He didn’t succeed at keeping his face still, because she looked pissed off. “Sorry.” Hubert, Etc was one of nature’s apologizers. A housemate once made a set of cardboard tombstones for Halloween, hung like bunting across the kitchen cabinets. Hubert, Etc’s read “Sorry.”
“Don’t sorry me. Look, Etcetera, at all this. On paper, this place is useless, the stuff coming off that line has to be destroyed. It’s a trademark violation; even though it came off an official Muji line, using Muji’s feedstock, it doesn’t have Muji’s license, so that configuration of cellulose and glue is a crime. That’s so manifestly fucked up and shit that anyone who pays attention to it is playing the wrong game and doesn’t deserve consideration. Anyone who says the world is a better place with this building left to rot—”
“I don’t think that’s the argument,” Hubert, Etc said. He’d once had this kind of discussion a lot. He wasn’t young and avant-garde, but he understood this. “It’s that telling people what they can do with their stuff produces worse outcomes than letting them do stupid things and letting the market sort out the good ideas from—”
“You think anyone believes that anymore? You know why people who need furniture don’t just break down the door of this place? It’s not market orthodoxy.”
“Of course not. It’s fear.”
“They’re right to be afraid. This world, if you aren’t a success, you’re a failure. If you’re not on top, you’re on the bottom. If you’re in between, you’re hanging on by your fingernails, hoping you can get a better grip before your strength gives out. Everyone holding on is too scared to let go. Everyone on the bottom is too worn down to try. The people on the top? They’re the ones who depend on things staying the way they are.”
“So what do you call your philosophy then? Post-fear?”
She shrugged. “Don’t care. Lots of names for it. None of that matters. That’s what I care about.” She pointed to the dancers and the beds. Another line of machines was online and folding-table-and-chair sets were piling up.
“What about ‘communist’?”
“What about it?”
“That’s a label with a lot of history. You could be communists.”
She waved her beard at him. “Communist party. That doesn’t make us ‘communists’ any more than throwing a birthday party makes us ‘birthdayists.’ Communism is an interesting thing to do, nothing I ever want to be.”
The ladder clanged and the catwalk vibrated like a tuning fork. They looked over the edge just as Seth’s head came into view. “Hello, lovebirds!” he said. He was sloppy and jittery, high on something interesting. Hubert, Etc grabbed him before he could reel over the guardrail. Another person popped over the edge, one of the bearded threesome that had been by the beer.
“Hey-hey!” He seemed stoned, too, but it was hard for Hubert, Etc to tell.
“This is the guy,” Seth said. “The guy with the names.”
“You’re Etcetera!” the new guy said, arms wide like he was greeting a lost brother. “I’m Billiam.” He gave Hubert, Etc a lingering drunkard’s embrace. Hubert, Etc had dated guys, was open to the idea, but Billiam, beautiful tilted eyes aside, was not his type and too high to consider in any event. Hubert, Etc firmly peeled him off, and the girl helped.
“Billiam,” she said, “what have you two been up to?”
Billiam and Seth locked eyes and dissolved into hysterical giggles.
She gave Billiam a playful shove that sent him sprawling, one foot dangling over the catwalk.
“Meta,” she said. “Or something like it.”
He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miserable lot. In his day—eight years before—the scourge had been called “Now,” something they gave to source-code auditors and drone pilots to give them robotic focus. He’d eaten a shit-ton of it while working on zepps. It made him feel like a happy android. The conspiracy people had said the same thing about Now that they said about Meta. End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro–status-quo.
“What’s your name?” Hubert, Etc said.
“Does it matter?” she said.
“It’s driving me nuts,” he admitted.
“You’ve got it in your address book,” she said.
He rolled his eyes. Of course he did. He rubbed the interface patch on his cuff and fingered it for a moment. “Natalie Redwater?” he said. “As in the Redwaters?”
“There are a lot of Redwaters,” she said. “We’re some of them. Not the ones you’re thinking of, though.”
“Close to them,” Billiam said from his stoned, prone, ironic world. “Cousins?”
“Cousins,” she said.
Hubert, Etc tried hard not to let phrases like “trustafarian” and “fauxhemian” cross his mind. He probably failed. She didn’t look happy about having her name out.
“Cousins as in ‘poor country relations,’” Seth said, from his fetal position, “or cousins as in ‘get to use the small airplane?’”
Hubert, Etc felt bad, not just because he was crushing on her. He’d known people born to privilege, plenty in the zepp scene, and they could be nice people whose salient facts extended beyond unearned privilege. Seth wouldn’t have normally been a dick about this kind of thing—it was precisely the sort of thing he wasn’t normally a dick about—but he was high.
“Cousins as in ‘enough to worry about kidnapping’ and ‘not enough to pay the ransom,’ she said, with the air of someone repeating a timeworn phrase.
The arrival of the two stoned boys sucked the magic out of the night. Below, the machines found a steady rhythm, and Rule 34 spun again, blending witch house and New Romantic, automatically syncing with the machines’ beat. It wasn’t pulling a lot of dancers, but a few diehards were out, being beautiful and in motion. Hubert, Etc stared at them.
Three things happened: the music changed (psychobilly and dubstep), he opened his mouth to say something, and Billiam said, in a tittering singsong: “Buuuu-sted!” and pointed at the ceiling.
They followed his finger and saw the flock of drones detach from the ceiling, fold back their wings, and plunge into a screaming drop. Natalie pulled her beard back on and Billiam made sure his was on, too.
“Seth, masks!” Hubert, Etc shook his friend. There had been a good reason for Seth to carry both of their masks, but he couldn’t remember it. Seth sat up with his eyebrows raised and a smirk on his face. Tucking chin to chest, Hubert, Etc swarmed over Seth and roughly turned out his pockets. He slapped his mask to his face and felt the fabric adhere in bunches and whorls as his breath teased it out and the oils in his skin were wicked through its weave. He did Seth.
“You don’t need to do this,” Seth said.