Gomorrah IV Blues
Preamble: After two centuries of economic, environmental, and political collapse, the largest corporations on Earth begin to desperately seek alternative means of human continuance, yet their greatest vices follow them wherever they may sow roots.
Set in a distant colony city built atop an asteroid, “Gomorah IV Blues” explores a brief moment in the lives of several wildly different inhabitants of the city. A neo-noir, jazz backed, cyberpunk melodrama, filled with suits, shootouts, and sleazy businessmen. Strap in, this ride starts at the top, but only goes down from here.
Gomorah IV Blues:
The Board:
Every level he passed sent a pulse of blinding light through the austere glass of the elevator window, forcing him to squint his bloodshot and dilated eyes to keep steady. He was nauseous, his stomach felt as if it were churning from this way to that one in his chest. The bright waves from the city subsided after a moment, along with the sound, which he had not even noticed. From a hardly subdued windswept wail, now to a hissing thrum as the glass carriage shot him down from the port and into the upper levels of the tower. Not that any of this made any sense to him at all, from where he was standing, it just felt like a terrible roller coaster. In an instant the hiss turned into a sharp metallic squeal, and his knees buckled, he took to clasping the brushed steel of the side rails in the elevator to keep from keeling over. Yet it was unbearable, the change in direction, in pressure, in speed, he felt like vomiting. It took what felt like every fiber in his being to subdue the urge, he squeezed his eyes shut, praying the food from yesteryear stayed where it ought to. It did not matter, in another moment it would be too late, in another moment…
The elevator stopped as quickly as it had started, and instead of a jarring slam, it flitted from the velocity of a cruise missile to a meandering sink, like an ice cube dancing to the bottom of a glass.
In some manner, which was alien to him, the glass in front of him peeled apart from one solid pane into two sheets, and retracted into, well somewhere, he supposed. Where the window had been, there was now nothing, and where he would’ve looked out, there was a golden hue cast over a seemingly empty hallway. He fiddled with a plastic lanyard thrown over his neck, it had a name, “Tom Mada”, a picture with the image of a handsome, albeit confused and disorientated, young man, with the same bloodshot and dilated eyes. He flipped the lanyard over, there were about a dozen lines of numbers and letters mixed together, some were separated, some were strung together, he had no idea what any of them were meant to represent, save for the first line, which was the only one composed of words. It read, “Executive in Waiting, p.2-14-2050, r.2-14-2250”.
Tom laid the card flat against his chest and stepped out of the used-to-be glass box. He turned around to look back, making sure he had not lost anything, but it was already gone, replaced already by the singular sheet of glass from before. He walked up to it, and looked down the shaft he assumed the elevator had gone to, and even though it seemed to be lit the whole way down, he found himself transfixed on the impossible void that seemed to collect at the center, as he watched the glass box shoot down, going, going, and gone, swallowed whole by the endless space beneath him.
“Mr. Mada?”, said a voice from behind him. It was light, inquisitive, but not intrusive, polite even, so much so he took just an extra second to gaze down into the paradoxical void beneath him. The voice called him again, and this time he turned. About six paces behind Tom stood a pretty woman, with a plain cobalt colored dress, and short, bobbing black curls.
He instinctively reached his hand out in welcome, “Hi, I’m uh Tom, I’m here for-.”
The girl met his hand with her own, it was cold, like she’d just taken it out of a freezer, but surprisingly gentle. She said her name was Julie, she knew why he was here, and she needed him to wait.
Julie brought him across the long hallway, the crème walls decorated sparsely with gilded paintings of men and women in suits shaking hands with others in similar suits, over and over again, like a chain, with whoever was on the right side of one taking place on the left side of the next painting, and so on.
Wherever they were going, it was deceptively far away, taking several minutes of walking at Julie’s strident pace to reach their destination. Tom had to force himself to keep up, which he thought must have been absurd, as the woman in heels bounded down the hall like she was being pulled across it. He pursed his lips to ask about the paintings on the wall, but before he could speak, Julie did.
“They’re all the former executives.” She stated plainly and matter-of-factly.
“Who?”, Tom asked dumbly, out of reflex more than anything.
“The pictures on the wall, that’s what you’re looking at right? They’re your predecessors!” Her tone had boiled over from whatever it was into bubbly and informative, like a tour guide he thought.
