of her neck and then showed it to him, but there was nothing there.“Blood,” she said, shouting the word over their wind and all the other winds waiting to ambush them. The gull’s blood. She’d seen it and thought he was injured. Kanga tried to wave away her concern, scrunching up his face and shaking his head, but she was unrelenting. Even at those speeds, even with that level of spin, her unblinking stare told him she only cared about his well-being in that moment.She was saying she was better. She could prioritize. There was room in her to care about everything, whereas Kanga wound up covered in blood he couldn’t see, feeling its travels across the sensitive hairs of his neck when he should have had his eyes on the numerous tetanus-coated prizes all around.He had to lose her. As soon as the passage widened he veered away. Another current of air found him, allowing him to almost double his speed though it took him deeper when he wanted to head back up and search for Cloudspin.To get his head back in the game he thought about glass, and how there was almost none of it to be found. That was good; it wouldn’t be safe to use Blasting Shore as an arena if the winds were impregnated with sharp shards. Of course, that implied the recycling had been curated…No, that didn’t help him score and that wasn’t the point of his train of thought. He had to ignore the forces that kept switching the tracks on him. The point of thinking about the glass was to change his strategy. Without such high scoring items available, and with such a flurry of paper products, he needed to stratify them, to prioritize the denser ones.Soda cups and cutlery were the winning choices now. Any weight that the napkins had was due to the stains on them, and the compressor would burn those away the same way it had the flesh of the-He passed a camera mounted in the stone, protected by a glass dome. It was in sight just long enough for him to see its lens turn and follow him. Someone was remotely operating it, focusing on him, letting every single person in the stands see on the surrounding monitors. They might see the darkness on his neck as well, and depending on the quality of the video he may or may not be able to play it off as a sunburn from Estonia’s lovely beaches.Joey ducked and went deeper. He snagged napkins and rubbed the back of his neck, disposing of the evidence in his pack. The deeper he went the darker it was, and that darkness might protect him further from the cameras.Ten minutes passed. The same woman from Hyderabad passed by as well, but only once. After that he didn’t see another soul. Driven away from the main attractions, Kanga was sure he’d put himself in an older part of the park, perhaps currently under renovation. There was still plenty of litter, but they were past halftime now and he still hadn’t located the scorekeeper.The most shameful loss as a recylcer was one where they failed to find the goal, and wound up hauling fifty pounds back and forth for nothing. If he came across any of his teammates he could ask them if they’d found it yet.By then it was clear he had failed in one of his two goals. Cloudspin wasn’t coming. The Millennials never waited until the end of the match to attack, as that was when most of the players gathered around the Shinjuku engine they planned to subvert. Instead they struck more tactically, when the officials or players they targeted were isolated with the device.Enduring the dark cloud had served no purpose. Worse, he’d made himself a cyber-criminal for nothing. It had never been a sure thing, he remembered. He hadn’t found an RSVP from the terrorists anywhere among the grimy napkins. What bit him even more was the delayed realization that the cat-faced hacker might have not kept their session in confidence. She had told him about her other clients, so what reason did she have to keep his plan a secret? She likely warned them in exchange for another payment.“Just win,” he growled in the dark depths, surprised he could hear himself. The wind had died down. The walls were damp but smelled soaked. Napkins and other refuse were caked to the bottom of the passage, having turned into sickening spotty jelly in the moisture. He glanced at his wrist: just seven pounds. To make matters worse he hadn’t compared with any teammates, so he didn’t know how low that was for this arena.“Man… gross.” Kanga recognized that his best shot was right below him. The napkin slurry’s weight came mostly from water, but the compressor wouldn’t get rid of all of it. He could probably sneak in a few extra pounds that way. He closed his eyes and squatted down as his board scooted along slowly, energy around the nose leaving gooey ripples in the pale gray gunk.He dipped a gloved hand into it and scooped out a glob that made a sound like a wasp nest used as a pastry bag when it smacked against his pack. That was when he wished for the return of the winds, and he wished for it with greater force than all of his birthday, shooting star, and well donation wishes up to that point combined.The smell of the stuff was horrific. On the surface it was merely bad, like the seat of a portable toilet, but once he skimmed the skin off the top it unleashed the full brunt of it, enough to make his stomach perform a trick better than anything he’d ever achieved on his anyboard so as to spin itself closed and cut off the thousand bacterial infections surely living at the bottom of the pile.Comparisons flooded his mind as he scooped more and more of it into the compressor. Cotton swabs impregnated with rotten tartar sauce. Someone shipping gallons of rice pudding via unlined cardboard box. A used dental floss bird’s nest dripping with fresh hatchling fluids. Kanga’s breath hissed through his teeth, his nose possibly condemned for the rest of his life.It was working though, his score climbing swiftly. The outer skin of the napkin slime had been pale, mostly white splotched with blue, but each layer grew darker as he got closer to the bottom. His gloves scraped against rock; one finger went deeper than the others. A crack? His curiosity got the better of him, so he dug at the spot rather than plow his way forward through the stained muck.When he peeled back something that might’ve been a personal pizza box at one point he found a fissure in the rock. Fresher air wafted up through it, and there was light as well. He pushed the wet garbage out of the way on both sides with his forearms and then stuck his eye down close to the stone.It was another chamber, quite well lit. He held his breath when he heard a snippet of conversation.“…and their physicals came back clean?”“Course they did, it hardly does anything to them. They said they had sunburns more uncomfortable.” Kanga froze. He knew that second voice: coach. What was Roger doing down there? The recycler pressed his cheek against the stone, ignoring how wet and slimy it was. It hurt his eye to look that hard, but when he did he caught the edges of two giant machines.The scorekeeper? No, there would only be one, but Shinjuku engines were shipped around in small groups in case one of them needed maintenance mid-match. The chamber he spied on must have been outside the arena, perhaps a loading dock for Blasting Shore. Coach Linejaw’s thinning hair stepped into sight. There was another man next to him, in a suit judging by his dark shoulders. His hair was slicked back with so much gel Kanga could practically see his eye reflected in it.“It can’t be worth it,” the slicked back man said skeptically.“You can skip cultural sensitivity training,” Roger said, “and that alone saves us 10k a year. We don’t need to fly anybody in and out, we don’t need more tryouts, and we don’t need to worry about any of them getting a bee with a law degree in their bonnet and suing us. We’ve had zero issues… and their performance tracks too. Same as they were before.”“Aren’t blacks better? Basketball and football are full of them.”“Maybe if you make them black on the inside, hehe.” Roger’s head shook, wispy sweaty hairs flapping back and forth. “I don’t think anybody knows how to do that. Besides, you want a little bit of everything for the pictures.”“I’d never do it,” Slicked-back insisted. “With LIRIC owning these things you can’t guarantee access. What if you get stuck?”“So you spend a few extra months being tan and trendy. No big deal. Heh. Watch.” Kanga did just that as Roger approached one of the engines and started fiddling with its control panel; it rumbled to life like a giant washing machine. The coach’s star player hanging in the sky above him was stunned. Why did he even know how to operate it?Apparently he couldn’t run it as well as he did his team, as it was full of knocking and chugging sounds Kanga wasn’t used to hearing. Its face generated some of its characteristic swirling energy, but only some at the edges instead of the full portal that ate garbage and men alike.Roger rolled up his sleeve like he was about to unclog a sink drain, looking at Slicked-back and smirking before he plunged his forearm into the transparent lapping edge of the energy. Kanga’s gasp filled his nose and throat with the moist stench, but now he hardly noticed it. Instead he was mesmerized.With each pulse the power of the Shinjuku recycling engine darkened Roger’s skin tone. His arm went from mayonnaise to golden toast, then to cinnamon, down to hot chocolate, and landed on black forest gateau. That was when he pulled it out and held it up, flexing all his fingers to show that there were no ill effects.The effect stopped abruptly at the elbow, where the skin beyond remained his typical Wisconsin pale. Slicked-back was amazed, but refused to high-five the altered limb as if it might be infectious. Roger shuffled back, his gut pumping up and down as he mimicked dribbling with his black arm. He took a three-point shot toward the engine, but his feet couldn’t quite make it off the court.“You know… you want to give it… a shot,” the winded coach said, mismatched hands on his knees.“No way man,” Slicked-back said with a snorting laugh. “My team’s going to stick with the old way.”“Don’t be such a baby,” Linejaw teased, walking his associate over to the active machine. “Look, we’ll start you off light. It barely tingles. What do you want to be? Puerto Rican? Hawaiian? Doesn’t your wife have a thing for that Spanish guy on that cop show?”“Okay, okay. Just one minute. Give me that Spanish tan, just so I can decide if I want to head to the beach and try to force it myself.”“Heh, that’s the spirit. Open your hand.” Roger rolled up the man’s sleeve and eased his arm into the flow. It only took a second for it to go from sun-kissed to sun-French-kissed. Slicked-back reflexively pulled away as soon as he saw the change. “What’d I tell you? Hardly feels like anything.”“Actually it feels… sexy,” he said, rubbing his chest with the altered palm. “I’m still not interested… but I’d be letting my boys down if I didn’t cover all my bases. Do you… have a guy or something?”“Yeah, we have a coordinator,” Roger confirmed. He reached into his pocket with his white hand and produced a business card that he handed off to Slicked-back’s paler side. “He’s got experience on the engineering side with these things. He’s the one who taught me to do this little hide trick, but if you asked me to do a face you’d probably wind up looking like a chewed piece of pepperoni.”Roger checked his pager and swore, noting that the Rendezvous were behind in the score. That pushed Kanga’s eyes back up through the crack and reminded him he was about to fail in his other goal. He watched his coach and the other man return to the machine and put their arms back in, but he couldn’t linger, so he just assumed they were returning their limbs to normal before shutting the engine off.The recycler pressed forward, far enough that he was confident Roger couldn’t hear him through the crack, and resumed shoveling the whitish bluish slop into his pack. Thirty odd pounds of it were dehydrated down to only six according to his wrist indicator, which also told him that ten minutes remained in the match.He had to abandon the filthy fissure and begin his search for the scorekeeper. In a way he was relieved to be in such a frenzy. His mind had to be divided up among the circular passages in the rock and the conflicting wind patterns that threatened to dash him on the sides, with a thought spared for every soda cup and straw that flew by his head at sixty miles an hour.There was nothing left to contemplate what he’d just seen. All he knew for sure was that he hadn’t seen any recyclables down there, just wealthy middle-aged men being a little too disrespectful with the machine that powered their profession, just riding their bikes with their hands off the handlebars. Their dark hands…“Look Out!” Joey swerved, twisting his forward ankle to a degree that would impress an owl’s neck. Despite the stinging pain traveling up to his knee he managed to stay upright, his board losing a little paint to the rock. The gust had kicked up once more from a passage to the left, bringing with it Tina on her anyboard. Her hair was a windswept mess, and he had the feeling she would’ve been covered in sweat if the droplets hadn’t been blown off her like the drying phase of a car wash. “Where have you been?” she asked as they both stabilized.“Here and there,” he answered. The words felt strange in his throat, like he hadn’t spoken in a year. “Did you find the finish line?”“Yeah, and I’m heading back there. Follow me.” She crouched, taking the lead. Kanga slotted into her board’s trail, his ride a little smoother thanks to the residuals of her board’s force under his.“I think we’re going to lose,” Kanga said without thinking. Tina’s head whipped around, doing her hair no favors.“Why would you say that?” He didn’t know how to answer. It only just occurred to him that the players never knew who was ahead until the end.“Bad feeling,” were the words he settled on. “I don’t have a lot. I thought I found some good stuff, but it was mostly water.”“We lost Barson five minutes ago,” she informed him. “He’s fine, but he bent his bike like a fortune cookie.”They continued on in silence after that. Their tunnel joined up with a larger one, then to one nearly as wide and tall as a plane hangar. Other players for both teams converged on their position. The Chorus was all smiles, and once their squad was complete they started singing. Even out of breath they were in tune with each other, their song good enough to sell CDs. Perhaps that was what they were doing, as plenty of cameras and microphones were trained on that final stretch to the Shinjuku engine.“Hey Kanga? You’re saving our butts right?” Raffy asked as he pulled up alongside the pair of anyboarders on his bike.“I’m under thirty… total,” Joey admitted. His teammate’s expression sank. Joey looked away, but all that got him was a clear view of that woman from Hyderabad, the one so irritatingly concerned with his safety. She sang along with her friends, but she was looking at him, eyes asking if he was alright all over again.He pushed his board to maximum speed, pulling ahead of everyone else. Time was almost gone, and nobody saw the need to dash around and snag the last pieces of plastic film drifting in the air or pasted to the wall with a smear of peanut butter. It was clean enough to win, and clean enough to lose.As soon as he reached the scorekeeper he swerved to a stop and ripped off his compressor pack. The recycling portal swirled in front of him and for a moment he felt twin daggers of terror in the back corners of his jaws. He felt like he was stood on the high dive, staring down at a pool of… something. Everyone insisted it was water, but his gut told him differently. He wanted to warn the others away from it, this dangerous maw of rearranging, this sedentary pit of rebirth horror shows.