Helm Watchers

“If the plague didn’t kill me, nothing will,” I said aloud to nobody as I let the cerulean-striped Devil Spider crawl on my leg. It strafed side to side on my resting calf then sat still. Impatient, I grabbed a pen and tapped the back of the spider to antagonize it. Success—the spider tensed and bit down into the meat of my calf. I winced, held my breath, then exhaled blissfully as the alien spider’s venom passed through my brain.

Three, two, one, dopamine dump.

My cheeks flushed and flesh prickled as euphoria encased me.

I grabbed the spider’s mason jar from beside me on my bed and trapped the quarter-sized creature in it. It leapt anxiously back to the webbed nest it had constructed at the base of the jar; I screwed the lid on just as my eyelids began to grow heavy. The arachnid successfully stored away (and not forgotten about and lost like my last Devil Spider, which I found crushed beneath my pillow the next day) I wiped the pinprick of blood up with my finger and slumped onto my back. Benny would be here in half an hour—I had a little bit of time to enjoy the drowsy euphoria the spider’s bite gave me as long as I didn’t let myself nod off.

Benny was coming over to go helm-sketching with me. H is one of the good ones, an actual friend, not one of the many fair-weather friends who have all come out of the woodwork ever since word got out about my recent good fortune.

Last week, at some point while hiding from the District Patrol, I came across what looked like a discarded flick-drive, wedged between a brick and cardboard box, behind a dumpster. Curiosity got the best of me and I pocketed the tiny stick. The boys and I were out late that night, way after curfew, on a mural run. Lenzy had the idea to spray paint a portrait of human’s removing their helms to reveal blank faces underneath, a statement on the loss of individuality that the booming helm-culture craze of the last decade brought upon us. We all thought it was brilliant and went out that night to paint it on the side of the empty elementary school. We got most of it done before District Patrol spotted us. We all split and I hid in an alley close to my apartment when I found the flicker-drive.

I took the drive home and plugged it into my console. There was a layer or two of encryption but I used some crackers Benny had written me a while ago to get past it all, and boom, 20,000 untraceable credits, right there. I thought my console had glitched out, maybe the drive was just a disguised viral load that got past my security, but after test depositing 1,000 of it into my crypto-wallet and seeing it actually there, the reality of the situation hit me. Twenty thousand credits, out of nowhere, just like that.

I can afford rehab.

That was the first thought through my head when it happened.

Or buy a hundred Devil Spiders.

I remember grinning when I had that second thought. Then cursing myself. Those awful spiders and their magical bites…a previously unknown state of elation, the best high on Earth.

I haven’t gone a day without at least five Devil Spiders in my possession for over a year. If you took care of them, they lived for at least a month or two. One could really get by with only one Devil Spider and still get enough fixes for themself and their friends…

Friends. Benny. How much times had it been? Benny was coming. We liked to go out during the afternoon and watch people, sketch their helms.

Back when people first started getting sick with the virus, a little more than ten years ago, the United World Front recommended that everyone wear medical masks when they go out in public. Just until they had the virus under control, a few weeks, tops.

A year later, masks became mandatory outside of one’s home. Another year later, after the everyone started to accept that the virus mutated so fast it would probably never go away completely and quarantine life was probably everyone’s new reality, people started getting creative with their masks. Really creative. Masks turned into full-fledged helmets. People started calling them helms. Pretty soon, helms were a part of life. Who you were, who you hung out with, your social class, your ambitions, your job, your philosophies—all could be communicated by your helm. People wear helms inside their own homes nowadays, especially streamers, the ones who documented their entire lives to live feeds and real audiences. I tried my hand in being a streamer once, but I’m too bad at VR and enjoy a few too many indulgences that aren’t necessarily legal…things that are better not broadcasted to the public.

Benny and I went helm watching more days than not. Some of them were so creative and absurd, we loved capturing them in an image, to help with our own art. The rest of the guys, the other artists in our little collective, loved looking at our findings. Two days ago, we saw a Cthulhu themed helm that added at least another foot to the height of the guy wearing it. Benny spotted a truly weird helm the time before that—it looked like the body of the child, connected neck-to-neck of the lady wearing it, so she looked like her head was the upside-down body of a smaller human, attached at the neck. We see stuff that once would’ve been reserved for Halloween, back when Halloween was allowed.

I sat up on my bed, grabbed the jar, and looked at my spider. This one in particular was getting old. I ended up spending only several thousand of my recently acquired credits on spiders. They don’t mate. They’re grown in back-alley labs, unless one was lucky enough to score a pharmaceutically-harvested vial of pure venom, but possessing something like that, at least in this neighborhood, was the same as wearing a bullseye helm.

