Short Story: Dances With Drumsticks (2022)
Dances With Drumstick. Art: Roman Dubina
Apathy Jackson was overtaking a bus outside the chicken graveyard when one of his neek LifeCode followers triggered an engine failure. The car glanced the verge with a scrape of metal, and the tyres screamed as he struggled to turn into the spin, trying to force a frantic smile when all six of the internal cameras sprang into life.
‘Okay, which one of you found a brain cell?’ he growled into the nearest lens, almost biting off his own tongue when the steering column locked and the vehicle finally shuddered to a halt.
The monitor screen spat out a series of comments which projected onto the windscreen in bold, angry fonts.
‘STOPPED in your tracks, Smartmouth.’ (Frances A, Lincoln)
‘...somebody’s TIRED.’ (Scotty, Stone Mountain)
‘Let’s all get to the chicken graveyard and END this guy.’
(Theo, Sarasota)
‘All credit to Marvin Grealish. LifeCode 3532.3511.’ ‘Hope you rot in-
Apathy snapped a finger at the screen and froze the feed. Breathing deeply to calm his nerves, he triggered Voice Recon and tried to level his tone so the fault lines would recognise him.
‘Search LifeCode Grealish, Marvin. 3532.3511.’
The digitised reply was immediate.
‘Request denied.’
Apathy rolled his eyes and tried again.
‘It’s ME. Voice identify, self-report: Jackson, Apathy. LifeCode 0021.0059. Repeat last instruction.’
‘Unable to complete request, Citizen Jackson. Minor identified.’
‘Minor?’ Apathy smirked at the cameras. ‘Seriously?’
He snatched at the closest one and wrenched it away from its holding pin. Then he climbed out of the car, holding the lens ahead of him in order to capture his best side.
‘Well, kid, I’m impressed: you just handed a Cease and Desist to Apathy Jackson at the Clackett Horn Chicken Graveyard outside New Chicago. I’m a man of my word, so if you can get here in thirty minutes with a registered LifeCoder then you will be worth approximately -‘ he checked his Palmpod, ‘Eighty-seven billion, five hundred million tiny plastic bitches. Countdown triggered....NOW.’
The clock on the lens suddenly proclaimed ‘29m 59s’ and began a measured decline.
Apathy gave the car a farewell kick and turned his attention to the mist-shrouded entrance of the graveyard itself: heíd driven by the place multiple times in the past few weeks but had never really given it much consideration as a decent spot for a showdown. On the whole, he reflected, there were probably worse places to die.
Approaching the carved arch that would have been moderately imposing had it not started to sink into the swamp, he noted that one of the great iron gates hung off tired hinges. The other had actually collapsed and now sported its own lady garden: quite literally, as it turned out that the naked corpse lying spread-eagled atop the wrought iron bars was recently female. Although Apathy had no intention of burying the woman or even getting a closer look at her, the sight did put him in mind of a spade.
WeaponsÖhe needed weapons.
Apathy quickly knocked back a muscle relaxant and concentrated hard on the mental image of a shovel, wincing only slightly when his new meditative state provoked a few rogue drops of urine to dribble down the inside of his leg.
A spade hovered in the air beside him but was far too insubstantial to take a firm hold on. He swallowed, gritted his teeth and narrowed his focus until
the shape of the shovel was everything: past, present and future. He closed his eyes as sweat began to bead on his forehead but felt a flood of relief wash through him as his fingers finally closed on splintered wood.
Drawing down the shovel, he whirled it around experimentally, taking a few swipes at the air to judge the weight of the tool. It was far from perfect but, he decided, it would do in a pinch.
Peering around the graveyard, he noticed for the first time that the floodlights hadn't activated, something that usually didn't happen in public community zones. Often, it was like being on a moving stage, and the illuminated circle simply followed you wherever you went, tracking your progress like a searchlight in a prison break. Although it could be a different kettle of fish in Quiet Spaces like cemeteries or meditation gardens, the presence of actively life-tracked human visitors generally forced a conflict between individual spotlights and area floods.
Apathy took a tentative step forward, his boots crunching on what he really hoped were twigs and not human bones as he neared the first line of gravestones.