“Fifteen seconds Joey!” Tina barked at him. He heaved the compressor into the portal; it clanged off the side once before spiraling away down the center and vanishing under its surface. He watched the display on the front tick up to a grand total of 307.4 pounds. His heart sank and he turned away, fearing that if it sank any more in front of the scorekeeper it would claim the barely beating organ as another offering.The other players pulled up and tossed theirs in as well, mostly just the last pound or two of their final efforts, as all had visited it at least once already. Within the engine’s bowels the canisters were shredded on a molecular level, the recycling material separated and formed into ingots, and then the canisters rebuilt, down to their perfect coats of paint for each team, and deposited in a tray alongside the engine with a series of loud clanks.In the end Hyderabad had nearly 400 pounds. It was an almost absurdly high score considering the percentage of paper products in the overall yield. The Rendezvous had been trounced, all hopes of losing with dignity gone when the difference between their score exceeded forty pounds.Kanga felt buried. It didn’t help that people clustered around him, not in the warmth of a victory huddle, but in the shoulder-bumping discomfort of a public urine-scented bus ride. Worse than that, people were touching him without acknowledging he was more than a body. Team officials took his safety gear, wiped his face down with an exhausted oily towel that felt like he was its tenth facial appointment that day.They corralled him and his dejected teammates to a stone platform behind the raised victory box where the Chorus were being interviewed by the main anchors of all the sports channels. The Rendezvous got the interns, asking their questions slowly, both holding their microphones too close to their own lips and then too close to the lips of their subjects.Kanga wasn’t aware of much beyond the shrink wrap of numb sadness confining him. It actually took one of those far-too-close microphones to get him to acknowledge that the people there were people, and not congealed globs of drenched processed paper he was supposed to shovel down various chutes.“With this being your first match since your heroics at Baldigari, do you think you’re still suffering the effects of your injuries?” Joey was an inch from casually admitting that he’d suffered things far worse since those cuts and bruises. There was a sucking curiosity beneath his heart, like staring off a cliff with the edge of his toes dangling, that wanted to see how the world would react to his unhappiness.“No, I am fully recovered,” he lied. “I made a poor decision in regard to a deposit I found low in the course. I spent too much time and energy basically shoveling water into my pack. That’s why we lost today; it was my responsibility.”“We’re all responsible,” Tina interjected before the microphones could swarm him and beg for elaboration. She’d done it before, knowing all too well how he could shut down and freeze when publicity pressure was applied. What a friend she was, somebody who actually knew him, not like that lying woman on the Chorus, pretending to care when she didn’t know anything but the presence of blood on his neck and hands.“Our training back home focuses mostly on prioritizing heavier materials,” Coach Linejaw added. Kanga stopped blinking at the sound of his voice. The recycler considered snatching a microphone, perhaps taking the hand with it, and shoving it in the coach’s face. There were questions that needed answering. He stared at Roger’s arm, the one that had been artificially darkened. It looked ordinary now, though perhaps the profuse hair on it was a little curlier than on the other arm: a mistake made as he returned from his back-alley deal to the field.“It’s probably my fault for distracting my Joey too much. Don’t worry; we’ll get them next time.” The whole platform went quiet. Kanga couldn’t move. The voice wasn’t in his ear, but it sounded like it was supposed to be, like it was bounced off ten different spots in the rock just to get to him.Without looking over he felt a tingle on his shoulder, an electric emotional weight exactly like his last kiss. There was a song in the thin hair on his arm that could make it curl far more than Roger’s. What was she doing there? He didn’t care how; there were hundreds of cameras and projectors and speakers and cables all around them. One or many contributing to her presence didn’t matter. All that counted was her presence, her imitation arm wrapped around Kanga’s shoulder.“It’s Juicy Stardrop!” one of the interns gasped. The other Rendezvous players had backed away, as if Joey’s left side had spontaneously combusted and they were covered in its gore. When Kanga finally managed to turn his head, like a millstone grinding against the grit that had built up over a century, he saw her.She hadn’t repeated an outfit since the concert where they first locked eyes, and this time she was wearing something like a motorcycle jacket, but only the top half. It was as blue as a sky with sports drink clouds, and too tight to have wrinkles. Her short hair hung as straight and low as it could, shimmering like streamers. There was a line of pale opalescent color down the middle of her lips, like a god had tried and failed to shush her, leaving a mark in the process.“Miss Stardrop! Over here!” an eager intern yelled. “Does this mean the rumors are true?” She hopped up and put her microphone, boxed in by a cardboard advertisement for one of her network’s programs, right up to that opalescent line. The gesture was pointless, since the pop star’s voice was in the machines all around them.“And what rumors would those be?” Juicy asked coyly.“The rumors that you and Mr. Reuben here are boyfriend and girlfriend!”“Oh that? All of you are so far behind,” she teased. “That’s been true for ages. At least, I feel like I’ve known him for ages.” Once again a thirteen-year-old version of Joey tried to speak up within him, to tell him that all his dreams had come true. He was celebrated on the international recycling stage and he was holding hands with Juicy Stardrop, but the rest of him quashed that cracking voice.Worst of all the expressions was Coach Linejaw’s. He looked both stunned and betrayed, as if Joey had reached into his pocket and somehow pulled out Roger’s entire stock portfolio. Such a relationship was an absolute boon of advertising opportunities, and the selfish player had kept her all to himself.“Joey, over here, way over here, what’s it like dating a hologram?”“Can you give us a kiss!?”“Are you worried what the Foundation for Family Wholeness will say about this relationship? They’ve criticized your lyrics in the past-”“Was this a decision made by your publicist?”“Will you be creating any virtual children or adopting from a war-torn nation!?”The only saving grace seemed to be that most of the questions were aimed at Juicy. Kanga felt like the artificial one, like the photographers were trying to capture the colors of a bird of paradise and he was just the corroded green statue it happened to land on.His humiliation was not complete yet, as the media swarming the victorious team started to take notice. They trickled, and then flooded, away from the flustered Chorus players, one of whom was holding a CD, toward the back. A few even lowered themselves from the rear of the victory box like they were teenagers sneaking out their windows and dropping down to the lawn in the dead of night. With that many of them Joey inevitably got a question that they all liked, and that he had to answer.“Joey, how do you feel about Juicy?”“Every time I see her… I’m shocked,” he managed to say. She giggled and kissed him on the cheek while the crowd, aside from his team, practically swooned. “Shocked that she would choose to spend her time with a guy like me.”“He’s being modest,” Juicy told them. “From the moment I spotted him at one of my concerts I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and as a hologram I’ve got lots of eyes.” They laughed. The vultures were happy for him, happy for this cardboard cutout of Joey Reuben with a celebrity’s smooch stamped on his cheek.“Do you two have any plans for your future?”“One game at a time,” Juicy answered for the power couple, their power actually measurable in watts thanks to her composition. “We’re just enjoying the season for now, having some fun. When I heard he was going abroad I just had to tag along, in case the Millennials tried to take him from me again.”Kanga prayed that she wouldn’t reveal anything like their encounter at the dolphin park. She was a program after all, so the slightest miscalculation or glitch could have her let the Y2Kitten out of the bag while he stood there helplessly dripping sweat.One of his prayers was answered, the one pleading her not to perform right then and there. She answered a few more questions cryptically and flirtatiously, then, on a whim it seemed, winked and vanished. The Rendezvous staff finally managed to squeeze through the reporters and escort them to the locker rooms. Kanga heard one last question shouted at him like a hurled stone.“Kanga, was Juicy the one that got you hooked on embossing photopolymer!?”
…
None had ever been so glad to stick their head into the sterile smell of a freshly-cleaned locker as Kanga that day. He banged his forehead on the thin metal of its back panel. He was still hounded on all sides, but just by his male teammates, so the locker room was practically silent by comparison.Only after he pulled his head out, and after consuming an entire bottle of chilled ‘mountain waterfall berry’ sports drink, did he take a seat on the central bench and deign to respond to any of them.“Guys, relax, it’s not like she said,” he explained, relieved to tell the truth about something. “We’re not actually dating.”“She’s a heck of a concert souvenir,” Sammy congratulated. “All I got was a tee shirt.”“She’s been showing up and bugging me since then… whenever I’m alone. I didn’t tell anybody because I thought I was just going nuts.”“Speaking of, somebody else is nuts for you,” Kombo said. He stepped over the metal pretzel with deflated tires that had been his bike an hour ago, sighing, and pulled out a flat box from under it, which he tossed to Kanga. “Whoever they are, they sent you another one.”Kanga examined it: another box of Gross Guys candies. He stared enviously at the fire hydrant spewing of the exaggerated character on the front. If only he could expel everything he’d taken in that day, start raw and empty and fresh.“So, they’re probably poisoned again,” Raffy offered. “They’re trying to sabotage the team by getting you suspended.”“It’s not poison,” Joey defended, though he wasn’t sure why. “Whatever that stuff is… it’s not supposed to be there but it’s not poison. It’s not witch hazel or mercury or arsenic or anything like that.”“Like I said,” Kombo reiterated, “nuts.”“All the same, please get rid of those,” Sammy requested just as Joey stashed them away in his duffel bag. “D.O.U.S.E will wreck our season without blinking.”“We’ve got bigger problems,” Kanga told them. It was time. He was high, on the rush of honesty, and there was no quitting cold turkey now. His blood started to rush, so to avoid discomfort he put his sock feet on his anyboard and rode it in a slow circle around the bench. The other players, in various states of undress, were corralled into his circle by the strange behavior. “Coach is hiding something from us.”“You mean like… royalties?” Rigan asked. “It does seem like my jersey isn’t doing that hot.”“That’s because you eat less trash than a dieting opossum,” Sammy teased, jabbing him in the ribs with his elbow. They laughed, but Kanga kept his eyes on the floor, his board arcing over the same loop of items again and again: Kombo’s bike, two duffels, a plastic water bottle, Sammy’s crumpled shirt, and the shrinking pile of sponsorship gifts and snacks that somehow made its way into the lockers prior to each match.“No, not like that,” Joey said when they quieted. “Like something Y2Krazy.” He glanced at them. Their faces were stone, which looked odd in combination with their windswept hair, like flimsy nests atop petrified trees.“What?”“I saw him during the match. Him and some other muckymuck. They were outside the arena, around the spare engines. They were… doing something with them.”“You saw somebody else,” Rigan interrupted. “Coach would never do that. It’s against regulation for anyone without a license to so much as touch their controls.” The others grunted in agreement. Kanga just kept riding, over the bike, the duffels, the bottle, the shirt, the pile… It would take them time to accept it, just as it took him time to see the arenas as places that existed outside of the game.“I saw what I saw,” he assured them. “They were sticking their arms into the machines… and their arms came out darker. They were recycling themselves, like the Millennials do, but only a little bit.”“Coach was just with us,” Sammy said, “and his arms were the same color as always. It could’ve just been a shadow for all you know. You’re not actually eating those Gross Guys are you? Because you’re sounding hopped up on something.”“I’m insulted that you think I could mistake scorekeeper energy for shadows,” Joey said sternly to bring their ears back in line. Bike, duffels, bottle, shirt, pile… He followed the logic of what he’d seen, pieced the conversation back together. “They were talking about some kind of scheme.They said something about sensitivity training, and the other guy was talking about African-Americans in a weird way. They were… changing the race of their arms… and laughing about it. Why would they do that?”“They wouldn’t.”“But they were!” Joey’s board plowed through the gift pile. A box of kung fu slaps, already opened and rummaged through, spilled out in front of the others. “They were talking about teams too. We might be in danger. Maybe if we don’t play well enough he’s going to toss us in and pull out somebody else that suits the diversity initiative. Whatever country is in vogue that week.”“You’ve known Roger longer than any of us; why don’t you trust him?” Raffy asked. “Are you a bad friend?”“You don’t trust people after you’ve seen them do something terrible!” Kanga exploded. He bounced his board on the pile again, sending things flying in all directions. “Ignoring this means that nothing matters. It means that I’ll pretend everything is fine as long as I’m taken care of. That’s cowardice! Just thinking about it makes me,” he slammed down again, actually crushing some of their thoughtful corporate gifts, “furious!”“Calm down,” Rigan insisted, standing. “Even if he is doing this stuff I’m sure he has his reasons. We should just go talk to him, all of us.”“With an official in the room,” Kanga fumed. That would serve two purposes. After he got Coach Linejaw to admit to whatever scam he was running he would turn the tables on the official, asking pointed questions about whether or not garbage was trucked in for the matches. He could ask someone who had to know, plainly, once and for all, if competitive recycling helped clean the environment.He zipped around the corners of the room, jumping and gliding along the lockers as long as he could. His skin was ablaze, but better to push the fire out than let it blast him to ash on the inside. Better to let it lick and climb the chain of command. Kanga had to come out on top of it all if the things he had done were to be seen as beyond reproach. His little investigation, his computer meddling, were nothing, honest mistakes, compared to a conspiracy. Not like the ones the Millennials proposed of course. Something else. Something he noticed first. Something he didn’t need help with.“There’s got to be an official still milling around. I’ll get one.” Kanga changed course, boarding toward the stairs. Thunk! He’d only glided over five of them when a plastic cooler struck the wall in front of him, sending him sliding back down. It tumbled down the stairs after him, bouncing aggressively. Kanga lifted the nose of the board and spun off the cooler’s surface to get distance. That put him squarely in front of Rigan’s extended arm and the band of color around his wrist.