The rest of my small fortune I had put away, swearing to myself and my closest friends that I would use it to get the help I need. I looked at my still exposed calf—it was littered with black scars, the aftermath of Devil Spider bites. I pulled my pant leg down over the scars. I didn’t want to look at them. Most other venom junkies let the spiders bite them on the arm or even on the neck, to get a better rush, but I prefer to hide my scars. Plus, neck-bites are just a fast-track to overdosing. I pride myself on being a user who has never overdosed.

If these spider bites can’t kill me, nothing can.

I lethargically trudged my way out of bed and started rummaging through the mess of clothes and empty food wrappers on my floor, looking for one of my helms. I have a few, to remain an anonymous nobody in case people start to notice me frequenting the areas where the spider dealers congregate. The one I found was nothing fancy, in fact it was laughably lazy—a brown box with a straight-mouthed face drew on it with three quick lines from a sharpie. The inside of it had all the required fittings—respirator, holes for the eyes, small speakers by the ears to amplify outside noise, movable jaw so I could eat and drink while wearing it. Only medical masks were necessary to go outside, but it’s rare to see someone wearing just that. Even children wore helms—clothing companies made what I imagine to be a killing dropping new lines of helms for children, based on popular kids shows and games. I started looking for my small black notebook which I sketched helms in when there was a rap on my door.

I opened it—it was either Benny or Sancho standing there. The two of them lived together and wore each other’s helms often. Being that they shared similar stature and clothes, it was hard to tell them apart until they spoke.

“Davey J, is that you?” he asked. Definitely Benny. His slight lisp gave him away.

“Yessir. Where do you wanna go today?” I replied.

“I want to find something really weird. I was thinking we could hit up The Seasick first, maybe grab a few drinks while we’re there.” He lowered his voice as an apartment door down the grime-coated hallway opened and an old figure wearing a sack as a helm shuffled out of the unit, hunched over a walker. He, or she, didn’t even bother to turn and greet us. Helms seemed to add another layer to public interaction between people—a layer of anonymity that most weren’t willing to break for a mere ‘hello’ in passing.

With constant connection always present, whether by console or the tabs in our pockets, the internet always a word away, one would think that loneliness was rare. But just the opposite was true. Ever since helms became a staple of society, times have never been lonelier. One didn’t dare appear in a photo or video online without their helm on. Yet one didn’t speak to anyone in public unless it was with purpose. Gone were pleasantries for the sake of being polite. Helms had become a unit of pride, placed over our heads…we are so obsessed with embellishing a persona that we made for ourselves, we have lost touch with who we actually are, and everyone else.

“Are you like, really high right now?” Benny asked in a whisper so the old-timer didn’t here.

“What? No, not anymore than usual. Why?”

“Just wondering,” he said in his normal voice. “To gauge how drunk we can get.” He chuckled as I stepped out into the hallway, black book in hand, and walked with him. My leg was a bit sore but nothing unmanageable. Walking got my blood flowing and my grogginess dissolved away, though my euphoria remained. I knew I had at least five hours of being pleasantly high before it wore off and the shakes and sweats started to squirm their way into my attention.

We walked downstairs to the floor level of the building and stepped outside onto the suspended walkway. We were still several hundred feet off the actual ground. Where my building ended started the roof of a lower-level apartment building that widened beyond the perimeter of mine. I think under that one was yet another residential compound of some sort before reaching the pitch-black street level, hidden under layers and layers of translucent walkways and gliding vehicles. Down the block, we waited for the subspeeder train. It took us through the glass pyramid midtown mall, down a few levels, past shuttered-shut tubular buildings, the seedy nightclubs and dancehalls that were closed at this hour or operating as smoky nectar dens and brothels. Our train dropped us off in a district that was once called the Docks, but the sea had long since retreated away from the area, exposing a ground that was actually layered trash one could lose a town in.

We stepped off the train and entered the labyrinth of stacked and overlapping repurposed shipping containers that was intertwined with littered walkways, illuminated under pale yellow-green lights. I felt a hand grab my shoulder and spin me around. Someone I couldn’t possibly recognize, in a helm I had never seen before, had their gloved hand on my shoulder.

“Oh. Thought you were someone else,” an androgynous voice said.

“Who knows, I could be,” I responded. As I turned to keep walking, I heard the voice asking,

“Well then, who are you? Who are you?”