A flash of lightning and a crack that sounded remarkably like distant thunder preceded the entire complex suddenly springing into dramatic, atmos‐
pheric life before his eyes. Every hovering light bee in the zone flashed on, revealing so many graves in such tight proximity that there was barely a footstep between them.
'You know why they call this place the Chicken Graveyard?' said a voice behind him.
Apathy turned to see someone he'd unfriended step out of the shadows: all his severed connections looked like lm characters from the silver age of the pre-holos while his current contacts were more in the guise of customer reps from The Software Empire. He'd always promised himself that he would get around to changing them over at some point, but they were just skins when it came right down to it: skins and personality traits.
Apathy sighed, staring into the face of the smirking figure while at the same time trying to read the name hovering just above the forehead. 'Can't say that I do, er...Felix?'
‘It's Falix...and I'll tell you just as soon as you tell ME why I got excluded from your LifeCode for making what was basically a VALID comment on one of the crummiest jackets I ever saw.'
Apathy took a deep breath and prepared to punch his Remote Wrist Blocker: he got four or five of these griefers in his face each time he ported in. He was
about to sever the link when he suddenly remembered the jacket and the comment.
‘As I recall, Falix, you said I collected the teeth of dead animals in my jacket pockets and used them to pay ugly women to date me.'
The stranger shook his head.
‘No, you posted a picture of yourself with 'Bitch Magnet' as the title, and I said you couldn't pull a tooth out of a dead dog's mouth in THAT jacket.'
Apathy stared humourlessly at the flickering visage, but something about the expression gave him pause for thought. He glanced over his shoulder at the first row of gravestones, each sporting its own grotesquely stuffed flesh and bone chicken beside whatever individually stylised and free-floating epitaph flashed on and off in neon lights above it.
‘I’m assuming it has something to do with the Cluck Clucks they're all using as grave-markers? That or the fact that Cluck Cluck in parasite form is now known to have cost us effectively – what – three quarters of the biped population?'
‘Somebody give this man a fashionable jacket!' came the glitching reply. 'A decent guess...and you'd certainly think so, wouldn't you? Though, actually, you'd be wrong.' The figure now begrudgingly identified as Falix strode over to stand beside the first grave.
'In fact, it's called the chicken graveyard because it was here that the government originally admitted that they'd run out of dead space in the futures district, and it was here that they buried those first patients vertically. Sweet mother of mercy: the indignity of it all. Dying in that weird roadrunner pose, you know, the way so many of them went? Personally, I'd prefer to be buried as that wolf who stalks him in the cartoons.'
‘You mean Wile E. Coyote...'
‘Yeah! Frozen in one of those moves where he's pushing the plunger for the massive stacks of dynamite he's always carting around...'
Apathy smirked, moved to the nearest stone and examined the epitaph. It read:
Here lies Grover Tee Eternally in glee He caught a cold From poultry mould At the chicken factory
'Poor Grover,' Falix said, toasting the grave with a can of Clucks Lite.
Apathy shook his head balefully. 'It's no surprise so many of us ended up in the ground, right? We all
went chicken mad in the end. I'm not just talking about the disease: I'm talking about what it did to us. The shoes, the hats, the stupid aprons: it was like we bought into the virus before it even WAS a virus. Do you remember Chicken Heist? The game? Everyone was going for the Golden Feathers and anyone who wasn't playing was at the cinema watching Freddie Fussbunder in that dumb movie about the Chickens taking over the White House.'
Falix had circled the first line of stones and was now carrying an aerosol can and an oven ignition stick. He shook the can thoughtfully and struck up a flame on the stick, casting a small pool of light that lit up his head and lent his face an eerie glow. The light bees hovering around him detected the sudden change and dulled accordingly.
‘You're about to be replaced,' he croaked, lifting his finger and smirking as the flames vanished to reveal a floating cigarette with a glowing red tip. Falix tossed the spray can aside and plucked it from the air, sucking it between his lips and drawing deeply. 'You've had your story and your hot cocoa. Now it's way past your deadtime.'
