Dispatch No.01
Dispatch is an experimental new section featuring solicited and editorial writing.

Fuck

Fuck

Fuck

I really thought I had enough juice.

In school we faked crashing with emergency power, for practice. Just gotta manage the float like they teach you: “not go, and not no, just low” meaning thrust, meaning still falling out of the fucking sky, but mind your ankles on impact, if you can.

I tap tap tap tap thrust as soon as I see rooftops poking through the grey on grey and in exchange my battery warning goes from small and red to giant and flashing. I’m gonna try and plummet in the general direction of one of those surfaces and hope I don’t pop through the smog and impale myself on a hundred-year-old antenna or something. That happens sometimes, they said. There was a diagram.

All of a sudden my boots make contact, it’s loud as shit. Clangy. I got like 1% power now. Shit I almost died? But I didn’t? I missed the roof roof though, instead I’m standing on this metal cage that wraps all the way around and down the building. I can feel it rattling, like it’s mad I stepped on it. I realize my heart sensor has been telling me to “take a few breaths, nice and easy” and I tell Balthazar to shut that shit off, we’re not gonna be breathing easy any time soon.

Instead of burning my last bit of juice just to fly down I find a climbable part of the scaffolding and ungracefully slip climb trip drop to the ground.

The actual ground, wow.

Damn, I’m lucky that whole building didn’t come down under me. It’s a tall chunky rectangle made of smaller chunky rectangles, and some of the little rectangles have just given up hanging together and went and smashed themselves into little red rocks on the grey ground. Why is there even scaffolding, they doing a renovation and gave up? Seems like a lost cause at this point in history but maybe someone thought they could make it work. Hey everyone I got some cheap real estate, ground is back baby, get in while it’s hot!

Pretty much all the windows are smashed out, not even taped over or nothing, so I guess they gave up. This whole thing would last about two seconds in a superstorm either way. I wonder what those are like down here.

“Balthazar, where’s my nearest active port? Ideally with L-Q so we can get going ASAP please.”

I said it out loud rather than subvocalizing cuz fuck it, not like there’s anyone around to hear me say I’m lost and out of lightning.

“Downloaded maps show a charging port 1.4 miles north of here, but I can’t determine if it’s lightning-quick or standard," he says, his rock-solid voice vibrating from implant to bone to brain. Ever since I gave him a slight Welsh accent I feel like he knows more. He doesn’t, but I feel like he does.

“Show me,” I say.

“I’m sorry, visuals are disabled on emergency power.”

“Can you ping someone and let them know I’m stuck? I’m definitely gonna be late,” I say.

“I’m sorry, outside of emergency services, messaging is disabled on backup power. Also, I should note: I will only be able to process approximately one more query before backup power is fully depleted.”

I freeze up. Suddenly I need like THE perfect question, like I’m talking to a magical AI Sphinx or some shit. Get it wrong and I’ll just wander the lowers forever wondering how much of my battery Balty burned saying “I’m sorry” and “approximately.”

I’ll save it. Yeah. I’ll just go see about that power station. At worst I’ll be stuck for a bit, rocket back up, be just a little bit late, won’t even have to say why.

I gotta get going. I feel like when you’re the last one to an IRL hang that gives everyone time to talk shit about you, all together, and then you get there and the whole time you’re wondering what they were talking about when you weren’t.

This would be dead embarrassing if she could see me stuck here literally, like, walking. Or if there was anyone around at all. But I can’t see anything human except for way the fuck up there, little dots flying around, silhouettes against the white-grey clouds. Cloudy enough I won’t even get a trickle charge from the solar either.

Which makes me realize my last question was fucked all along: the sky looks like a lumpy backlit blanket and I could never remember which direction the sun comes from anyway. All that is usually on my UI but.

Fine, Sphinx, I give up:

“Which way is north?” I ask.

“The direction you’re facing,” Bal says.

Then I hear the 3-tone chime of my backup battery admitting defeat, true death, complete emptiness. So long buddy, see you on the other side.

I start walking.

If there was someone here, I could just get a jump charge — enough power to get me in the air for a little hop to this charging station — or even just to get my connect back up and running. Ask about ground level real estate opportunities. Important stuff.

But everyone is way up there at cruising altitude, where I’m supposed to be. I wonder if they saw me, like… poor idiot didn’t charge up and now he’s stuck down there. Or do I look like a regular Dropout type-of-person who goes to ground all the time and they’re just like shit glad I’m not that kinda guy.