Tom looked back down the hall, which just like the elevator shaft remained well lit, yet its end was so far back now he could no longer make it out, a void within the void. The paintings stretched back just as far, trailing down as far as he could see into whatever was before him, and whatever was after. “That’s a lot of people.” He stated bluntly, and felt foolish for saying something so insubstantial.
The receptionist giggled at the incredulity of his remark, “I suppose so, but the turnover rate has always been a little high.” She motioned a finger at a small bronzed placard beneath one of the paintings which read, “Phillip E. Mallard, 2205-2207”.
“That’s an awfully short tenure.” Tom remarked, looking around at some others. They all had similarly short dates, a six year stint was the farthest anyone had gone, as far as he could tell anyways.
Julie turned around for a second and shrugged, “What can I say? I know you know how this business works, it’s cutthroat.” She mimed a knife blade across her throat with a finger, and kept walking.
“Is it any different?”, he intoned with a rime of anxiety on his lips.
She giggled again, “Advertising? No, I’m sure it’s been the same since they put you in the ice box.”
They finally trundled around a corner to a small lobby. The clinical creme gave way to cool black marble tile. The room was squareish, with semi circular corners, which each had pillars of contrastingly white marble. Both kinds of stone were replete with veins of gold which seemed to shift and flow like molasses might, up and down the stone. In the center of the room was a fountain with a statue above it. Tom stared at it for a moment to figure out what it was, while Julie headed off to a set of four-panneled oak double doors at the end of the room. It was an angel Tom thought, or at least it was meant to be. It was somewhat abstract, constructed out of brass sheets, skewing any particulars of detail. It was an angel Tom thought, because here were two outlined rectangles with little round spurs for feet, and a slender T-shaped one for a chest, two spindly arms, an odd hook for a head, and one part which was finely detailed, much more so than the other shapes of the sculpture. He walked around the back of the statue to get a better look at it.
Where the thing’s back should be he thought, there was one great wing, curled like a bird’s. Where the other components of the body were left as formless as possible, every single pinion and feather was rendered in stark, miraculous detail. But there was only one wing, and where the other might have been, water flowed out of a spout. Tom tracked the movement of the figure, looking then to where its lamentable spindles reached out to, down at the bottom of the fountain, underneath the water, another gilded wing.
The oak doors opened with a whoosh and a creak, snapping Tom out of his trance. He peeked his head up above the statue like a gopher.
“You asked me what was different.” Julie said, grabbing his attention.
“I, yeah, I did.” Tom replied, trailing off a bit as his gaze drifted again to the statue.
Julie goaded him, “Well follow me then.”
His focus returned to him, “I thought you said the job was the same?”
“It is.”
“So what’s different then?”
“Come and see.”
Past the doors, an immense space opened up. When Tom had grown up, he lived in an apartment that was a little less than a thousand square feet. This must have been at least seven or eight times that, which he supposed explained all the walking. The floors and walls were the same mix of white and black marble, with similar oak furnishing across the space. In one corner, on a raised platform, a sleek black grand piano stood, in another a set of bookshelves that could have been their own library sat, with jutting ends of velvet and felt covers.
It was so much to take in, his eyes danced up and down and around, but before he could even glance across the second half of the room he was interrupted. From the center, about where his eyes had stopped, were a pair of two dark leather chairs, facing a broad window which covered the entirety of the opposite wall.
Out of the one on the left, a lithe man rose. He was tall yet not lanky, old yet not decrepit. His hair was a pearl white combover, his jaw was pointed and thin. His suit was the shade of midnight, lapping up whatever rays shot through the window behind him and reflecting off the dull sheets of fire light bouncing off of lamps at the edge of the room. He smiled, and it was an odd smile, not because it was this thing or that, but because it was many things. Tom looked at this not quite old, not quite slender man’s smile which contained multitudes of meaning. It was both cold and warm, inviting and foreboding, both a smile and not a smile. Tom could not decide if he wanted to be this man or run far, far away from him.
“What do you think son? How is the place?”, the words rolled out like a sweet whiskey.
There was really only one word Tom was thinking of, and he couldn’t tell if this man wanted him to be honest or not, so he didn’t bother lying. “Opulent.” he says, in a measured tone.
