Are You Looking?

After it refused to go down dry, Van tried swallowing the locket with a handful of water, but still it fought for purchase in his throat.

He’d flip-flopped about whether to remove the thin chain, knew it would be easier going down. But as the bathroom door rattled in its frame and bent in its middle, the lobster claw latch still dangled from his gagging mouth. He figured he had a better chance of retrieving it again with the chain still attached. The heart-shaped hunk was excruciating in his gullet, but he knew the risks going in, knew this was a promise he had to keep. It had been Owen’s dying wish. Once you go dark, they’ll come for you, Owen had told Van, They’ll get you behind the wall, but no matter what it takes, they can’t find the locket!

“LAPD! Open up now!” the police barked. Van knew things would get rough when the door came down and they took him, but even though they’d count on his youth to give them a show, playing dull might just spare him from being featured, being put into one of their Interrocasts…

The water hadn’t helped, and Van's face bloomed a purplish hue and the bathroom door looked as if it might give much sooner than he'd anticipated. In any case, if the necklace wasn’t down before he was hauled away, it would be bad. So, with precious few moments left, Van squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers down his raw throat.

He gulped the thing down just as the door was kicked free and came for his face. He saw stars just before he went all gone.

~

In a way, Screens came after Glass.

There had been a lot of fear back during the big sick, and everyone knows that was a much darker time. Dark like the stone age before electricity, dark like the streets of New York before cars, dark like that. Back during the big sick Screens were just getting their say, but people still didn't realize their full potential, didn't know just how much they could do.

“Globally streamed murders and a circus presidency really turned the tides.”

That's what Mollie Yup told her top-tier influencer grandchildren when they asked why her house had ‘gone dark’ for so long, why she had no Glass or Screens before finally being taken to the high-security old folks’ Suite. “It brought out some of the very worst in people,” At that, the kids scoffed. “Don't you see what these cameras are doing to us? To you?” Mollie asked the children, and they really got a kick out of her calling Glass cameras. Mollie’s grandkids made a big show of laughing at her just before they held up their Glass and asked their subscribed and paying audience if their own grandparents had ever said anything super millennial and embarrassing to them, and if so to comment and share.

Mollie hadn’t known her grandchildren were casting and the tail end of the childrens’ morning cast consisted of her flying off the handle and kicking them out of her room in tears, all to the sounds of their laughter and the constant jangle of digital tips being dumped into their accounts. Top-tier influencers like Mollie’s grandkids had access to the most secure places, like old folks’ Suites, because with that many viewers and tips came a kind of power. They laughed and cast all the way back across the wall and home on their scooters, uninterrupted, deaf to the sounds of their grandmother's tears.

Which is really what Mollie Yup had been trying to tell them. Always Glass meant always Screens meant always gone. Mollie had been 26 when the big sick hit, had seen how truly dark—real dark—things could get when what she called cameras were on all the time.

~

Van tongued the tear in his lip as he imagined the locket in his guts. He could even feel it sliding around, or, at least could swear he did. There were no Screens with him in the back of the police cruiser, but there was Glass. Special Glass that could blink off and on depending on the performance they picked up or didn’t.

He kept his eyes out the car windows and pointedly not on the view count meter above him slowly climbing to fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a million live viewers! This was part of the cast people paid to watch. First was The Arrest. What was happening now was The Transport. The next part always got rough, just how the paying audience liked it. Van sat on his cuffed hands to keep them from shaking. He was terrified, but he wouldn’t put on a show, wouldn’t give them what they wanted. He leaned his head against the side of the car and imagined the outside world he had rejected was flying past him—the world he’d gone dark to.

Screens, silhouetting everybody looking into their Glass. Everyone had a show to put on, a ‘buck to huck’, as it's said now; a kitschy term because bucks were no longer a thing, and hucking was a short-lived synonym for earning. Some older folks like Mollie Yup might use the term ‘hustling’ when referring to what was happening in every home and every car and every street corner and every bathroom stall and every bedroom, but it was much more than that now. Hustle didn’t even touch it. Because going dark was not only illegal, it was practically a death sentence. To switch (intentionally go dark, like an old-timey light switch) was to go obsolete, and that meant off-the-grid. Essentially, slow and solitary starvation. And for those countless numbers who simply couldn’t go along for one reason or another (usually financial), there was the Marshes, and you didn’t want to end up there…

With no real money left in the world, the whole thing—Glass, Screens, casting, tips—was really more akin to slavery.