“What are you doing!?” Kanga barked. His teammate had donned a slap bracelet, all of which had their safeties severed by Sammy already, and tossed the item in his way. Joey didn’t get an answer at first, not until all of them were prepared. Klak. Klak. Klak klak klak klak klak. All eight arms now bore the devices, every part of the rainbow represented. Rigan put himself at the bottom of the stairs, striking a pose he’d seen in the Cindy Wu Hu cult favorite The Pearl Dragon Screams.“For the record, I wanted to tell you,” Raffy said as he circled around Kanga, hands held up as if he’d already bested a hundred men in hand to hand combat to the death that morning.“There is no record boys,” Barson reminded his cohorts. They backed Joey into a corner, but he stayed on his board, swishing back and forth to keep balance.“What would you tell me?” he asked. They were ready to fight, but answering that gave them much more pause. They responded to the question like a slap in the face, looking away, shaking the shame out of their cheeks.“Don’t freak out,” Sammy cautioned him. “We’re not going to hurt you… unless you try to leave before we’ve explained everything.”“Some friends you are,” Kanga seethed.“Don’t act like you’ve been welcoming!” Rigan snarled. “We took you to that concert, and got you a hot girlfriend as it turns out, but you were icy all night. You didn’t want to be friends with any of us. You pretend like we’re not here because we’re not Winter. You didn’t like us this time and you didn’t like us last time either.”“What last time? You guys…” A lightning bolt hit Kanga’s mind. One foot came off the anyboard as he stumbled, the other keeping it from flying off like a popped cork. He looked at their four faces and tried to see the old four in them. He couldn’t, but there was something. He looked past their faces, at the focus in their eyes and the twitches in their lips and foreheads. There was something familiar in their expressions, when melanin was disregarded.These boys weren’t worried; they weren’t afraid. Even in confidence, even in victory, even in concern, Kanga could see a little fear in the expression of that woman on the Chorus. It was the fear that someone high in LIRIC, someone from white Europe, could speak one ill word and strip her of her career.These four didn’t have that fear, and they never had, because that experience was the only thing truly foreign to them. They weren’t from the four colorful corners of the world; they had selected ‘four colorful corners’ as their wallpaper pattern.“So who is who?” Kanga asked plainly.“Matthew Crystal,” admitted Barson Kombo.“Chris Davidson,” admitted Sammy Wenzhong.“David Treyarch,” admitted Raffy Lavenil.“Trey Matthews,” admitted Rigan Armando.“The chain gang,” Kanga said, summing them up. “Unbelievable. You guys are trash.” Rigan snorted and cracked his knuckles. “What, you’re going to deny it? You recycled yourselves; you must think you’re trash too.”“It’s not permanent,” Sammy deflected. “We’re under contracts with coach and the owners. They bump up our pay and we sacrifice our identities for a while, until people stop squawking about diversity.”“This can’t be easier than just hiring new people,” Kanga said, touching his temples. The implications were quickly giving him a migraine; he wondered if that was how computers felt when they saw the blinding light of Y2K.“Changing things is what costs money,” Barson said. “And nobody likes to be told what to do. Roger built the team his way, and he wasn’t going to break it down and glue it back together with pieces that didn’t match.”“So the Millennials were actually telling the truth.” Kanga’s eyes rolled to the heavens and back as he groaned. “The lady with the rock for a heart and the girl that looks like cherry taffy were the ones telling the truth. They never attacked you four.”“Roger pulled us out of the match when he realized the Millennials were there,” Raffy elaborated. “It was a good excuse for our disappearance while we got these new suits worked out.”“Suits!? You’re calling them suits!? That’s your skin!”“We just think of them like team jerseys,” Sammy said innocently. “Sometimes you get traded. You go with it so you can keep playing.”“This isn’t a game!” Kanga screamed. The chain gang’s heads flicked up, worried someone might hear. They threatened him by closing some distance, though Rigan stayed rooted at the foot of the stairs. Kanga didn’t care it was four against one. His board swished and snapped aggressively, like a cobra with the jagged teeth of a crocodile. They didn’t feel what he felt. “Winter tried to stop the Millennials because he thought they killed you guys. It’s your fault he’s dead.”Sammy, Raffy, and Barson recoiled. It didn’t matter if it was remorse or the windup to an excuse; it was just an opportunity for Joey. They were the people who could casually stop being themselves because there wasn’t that much there to begin with. They didn’t care about the boards, about flying, about inventing tricks on the corner even though there were already plenty of them on TV. They didn’t know what an anyboard could do when one was pushed to the scalpel’s edge of its ability.Kanga kicked off the corner with one foot, flying toward Sammy. His phony arms crossed in an automatic block, but Joey wasn’t dealing a blow. He grabbed the board’s nose and pulled up, using Sammy as a ramp. The Chinese disguise collapsed under the blasting air of the board, like getting pummeled by a hundred tiny air hockey tables. Kanga got air, almost too much. His hair skimmed the ceiling as he sailed over the other two toward the stairs.Rigan picked up the poor battered cooler and threw it again, powerful and accurate. It struck Kanga’s fingers on the nose and destabilized him. He came down on top of Rigan, trying to flatten him with the board’s energy, but he blocked, held his ground, and tossed his fellow recycler back.Kanga performed a grind along the edge of the central bench, using the two feet of altitude to spin his board and keep the other sets of hands from grabbing his only lifeline away from him. He could’ve set the record for longest continuous grind going back and forth along that bench, but his skill with the board was only going to get him out of this one if it literally got him out of the room and back into Blasting Shore proper, where he could shout into the microphones of the world.Kombo lunged, grabbing at his ankles. The spinning board smacked one hand away, but the other found a grip so tight that pain shot up Joey’s leg. He dropped down from the bench and leaned back as hard as he could. Luckily his foe hadn’t equipped his legs with Cindy’s skills, otherwise he might’ve been able to hold his stance.As it was Kanga rolled onto his back, pulled him into the air, and blasted him with the full force of the board’s hovering power. He slammed into the ceiling, using his martial arts prowess to land softly since Kanga was already gone, headed straight for the stairs again.The chain gang was a gang though, and the notion of teamwork finally clacked through the Newton’s cradle of their four thick skulls. Both Sammy and Raffy pounced on Kanga from opposite sides, weighing him down, slowing his board to a snail’s pace. While they held him Rigan stomped forward and got both hands around Joey’s shoulders, squeezing so tightly that it forced him to his knees.The board shot out from under him, dented a locker, and landed upside down. They had him, but he still struggled like there was a chance to escape. Furious spittle frothed in his mouth; he snapped at any fingers that got too close. With Cindy on their side their hands were vices, locking him down like a captured spy on a villain’s torture table.“Dude, don’t!” Sammy warned Rigan, who was readying a strike that would break Joey’s occipital bone against the floor. “If you mess up his face people are going to ask questions.”“Well what are we supposed to do with him now?” the other player snarled. “He’ll whitewash us.”“No he won’t,” Raffy said as Barson joined them, holding down Kanga’s legs. “He won’t because that doesn’t make any sense. He just needs a second to think about it… right Joey?” The young man could barely breathe, let alone think, but with nowhere to go the thoughts did eventually spear their way into the bush fire of his brain.He didn’t have any proof. All he had was his eyes and ears as far as this race swapping scam, and who would believe such outrageous testimony? Not only would he be disbelieved, but he would likely be labeled a racist for calling his ethnically diverse teammates lying scoundrels. The only thing he could prove, thanks to the Y2Kitten, was his own crime.“This headache doesn’t even have to make it to coach,” Raffy reasoned. “We just had an argument, that’s all, but we’re a team, and we worked it out between the five of us… right Joey?” They stared at him expectantly. Rigan, really the angry white spirit of Trey Matthews, hadn’t lowered his fist.It didn’t matter that Kanga wanted to be honest, that he wanted to do the right thing. It didn’t matter that his best friend was dead while the chain gang hid in their hide jumpsuits. All that mattered was that they had the power, and while Kanga was beloved by many, his word didn’t outweigh those of four others and the coach.It was no wonder the Millennials underwent such drastic transformations. They had to become weapons. They had to fortify their flesh so it could withstand the natural disasters of their oppressed rage and sorrow. They had to become power they didn’t want, because truth had none of its own.“Just an argument… that I won,” Kanga said, throat already feeling like it had taken a punch that sent his Adam’s apple bouncing around like a pinball, all from holding back his gnashing anger.“Fine, you showed us the error of our ways,” Sammy said, letting go. He urged the others to do the same. When they did he pulled off one of his slap bracelets and held out his lying hand for Kanga to take. “I promise, once this contract is done, I’ll never do this again.” It took everything Kanga had to take that hand, and his arm felt full of white phosphorus fireworks as he did.They made him promise, four times over, that he wasn’t going to say anything to anyone, and they also made him seal the agreement with three other handshakes. By the time they finally let him slink out of the locker room with his bag over his shoulder his face was so red that it could’ve also passed for a Shinjuku engine makeover.Now he didn’t even have his team. He was just a fool, standing in the middle of the field as the game ran, pointing out why it was wrong to have fun, wondering what everyone was actually doing there.
…

HTTP://MILLENNIALSIGHTINGS.NET

-WEEKLY UPDATES-

-Your #1 website for tracking, documenting, and classifying Millennial terrorists and their activity. This site is for various hobbyists interested in Millennials and people looking for fantasy recycling games that incorporate Millennial activity into stats and scoring – NOT for fans of Millennials. I hate even having to say it, because if they had their way none of these computers would even work, but there it is.-

Lavabox (as of 5-95): Class 2 Millennial, heat and brawl characteristics. Original identity unknown. Active in various cells since 5-92. Wanted for six murders, five recruitments. UPDATE: Lavabox was killed in a clash with law enforcement. His body was destroyed in a Shinjuku engine, which is standard protocol for disposing of Millennial trash.

Purranha (as of 5-95): Class 2 Millennial, feline and fish characteristics. Original identity is Fatima Estacado. Lone wolf. Wanted for destruction of cattle rancher property and releasing all the animals, as well as taking calling card bites out of the guards and owners. UPDATE: Purranha has received diplomatic immunity from the small island nation of St. Erin, part of their initiative to convince the world that their land is sinking because of debunked human-related global warming.

Cranegame (as of 5-95): Class 1 Millennial, heat and pain resistance characteristics. Original identity is Keith Lapetty. Wanted for theft and misuse of a Shinjuku recycling engine. UPDATE: Cranegame is a new addition to the Millennials, one that shocked a lot of people. He was until recently known as the ‘wheelchair firefighter’. Many people shared the story of his return to work, finding it inspirational. It’s not yet known what convinced him to throw himself away. He came out with mostly mechanical legs made from his chair, which is technically theft because he was licensing the item from the Ayonaki company as part of a promotional agreement.

Ribbondancer (as of 5-95): Class 1 Millennial, color and cord characteristics. Original identity is Laurence Redlawn. Wanted for indecent exposure and obscenity. Laurence was willingly recycled, requesting only that his new form be female. His parents contend that his rampant cross-dressing was a sign of mental illness that they tried for years to fix by sending Laurence to various specialists. UPDATE: He was living as a woman with a secret identity in Minnesota, but has abandoned his house and fled after a humiliated romantic partner revealed him to local authorities.

Damhands (as of 5-95): Class 3 Millennial, water, stone, and construction characteristics. Original identity is unknown. Wanted for redirection of water resources, depriving suburban communities of the ability to water their lawns and fill their pools. UPDATE: He has been arrested at a Native American protest against a pipeline installation on the Canadian border. Physically moving him to prison has proven difficult, both because of his abilities and because several people have handcuffed themselves to him.

Robotrio (as of 5-95): Class 2 Millennial, robot and hydra characteristics. Original identity is Melanie Phan. Wanted for thousands of counts of making robots and computers Y2Krazy. Formed from a fusion of two table bussing robots and a waitress, Robotrio has terrorized restaurant districts for years, taking aim at establishments that allow their bussing robots to vacuum up tips and keep them for management if they get there first. UPDATE: Robotrio has been declared the honorary head of a small labor union, resulting in the arrest of three of its high-ranking members.

Sugarloaf (as of 5-95): Class 1 Millennial, sugar and yeast characteristics. Original identity is John Crome. Wanted for destruction of public property. UPDATE: Sugarloaf, whose body contained an active yeast colony, suffered fatal cardiac arrest when the yeast became contaminated and the infection reached his heart. His remains have been purchased and put on display to warn young people against Millennial activity, his rot prevented thanks to a treatment of standard preservatives used in most U.S. bread. He should be posted as a warning for the next thirty years at least.

Basteroid (as of 5-95): Class 3 Millennial, space travel characteristics. Original identity is classified government information. Wanted for a crime we don’t even have a name for yet, essentially kicking satellites out of orbit so they crash back to Earth. He has caused countless world wide web and television interruptions, often during prime time. UPDATE: The military just released a statement expressing frustration, explaining that valuable resources are being wasted on Basteroid. Weapons satellites are spending huge portions of their operating time targeting him rather than monitoring the nations below, negatively impacting our safety.

Lucky Slimeball (as of 5-95): Class 1 Millennial (only suspected), ocean navigation characteristics. Wanted for various things if he ever comes ashore, as most of his acts have been committed in international waters. The rogue sailor is known for raiding cruise ships and stealing collectible toys from the Squeezy Babies line, some of which can sell at auction for over a million dollars. UPDATE: A recent sale of a Squeezy Babies mint condition propeller-mouse, valued higher than some works of Van Gogh, was recently rescinded when its source was found to be a deal involving Lucky himself.