The man cloaked in midnight raised his hand to his nose, like he was wafting in a smell from a bakery. He sniffed, “Hmmm, Opulent. Opulence. Opulence! Now doesn’t that, sorry this,” he spread his arms to gesture around the space, “doesn’t this really sell opulence. I love that word, you could bunch it up, and sell it in a can, and it would smell like this. It would smell like us. Isn’t that wonderful, that if people could they would buy our lives for the highest bidder.”
Tom stumbled subtly on the carpet walking towards the window wall, catching himself, “I’m sorry sir, I think I have the wrong room, I’m-”
The charming grey haired man held his left arm towards Tom like he was trying to read his mind, “You’re…hmmm…Thomas Mada…yes…from New York…born 2025…and you’re here about your job,” there was the shark tooth smile again, “how’d I do?” The old man extended a hand, “Cooper Deville, Chief Operating Executive for this little operation we call a city.”
“Is this an interview? I thought I already had the job.”
“Stubborn man! I like that! You’re right, of course. This is only a toast.” Cooper said, taking two small crystal glasses of amber off of an oblong table between the two chairs. He gave one to Tom and then forced the two together, creating a sonorous chime that rubbed the ear pleasantly. They drank, and the liquid, which Tom decided must have been a scotch or a bourbon, was glacially cold, and sweet, and it’s aftertaste was lingering heat. He took another sip, and it was just as sensational as the last, if not more so, as the lingering last drop met the rush of the new. Opulence in a bottle.
Cooper walked him over to the set of chairs, “Now I know I said the job was yours,” he started, raising a palm in caution as Tom’s eyes widened, “and it is. But first, there are some things you should consider, take a seat.”
Tom obeyed, the hair on his arms raised as he lowered himself into the large sweeping arms of the chair. It still seemed like an odd trick, like spikes might come out suddenly or he might be dropped down into the floor, like in an old movie. Nothing like that happened, it was just a deliciously comfortable place to sit. Cooper poured him another drink of the amber delight and sat down too.
They stared in silence for a moment out the monolithic wall of glass ahead of them.
“You know, it doesn’t get a whole lot better than this kid. You can literally see the whole world from here.”
Tom watched as small blips of light danced by the million around the abyss outside. There were big lights, and small lights, and lights of many different colors, some had been there the whole time, some stayed and went, and many were only there for a moment.
“Are those stars? Are we looking outside?”
Cooper chuckled, “No, we’re very much looking inside. You’re looking at about a billion little lives playing out outside our walls.”
“A billion people live here? In one city?”
“A billion people live in this ring of the city, there are seven. Each bigger and newer than the last one.”
“Christ.”
“Well, that fella’s not super popular around here but I’m sure he’d be surprised too if he ever came to visit.”
“I just mean, that’s a lot of people.”
“It is! A lot of people to sell to!” Cooper leaned over to look at Tom and laughed.
“It’s just a lot of people in general, I think, kind of nerve wracking.” Tom laughed back, nervously.
“Come and see.”
“See what.”
“That’s what Julie told you in the hall right?
“She did. How’d you know?”
Cooper shrugged and got up from the chair. He began to walk towards the exit.
“Are we done? You left your drink.”
“You’ll need it.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“See the city.”
“I don’t get it.”
Cooper paused and turned around, there was a hint of frustration in his glance, but it subsided instantly, like a twitching vein. “You know what my favorite story was growing up?”
“What?”
“Romulus and Remus, the brothers who built Rome. I liked them. A city founded by wolves. What a novel idea. Of course, my younger brother always hated that story.”
“Why?”
“He ended up being a carpenter, said all you need to make a city was a hammer, some nails, a board to hold it up.”
“If there’s a moral here sir, I’m afraid I’ve lost it.”
“Turn around son, and look down.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Whether or not this place was built by carpenters,” he reveals a cigar from his coat, lighting it, “or canines.”
Cooper left, the smell of ash behind him, and Tom walked up to the window. He reached out his pointer finger towards a splotch of blinking soft pink, and the glass shifted in a blink, in an instant the wall showed a different scene, down on a street somewhere, lit by the fluorescent pink of a neon sign, Tom watched as a man with a faceless metal helmet and a red coat walked into a bar.
