A Tension Economy

A Tension Economy

by Adam Parker

Mike never much liked going downtown. Too many of “those” people, he would say; them scabby-stabbys, and the gropers, or those just there crying who would reach out and grab your leg and not let go and, especially, he hated the ones there calling you, cutting themselves. But the day that this part of the story happened, he had to take the train there (they never had a space big enough for his truck) to get tickets for his girlfriend, Suzette, so he could take her to the Tal Ben-Ami concert that September. Suzette would tell you that, in case you have been living under a literal rock for the past decade, Tal Ben-Ami is only the most impactful and opinionformative aurtist of the second half of the trientyfirst centurary. Needless to say, she was really looking forward to going and Mike said he was more than happy to shell out for the exorbitant price of the tickets. Then the bombshell dropped. He would have to leave the luxury of his home office as the singer-dancer-comedienne, plus actor, was in such demand and, in her challenge of the concert monopolies, she had been banned from the omninet ticketing system and now had to resort to selling the seats, for each show of her world tour, to lineups of real, live people. And she was being charged a premium to pay for the police presence, to control the mob, at each sale. She was set to lose billions, but would become, possibly, the first female trillionaire. On the train ride down that day, Mike got the idea to buy a few extra tickets to speculate on.

They were selling the tickets, right there, at the same venue that the concert would be held at, some six months later: the TruAgua Arena. The selling of the tickets was filmed; to be broadcast locally (with a highlights reel nationally), by a series of cameras set up on quickly set up scaffolding towers, in the parking lot and on the field, and from the usual camera stands along the sidelines and up in the bleachers. Getting his hand on the tickets was a true sport. They had the full crowd pressed up against the bay doors covering the front doors, and at noon it was a mad dash into the place, as they raised them. The glass had been removed from the inner doors so it was clear on through, and up the stairs, through the food and merchandise corridor and down the stands to the field where they had a booth set up at the far goal post, behind bomb-proof glass, all lit up in tasteful soft gold hues. Now our guy Mike was a big boy back then, well over six foot five, wide shouldered and sturdy. He had already wormed his way to the front bay doors by twelve noon and then mercilessly kept near the front of the pack as the rush commenced. He was not first to the reach the golden booth. That honour, he had been surprised to see, was a scrawny fourteen year old female. But he had made it a close seventh and he spent all he had and bought seven tickets. These he held onto until the trouble started, about five weeks later. By then, the tickets were worth next to nothing.

What happened was that it had come out in the press that Tal had been caught in a romantic tryst with a rising actor, one Sunny Khan, who’s massive upward trajectory had been consigned to his father’s ability to place him in the number one most popular boy band in the world, Kabirqadib, a group who had, in the previous year, gained major traction in the United States (of America). Setting themselves up as an opposing , even rival, force to the soft lush soundscapes of Tal’s recent studio work, Kabirqadib was known for the kind of aggressive club bangers Generation Cantus was known to inject the latest synthadream snortables and subnormal injectables coming out of the labs of ______. In this zeitgeist frenzied excitement, Sunny launched his new acting career with, what was branded, the “role of a lifetime” playing a soldier on the frontlines of the very contemporary Martian skirmishes happening between the Pan-Eurasian Syndicate and the Axis of Greenland, Great Britain and NORAD. And, as you know, these artist’s national alliances lay along the opposing lines and, despite the blatant propaganda of Sunny’s film, and his father’s association with a certain dismembered journalist, Tal had found it in her to look past all that and the two had, it was reported, failed head-over-heels in love. That, or it was all a publicity stunt. The public reaction to all this, however, had been less than understanding.

So, there he was, with five extra tickets no one wanted. Additionally, Suzette had taken it upon herself, in response to all the omninet drama, to delete all her music and bonus interview and behind the scenes content downloads, as well as burn all of the physical vinyl copies of her albums and her half-dozen officially licensed t-shirts, lipsticks and eyeliner from her makeup line, the commemorative plates, her mug, pyjamas, custom molded sex toys and a limited edition ashtray. She was still debating whether or not to actually attend the concert that September. Mike had first tried to go through the usual, most popular scalper app, but no go. The moderators were cracking down on resells for Tal’s tickets, in response to the political pressure she was receiving due to her relationship. He tried other sites but all prices, he could see, were listed at a zero. He tried again at work, but his supervisor stepped in, first sending a cursory message, then proceeding to thoroughly berate him in front of his team during one of the group meetings they held on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In desperation, he finally went back downtown, on a Friday night to push the tickets which had freshly arrived, mailed in their holographed and florescent thread marked physical forms, at one of the youth discos they had set up with the hopes of curbing teen related gang violence in the city’s suburbs. This scene failed spectacularly when a blonde youngster, with bleeding zits and wearing a red pleather jacket and matching pants, punched him hard in the gut, when he talked to “his girl” and proceeded to, with his reeking crew of ropey armed skidmarks, stomped his head repeatedly against the curb. They took the tickets and his wallet and that was that. He limped off to the train station. His only bit of luck was that he still had the transit pass card still in his pocket and it had enough fare on it to make it home.