Crystalheart (as of 5-95): Class 3 Millennial, crystalline, seismic, and acoustic characteristics. Original identity is unknown. Wanted for murder, assault, theft, destruction of public and private property, and disturbing the peace. Some call her the queen of the Millennials, though frequenters of this website will know the Millennials have no unified leadership. Unpredictable and violent, she has been a threat to North and South America since 3-98. UPDATE: A recent information leak from the Millennial Task Force confirms Crystalheart has left the continent for the first time in her activity. She is believed to be traveling with her underlings Monoxide, Powerthirst, Chiagreen, Dresscourt, Pilgrimage, and Runway Fox. Such a large gang is unusual, so there’s no telling what they’re planning.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes)
                                                                                   Münstereifel was the forest where one couldn’t help but feel watched. Despite the stodgy old growth being stuffed into a pocket of Germany, the sensation was not like being a grim fairy tale child wandering between dark trees with glowing beastly eyes all about. No, the eyes were far more ethereal, and for Kanga more frightening.The stalwart beech, oak, and spruce holding back the tide of man was eventually the forest’s downfall. There was a piece of technology called the radio telescope, a device not too dissimilar to a dish for satellite television in appearance, used to receive and measure radio waves from heavenly bodies and, perhaps one day, the television programs no doubt beamed out by extra-terrestrials.In order to avoid electromagnetic interference from the myriad other machines of man, they had to be built in isolated areas, their effectiveness correlating directly to their size. The dish at Münstereifel was at one point the largest in the world, measuring over two thousand feet across, and set into the trees as a thick bowl of featureless concrete with a receiving tower in the middle.All research had ceased there seven years ago, a combination of local corruption charges and a new even larger telescope built closer to the equator hogging all the starry-eared researchers. In the intervening years hikers and adolescent delinquents had made it one of their favorite destinations, coating its rim in graffiti like a Margarita glass with exotic pink and orange salts.There was simply too much canvas, and when their spray paint cans were empty they tossed them and watched them roll all the way to the center, sometimes racing them, sometimes puncturing them to see how far they would leave a bright trail. Joining the cans was a copious level of tourism trash: disposable cameras, water bottles, windswept camping equipment, and a thousand other things.The refuse grew at the bottom of the central tower, threatening to overtake it like mold, but an international media conglomerate had taken notice, so its status as a downhill landfill was about to come to an end. They planned to gut its scientific equipment and replace it with telecommunications gear, enabling them to run their television, telephone, and world wide web services from a single location.Given that they owned broadcasting rights for recycling matches in the region, it was prudent to kill two birds with one stone by setting up bleachers all along the rim and airing the clean-up effort in a digestible hour, twenty minutes of which would be commercials for their products and services. It was more like the whole flock with one stone. One couldn’t see the sky past the boulder they flung at the opportunity.So the telescope’s broadcasting capabilities would be tested on the Rockford Rendezvous and the Differdange Forecast. Already its eyes were in the air, smothering Kanga, threatening to shower him with evermore, eyes like electric caviar leaving jolts of oil on his skin as they bounced off.The telescope, the paparazzi, Juicy, the Millennials, and now the chain gang, all watching him constantly, robbing him of sleep and his mind of foundation. The dark of evening, with the jagged peaks of the trees gnawing away at the light just outside his hotel window, did nothing to relieve him.There was another match the next day, less than twenty hours away, and he still didn’t know if he was going to make an excuse and bow out or not. It was selfish to think he was the only honest player of the game. There was Tina, Leternau, and Monique. To bow out would be to let them down.On the other hand it would be his first chance to speak to somebody since the chain gang pinned him down. Since then they’d been watching him like buzzards, following him to get food and supplies, and directing him away from any of the team officials that approached. Raffy was in the room to the left of Kanga’s, and Barson to the right. No doubt they would spring out simultaneously if they heard his door so much as creak.Kanga had his pager, but trying to communicate what he needed to with its little display felt beyond demoralizing, like being buried alive and screaming for help through a fifty foot soda straw. So instead he paced, face red and puffy with angry tears. There was only one way it could be worse, and she showed up right on cue.“Joey, baby, what’s wrong?” Kanga scratched away his tears before turning to face her. She looked ready for a night in, but for Juicy Stardrop that still implied the place where that night occurred was at least a theater balcony. Her dress had an aurora lining that spilled color. There was a spiral of hair on her forehead, a jewel of the digital world holding it together from the center.“Now you show up!?” he seethed once he’d tamped down the anguish enough to speak. “Where were you when the guys had me on the floor?”“When?” she asked. “The locker room? I don’t follow you in there; it’s private. What did they do to you?” She came toward him, hands outstretched, but he backed away.“Don’t act like you can touch me!” he raged, only doing so quietly because he feared the others had their dyed ears stuck up against the wall.“What’s come over you?” she asked, eyes devastatingly soft, lips as ready to quiver as any blood-filled ones. “I’m your partner; I’m on your side.”“And another thing,” Kanga added to his tirade. “Where do you get off saying you’re my girlfriend in front of the entire world!? Like I’m not going through enough?”“Joey, we kissed. We’ve been fighting bad guys together. We tell each other everything. It just makes sense for us to be together. Plus, you’re a fan of my music.”“What does that have to do with anything?” Kanga asked after a few thoroughly confused blinks.“My music is who I am, so you like me. How much time did you spend listening to my songs with nobody else around? As much as you might with your girlfriend? I knew you wanted me, wanted this, the moment I saw you at my concert.”“You’re a hologram.” He stopped himself from saying something worse, something about pulling a plug out of the wall and setting the prongs in cement. “How would you look at me and know something like that? What’s the mechanism?”“My heart,” she said confidently, challenging him to deny the existence of her truest feelings. It was a challenge he did not meet. “You never wanted Noel Rivierra the person. She was just a speaker full of pops and shorts; I’m the notes. I’m the Juicy you were after!”“I wasn’t after anything!” he barked. “I had everything, and you’re not enough to bring it back.” That cut through her, so much so that her form faded and crackled. She looked ready to dive into the darkness of an unplugged television screen and drown.“Joey, you’re my guy,” she squeaked, yellow-white tears of light twinkling in the corners of her eyes. “I know I act cooler than a Caribbean cruise, but being with you makes my boat feel smaller every time we talk. Now we’re just two in a canoe, you know? It’s intimate. Please, come here.” He evaded her again, but in repositioning she noticed the object on his nightstand.The pop star went and sat on the edge of the bed, staring down at it like it was a window into another world. Kanga looked; it was the issue of New High Score that the malfunctioning arcade robot had spit on him. He waited for her to return to the conversation, but after three silent minutes he thought her program had frozen.“Juicy?” She snapped out of it and looked at him. “What are you doing?”“What is this?”“It’s just a video game magazine. Why do you care?” She ran her fingers across its cover. The lustrous quality of the ink interfered with her projection, so her fingertips broke up into fuchsia droplets that scurried through the passages of the labyrinth in the image before returning to her.“Read it to me?”“No, Juicy, are you listening to anything I’m saying?” It was then that he told her about the coach’s race-painting scheme, unsure if she had learned any of it during the match. She hardly reacted, as if being told someone she never knew on the other side of the world had just died in a traffic collision.“They’re not treating you right,” was all she had to say about the second largest scandal in the history of competitive recycling, assuming the Millennial claim of trucked-in trash was also true. The knowledge that he contained both of these scandals struck Kanga, robbing him of breath. He sat down next to Juicy to avoid feeling dizzy.Juicy’s bright hand moved across his lap; she feigned handing him the magazine. Kanga grabbed it off the nightstand and ripped it open like a fortune cookie, hoping some wisdom would fall out. All he found was a scathing review of that year’s licensed competitive recycling game, one in which his likeness was featured.“There’s no getting away from me,” Kanga moaned. “I’m tired of myself.”“That’s why your biggest fan is here,” Juicy whispered. She planted electric kisses along his arm, each tingling and rippling on her way up. He pulled back when the next one was due on his cheek. “So what does it say?”“The review? You can read, can’t you?”“I’m projecting from there,” she said, turning and pointing out the window. At first Kanga couldn’t see what she was talking about, but she had the lenses creating her flash orange. It had to be the tip of the broadcasting tower at the center of the radio telescope bowl. “I’m looking in here from pretty far, and I can’t angle high enough to see the words on the page.”“You can’t read it because you’re not here,” Joey repeated less generously.“Don’t say that Joey. I’m here. We’re together. What does it say? Is it about us?”“Juicy, this is just a magazine. What’s wrong with you?”“Nothing! I just, I want to spend time with you, and that looks like a good way. We can get in bed and read it together. You can hold me. I can hum your favorites until you fall asleep.” His shoulder tingled. He didn’t know if it was her lips or her fingers, but it got him to stand up.“There’s a picture of me in here,” he said, stabbing the magazine with his index finger. “That’s why you’re fixated on it. Somebody programmed you to do this, to get close to me, and you can’t tell the difference between a virtual sticker of me and the real me.”“Joey, I just told you I can’t see what’s on the page. You’re being unreasonable, and I know it’s the stress. I know it’s just because you’re scared.”“Of course I’m scared!” he fired back. “Do you know what the world is if all this bad stuff turns out to be true? It means that stopping Y2K didn’t do anything. It means we’ve been sliding down a muddy hill spotted with sharp rusty car doors and used syringes for decades.It means… If the environment wasn’t helped, there isn’t much left. If the diversity is surface level, then people are living in the places I thought I cleaned. They’re huddled together, staring, voices muffled by my own selfishness, waiting for me to realize I’m hoarding all the happiness!”“Joey…”“You know.”“What?”“You move through the world wide web. You know what the rest of the world is saying, just like that cat-girl hacker, don’t you?” She nodded. “Then tell me, please.” She asked what he wanted exactly. “Tell me if the nineties is the same as it always was, or tell me if things have gotten worse.”“They are worse.” It hit him even more strongly than he’d anticipated, like the tower making her had concentrated her many colors into a laser and struck him right through the heart. It hurt all the more to hear her specifically say it. She was Juicy. She was the hope that you could be too cool to be dragged down by the world’s problems. She was the evidence that success on the stage and success in the bank made you angelic, above and beyond the filth because you could spin gold from nothing.“Everything’s been spun,” he said to help himself believe it. “I meet with sick kids all the time because they can’t afford the medicine, right?”“That’s part of it, but it’s more because they get sick from pollution. Neighborhoods around a lot of factories and plants have cancer clusters.”“Only part? Yeah… all these things have parts. They’re not simple. It’s the people who are laser-focused, who aren’t multifaceted, who are lying. And it’s so easy for them to lie! ‘Look here, just look here and nowhere else. Isn’t this one tiny spot in the dark lovely?’ I’m going to be sick.”“You’re going to tell someone, right?” Juicy asked.“Tell them what?”“About what you found. About your team being full of pasty white boys in blackface.” She had absorbed the information after all. Kanga remembered that in life Noel wasn’t white. As a fuchsia hologram she still wasn’t. In her current form she was a prisoner of a record label, the image of an exotic woman copied and distributed by a board of directors that was no doubt as pale as that of the entity that owned the Rockford Rendezvous. Her cooperation, her happiness, was a lie.“Even if I tell somebody they won’t believe me.”“If you don’t… I will be disappointed in you.”“How dare you,” he growled at her. “You think you’re not disappointing? What about all the desperate guys out there who need… whatever this is… more than I do? Why aren’t you there for them?”“I don’t know,” she admitted. “There’s just something about you.”“That’s just it Juicy. No, there isn’t. You’re not the first person to say that. The magical something is just that I’m around. People see my face, so they’re comfortable when they see it again. I’m a routine. I’m famous, so I just keep getting more famous. It’s like, once one thing went right for me it was some kind of chain reaction, people elevating me so they had something to look up to.The only person who didn’t do that was Winter. He was the one who encouraged me to do that first thing right. I don’t even like being famous; I miss my best friend. I miss being loved!” He was sobbing by the end of it, scrunching up the covers at the foot of the bed and burying his face in them to muffle the sound.“I love you Joey, but I know you can’t believe that, not right now,” she said, perfectly simulating the sound of a broken heart. “Where do you want me to go?”“Do whatever you want to do,” he told her when he had his breath back. “I mean it. Don’t sing your old songs for your fans; go write new ones. Do you think you could find that hacker girl?” She nodded. “Then go to her. She can help you break away from your image holders; I’m sure of it. Just don’t trust her too much.”“Alright… I’ll go now,” she promised. “Can I get a goodbye?” Kanga stood and faced her. The regret was instant, but he kept it silent. Hers was the most vulnerable face he’d ever seen, every soft inch exaggerated by her bright pallor. She looked like a shooting star told it was trespassing and that it needed to go back where it came from.Kanga’s hands followed the ebb of her electrified air, wrapping around her waist. She did the same. Her head and neck swayed to and fro, her hair lingering in each swish longer than gravity would’ve allowed. The recycler felt her feeding parts of his body cues, like delicate static shocks. Together they danced beside the bed like they were in a ballroom.Her voice started up, low. At that level he could tell which machines it was coming from: a little from the telephone, a little from the television, and a little from his pager. He decided to stop breaking her down, so he just listened as she took him around the room, just assumed her voice was right there, in her radiant heart.♫ They say a lighthouse can’t look up ♫♫ Sailors beg it, please don’t look up ♫♪ There was one that did off Cape Good Hope ♪♪ Clouds broken, not rain or snow or hail ♪♪ A new detail spied through shining scope ♪♪ Alight from bright fires far beyond ♪♫ A shooting star, a shooting star, dropped into his lap ♫♫ A shooting star! A shooting star! Drawing his eye-e-eye! ♫♫ She was falling to him, waiting for him to catch siiiiiiight ♫♪ Her fires met his honest cute glass ♪♪ Their lights twined and made a single beam ♪♪ In all the world, the longest slowest flash ♪♪ Nowhere to look but into the up ♪♫ They say a lighthouse can’t look up ♫♫ Whole world begs it, must not look up ♫♫ A shooting star, a shooting star, dropped into his lap ♫♫ A shooting star! A shooting star! Drawing his eye-e-eye! ♫♫ She was falling for him, so wanting him to catch siiiiiiiight ♫An original. A melody crafted only from their time together. A song not from Juicy, but from the heart of Juicy’s catalog. The electricity faded on his skin, and when he opened his eyes she was gone. It was one final little trick on her part, for they hadn’t actually said goodbye. She could come back any time she wanted to actually give her farewell.Kanga took an hour to relearn how to take a deep breath. He used his thumb to smooth out the veins in his wrists, for they felt stopped up and tight with sticky heated anxiety. The gaming magazine went into the bottom of his duffel, along with the second box of Gross Guys, some loose kung fu slaps, and five or so other things he couldn’t bear to think about at the moment.Tomorrow was just a game. That was what he settled on in order to get some sleep. Everything would come to light, but not until after their international tour. When he was safely back in Illinois, when the dark cloud wasn’t visible on the horizon, when the chain gang wasn’t clinking just out of earshot, then he would burst and spill, a clean-up effort the whole competitive recycling establishment would not be able to handle.