The Hammer and the Nails:
His father had been a mechanic. He had even been a good one. In his spare time his father liked to restore old watches. He also liked to gamble. When he had been nine, two men came to their hab block, with broad shoulders and big black coats. They took long pistols out of their long dark coats and shot his father, his mother too but she had been ok. When those men hadn’t been looking, he took one of his father’s small chisels from off the counter and stabbed one with it. The other had run off. When he had been nine and one day, a man in a midnight suit found him at the hospital and he took him away, but that was alright, because then he knew the debt had been paid.
He was now twenty three and a day. He was walking into a bar. It was not a very nice place by any stretch of the imagination. The cinnabar red of the brick walls was fading to a chalky burgundy, where it was not fading it was chipped or cracked. There were no fancy chandeliers or candelabras, the lights came from sunken neon strips and burnt out filament bulbs, with pin pricks of orange cigarette embers lighting up the sea of degenerates that called this place home.
“What’re you drinking hon?” said the woman with the scratchy charm across the bar.
Dawn, his helmet told him. He was able to see more than her name too. In floating boxes of text she could not see beside her, all sorts of things appeared. She was addicted to Shift, a mild strength amphetamine and hallucinogen. She liked romance stories and Mexican food. She had bought a shotgun four years ago, a Titan Arms over-under 12 gauge, and the RF tag (installed for consumer ease of mind), said it was right under the counter.
He pointed to a dark amber bottle at the back and top left of her mismatched gallery of spirits. She pulled it down and poured him a glass. It was warm and tinged with the aroma of gasoline. He pulled a thin clear cable out from his coat sleeve and threaded it into the drinking glass. The whiskey shot up the tube in an instant.
“Starting a tab?”
The man nodded and passed a silver card across the bar, the bartender tapped it on a small terminal then handed it back, “Name?”
The man just held up each of the fingers on his right hand.
“Five? Like the number five?”, she said with an incredulous groan.
He nodded, the smooth black opaline surface of his helmet illuminated with text,
>Like_the_Number
She poured him another, then another, and after that one, someone else walked into the bar. From down a staircase behind a stage in the back, a squirrely looking fellow in a worn plaid suit had sat himself down on the other side of the bar. He had frumpy, sweat matted hair, and by the looks of it, a very curiously well constructed beige box. It appeared seamless and without any particular mechanism by which to open it. The voice in his helmet, who was named Two, translated from the FTC product manual, which was acquired with dubious legitimacy. She reads many features he ignores, cost, color, size, but threshes out some of the better ones. Vacuum-rated, tungsten coating, biometric access only.
Five walked over to the squirely man, Two said his name was Something O’Connor, a trade facilitator between the port on Side-7 and the rest of the rings. O’Connor had been smuggling products from the port for a long time, and they had known that, that’s why anyone gets involved with port business in the first place. That was not the crime though, this pitiable fool of a man’s crime was smuggling the wrong brand; Employee Handbook, Section B-Subsection 29e: Any employee of Imperius Incorporated, or any of its subsidiaries, may not possess, distribute, or otherwise willingly obtain any product manufactured or distributed by Fengtao Trade Confederation, LLC.
“Are-are you the buyer?”, the boy with the box stammered.
Five shakes his reflective head side to side.
“Are you-you’re-!”
>Bad News! :(
The bar erupted into the sound of a thunderous symphony.
The scratchy voiced bartender reached for her shotgun under the bar, aiming it at the steel headed savage.
Five remembered when he actually was five, and his father had been building a swiss watch, a very special kind he had said. One where there were a hundred different gears that each had a hundred different tiny jobs, and when they all worked together, they created a work of art.
The bartender is so frightened, she does not even shoulder the shotgun, giving it a jarring tug. It responds with a click, but not a boom.
Five remembered asking his father why people would then bother buying a Casio if they could have a Rolex. “Because some people just need to tell the time, kiddo.”
He spun around and dropped to one knee, shouldering the rifle slung underneath his jacket. It hissed for a second, less than a second, for one-one thousandth of a second, the rifle hissed, then with a squeeze, a shockwave sent every bottle between Five and the bartender into a cacophonic klaxon of shards. She dropped to the ground long after the tungsten spikes flew through her heart and spine at mach six.
They liked his watch story, for the commercial. It started with a close up view of a cluster of gears in a watch, then it zoomed out to become the spokes of a wheel on a tank. The tank was on a conveyor belt. A machine smashes it as it passes, gears and scrap jut out from it. Then again, and again, compressing the components over and over, making them smaller. Until, the camera zooms in at the end product of the assembly line, a twin barreled rifle layered with chrome and black polymer. It does a 360-rotation as the conveyor belt fades into a black void and the tagline appears: Never sacrifice luxury for security-The Staccato Line, by Monogram Security Solutions. Perfection, Tailored.