Apathy shrugged, glancing back at the road where his car was undoubtedly bleeding location signals all across the void. He wondered with vague interest if
the kid would get to him in time and what form his expulsion from the zone would be. The old saying 'what goes around, comes around' seemed suddenly and unavoidably appropriate. He'd decapitated the ageing rockstar he'd ended up supplanting, one swift arc with a narrow sword and that had been that. Still, at least the battle was a battle in every possible sense. It might have started as a bog-standard status update and the inevitable challenge comment, but it'd ultimately progressed into a sword-fight on a pirate ship, and you didn't get much more rock 'n' roll than that.
Falix, who had moved to stand directly in the path of Apathy's planned escape route, grinned like a Cheshire cat in the moonlight that was now being reflected in the eyes of the hovering drones.
‘I know what you are,' Apathy whispered, peering distractedly around him.
‘Is that a fact?'
He forced a shrug. 'It's a strong suspicion.'
‘Why don't you unburden yourself and enlighten me at the same time?'
‘You're a Luck Jockey,' Apathy continued. 'You ride the streams waiting for some sap to get a shutdown hit, and then you turn up in case there's a glitch. Good luck getting your hands on this skin, though: your window of opportunity is going to be, like, point eight of a second...and that's if you back the right horse. What if you jump into the kid and it's me who wins? You'd be dog-meat.'
Falix shrugged and plunged a fist into his overcoat, produced a handful of birdseed and proffered it to Apathy with a mock apologetic smile. 'Last meal?'
The words had barely left his lips when the formerly attentive congregation of light bees suddenly flocked towards the graveyard's dilapidated entrance, where a young boy in a baseball cap, loose-fitting jeans and a bright white t-shirt was crossing the threshold. He moved at an almost languid pace, seemingly taking an interest in every tree he passed. Apathy watched as he rounded the near side of the grave lines and finally spotted his shutdown target standing in the shadows before him.
'Hey there!' he called, reaching up to turn his cap backwards. 'It's really good to finally meet you, dude: I've loved your stream!'
'Thanks, kid.' Apathy felt his grip on the shovel tighten, and he swung it a few times, experimentally. 'Always good to meet a fan.'
'Thanks! Hey: just a quick heads up, by the by, I think you might actually be my dad.'
Apathy stared from the kid to Falix and back again: he noted that the interloper now looked positively riveted to the conversation.
‘That's a bold claim, kid: I hope you have a back‐ track for it.'
The boy produced an antique-looking flute and expelled enough strangled notes to demonstrate his inability to play a tune. The notes became cartoon speech bubbles in the air, which in turn evaporated as he read the contents of each one aloud.
‘You met Laney Veral during Meat Week on F87, took your relationship to text on Mineeld and graduated to speech and vidstream on InnerLife, where your avatars joined to produce seven Lifecode offspring, including 3532.3511, username Marvin Hamst Grealish. That would be me. Full circle. This is my Luke moment. YOU....are my father.'
The shovel connected with the boy's jaw and knocked him sideways, though he'd morphed into a miniature dragon before he actually hit the tree.
The dragon apped madly into the air, arcing and wheeling around the clearing before it spewed a short jet of ame at Apathy, who mitigated the damage bby f aerosol deodorant back through the stream. Nevertheless, he took enough heat to finish up the encounter, stamping out flames on his increasingly patchy raincoat.
Falix had crouched like a predator about to devour his prey, eyes searching madly for any sign that a death-strike was imminent.
Marvin Grealish took a few confident steps forward...and clucked. Falix froze to the spot, a look of bone-chilling terror on his face. His gaze immediately switched to Apathy Jackson, who had registered the sound and seized the initiative to put as much distance between himself and the boy as possible. Unfortunately, this frantic retreat resulted in him colliding with a low-hanging tree branch and knocking himself senseless: he staggered back and collapsed onto the dirt.
Falix moved in, step by cautious step.
Two more clucks and Grealish now looked worried himself: the boy cast imploring glances around him and saw only enemies. His arms began the slow but terrifyingly familiarflapping motion that every household in the western world had been on high alert to identify, the strange series of attitudes from which there was no likely return.
‘H-help me, Dad!' he managed, following the plea with two more clucks and a dip of the head that could only mean one thing.