There was this mystery series when we were kids, had an episode where people would fake an emergency fall and when someone came down to ground to help them out, give them a jump, the people who lived there would pop out and net them and steal their shit. Kinda dark for a kid’s show, now that I think about it. So I very much doubt someone is gonna scope me from up there and fly down to help, not with that kinda thing in their head.

Damn I wish I hadn’t thought of that. I’m walking down the middle of this old vehicle street, solid slab buildings with little windows on both sides, just dust and shadows looking down on me. What does a window look like if there’s a murderer hiding behind it? Now I can feel myself trying to fucking peer through walls with my bare eyes. Well, I guess I still have goggles on they just don’t do anything now. I haven’t gone this long unconnected in a while. Since the breakup, probably.

My thoughts are so loud. This ground makes so many sounds when you walk on it. Clump scrape whoosh clump scrape. And all the clumps and scrapes are different depending on whatever’s down there under my boots. Like if you walked all the time you’d just be constantly hearing these weird feet noises? I double-tap my ear to flag the sounds for noise cancellation before it drives me insane, but I forgot all my shit is shut down.

I take my headphones out since they’re useless right now. I know it’s risky, we get so many warnings about unprotected ears and noise and shit, but I don’t know, it feels safer for some reason. Animal instincts, keep your guard up. It is super weird having them naked though. It’s like there’s this airy everywhere noise I’m not used to. But mostly I just hear the stupid scraping of my stupid boots.

I walked past all those warehouses and then these tall skinny buildings and now it’s like all sorts of stuff mixed together. People really just built whatever down here I guess, no plan. One story, ten stories, it’s all over the place, except that everything has been painted with this magically uniform filter of brown-grey dust. There’s even cars, man, with tires. I know those haven’t moved in years. I wish I remembered when we ran out of gas. Like I have no idea if it was ten years ago or thirty, I just know I haven’t ever seen one of these go in real life, just in clips. Shit, can you imagine how fucking scary it would be if the lights just popped on and one of these took off outta nowhere? If my shoes are this loud, tires must be crazy.

I look up just to see if there’s any sun to steal, and I’m wondering if my friends can still see my location at all. Do our suits actually have some sort of hidden backup nobody-goes-missing emergency power or am I truly invisible right now? Maybe my friends are like “why is this dude flying so slow come on” when I’m actually down here literally kicking rocks.

Ok, excellent, I see the charging station. Or I think I see it, cuz it doesn’t look like the spots I’m used to, or even a basic one. It’s just like… a bunch of cables and equipment in a pile in the middle of an empty square of slightly less dusty concrete. Looks like someone has been here at some point in the last decade at least. Is that good or bad?

It’s actually a bunch of cords made out of one really big cord, cuz I can see it gets thicker and runs back through just this open window in one of the nearby buildings. Sketchy. But also, not like I have another option.

Wait, I’m kinda fucked. Like… I know all this stuff interfaces with my batteries probably but — I have no idea how exactly. There’s always an AI and a bunch of arms to make sure each device gets the right amount and they know how to hook them up with what and all that.

“Balthazar, help me out with these cords,” I say to no one, since Balthazar is dead and gone until I can resurrect him with those cords I don’t know how to use.

I spot a desk, over by the building, and thank fuck it’s got a ringer or something on it. I wave my hands around it, trying to trigger the sensor, but nothing happens.

“Hello? Ring bell," I say out loud to whatever computer is in charge, throwing in a “please” just in case to make sure I don’t make the AI mad. I don’t know, people program their shit differently sometimes, I don’t want any trouble. Nothing happens though.

I touch the bell thing, maybe it’s capacitive instead of audio or spatial.

“You have to actually hit the thing on top, dude.”

The voice scares the shit out of me but I cover it pretty quick. A guy has appeared in the window, leaning on the big fat cable that goes up and over the sill and into the room behind him where I can’t see shit. Could be like twenty people in there about to wreck me. I don’t think you’d even need more than two people to wreck me though, I don’t know. Like, I’m tough I think, compared to my friends, but it’s all relative probably. I feel like ground people are different.

He’s using his long skinny arms to make this hand motion, like I’m supposed to sort of smack the thing. I copy him and the bell rings out, real physical sounding. I touch the bell and holy shit yeah, it was actually vibrating before I stopped it — not even a speaker or anything.

“Yeah, you got it,” the guy says and gives me an actual thumbs up, wow. “Looking for a charge?”

Moment of no return, feels like.