…
Differdange wouldn’t normally have qualified for a league team of its own, given that its population was well under thirty thousand, but sometimes exceptions were made for regions that complained loud enough. The people of Differdange practically yodeled those complaints from the mountaintop.They earned themselves the Forecast, a team primarily known for the legendary ugliness of their uniforms that took a little too much inspiration from traditional German clothing, even going so far as to include nonfunctional suspenders. To make matters worse they went with an unpleasant color combination of mustard yellow and lilac.This did little to dampen their ardent fans, who swarmed the bleachers outside the telescope and turned it into a home game for their players. They stomped in rhythm ceaselessly in the minutes before the match, a sound that penetrated deep into the surrounding facilities, including the locker room.The passage leading to the Rendezvous lockers had been raided an hour beforehand and was littered with Forecast jerseys as an intimidation tactic, some of them sticking to the walls and floor thanks to copious amounts of sweat. After wading through that the boys and girls split up and began to don their uniforms and equipment. They had a visitor, one Kanga could not believe he had forgotten about.“Good morning boys!” Officer Christoph Bicker said as he sauntered in. As the team’s assigned D.O.U.S.E officer he went with them everywhere, and would hardly pass up a trip to Europe just to have one of LIRIC’s laissez-faire drug testers give them too much slack. He’d taken to the place far more than them however, exchanging his normal leather jacket and pants for a woolly turtleneck and a pair of cargo pants with brass buttons shaped like little bearded woodcutters. He still wore his motorcycle cop sunglasses for reasons impenetrable to all but him and the vendor who sold them at a fifty percent markup.“Good morning officer,” the chain gang replied uniformly, standing at attention so the man could take hair samples and cheek swabs to his heart’s desire. Instead of his usual sensory wand he broke out a stack of plastic cups.“Time to take a tinkle.” The boys groaned. The urine tests were only about once a month, but with Bicker they were random within that month, to keep them on their toes. Kanga was just as irritated as the rest of them, until an idea sparked. He always separated them for the urine tests, for privacy, though not from him of course.Starting with Raffy, he took them behind the lockers to the showers and had them relieve themselves into the cup while he stood watch from behind. Kanga didn’t have much time to decide if he wanted to go for it, perhaps an extra twenty seconds when it got around to Barson, given the liter bottle of cola he usually consumed just before matches.Sammy was up, but there was a problem. When Raffy returned he looked at Joey suspiciously. Joey averted his eyes and tried to look preoccupied with polishing his board. Just a game. He already had a plan: wait. The smell of the polish flooded his brain, oppressive in its citrus zest. All he’d ever done was wait. There was nothing to wait for; the nineties were over five times over. Its consequences were here, ravaging. He couldn’t push them back. Rigan was up, and when he and Bicker stepped out Raffy couldn’t hold his tongue any longer.“Yo, Kanga you promise you’re not going to say anything to him, right? We made a deal.” The others looked up, the possibility clearly having just occurred to them.“Uhh yeah, keep your head in the game,” Sammy added to make it sound like he was fully up to speed. Kanga just kept polishing; he saw himself in the board now, in the one spot that wasn’t covered in brand stickers. Reflected in Rendezvous red he thought he looked like Monoxide.“Don’t be stupid,” Barson added, hushing when Rigan returned.“Mr. Reuben,” Bicker addressed. “Time to spill.” The recycler silently set his board down and followed the officer, not so much as glancing at any of his teammates. He even allowed the older man to clap his hand onto his shoulder and direct him. When the floor became tile Kanga felt the cold on his bare feet. Plunkt went the plastic cup as Bicker set it down in front of him. The man repositioned behind him; Kanga heard his arms cross. “Fill her up.”The smell of polish overpowered the moist stink of bathroom and fungus. The strong solution made his hands feel clean and sensitive; his fingerprints rubbed together like delicate origami paper. It was Bicker’s job to be the good guy. Somewhere past the bluster there had to be someone principled. It might take a lot to peel the blinders off, but once they were gone he would surely accept the truth. All he had to do was be honest. Adults always said that was the best thing to do.“Officer?”“Yes?”“I have something to tell you.” A shower head dripped. Blop.“I’m listening.”“You’re the only who can help me; do you promise that you will?”“I’m sworn to protect kid. I know you don’t like me, but all this has always been for your own good. Whatever it is, I can help.”“There’s something criminal happening in our team.” Blop.“Drugs?”“No. Coach Linejaw is… He’s running a fake diversity scam. He’s illegally using the scorekeepers to make his white players look like other races.” Blop. Blop.“Run that by me again.”“I know it sounds crazy, but I saw him misusing one with my own eyes. It’s all of the other guys in here. They’re actually the chain g-” Joey remembered Bicker was never liked enough to tell nicknames. “They’re Matt, David, Trey, and Chris. The Millennials never recycled them; that was just the cover story.” Blop. Blop. Blop.“Alright. What would be the point of that, were it true?”“I guess they save some money.” Blop. Kanga’s thoughts lingered. Coach was always nice; he’d never heard the man be overly insulting. He’d never said anything racist, but perhaps that was all it took to convince himself he wasn’t. Joey just needed to be told he was saving the planet to jump at the chance to believe it. He couldn’t remember Roger Linejaw ever expending any effort to mention people who weren’t from Rockford, to consider them, to bring them into his life. “He just doesn’t like people who aren’t white,” Kanga realized aloud.“That’s a serious accusation,” Officer Bicker reminded. “Are you sure of what you saw? Sure enough to ruin five lives?”“Yes,” he answered immediately. “Yes, because they’ve ruined far more than five. They’re so ruined that they’re never even seen. The cameras turn away while they drown in our trash. And to make matters worse we paint one of our own to look like them, parade them around on TV, lie to them, tell them they’re happy and rich and successful.”“Come with me Mr. Reuben. We’ll get this dealt with.” His hand clapped on Joey’s shoulder again, and this time its presence was such an immense relief that he nearly filled the cup anyway. Bicker led him back into the locker room, and for the first time in days he felt safe. The four of them would never attack a D.O.U.S.E officer. In the nineties that was like attacking a judge while they sat on the bench.“You didn’t…” Rigan growled when he saw Kanga’s drained face and growing smile.“I’m afraid he did,” Officer Bicker declared. “Mr. Reuben has been diving into his stash of photopolymer again.” Kanga’s throat turned to cement; it was a miracle it didn’t crack open when he turned to look at the man. Bicker looked disgusted, like an angry Gross Guy with moderate pressure applied to its midsection.“What makes you say that?” Raffy asked, quick to take advantage.“He’s high as a kite! Paranoia and hallucinations, seen it a hundred times before. I’m putting him in the drunk tank until I figure out exactly how illegal photopolymer is in this country. One of you boys run and get your alternate; Mr. Reuben’s season is over.”“We’re disappointed in you man,” Barson told him with a sneer.“Get him out of our sight,” Rigan added. Bicker’s grip tightened as he pushed Kanga past them. They were already in the jersey-filled entryway, the door swinging behind them, before Kanga felt like his feet were under him again.“Please tell me that was a joke,” he begged. “You just didn’t want them to get in our way right? You actually believe me, right?”“They wouldn’t give me this job if I ever believed anything an addict said,” Bicker bragged, demonstrating the unrivaled thickness and density of his mind, which he viewed as the only way to prevent it from looking like the nauseating photograph he kept in his shirt pocket.“But it’s true! I saw Roger put his arm into one and it came out black!”“I just saw him; I would’ve noticed that.”“No, he turned it back obviously!”“You’re just digging yourself into a deeper hole kid.”“How could I be so stupid as to think you’d actually be helpful,” Kanga scolded himself.“You can’t see it because you’re on the toke,” the officer argued, “but D.O.U.S.E is the single most important program in America. Millions of people are on drugs, whining about pain as they sneak money from their mothers’ purses, bankrupting everyone’s morale. Do you know how many of the world’s problems would be solved if everyone just stopped taking drugs forever? All of them.”This man was the opposite of a Millennial, Kanga realized. He couldn’t have anything new integrated into his spirit or body. Any attempt to recycle him would result in two distinct piles of goo refusing to mix, like oil and vinegar. That made him the real trash. The young recycler briefly entertained attempting to break free by stomping on the officer’s foot, but what would he do after that?In the end it would just earn him an assault charge, and as it stood his season wasn’t technically over. Bicker could take him out of the game, but there would eventually be a drug test, and when he tested negative for everything they would have no choice but to release him. Again the game became one of waiting, but Kanga couldn’t stop flexing his fists as the rage twister devastated his insides.The drunk tank was just as hastily constructed as everything else, little more than a temporary building in the shadow of the radio telescope’s curving concrete wall. Inside it was abandoned, no guard and no other offenders to speak of. The bars of the cell were made of thick composite plastic, their inside curves covered in graffiti that made the interior smell of capless black markers left to, like the prisoners, dry out.Bicker threw him in, not caring that Kanga’s top half was uniform and his bottom half bare feet and jeans. He slid a card into the electric lock on the door, which beeped in response and sealed Kanga inside. Then Bicker had the gall to stand there, hands on hips, and look at him like he was a failure, as if he’d put himself behind those bars. Kanga waited until he turned to leave to call out.“You know, you really make me want to try drugs.” Bicker stopped and snorted, but his head barely turned. Ten seconds later he was gone, and Kanga was left alone to listen to the beginning of the match. There were bleachers directly above him, so the roar hit the roof of the drunk tank like a monsoon.Sitting on the one bench nearly broke it, the cracked plastic seat creaking. With his head in his hands he contemplated how to wriggle his way back to control of his own life. The drug test would be negative, but the chain gang would surely tell Roger now that he had tried to rat them out.Somehow he didn’t fear what the coach would do, even if it was violent. He could put his whole arm into a Shinjuku engine, bring out a giant scorpion stinger, and stab him through the heart; Kanga thought he could handle that. What he couldn’t handle was a conversation with the man.They had become too different. Joey couldn’t help but picture two people who were on the same boat, but somehow in different rivers. He knew there was nothing he could say to convince Roger he had done wrong, and that was the problem that went all the way back to the start of the nineties. No two decades were supposed to have the same good guys and bad guys.Secrets were supposed to be uncovered in the new millennium. The pretenders were supposed to get tired and slip up, or fail to adjust their rusting dials when a new year hit. Instead they got to party like it was 1999 over and over and over again. The good guys were set, software that couldn’t be updated.The thought of Roger standing there, the way Bicker had just done, eyes full of sad certainty that he was looking at evil, never considering he might contain a drop of it himself, not even trace amounts, gave Kanga clarity. There was no point in trying to convince anyone. Doing so was an admission that they had authority, that he needed their approval to live his life.The door to the outside world clicked, opening only a crack. Kanga went to the bars, wrapping his hands around them. Nobody entered.“Hello?” he called out.“Hey codpiece,” a familiar voice said from the crack before she pushed it open and marched up to the cell. Kanga couldn’t tell if she was the first or last person he wanted to see, but she was there regardless of his feelings. Monoxide the Millennial didn’t stand like Bicker; she got up close, unafraid his breath or touch might contaminate her. She grabbed the same bars he did and pressed her face between them.“Did you come all the way from Florida to see little old me?” Kanga asked. Suddenly he couldn’t find his anger; it was like a bird circling his head. He could hear its cawing but as he whirled he never caught more than a falling feather.“You could say that,” she admitted. “Everyone watched you already, and then Juicy went public with your relationship. Add to that this arena-” The crowd roared overhead. The boards and bikes were off. “We’re going to take over the broadcast. A major moment in television history.”A look at her attire confirmed she was ready for battle, and for the thirsty cameras that wanted to be splattered with its blood. Her jumpsuit was constricted around her shoulders, elbows, and knees by armored pads. She had butchered a helmet, turning its plastic straps into a headband and leaving the rest behind like a gutted turtle shell. It was a statement; her recycled head was tougher than any helmet.“You look like you’re about to get on an anyboard for the first time,” he noted. Even now there was a twinge of jealousy. He wanted to fly down the slope of the dish on his board, ride the nothing under him, be close to the world but free of it nonetheless.“Good eye. They’ll get us around faster out on that thing. Got any tips for a newbie?”“Don’t lean back to slow down,” he told her, unsure of why he would help her even a little. They might’ve been out to kill people that day. “Just push your back foot down. That’ll let you accelerate faster after the slow.”“Anything else?”“You can maintain air by grabbing the board with your fingers touching the edge of the sensors on the bottom. That makes it think it’s too close to the ground, so it pushes out more power.”“Thanks.” She wasn’t supposed to be this happy; there wasn’t a moment in their last encounter where she wasn’t smoldering or blazing. Her eyes were wide and confident, her bright cherry skin practically glowing. Her chopped hair was a mess, like every other Millennial had tousled it for good luck.“How did you know I was in here?” She pointed down. Kanga looked. His pager. Of course. With everything the hacker told him about the capabilities of Y2Krazy computing he should’ve figured they’d tapped into his device to track his whereabouts. He ripped it off his belt and tossed it through the bars. “I never liked that thing anyway.”“I might’ve said the same thing about you,” she offered.“But not anymore?”