All across the graveyard, the echoes of chucks and clucks exploded through speakers like a rapturous
round of applause. As if in response to the noise, several graves were now giving up their own offer‐ ings: small mounds of dirt began to dislodge and rise upwards, soil cascading around the automated forms of skeletal chicken heads emerging from the earth. The cacophony of clucks increased in pitch and became a frenzy of deafening proportions as Falix knelt beside Apathy Jackson and proffered a small package towards him.
‘Your meal, buddy.'
The words were jarring, and Apathy twitched a few times. For the briefest of seconds, the graveyard vanished, and he saw a sea of faces surrounding him at a distance, each gawking intently while their owners munched down on a mixture of burgers and fries. Before the image faded, he noticed that the tables were positioned all around the graveyard and looked out of place in the setting while an outline behind them almost became the merest suggestion of a menu board.
Apathy squinted at the sudden interruption to his consciousness and pinched the bridge of his nose with the rough balls of hisfingers. When he opened his eyes, the graveyard was nothing more than a zone on the screen of the console in his hands, a tiny destination marker for the car that he was steering with the thumb-pad. He reached down and switched the viewscreen to first person, watching as the avatar of Apathy Jackson shrank back to give an expanded view of the car windscreen.
‘Sir?' the voice came again.
Apathy concentrated harder on the screen as a whirlwind of social messages flashed up in the corners:
‘STOPPED in your tracks, Smartmouth.’
‘...somebody’s TIRED.’
‘Let’s all get to the chicken graveyard and END this guy.’
'Your cappuccino, buddy? Wash down all that cluck?'
Apathy looked up into the face of the Happy Wing Crew Member who was staring down at him: the man with the ventilation mask hanging under his chin.
‘What's that?' he said, trying and failing not to drag his gaze back towards the screen.
‘They've paid for your MEAL, buddy.' The crew
member pointed to a small boy sitting with his father a few tables away.
‘Ah! Right you are. Tell the kid he can have eighty-seven billion if he can get here FAST and prove he's mine.'
There was an awkward silence.
‘I’ll just put it down here, shall I?' said the crew member. 'See who you have to thank?' he reiterated. 'The gentleman over at table ve paid today: the guy sitting with his son. Wasn't that nice?'
Apathy vaguely noticed that Falix and Grealish were now sitting together in the graveyard; the trolls. He sneered over at them and continued playing. As the car skidded to a halt, his social board spewed up another alert:
‘All credit to Hamlyn Bodaker. LifeCode 1945.8132.’
The Happy Wing Crew member cleared a few more tables. On his way back to the kitchen, he passed the father and son who had Paid It Forward for the diner's most notorious Gamehead.
‘Thanks, guys,' he said. 'A sad story, that one. Blissed out of his mind and wired into that game like no tomorrow. We don't even know how hefinds the
restroom. I guess there's a lesson in there: don't chew and drive!'
The boy looked down at his own drink, but the father was clearly in bewildered awe of the infamous Gamehead.'Did he...get sick off the game? Or the food?'
The Happy Winger shrugged, non-committally. 'You could say both. He got poultry mould some time around the turn of '28 when everyone was down with it, but he was unlucky: went straight to his brain.'
‘They say we're all showing signs of it, now.'
‘Right...but now at least there's a chance. Back then the docs gave him a couple months tops, so he just wired himself up to slow the body rot...but it won't be long now. You can't really see it through the overcoat, but he's mostly ribs these days. Not everyone is as charitable as you two...and I guess not everyone remembers him or – ya' know - those amazing scores.'
'What was his Lifecode tag again? Empathy something, right? I feel bad that I can never remember.'
‘Apathy Jackson. Best tag ever.' The crew member made a face and scratched around the loop of his mask. 'I always wondered what he went by on the outside, but I guess we'll never know for sure. I think the woman who used to pay for most of his meals
called him Grover...but that might have been a nickname.'
He wiped one last table on his way to the kitchen, from which he cast a final glance towards Apathy Jackson, noting the ominous bulge in the man's coat pockets and hoping he hadn't packed the same aerosol/lighter combo that had got him arrested the day before. Then he turned and headed into the kitchen, covering his mouth nervously as he coughed up a few feathers.