“Yeah, def. You got L-Q? I need juice first, to pay, cuz of the wireless,” I say, inverting every single fucking part of the sentence like a moron who has never heard their own voice. I have heard my own voice.

The guy stares at me hard enough I feel like I gotta look at my boots or at the bell or something to avoid the straight up, down the barrel eye contact.

“I got lighting, but it’s inside. The cord’s not long enough. You don’t have any coin at all?”

Sir, I haven’t even seen coin in my entire life.

“No, sorry, just digital, but I should be able to pay as soon as I get past zero, I’ve got nothing powered right now,” I say, but halfway through I wonder how dangerous it is to tell this guy I’m 100% out-of-touch and murderable right now. But what am I gonna do? I don’t even know how the cords work. Damn, I’m kinda goofy I need to like… know more shit.

“Fine, I can make it work,” guy says. “Door right there, up the stairs, I’ll hook you up.”

He takes one step back and his lanky body just poofs back into the shadows. Like man if you’re not a murderer why do you keep doing murder-y shit. Let’s get this going, get through the door, get the juice, get going. There’s little rocks everywhere on the ground, where do all these little rocks come from? Loud as shit, man.

I go through this solid solid door, scrapes the shit out of the ground, loud. There’s boxes and crates everywhere, chairs stacked till they lean. A lot of stuff I don’t recognize at all, feels like pieces of things, and this one little canyon of space through the middle to some stairs. Are these like, pipes? I don’t know. It all seems too heavy to work up at altitude, where weight equals battery life equals money.

Maybe I can snag something light when I’m fully powered again, bring it to the hang. If you’re gonna be late might as well have a story and a souvenir – I been to the ground y’all, I saw with my own two eyes, no UI or nothing. A real like, topic. See that’s what I was always telling her, like, talking is fine but what do you even say.

As I climb the stairs I can hear some stuff buzzing — powering on. Electricity exists, that’s a good sign.

There’s no door to the room at the top of the stairs, so I get a good clean look right at his face, but no ID pops up or anything. Just meeting a stranger with NO info? It has happened to me once, but we all did that on purpose, at this party. Sort of a lo-fi thing she brought me to cuz she was always trying shit like that.

He’s tall. And skinny in every way: stick legs, stick middle, even like a kinda vertical head with his hair sticking, and just wearing a mix of inside clothes, not even a jumpsuit. No sign of gear at all.

I’m not used to seeing this much skin. In this context. He nods at me. I nod back. Why am I so tense like I need to impress this dude? A second ago I was worried about being murdered and now I’m like “sup bro.”

“You can sit if you want, it’ll take me a second to get it running, some updates queued up, I don’t use this system as much,” he says, pointing to a bench of chairs all connected together in a row of four.

“Cool, yeah. Thanks,” I say.

He turns his back to me, goes towards his setup, which doesn’t seem like something a murderer would do. I wonder if I’m gonna get like fifty messages as soon as I’m back online. Stop flying so slow and are you okay and holy shit we thought you were dead. Honestly, maybe this is kinda cool, people might think it’s interesting or something.

Otherwise it’s like — we stand around and talk to each other but we’re always talking to each other online so being in person doesn’t really feel like… anything. Or I try and talk to new people – which I know is the whole point of doing these things – but I feel like most of the time it’s just me pretending to be into their shit or them pretending to be into my shit until we find a way out of the convo and it starts all over again.

It is annoying though, people are always like “in the era of superconnection the kids don’t know how to connect” blah blah blah. They always ignore that it’s a GOOD thing that we have these groups of people we are willing to be open channel with, no? Why am I being judged by the generation that won’t stop talking about how they survived the “loneliness epidemic.” At least we have real friends. Sex is an optional part of the human experience. Just because cavemen and Gen A were obsessed with fucking doesn’t mean we have to. Cavemen also killed each other with rocks and sticks, does that mean I am not being a good Homo sapien if I’ve never bludgeoned someone to death?

“Ok, up and running I think, you’re good to go,” he says, turning around with just one smaller cord in his hand that he’s holding out to me.

“Uh,” is all I say.

“You can connect it,” he says, still holding the thing floppy in between us.

“Sorry, I guess. I don’t know how to connect it actually, usually Balty connects with the station and they kinda plug it all in,” I say.

“Baltconnects?” he says.

“Balthazar,” I say, pointing to my helmet, as if the AI lives in the helmet, which it does not. He laughs kinda, like out loud, like a single h- a-.