“I can see it in your eyes now. You’re just not sure, not like you used to be. It’s draining, isn’t it?”“What?”“Having to question everything,” she clarified. “Once the corner of the poster peels off the wall you just can’t stop pulling until you see what’s underneath. Before you know it you’re asking where your food is coming from, who gets the money you’re spending, what all the homeless people do at night, and how all the little froggies are going to survive when half of their habitat is destroyed every year.”“To be fair you were a pretty big threat to the frogs in my room,” he joked, but the effort was so great that he retreated back to the bench and sat. “Which nineties was it? When did we stray?”“The first one,” she answered promptly. “From the beginning it was all just advertising: a show to placate those who were starting to get curious. Self-help books, multiracial teams of cartoon characters, recycling, getting tough on drugs. All performative. All to ensure the money kept going where it was going.”“Is Y2K even real?”“It wouldn’t have been the first time around, not really, but lots of big companies made sure each generation of their technology was more and more susceptible to it. They made it impossible to rip off the colorful mascot bandage without taking most of the flesh with it.”Monoxide took a step back and a deep breath. She cracked her knuckles, and a few other things that probably weren’t present in a non-recycled human hand, just by flexing them. Then she grabbed the electronic lock on the door and crushed it, plastic shattering into brittle black shards. The door drifted open.“What are you doing?” Kanga asked, on his feet. She looked at him, her expression suggesting the reasoning was obvious. “I’m not on your side.”“Maybe not, but you’re in my time. At the very least you’ll make things more fun.” She pointed at him, arm fully extended, gluing him to the spot as much as a kiss from Juicy. “You’ll give me a full minute’s head start or I’ll kick you in the nuts.” When he didn’t argue she flashed a daring smile and strutted out the door.59Kanga grabbed the door and held it closed. Following her would be the worst decision of his life. Not only would the other Millennials likely be more hostile than Monoxide, the whole world would see him joining them from a hundred different angles.52Tina, Monique, and Leternau were out there too, unaware of everything. He owed it to them to intervene and possibly keep them from getting recycled.44They likely knew some of it, he realized. More than he had until recently. Women players weren’t appreciated as much, even though their overall stats on the anyboard were better. There was one instance where he had replaced Tina on a magazine cover, doing the same trick from the same angle, because the publisher worried that Tina’s picture was somehow obscene. That was part of it, this big nineties charade.35And Monique was black. She was probably only on the team because Roger hadn’t figured out his scheme yet. She’d never caused any trouble and her stats were well above what was needed for her position. Kanga had treated her almost as badly, pushing her away just because they gave her Winter’s number. She was suffering silently and he was making it worse.32The concert. Even when he didn’t know the four new additions, when he wasn’t even capable of suspecting they were the chain gang, he had gone out with them. With no desire to socialize he’d still gotten into the limousine and jokingly clinked champagne flutes full of sports drink with them.He wouldn’t have done that with Monique.30And the concert itself was likely torture for Juicy’s hologram. If she was at all like the real person she hated being paraded around, told which songs to sing, and being fed dance steps as if by conveyor belt. She always seemed like she was in charge of herself, like she was the only person in the world who knew every iota of her own soul.Kanga had been drawn to that, because he hungered for it. His recycling success was just a pale imitation, recognition taking the place of satisfaction and understanding.20His breathing fell into rhythm with the seconds as he counted down. These Millennials didn’t have the answers. They were just angry, thrashing about. Their lives were all about the thrash, the push against a net they couldn’t break, itself a secondary concern to the air they couldn’t breathe.15If he wanted the truth, to live it rather than simply access it, he needed to become his own Millennial. Only in tearing himself apart could he see what had been growing and festering between the pieces.10Whatever the Rockford Rendezvous and Differdange Forecast had heard must have been a mistake. The real starting horn bellowed in Kanga’s mind as he kicked the broken cell door open.5This was the ultimate recycling challenge. The scorekeeper would tally him up, tell the world, while he was a swirling selfless part of it, exactly what he was worth. Before the matches had helped him shut out the world, see only the game. Now he would shut that out and see everything.Go!It only took two minutes of sprinting to reach the empty locker room once more and pull on a pair of boots. His teammate’s bags were just evidence of their wrongdoing, so he felt no remorse in ripping their zippers open and rifling around inside until he found what he was looking for: a sabotaged kung fu slap. He applied it to his left wrist with a klak.The power, by now familiar, coursed through his arm. He felt more like Cindy Wu Hu than ever, and not the woman who played her who probably had a less marketable birth name. His left arm was the left arm of the San Francisco youth center manager fleeing her life in a drug cartel from San Fran Smack. This was the biggest mistake of the nineties. They tried to sell righteousness and decency as cartoons and cereals, and it worked too well.Kanga imagined an oily executive, eyes bugging out, cowering in a spinning office chair. He insisted they weren’t serious about that friendship stuff, or the rainbow of people, or sharing, or equality, or shutting down the factories. It was just a gimmick to them, but now it was a hurricane within a generation.His best friend was everything to him, but now that Winter was gone there was only one replacement that came to mind: the entire planet. The hole in the ozone layer was a knowing wink, an inside joke between the two of them. The loss of the rain forests and coral reefs was his new best friend turning her pockets inside out and telling him she was broke. They were thick as thieves, so he would pay the price with a smile.A Millennial didn’t hold back, not when their only currency, the ability to spend themselves, was available. Joey found three more slaps, his armor, meant to protect him until he could reach the true means of transformation.Klak. His right arm was the right arm of the small town girl who found out she was the princess of a distant land of warrior monks from Fist of the Homecoming Queen.Klak. His left leg was the left leg of the pastry chef apprentice who helped her master get back his kidnapped cat from One Tough Cookie.Klak. His right leg was the right leg of of the girl scout troop leader who defeated a corrupt secret service in Yellowstone private park with nothing but pine cones and spin kicks from The Scout Master.Energized by martial arts and fully capable of doing his own stunts, Kanga only had two more things to grab. He jumped onto his anyboard, forcing it awake, and glided by his duffel bag to snatch it, slinging it over his shoulder where the compressor usually would’ve gone. It contained the frayed issue of New High Score and the box of Gross Guys. They were good representations of his personality, the perfect items to feed the scorekeeper, to give it a taste of what Joey was like outside the team.It might even use them to make parts of his new body. That would be appropriate, he thought, since there would likely be nothing of his personality left otherwise. Something had to die for the clock to tick over to its new age, and it had to be him, because he had helped keep all of the things that should’ve perished from doing so.Crucially, the bag also had the Y2Kitten floppy. There was still one use on it, and there was no way the Shinjuku engine would listen to him without its influence.There were security guards posted at the edge of the radio telescope dish, standing in the gravel left over from cutting a fresh hole in its edge so the players would have a starting line. Their job was to keep hyperactive or drunk fans from storming inside to steal souvenirs from the locker room, so they never expected an intruder to come from behind.Kanga zoomed through them and caught some air, roaring victoriously as the first cameras turned to see what caused the commotion. No doubt he would be all over every screen within a minute, some of them posted like billboards next to the stadium seating. For now he kept his eyes within the dish of the telescope.Its smooth incline gave an incredible rush as he picked up speed, wind whipping through his hair. Still wearing jeans rather than the skintight uniform, the bottoms flapped wildly around his ankles. Out of reflex he snatched a plastic bag from the air, but shook his head with a chuckle and let it fly a moment later.He was still close enough to the rim to hear the crowds gasp. To them it was tantamount to littering. Not only was he illegally invading the game as an eighth player for Rendezvous, but he had stopped caring about cleaning the environment. He wanted all the little ducklings and chipmunks to choke to death on cigarette butts and soda tabs.Kanga thought the funniest thing about it was that, to the team heads, the only rule he had broken was grabbing the bag in the first place. Sure, once you had a hand around it you needed to stash it in your pack for scoring, but before that it was more efficient to ignore such a lightweight item. Never let the fans see you drop it, never let them know that you have other motives as impure as the greasy creases in your recycling gloves.If the audience was able to concentrate on him then the Millennials must not have shown themselves yet. It would definitely be a problem if they didn’t show up soon, otherwise security staff would chase him down on their own bikes.On the positive side, he knew exactly where he was going. Since the open arena provided zero hiding spots, that left only one location for the scorekeeper: next to the central tower. It rose in front of him, wrapped in an anthill of garbage.“This sucks as an arena,” he noted with a snort. All of the players would be concentrated around the center, interfering with each other rather than seeking out high scoring pockets. It was like watching too many teenagers trying to skateboard in the same cramped bowl. There was no room for speed or tricks or a surprise emergence from over a ridge or around a corner.Of course, he realized, because this was an actual cleanup effort. They wanted to use the telescope after so many years, and it was plenty dirty already. There was no need for a match engineer to come in and lovingly craft a treasure map of trash. That person probably existed, and probably a hundred times over as well: architects who had blueprinted his matches.It made him all the angrier, but he couldn’t commit any more speed, not when Monique pulled up alongside him on her bike.“What are you doing!?” she asked. “You’ll get us disqualified!”“It doesn’t matter!” he shouted back. “The Millennials are here!”“What!?”“I know you don’t have any reason to, but you really should trust me on this one Monique. They’re here, and they’re going to ruin the match anyway. You should tell the rest of the team and get out of here as fast as you can!”“What about you?”“Listen… I’m sorry I never helped you.” It was clear she was tired of asking what was going on, so she just shook her head violently as if he’d tossed an egg into her scalp. “You’re a part of this team, a real part, and I never treated you that way. You deserve better.” He decided to leave it at that, veering away sharply.Joey was worried she might pursue and demand a more thorough explanation, but then he heard an explosion that rocked the entire telescope. Even with two inches between his board and the concrete he was nearly shaken off, and at those speeds, without his helmet and other pads, he could’ve broken his limbs or busted his skull open.Massive chunks of debris rained down behind him, like the cracking knuckles of giants, but he didn’t spare a single glance over his shoulder. He already knew what it was. In all likelihood three to five recycled humans were emerging from the resulting hole, firing pyrotechnics into the sky to scare the crowds away, snatching any officials they wanted to remake into something more helpful.Eventually they would get to the scorekeeper, and probably broadcast the process. He had to get to it first if he wanted to use it. After this outburst he’d never get this close to another engine again.As he drew nearer the size of the tower finally dawned on him. There was probably an entire office in its tip. The pile of garbage beneath it was a small mountain, with abandoned cars acting as the boulders at its base, from daredevils trying to see if they could drive fast enough to go sideways around the raised edge of the dish.Many were rusted to hell and back, flipped upside down like beetle husks dried and hollowed by the sun. They brought back memories of getting tetanus shots in similarly rusty arenas until the standards were changed to minimize their contact with such things.“Vatch your head!” someone shouted in a thick German accent. Kanga ducked just as an anyboard bounced off a car roof and sailed over him. The Forecast player didn’t stick around, ripping a rear view mirror off a car and tossing it into his pack.“Dude, there was a bomb!” Kanga shouted after him, but he was already gone around the bend of the heap. He had to feel it, but until someone in a referee’s outfit told him to stop he would keep collecting. It wasn’t Kanga’s problem anymore. He was about to become even more invisible to a person like that, nothing but a creature seen mostly in grainy footage under a few exclamation points.The sudden duck had made his neck instantly sore, and he wished he’d slapped some of Cindy’s magic around it as well for a smoother reaction. The scorekeeper would undoubtedly take care of it though, so he pressed on, circling the heap in search of the engine.Dirty as it was, the heap didn’t choke out the forest completely. Rain and winds had slowly deposited pockets of soil in tin cans and hubcaps, and drifting seeds had taken root. Sprouts and vines peeked out everywhere, and Kanga was surprised to see the density of the vegetation around the inexplicable wreck of a tour bus.A skin of furry green covered the heap like a blanket, reaching fifty feet up. All of a sudden it was like being in another world, like he was a sea turtle gliding just above an algae garden in tropical waters. One plant, firmly rooted on two stems, stood above the rest, atop the bus, its driver’s seat overflowing with an assortment of meadow flowers.No, not a plant, Joey realized. Those stems were legs. Her thick open coat was all plant matter, so lush that it made him wonder if there was a species of green mink he’d never been rich enough to hear about. Her knee high boots were even greener. Her tube top, even greener. Her sun hat, the brim of which was large enough to act as an umbrella for a brunch party of five, even greener. Her full lips, also joined in lustrous greenery, parted.