Mike watched the story unfold in the media and the lovers, free from those ancient and arbitrary enmities that are endemic to the human condition, continued to bloom. Despite the almost universal condemnation, their mutual fortunes, additionally, continued to rise. You see, despite the hate they received, their viewership and audible influence was up over thirty-five percent. And, since the Universal Media Compensation Pact, between the Axis and the Syndicate, along with the possibilities for automates compliance, provided by the neural omninet intercessors, now mandatorily provided on the day of birth, in two hundred and ninety-two of two hundred and ninety-eight of the planet’s nations, as well as on Mars and in Ceres, now that your monetary units could be withdrawn from your Universal Banking Account (UBA) instantly, and given directly to the artists and creatives whose work you partook in paying attention to. Dollars, cents or centimes. There were two of Tal’s tracks particularly, early tracks, full of heartache and woe, that had really grabbed his attention, and he was really getting into her recent catalogue as well. This all, he would never admit to anyone though. That month he really had to tighten his belt, which he found almost impossible. To miss dessert at any meal, he would say, would surely take all joy out of life. Still, he tried. He had depleted his savings on speculation of those tickets, so he had to maintain it to dessert twice a day, and a strict regulation of only the mandatory streaming shows he was obliged, for national defence, to give his full attention to. That, and the ancient anthropomorphized animal fighter program he liked to fall asleep to.

He maintained in this way successfully for the next week and a half, until the next payday. However this was when his rent and most of his bills were due, so he had to go downtown again to get a payday loan to cover the delivery of groceries for the next two weeks. It was bad enough for him that he had to go into the outdoors, not to mention the tortuousness of going all the way, by train, to the downtown core three times that month. He had had it. When his supervisor chastised him again, in the group video meeting for (ironically, as a joke, he claimed) trying to offload the two of the seven tickets to a coworker, he blew up at her, claiming discrimination at being involved with a fan of this so suddenly outdated artist. That’s when his monitor went red. He then received a notification notice on his phone that he had been terminated. Another turn of his downward spiral. The next came when his girlfriend moved out.

Suzette had, in response to his gloom, taken one of the popular predictive polls, staying up all night and, very thoughtfully, filling in the over two hundred and fifty multiple choice questions, and had come to the conclusion that their relationship was going nowhere. Mike tried to reason that the poll’s methodology was inherently flawed, even took the questionnaire himself to try and prove that the survey was nonsense. His results had come back claiming a high degree of compatibility between them, but it was of no use to her then. She left him with an actual aching heart and the conclusion that nonsense never was supposed to make sense, it was not supposed to, but it still reigned supreme on this world. Now on the other worlds too.

He refused to give up his home pad, despite a warning sent by the UBA board. The one room rectangle had become his own, over the years, and persisted to provide a shaggy relief from the confusion outside. The yellowing drapes and the smell wafting from the commode closet, the hot plate and coolerator was where his comfort lay. That, and the now nonstop vibes pulsing from his hi-fi system. Tal’s soothing, simmering burn; a healing vitriol commiserating with the buildup of the tension in his shoulders and back. Until it was gone. Without warning, the morning of June the first, he woke up without the use of his ears. It took a minute or two to realize what had happened. No birds, no cars. So what? He turned the light on in his water closet, to take a piss, and there was no distinctive click. That’s when he knew. He powered the urine out of him and rushed to his home-office and there was a notification for him in his personal inbox. Somewhere, some automated process had turned some digital switch from on to off, and the omninet link, installed that first day he had breathed the air of the Earth, had reasoned in the most impersonal way and rendered him deaf. He did not know how it had. Apparently no one did, as is often the case--the powers that be just knew it worked.