Five took the beige box from the counter as what-was-O’Connor slumped to the floor. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, its twin barrels puffing smoke in the absence of all the regulars who had gone away. He arrives at the stairs behind the stage, and atop them is a grated door of black iron.
Five knocked on the door, there was no answer. The helmet told him there were one-two-three-four men inside, represented by four big orange blobs in the purple of thermals. He tried to push open the door, but it was locked. This scared the quartet behind the door and they peppered the other side with rounds prematurely. Five waited for them to stop, and after two and half seconds, the last man to the right, ran out of ammo. He put a duo of .65 caseless rounds through the lock on the door. Then in a sudden burst, he ran up the last few steps of the stairs and slammed his heel into the door, swinging it ajar. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small baseball sized sphere, bound with dozens of small bulbs. The bulb landed with a satisfying tha-thunk, and sent tens of thousands of lumens into the eyes of the poor fools who thought the big door would save them. They wailed and howled, like a pack of hounds, Five thought. He watched for a moment as one rolled around, another ran into a wall, and the other two looked for each other. He let the Staccato sing another eight notes, and kept moving.
He went like this, up another half dozen floors, each filled with more sorry fools than the last. Then when he got to the top, and he was quite messy when he got there, he knocked on another door. No iron bars on this one, just a plain white office door, at the top of a plain rundown building. This time it opened all on its own. Inside, a man in a chalk white suit sat at an old desk, with scratches in the grain and splinters on the edges. He was portly and jolly, bald too, he laughed morosely at himself when Five entered the room, with the little box in one hand and the rifle in the other.
“Well I suppose today’s as good as any.”, the bald man said, holding up his arms in surrender.
Five placed the box on the degrading desk and waited.
The man in the white suit grimaced, and put his thumb on the top of the box. Air hissed out in a cool stream from a suddenly extant gap between two previously non-existent halves. The bald man did him the courtesy of opening the box. Inside, were half a dozen clear pill looking objects. Inside were many grains of a shifting something, it looked like a swimming, living glob of metal.
>?
“Really? You came all this way, killed all these people, and you have no idea what you’re even after.”
>Professional Curiosity
The man took his thick hands and brought up a vial to shake, the metal thing followed his figure, like it were a magnet, “They’re called Fengtao Micro-Miracles,” he laughed again, more like a wheeze this time.
“Cure for the common everything, right in this here little vial.”
>Why?
The shoulders of the white suit crinkled as the man shrugged, “Only thing that sells better than drugs is medicine, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.”
>Selling to ur ppl :/?
“Well yeah, oh come on don’t look at me like that. It’d have been cheaper than FTC would sell it for, and leagues better than what your folks are peddling. If we made a little extra scratch on top of that, where’s the harm?”
Five shook his head, >Not ur scratch to make
“Oh and I suppose you decide that then? Who can and can’t meet out an inch of shit for themselves down here”
Five shook his head again and the helmet display began to blink in an alternating pattern
>Mr. Scratch
>↑
>Mr. Scratch
>↑
>Mr. Scratch
>↑
“I don’t know what the fuck that’s ‘sposed to mean, but if you’re gonna shoot me to kingdom come just get it over with.”
Five reached back into his coat and pulled out a lump of putty, similar in color to their little box. He sculpted it in his hands for a moment, pressing and kneading, entirely focused, as if the other man was not there.
A moment later he presented the putty in a new shape. It looked like a little dog, and he pranced up and down the desk for a moment before placing it where the missing capsule had been in the box.
>Roof
“Yes that’s very clever, now leave me be, I’ve one more cigar to smoke and a shot to chase it with, if ye don’t mind.”
Five held his hands up in mocking surrender, then placed a little silver needle in the putty dog.
>3:00
“Seems more than fair.”, shrugged the man in the white suit.
>Tutto Passa
>2:45
The bald man wrapped the cigar between his knuckles and took a long drag.
The chrome headed man leapt down a half dozen flights of stairs.
The building erupted into a torrent of flame and slag.
Across the city, a man in the highest tower watches a soft pink light fade into the void.