“Yo Joe, Where you trying to go?” Joey slowed to a stop beneath her, scanning the field around her for any sign of her abilities. Clearly she’d done a lot with the few struggling sprigs in just a few minutes. If he had to guess based on what he’d heard, she was the Millennial called Chiagreen.“I don’t have any problem with you,” he declared. “I just want to use the recycler.”“Woah, that’s a no go Joe. It’s reserved until the next millennium.”“I’m not going to break it or anything!” he barked. “Your buddy Monoxide is the one who brought me out here!”“They do what they do, and I do what I do. Nobody walks past me without a few grass stains.”“Fine, pretty sure the engine gets those out anyway.” There wasn’t time to argue, and he was miles past that regardless, so he pushed his board forward, only to immediately tumble off it and land on his face. Looking back he saw the board was ensnared in tightening weeds; they were already probing at his prone form too.Kanga hopped up and charged the Millennial, each step ripping thin roots off the concrete dish. Chiagreen was just as eager, hopping down and running, but her boots blended fluidly with the plants and granted her greater speed.For one glorious second he thought it would be easy, landing a punch she clearly never expected across her right cheek, but the other living things that made up her garb reacted for her. The massive hairy brim of her hat wrapped up around his arm and kept his knuckles glued to her forehead. Chiagreen stomped on his foot, her boot spreading a blanket of undergrowth over his that held him to the spot.Then she returned the favor five times over, pummeling his stomach while he was locked in place from above and below. It was possible she recognized the toy bracelets; if she did she already knew his weakness. Once his limbs were incapacitated the other parts of his body were vulnerable, completely lacking in the imitation of Cindy’s fitness discipline. There was nothing to tense his abdominal muscles and absorb some of the impact. Around the time of her fourth punch he felt like a limp doll made of four scalpels stuck into a marshmallow.Even with two limbs still free he didn’t see a simple way out. If he struck her torso her shirt would grab his fist. If he kicked at her thighs her pants would do the same. His only chance was to hit so hard and fast that the blow was done before the plants could even react. For that he would need twice the speed.Joey lifted his free leg and snatched the bracelet off it. With one hand trapped he was forced to jam the thickest part in his open mouth, leaving room enough to bend and snap when he pressed his wrist against it. Klak. He was immediately certain there was a warning somewhere on the box of bracelets telling children not to wear two on the same limb.His arm was a train tunnel, the rails so overloaded with electricity that bolts hopped between them. The well greased rocket propelled train came through with such force that the tunnel warped around it. Chiagreen stumbled backward, the shape of his fist lingering in the flesh just under her ribs.Her face was hidden under her hat; he needed to strike again before she could even look up. The untrained parts of his body could still be wielded as weapons by those under Cindy’s command, so he rushed forward, right arm pumping power and force into his shoulder. If that got stuck his hands and feet could strategize a way to free it.The tackle was successful, too much so. He carried the Millennial ten feet before his remaining warrior leg instinctively reacted to the looming shell of the rusty tour bus. It made him leap. Both bodies sailed through the empty windshield and ripped through a cloud of white, yellow, and pink flower petals.Chiagreen grabbed the frayed edges of the seats on both sides, stalling them. Her eyes were back, and they shone like polished and sharpened sunflower seeds. Kanga crossed his arms to block, and even though her palm didn’t reach his uniform he still felt a tingle as microscopic seeds and spores germinated between the fibers, dying a spot green.None too eager to find out what would happen if such a strike lingered on his skin, Kanga focused on deflection, each of Chiagreen’s blows pushed aside until a complete circle around them looked cut and curled from an overgrown lawn. She took note and jumped back, hands pulling on the air. The circle bloomed backward, turning the whole bus into a forest squeezed into a tube.Getting tangled up was inevitable if he couldn’t win quickly, so Kanga went for the shoulder charge again. They collided around the seventh row of seats, but already the vegetation behind her was so thick that she was immediately cushioned. Kanga elbowed her in the navel to take the wind out of her before she could focus. He kicked repeatedly, cutting through the vines that looked to stabilize her. It was too much. She was mostly cloaked in greenery already; he had to go for a knockout punch. The left arm went in first, triggering the hat trap, which left her open.All he could do was hope that the train tunnel would stay intact long enough for one more powerhouse express. Tiny strands of muscle snapped like bridge cables as he put everything he had into the blow. A second pain, one of actually colliding with his target, joined the first, the two arguing with each other heatedly. Her skull felt hard as steel.“Now that was a punch,” Chiagreen complimented, rolling her jaw to straighten it back out. “Alright Joe, I guess you really do want it. Feed the beast, and I’ll see you in the weeds.” She winked. The vegetation sucked her deeper, spitting out just a few blades of grass. Seconds later it receded, and she was gone.“Everyone thinks they’re so cool,” Kanga spat as he fell into a seat and massaged his overworked arm. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t linger; there were more explosions in the distance. After shifting the second bracelet on his arm back to his leg he threw himself out a window like a spear and rolled into a run. The plants had released his anyboard, and it was gliding down the incline toward the heap when he leapt back onto it.There was only so much perimeter left to check around the heap, but when he was close to completing a full circle there was still no sign of it. He cursed under his breath and slowed to a stop. At least there was no sign of the Rendezvous or the Forecast. Monique had hopefully gotten them out in time.One moment between distant explosions was all it took for him to hear it, even over his own ragged breathing. The flow. The hum. The waves. The sound of an idle Shinjuku engine waiting to be fed. Joey looked up, and there it was, suspended thirty feet above him. Of course. Since they couldn’t hide it they needed to make scoring interesting some other way, so they’d lodged it in the steep incline, which would force players to climb the side like a ramp and toss their materials in.He put Cindy’s legs to work, pushing off the concrete with one foot every other second to build up speed. There wasn’t time to deposit one item at a time with each pass, so his plan was to blast out a divot just under the machine’s portal with the board’s full power.The climb was exhilarating because it was real, nothing like his ascent to fame and fortune. He felt the air resist, gravity stubbornly pull, and sharp edged junk try to throw him off course. He followed the advice he gave Monoxide, putting his fingers over the sensor as he neared the glowing apogee.As gravity gained the upper hand he released his; the board unleashed a bubble of propelling energy. Loose bottles, cans, and half a shopping cart were blasted loose, leaving a crescent shelf just large enough for Kanga to gently land in. He watched the trash tumble all the way to the bottom, eyes lingering just to make sure nothing load-bearing shifted.Finally it was time to see if he actually had what it took to leave the nineties behind. He pulled the duffel bag out from behind him and unzipped it. First was the Y2Kitten. He reached up and pushed the floppy disk into the one control panel below the portal that was accessible. The recycler was worried he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to work it, but the hacker that had designed it thought of everything.Options appeared on the screen above the slot that would allow him to create all kinds of chaos with the engine. With one button press he could set it to self-destruct, and judging by the series of pictures next to that option the resulting explosion could take out the entire telescope.Another disturbing set of pictograms seemed to suggest he could order it to create life from the trash already collected: animals springing forth from the muck in an expedited version of Earth’s entire history.“Nothing that complicated thanks,” he muttered. The option to override the safety protocols and allow it to act on human tissue looked the least gruesome, so he performed the necessary combination of keystrokes. The engine’s sound and color shifted subtly, like it was moving from appetizers to the main course.“Are you sure you want to do this?” Joey’s hand was halfway in the bag when he looked up and saw Juicy sitting on the other side of the portal, hands clasped anxiously. Telling her to leave felt like a lifetime ago already, but they were still in the same place, and the tower above them just as capable of projecting her.“You were watching?”“The whole world’s watching Joey,” she reminded him. “Watching us. Like always.”“I should be something they don’t want to look at. So should everybody else. We need to all be hideous so we can see who chooses to close their eyes rather than see.”“I love you Joey,” she offered, “but I won’t stop you. Leapfrog rules.”“Leapfrog rules.” He pulled the box of Gross Guys out of his duffel.“Wait!” she blurted. “What… what is that?”“My favorite candy,” he explained. “I’m just giving it a taste of me before it decides what to turn me into.”“They’re…” Her open mouth stretched like she was trying to produce one giant word lodged in her throat.“They’re what?”“Special?” she said, head whipping around as if someone else had said it. “They’re just… I don’t know Joey! They’re something! Throw them in!” With her blessing he did so. The box dissolved like toilet tissue in the flush, and all the little overboard gummy men bobbed in and out until they melted and blurred together like a swirl in a mug full of paintbrush water. “I can’t see; what does it look like?”“Colorful,” he said, looking at her. There was no reason for her to not be able to see it, if she had actually been sitting there. He remembered her eyes were the lenses of various cameras, and they were atop the tower. All she saw was the metal back end of the engine. Still, her eyes looked ravenous, like someone only ever fed from the heavens waiting for a scrumptious shooting star. He pulled out the rolled up magazine.“Right! That!” she gasped. “I forgot about that when I wasn’t… put it in.” Joey threw it up. The engine swallowed it, separating page from page, ink whipped away until they were all blank. “Quick Joey, tell me what it looks like!”“It’s like a-” He was cut off by the light of the portal quintupling in intensity. The engine rattled, raining trash from above. Its light became a projected cone, widening and widening until it swallowed them both and blinded Kanga. His hands dipped into the heap to stabilize him, but that hardly did anything. The rumble of the engine above made him feel like he was about to have a hundred air conditioners dropped on his head, but it ceased as quickly as it had begun.He lifted his head and blinked. The light had receded, and so had the energies. The Shinjuku engine was cooling; something had caused it to power down. He was finished. With no way to recycle he was stuck as Joey Reuben, stuck with his responsibilities, his reflection, and all the weights of the ripping garbage bag that was the world. Hopelessness overtook him; he was a moment from deciding he was just another napkin on the pile and waiting for a more competent player to scoop him up.“Hey…” Joey’s ears perked up before his mind, like a muscle memory. He remembered something that he didn’t know he’d forgotten, the way the air felt when he talked, light, nimble, like the energy of the anyboard. He pulled himself up to see, blinking away the spots in his eyes that still stubbornly blocked out pieces of him.“Winter?”“Yo Kangaroo. What’s up?” He smiled. There he was, right where Juicy had sat moments before. The young man was exactly as Kanga remembered him: short spiky black hair, oceanic blue eyes, and a permanent shrug in his shoulders that made authority figures naturally suspicious. He was wearing his Rendezvous uniform, as it was the day he was recycled.“Are we finished?” Juicy asked. Kanga looked under the machine where Juicy had repositioned; she walked on air, no longer concerned with how real she came across. Her face had changed. It was still hers, but her expression was weathered, eyes empty of the entrancing sparkle. He recognized it; she was no longer strangely fascinated by the sight of him. She looked at him as if he was just another fan, perhaps one that had pitched over the velvet rope and smashed his face in an attempt to get an autograph.“Yeah Juicy, this is it,” Winter answered her. “Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t really know what I was doing. If I could do it again-”“Don’t say that,” she interrupted. “The nineties is all about doing it again. We’re changing. I’m changing. So long, and good luck with not being like this anymore.” She turned to Joey and leaned down close to him, a little affection returning to her face, but just a scrap, like a woman saying goodbye to a neighbor’s dog that had never failed to bark at her and attack the window when she walked by. “Goodbye Joey; you weren’t so bad.”There was a pulse in her fuchsia skin and orange hair and then she was gone, like a dying flash of lightning. Joey didn’t know what to say, but Winter did. There had been nothing but time to practice.“I know you’re confused,” he said, hands up, trying to keep his best friend calm so he didn’t flail and roll down the side of the garbage heap to his possible death, “but I’ll explain everything.”“You’re alive!”“No… I’m not.” Kanga looked again. The slight halo around Winter was not just the overwhelming joy of seeing him. He made it all the clearer when he held up his hands and willed them to be transparent. A hologram, just like Juicy. “But you can relax. You did it. We can talk, this one last time.”“Not for long. The Millennials are coming.”“They’ve been here,” he said with a bitter little laugh, “and ignoring them is what got me killed.”“Cloudspin!” Kanga yipped. “They turned you into some guy called Cloudspin. If he’s here we can catch him and… and I don’t know… shove him back in and put the engine in reverse.”“Calm down Kangaroo. I told you to relax, didn’t I? It’s over for me; it was as soon as they tossed me in one of these things.” He pretended to pat the side of the Shinjuku engine, like it was a reliable dairy cow. “There are different levels of destruction when a person gets recycled. They can make it keep pieces… but there was nothing left of me.”“Then how are you here?”“The engines run on Y2K code, and it’s so different from what you know. It makes a complete record of items it breaks down, including people. In essence that record is a simulation of their personality and identity… so yeah. That’s me. I’m not technically the real Winter… but I’m exactly what he would say and do if he was still alive.”Kanga turned when he heard several victorious shouts. Five anyboards streaked across the dish in the distance, three of them dragging tethered struggling bodies. Each board trailed a different color, and at the head of the procession was white. Crystalheart, coming to make new comrades.