Stifling his pounding heart, he got to work immediately, sending out copies of his curriculum vitae, altering the saved drafts of his cover letters, and completing the surveys and forms for the posted invitations for the job applications that he could find on the usual job sites and apps, within his chosen profession, experience level and preferred pay grade. He even based himself applying for an entry level position to a rival company of his previous employer, curating the cheap plastic prizes they were known to house to keep their loyal tween demographic to indulge in their brand of horror film themed daymasks. However, the mark of his new condition, his hearinglessness, was autostamped onto his CV every time he would send an application in and he would receive the same form auto-response that their concern would be his missing the auditory cues for messaging, even though visual cues had been widely implemented (along with the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws) for those who were either born or had later received a sentence of punitive deafness.

Mike tried to reach Suzette but she had blocked him on everything. He had never met her parents, or any of her friends, and had no idea where she could be. This was true for his own parents too. He consoled himself repeatedly watching interview, and even concert footage, from Tal’s ongoing tour. There had been a recent prestige interview broadcast with Tal and Sunny together, live from the new international space colony way above the Earth. Given a chance to clear the glut of rumours and accusations of the falsity of their relationship, along with some long standing scandalous rumours about Sunny’s robosexuality, their mutual reputations, and fiscal rating scores, had been helped to restore, if only partially, and superficially. But it was enough to put Tal over the top to finally become the world’s first trillionairress. For this she had been presented with a special reward, and a statue in the form of a platinum key, by Earth’s own Central Alliance of Banking Cartels. Mike had the notion to find her through a private detective, but that was out of the question, presently. Anyway, he had to sell and downgrade a lot of the components of his home office: his organic printer (that he also used mainly for meals), the largest of his hi-fi speakers, and a lot of his vinyl; toys and albums mostly. This bought him another month, eating the bare minimum and only one dessert, with breakfast, per day. On the day of his eviction, real live men in black shirts showed up to forcibly remove him and put the rest of his belongings to the torch. They collected his belongings and took them to burn in the building’s furnace, they said, for measures of sanitation.

He kept hold of his favourite grey hooded sweatshirt, black high-tops and, for some reason, a pair of thickly corduroyed green pants and dressing, screamed threats and curses as they dragged him out the front door. The key fob he tried then, but had already been barred from the building. He stomped to the corner and, when the bus came, found his transit pass was dead for funds too--he had to walk eight and a half kilometres that day to reach the shelter downtown where he had a chance to get a cot in the heated station they provided. He got within a block of the place then decided to spend the night on a park bench. However, he found that the benches all had dividers installed, thus preventing the comfort of stretching out. He found a shrub to lie under but, as soon as the sun went down, a high-pitched squeal began, throughout the park, that drilled his brain enough to keep him from finding any rest.

The next day, at last, a glimmer of hope flashed before his eyes. He found Suzette. She was having coffee with some guy at the very same restaurant they had their first day, nearly three years earlier. He went in and went up to their table and pleaded with her to take him back. At a signal, the restaurant’s armed guard dragged him out back and, taking a degree of pity upon him, tossed him some breadsticks and a couple packets of ketchup. He was picked up by the police that night for vagrancy and taken to a lock-in shelter where he woke up being groped in his sleep by some unseen assailant who scurried away in the dark. He never went back and found a hollow log, in the deep of the forest park that bordered the other side of downtown. One day he tried busking, singing tunelessly to the commuters, out front of the train station by the Arena. This provided him enough to eat, but little more. Worse still, the billboard advertisements at the station were nearly impossible to ignore; his digital wallet was slowly being drained of cents and centimes every time he would even glance at the pretty pictures of the models selling their cleaning products, the actors selling their new shows, smiling faces for the in-person and omninet marketplaces and, especially, the upcoming Tal Ben-Ami concert in September.

The day of the concert, he stood at the station with a plastic cup out, once again forgetting to make the friendly eye-contact with the passersby that vastly improved his chances of guilting and goading the transitors. He felt so low that all he could do was stare at the lovely face of Tal on the living screen of the billboard he faced outside the station’s entrance. Her dark hair, her ruby lips. She would appear in profile before facing the pedestrians, facing him, and smiling her mysterious, knowing smile. As somewhere some switch turned his eyes off, and the switch in his head complied, that smile, at least, became the last thing he ever saw.

END