“Interesting name for it. Ok, I know how to manually connect it for the startup charge, hold on a sec,” he says, stepping WAY close to me like, right up in my space, and then he actually REACHES OUT and touches my CP unit and my body kinda freaks out and we both sort of hop backwards like little birds.

He points at my chest with his free hand.

“There’s a slider there to manually open the charge port in the front, I was just gonna open it for you. Since you said you don’t know how to do it,” he says.

“No, gotcha, gotcha, sorry. Just jumpy y’know, from being on ground level. Go for it,” I say, realizing like ten seconds later this dude probably lives here and I’m talking shit.

“Sorry, one more thing before I send you the power, do you mind covering your external sensors? Just while you’re in here?” he says.

“Uh sure,” I say, completely unsure of what he means. Maybe my senses? Most of them are in the headpiece so I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that.

“Probably easiest to take the helmet off and cover it up. It’ll block all the sensors,” he says. He points to what looks like a sort of thick silver blanket laying on one of the chairs.

“Oh no worries, nothing is on right now, fully dead,” I say, but he kinda frowns.

“Right, but as soon as I hit ‘go’ all of that will power on and start grabbing everything in here: my face, the room, the equipment. We normally don’t even have people in here with sensors live or dead. But it’s not a big deal, that blanket will block it all no problem. Then you can put it back on out there,” he says, nodding towards the street outside.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about but I need the juice and I feel like it’s getting awkward, so I take my helmet off, put it on the chair like he said. He grabs the blanket and covers the chair and the helmet.

“Great, thank you,” he says, and hits a button that makes the whole room hum a little louder.

“Ah shit, sorry one sec, there are sensors in my vest too…” I start but he cuts me off.

“Not in that model, actually. You have internal sensors for your body, but it doesn’t capture anything external. All that is in the helmet. We just don’t wanna be scanned and tagged, y’know,” he says, but I still don’t get it. What would be the point of avoiding one scan from some rando one time? What’s a trillion minus one? And who the fuck is we? I imagine nets shooting up from the floor, grabbing my feet, like the kids show.

Whoa, is that what I look like without my headpiece? I can only kinda see in the reflection of the window, my head looks tiny! Little tiny naked head sitting on top of a giant body is what it looks like. No wonder people wear headpieces 24/7. If there was a god I’d tell him he got the proportions wrong and we had to fix it for him. One of many things bro fucked up, one of many things.

I feel my gear powering up. I hadn’t noticed it like, vibrates ever so slightly all through my body. Does it do that all the time? Feels like last time I got too high and couldn’t stop thinking about having fingerprints. I keep waiting for the UI to pop up but I don’t have my headset on.

Now the guy is messing around in this drawer that’s making a ton of noise, like he’s doing it on purpose, like it doesn’t even bother him that he doesn’t have any filters on. Sees what he sees, hears what he hears.

“This will be the cost for full battery, good with you?” he says, turning around with a device in hand with a little physical screen to show the number. The charge is a bit expensive but that makes sense. Probably not a ton of customers, probably not a ton of competition.

“All good,” I say, tapping my hand to the unit. It beeps, thankfully. That means I’m powering up, I paid the man, I’m practically on my way soon as this thing finishes.

“You live down here?” I ask while the guy goes back to his screens.

“Nope.”

“So you go up and down then? Do you gear up when you go up?” I ask, wondering like… does he fly without a helmet and stuff? I don’t even know if that’s allowed.

“Oh,” he says, kinda weird. “No, I mean. I don’t live in this building, we live…” He trails off and then just nods up and away, real vague.

“Ah okay, yeah, I was wondering,” I say.His head is down in the drawers still, just messing with his stuff. I wonder if he actually has something to do over there or he’s just like please get this Dropout outta my office house thing for fuck’s sake.

He doesn’t say anything for awhile, which I guess is fair, since I didn’t actually ask a question.

Damn, I made it all the way to the literal dirt, and I’m about to fly off and try and tell the story and they’re gonna be like ‘hey what was he like, what did he say, is he grouped up,’ and I’m gonna say what? Make stuff up? I’m not good at making stuff up. She used to tell me that all the time. Said stop trying so hard to be interesting, just be yourself and say what you think, like, what does that even mean. What I think is I’m bad at thinking. Or at least I’m bad at thinking of good stuff or interesting stuff or whatever I’m supposed to be thinking that people want to hear about so badly.

“You may not get much signal till you’re a-ways out,” he says. “It’s blocked around here.”