They were pulling up through the first security wall toward the station as the Police Commander (who also acted as the station’s lead personality) was casting out in front, telling law enforcements’ impassioned subscribers that he was keeping them safe. Like old folks’ suites and computer hard drive bays, all police stations were located in inaccessible corners of any given city behind high-security walls. Special top-tier access only.

“Our new profile stations are up and running, so you can hear from your favorite officers more often! Perfect numbers coming out of Station 32, thanks to all of you out there!” The Police Commander exclaimed, practically shrieking, “And don't forget to hit that huck button so we can keep the scum off of your streets!”

Next, he threw up a poll asking Station 32’s patrons what next season’s uniforms should look like, all while Van was yanked from the back of the cruiser and hauled into the main event entrance of the building. The Police Commander threw the live cast over to the incoming scum. “This scum’s one to watch,” the Commander’s voice echoed through the flashing light and plexiglass archway above Van, “This one’s gone dark!” The digital jangle of millions of tips flooded Van’s ears and the countless refracting eyes of the stations’ Glass was blinding. Van could hardly take it.

As he was dragged through the porcelain halls to the interrogation stage, he couldn’t help but tremble. Playing dull hadn’t worked. He remembered Owen once describing how it used to be, back before the police force was privately funded, back before the great boom of violence and sickening wealth and head-spinning poverty. Back before the world went a different kind of dark. One hulking cop fastened a metallic crown around Van’s head, unsheathed his think-stick (a cruel name for it, really), and locked Van and himself in a small room surrounded by Glass. The cop raised his hands to the millions of viewing fans, then whispered to Van, “This crowd’s a mean one, switch.”

Van tried to mentally brace himself, reminded himself of the mission. This is where the station really made its money, what kept their uniforms crisp, their accounts jangling, and their stunner guns surging with killer electric volts. It's what kept the Glass running—The Interrocast.

The cop waved his metallic wand, the crown on Van’s head vibrated—it's electrodes kicking into gear—and his vision went. What he would see and feel next was operated by the wand and decided by the paying audience. And the audience was always cruel.

~

What he saw would stay with him forever, would come up in his nightmares like bile in his throat. But after a relentless hour, it was finally over. Yet even though it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and even though the audience screamed for him to, he never begged and never fought back, and so they grew bored of him.

His holding cell continued casting only a few short minutes, eventually cutting out when the Commander saw they were losing eyes and, consequently, tips.

Eventually, Van passed the locket, and fishing it from the chemical-filled basin was messy business, but business he got done, and soon the glittering thing was in his palm. No turning ‘round and running back now that Van held the thing in his hand—the ancient locket, Owen Yup’s death-bed gift to his wife, Mollie. This was game’s end, because Van was finally behind the high-security wall, just across the street from the old folks’ suite, Millennium Suites, where Mollie was being held.

Apparently, what the locket held was contraband nowadays, far too valuable. Van knew what he was agreeing to when Owen had asked this of him, to risk it all to deliver the thing to his Mollie. Owen had promised his young caretaker, Van, that he could join Mollie when she went. There’d be enough there to take care of them both.

Van looked upon the charm, steeled himself, and coughed loudly three times, then two, and waited. There was a long silence and Van thought the plan was about to fall apart, that he’d be stuck here until the next Interrocast, but then heard three taps on his cell door, then two. Good, Van thought, relieved, she came through. Van had offered the officer the very last of his tips before going dark, but the cop refused them, said she’d do it because, even though she’d never dare say it, she believed in the dark.

~

Knocks on Mollie Yups’ room door - three, and then two. She threw it open and as soon as Van had closed it behind him she fell into his arms and into a fit of weeping, held him so tightly he thought he might lose his breath, and soon he was crying right with her.

He gave her the heart-shaped locket and waited for her to open it, to see this long-lost, precious-metal stone he’d only heard about but had never seen. Mollie inspected the thing closely, carefully, then laughed when she saw Van’s bright anticipation. She opened it and his face dropped.

It was empty.

“Where is it?” he asked, scared it had come out in the basin and he’d missed it.

“The necklace is the gold,” she explained, “Passed down for generations and kept secret and safe. This is the real deal, kid. Enough to sell on the black market and buy dark to last both our lives. We'd finally be free.”

Van swooned, realizing he had passed countless millions through his guts and could’ve unknowingly flushed what was probably some of the very last real gold.

But there was little time to overthink - their getaway car was waiting, the resting eyes of the police cruiser blind to the watching world for the next several hours, ready to take them out and away and into the waiting and free place. Away from Glass and Screens and the insane jangling of tips and screaming of huck-hungry masses.

Away from the blinding light and into the perfect and free dark.