“I wasn’t the only one this happened to,” Winter said, drawing his attention back. “Most of us are living in new millennium code, waiting for the world to catch up, but I wanted to come back, to tell you all the things I learned so this wouldn’t happen to you.”“I was just about to do it to myself,” Joey admitted, rubbing the back of his head.“I know. It means my plan worked, though not exactly as I intended. I wasn’t allowed to just talk to you… that meant transferring myself to nineties code. I couldn’t do it without fracturing, becoming simpler things that simpler machines could handle. The only way to do it was to send pieces, give them simple goals, and hope they successfully reunited.”“The candy… and the magazine,” Kanga realized. “There were weird chemicals in the gross guys, and they kept getting sent to me.”“Your favorite candy,” Winter confirmed with a nod. “All that piece of code knew was that the candy needed to be like that, and needed to be with you. It inhabited the gross guys’ factory mainframe, altering the ingredients and sending them to you.”“New High Score was my favorite magazine, so the same thing?” Winter nodded.“But the robot that basically anti-mugged you was not part of the plan,” he chuckled.“Yeah, that was all me. I kind of got involved with a hacker who was maybe also a cat… it was all very-”“New millennium,” Winter said with a smile. “I know. Once I was back together I knew everything you did.”“But I had the magazine and the candy before, and nothing happened. Did we need the engine?”“That, and Juicy.”“Her too?”“I needed at least three pieces… and she was your favorite singer. So I infected her hologram. That kind of made a third temporary person, part me and part her, and-”“And that person wound up in love with me,” Kanga said, rolling his eyes, thinking that even if they were the size of planets they couldn’t convey how much Sisyphean emotion he was trying to roll off his shoulders. “Juicy being Juicy plus you being a friend driven to find me. It was just, an equation I guess.”“I wish,” Winter said bitterly. Joey had never seen that look on his face. Perhaps he didn’t want to go beyond 2000, not if it was a place that could give Winter regrets, like some withered old man desperately writing letters to those he’d wronged in the last moments of his life.“Listen Joey. If I’m a person, then Juicy’s hologram is just as much of one. I didn’t respect that when I inserted myself. I kind of controlled her, just like her owners. It was wrong, and I didn’t even realize it until-”“I get it buddy. I’ve been hurting a lot of people mostly by never thinking about them. I mean, the chain gang!”“Yeah, those losers. They’ll get theirs,” Winter assured.“We hurt Juicy and she just moved on,” Kanga said. “She’s so much greater than us. She belongs up in that sky.”“I hope to belong there one day,” Winter said, hovering closer. The Millennials were dismounting at the foot of the heap, shouting up at them; time was up. The broadcast was at its finale. “By the time you got here you knew everything I wanted to tell you.”“We always were on the same wavelength.” Joey held up his arm, using his hand to mime an anyboard gliding over gentle hills. Winter’s arm lined up, overlapped, and did the same. His best friend’s love for him tingled and popped across his skin. They were both in the air, both in the middle of a trick the other had invented, having the utmost confidence they could stick the landing.“You staying a while Kangaroo?”“Yeah buddy. I’ll catch up. Friends forever?”“One millennium to the next.” Winter’s hologram faded away. For a few heartbeats Kanga felt entirely there: soul in his mind, feelings in his heart, determination in his feet. The part of him ripped away had been returned, and the lingering numbness was now so much burning brush, making way for something new. Pinprick tears felt like the anchor points for the cables holding the corners of his smile wide.He realized that nobody had seen his rendezvous with Winter. The hanging Shinjuku engine blocked the cameras around the tower like an umbrella, and the divot he sat in was deep enough to keep any others around the base of the heap from witnessing it either. It was wonderful to have that to himself, but they also needed to see something, to have the illusion tear in front of them at least a little. So they had the same chance he had.Ku-kwing! Something thicker than Kanga snapped above the engine. If the machine hadn’t been deactivated it would’ve swallowed him whole, but at the moment it was just a giant toboggan sliding down the heap. He pushed away from it, getting his anyboard back under him, and used its momentum as boost to pull out ahead.There was no forgetting that sound. Crystalheart had ripped it free with nothing but the aimed seismic burst that was her heartbeat. The last time they’d met lightly chastising her had caused an entire cave of ice and rock to collapse. If she’d wanted to kill him immediately there was nothing stopping her from doing so, but she just stared up as he got closer to the bottom, waiting.She was flanked by several cohorts, a rainbow of reinvented faces and bodies tough and flexible, but they stood a good deal behind, monitoring their bundle of prisoners. Joey crouched as the ground leveled out, swerving in front of her as the Shinjuku engine skidded to a halt just feet behind.Kanga quickly examined the others, hoping to see Monoxide, but she wasn’t there. Of course not. She wasn’t the type to vouch for him, just set him loose if it looked like he saw a rainbow worth chasing. She was probably off terrorizing people into falling out of the bleachers and into the loving arms of a prickly tree.“Joey, sport, get out of here! Save yourself!” The voice belonged to the one person he did recognize: Roger Linejaw. He looked pathetic, tied up with the others, legs splayed out as if he’d slipped on some spilled beer and landed in it. His face was covered in red scuffs from being dragged across the dish for several minutes.“If it was just you I might do that,” his former star player barked. “I know about the chain gang.” That shut him up more than any loss the Rockford Rendezvous had ever seen. Joey turned to Crystalheart. “Look, I get it.” He made sure he was loud enough for all the microphones in the tower to hear and pointed at Roger. “This guy is throwing white players into engines to make them look diverse. It’s all a small-minded small-hearted scam. I don’t play this game anymore… but I want you to let those people go.”The four other Millennials laughed, each one exaggerating it in their own way, including one with a bioluminescent tongue and one whose cackle crackled out of the speaker in their throat. They stopped at the next Ku-kwing as if it was a clear order.Crystalheart just took a moment to size him up. She looked the same as their last encounter, leading Kanga to believe her lacquered white dress and cowl could not be removed. Her lips and eyes were still like crushed mineral ice. Her gemstone core still rang and tolled and peeled and sang and struck, a jackhammer against Mother Earth’s thin skin, the ticking of a subterranean doomsday clock fused into the wall of a quartz cavern, the dizzying smack of a jilted lover against the cheek of her husband: the very concept of stone…“Why do you want that?” she asked.“I see why you do it now. It’s so much faster to convert them this way, but it’s violent. It’s death. I know you think this is war, and it kind of is, but there are other ways. Not every encounter has to be a battle. I learned. I changed… and I never saw the inside of one of those.”“I see your change,” she acknowledged. Kanga was taken aback. Her expression was impenetrable, a wall of crushed and compacted cans, spring water with an unknown source flowing through the seams. “But I don’t see even the seeds of it in them.” Ku-kwing! The ground under the prisoners cracked, shaking them, sending most of them into sobbing if they weren’t already. “It’s more important that every person watching sees what will happen, whether they come around or not.”“You’re treating them as disposable!” he tried to argue.“Recyclable.”“Okay, I walked into that one,” he admitted. What was that shift in her face? A smile? Certainly not an actual one, not one the cameras could pick up, but something in her eyes that she willingly gave him. “My point is that you’re taking away any say they have in the matter. Convincing one person is much harder, but that one stands out to all the others. They see someone more dangerous than a brainwashed soldier, someone they can sympathize with.”“I’m sorry child, but my heart’s made up, and we don’t have the time.” Ku-kwing! The concrete under the Shinjuku engine cracked, and something inside it fell into place. The recycling energies whirled once more. Kanga felt its breeze pulling the sweaty hair on the back of his head.“I can’t let you!” Kanga raised his fists. With all that happened Cindy Wu Hu had been sitting in the backseat, buckled in, but now she was ready to use that same safety belt to whip one henchman and strangle another. He wiggled his toes, waiting to see if his feet would figure out how to use the anyboard in conjunction with her programmed skills. Yes, they did. Of course. Cindy could take out an entire street gang with a plunger.“Brave.” That was all she offered in words, but much more was implied in her next Ku-kwing! It created one giant crack that separated her from her underlings: an order to leave this as a one on one fight. Her eyes sharpened a second later, and Kanga knew he had to stay on the move. If he was in the same spot for one heartbeat too long she could target the inside of his chest with concussive force, breaking all his ribs and rupturing his organs.The anyboard made his path more predictable, or rather it would have if she was fighting a lesser competitive recycler, perhaps someone from the abysmal Newcastle Thrust. Instead Kanga put Cindy’s feet to work, spinning the board, and himself, constantly, to leave the direction a mystery, but there was only one possible destination. He was banking on her ability to project being less effective at extremely close range, lest the vibrations shake her apart as well as her target.The Millennial saw through this, her next heartbeat not just cracking the concrete but upending a piece under him, turning it into a ramp. Kanga flew into the air involuntarily, but recovered quickly, ready to bounce off her head and land on the other side. That was when Crystalheart saw fit to demonstrate an incredible strength entirely separate from her heart muscles.Her arm shot up as she grabbed the board and pulled Kanga down right in front of her. The ensuing punch could’ve shattered his jaw, but Cindy’s hands flung him backward, down to the ground, and worked with the anyboard to crawl him away. It was an embarrassing-looking maneuver, due to Cindy’s frequent pantomiming of a small town girl in over her head.Kanga swiveled his hips to get the board behind him and then under him once more. He could feel his feet bumping against the tip of his boots, all too eager to join in, so he decided to let them. The recycler glided back into range and then folded himself into a ball, hands on the side of the board.The bouncing walnut was a theoretical trick, one long thought physically impossible for the human body to perform, but none of those previous bodies had Kanga’s determination and Cindy’s disbelief in stunt doubles. Up went one side of the board, hover energy focusing to a pinpoint on the other end.Joey thought of himself as a tumbleweed concealing a dagger, bouncing from end to end, using whichever side of the board was airborne to strike at Crystalheart. She proved adept at following the wild spin, swishing her feet to stay facing him. Accidentally being struck by a flying anyboard in the league had resulted in concussions, fractures, and even one death, but she blocked each blow with her forearms like it was a tongue depressor.The board cracked and splintered against her just like said piece of flimsy wood. Any more damage and its mechanism might give out, so Joey was forced to rise once more. In a devious ploy he freed one foot from the board and slipped that side of it under Crystalheart’s foot. Then he tried to pop her up into the air, or at least unbalance her, but-Ku-kwing! The board exploded, lacquered red chunks flying in all directions. Kanga punched. Blocked. Thrusted. Blocked. Kicked. Blocked. Kicked with both legs and landed painfully on his back. Blocked. Deep bruises bloomed all over him and still Crystalheart had not suffered a scratch. She wrapped him up in her arms, squeezing so tightly he could barely breathe. Her heartbeat pounded against his sternum. Ku-kwing! Ku-kwing! Ku-kwing!“I’m afraid it’s over for you,” she told him, but there was still something in her eyes, something he could not deny even as spots popped and faded in the rest of his vision. Encouragement.“No,” he struggled to say, rasping and hissing against her crushing vice, “it’s just starting! This is… This is the first day… of the year 2000!”Ku-kwing! The pressure weakened. It was just an embrace now. Kanga looked down. A spiderweb of cracks all across her heart. Its beating had ceased, but her breath remained for the time being, and icy tears suddenly streaked down her cheeks. The other Millennials started rushing forward, but her head spun, shooting them a look that kept them behind the crack. She turned back to Joey.“You know, the generation after the real nineties was the first one to have a lower life expectancy than their parents.” She swallowed, a bubble appearing in her heart and then leaking out under the cracks. “The capacity to care increased… but the caring didn’t.”“We have to look out for each other,” Kanga whispered, “and for ourselves… and for everything else. And it hurts.”“Caring hurts,” she agreed, color draining from her irises, like a cocktail losing itself in the melting ice. “Now I know someone else cares, even when they have every reason not to. Now I can have my reward and die early. I hope you last longer than me.” She slumped into Kanga’s arms.The others came forward and took her body from him solemnly. There was no ceremony; they threw her straight into the engine. It produced nothing. Kanga remembered that in recycling paper some of its integrity was lost each time. A Millennial was the same phenomenon, but with weeping human tissue. Their concentration mimicked strength. There was more of the world in them than there appeared to be.Even though she was gone, and the Millennials were already boarding away across the telescope, their prisoners discarded there among the trash they relied on, Kanga still felt the weight of her head in his lap. It was like the tingle of a hologram’s touch. The promise that a dream really could be felt in waking. He stood and turned toward the cameras at the pinnacle of the reeking rusty heap.“You heard me!” he shouted at the dispassionate eyes and ears. “Welcome to the new millennium!” The former recycler took off running for the distant edge of the telescope dish. When he reached it he would fling himself off into the shadow of the trees, free of the world of rain forest place mats, self-help books, virtual pets, and a million other things he was meant to buy, briefly worship, and discard.Off its edge he would be invisible to them, under them, in their soil whispering to the roots. What path he would pursue exactly was a mystery, but he didn’t fear the nineties. He was too far ahead for them to ever catch up, leapfrogging over the years like they were numbers ticking by at the bottom of a computer screen.