“Ah okay,” I say. “Is it the building, because of the old walls or whatever?”

“No, that doesn’t really work anymore, the latest stuff will punch through pretty much any material, you have to build an active system to keep it quiet,” he says.

"You blocked it on purpose? What if you need to talk to someone?”

He laughs, which I know usually means I said something dumb, not something funny.

“People live here,” he says, not unfriendly but not friendly.

He turns around and looks at me, very focused of all sudden, which is weird. I can see exactly where his eyes are looking, these little tiny twitches. He’s got dark black stubble with a bunch of little white hairs all over. Lots of little wrinkles, like he makes this face all the time. I realize he can see my eyes now too, since neither of us have visors on, so all of a sudden I’m looking at the floor or the screens or like — what’s even normal to look at?

“I guess it’s probably pretty strange for you,” he says. “A lot of us just think it’s all too much.”

He nods towards me when he says that, but I can tell what he really means is my gear. Which is modest, actually. I know a lot of people who are fully hardwired with their shit now, for latency. I thought about it too, but I don’t really have the money to get it done right. When I mentioned it to her, she had said it was…what was the word she used? I want to ask Balty to pull up the convo but I can’t see my UI proper without the helmet.

“Good to go?” the guy says.

“Oh yeah, definitely, thanks, top notch,” I say. I look at the guy again before I uncover the helmet since he was being so weird about it.

“Yeah you can grab it,” he says. “Just don’t put it on till you’re out in the street, please. And you should have location and all that once you’re out there. And then full signal will kick in about a half a mile out. Or up, I guess.”

“Yep, I’m headed back up,” I say.

He just nods. Cool.

I start walking to the stairs automatically, very normal, except my mind is going crazy: that was it. That was my big adventure. And that was it it, because Balty doesn’t have any of it logged: not the convo, not the sound of the little rocks, nothing.

And then suddenly I’m back out in the street past the door and the boxes and the stuff and he doesn’t follow me or wave from the window or anything and now I’m just standing here thinking I should’ve said something or asked more questions or…

There’s this little patch of life right between my boots, this tiny firework of green. The concrete isn’t solid I guess, when you really look at it. There’s little dots of green all over the place, like someone shook them out on top of the grey and they took it from there. It’s crazy, my friend works so hard with this little plant he’s got. It looks miserable, but I guess it’s harder to grow stuff up there. Not sure plants are meant to grow at altitude. But down here I’m looking at this like baby tree or whayever just busting up through the road like get the fuck outta my way or else.

Fuck I gotta go, I’m probably so late.

I put on my helmet on and do a full reset just for good measure, but not until I found a patch of concrete with no green or nothing as my boots and shit kick on. Not trying to make life down here any harder than it already is, little plant guy.The suit pulls at me and my weight shifts from my legs and my feet to my ass and armpits as lift ramps up. My UI says full fucking charge, good for a trip there and back again, for sure this time. A few seconds later and the buildings below me have gone from short tall and medium to uniform rectangles on a haphazard grid. Look at me, on my way, unmurdered.

A little ways up the messages come in all at once, as if I flew through a cloud of data hanging in the air, waiting for me, but I leave them unopened for a sec so I can have Balthazar pull up the memory of that convo I couldn’t remember.

Subservient. That’s the word she used when I mentioned people getting hardwired. She also had said subsumed. She was always good at making words go together like that. Subservient, subsumed, sacred — she used all three in like two sentences. And I couldn’t even make conversation with one dude who lives on the ground.

What does he do when he can’t remember something? Do you just go crazy trying to dig the word up in your own memory, just die being like ‘I can almost remember!’ Or make shit up that probably didn’t even happen? Brains are mushy, that’s just a fact. Without an onboard how can you trust that lump.

Damn, that would’ve been a good question to ask him.

I forgot to grab a souvenir.

“Balty, did you get any of that convo?” I ask.

“No,” it says.

“How long were you offline?”

“About thirty-two minutes.”

I coulda sworn I was down for like two hours, but I guess he’s right. I’m not even that late. But it didn’t feel like minutes, not at all.

Nobody even really gives me shit for it when I get there, they just wanna know why I went offline, if I was fighting with my mom or doing something “private.” I tell them the truth, but a little vague, ya know, to keep it interesting. I was offline for a bit, having a convo. They roll their eyes at me, but she doesn’t. She just kinda looks at me while I’m saying it and I really wish I could see her eyes.