FuzzbombMathew Lebowitz
4000 words “Hey, Champ, you up there?” Soft light and strange music floated down through the open trapdoor of the attic. Marissa had warned Eric that Bryce had sequestered himself, and Eric felt cautious about intruding. Plus the ladder presented a rickety challenge for his old achy knees. Eric wished Grace were there to help sort it out. Trust your North Star, she would say. Unfortunately that North Star had been her. “I’m coming up,” he said decisively, climbing the ladder and poking his head into the loft. It wasn’t as spooky as he had feared, or the future-serial-killer lair that Marissa had implied. To the contrary, it was cozy and charming. Bryce had sectioned the space with hanging tapestries and some bookcases. There was a carpet unrolled on the floor and a couple of chairs, a cot with a sleeping bag. It was lit by strings of amber lights. Bryce was reclined in a puffy chair, Cassidy by his side. “See, Grandpa?” said Cassidy, as Eric appeared. “He lives here now.” Cassidy was only five to Bryce’s eight (going on forty), but their roles had shifted during their father’s illness and she had come out the other side as Bryce’s gatekeeper, or guardian. She regarded him critically, like he was an obstruction that wasn’t easily moved. Bryce remained impervious in his chair, idly spinning a fuzzbomb so its pulsing glow swept his boyish features. “I do not live here,” he announced mildly. “He basically lives here,” insisted Cassidy. “This is where he goes to sleep and where he wakes up and where he spends all the time in between.” Cassidy’s face clouded and her brow puckered and her chin stuck out in a telltale way that preceded a squall. “Well, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,” said Eric, hoisting himself the rest of the way into the loft. He straightened cautiously, unsure of the headroom. He still stood six foot two in any decent shoes. Okay, six foot one, truth be told. Tall enough to reach the floor, is what Grace would have said. “I remember this stuff,” he said, looking around. There were bookshelves, lamps, a trunk half-full of board games, some old vinyl LPs in their cardboard sleeves. Most notable—and jarring—were the gauzy tapestries that Bryce had hung as a makeshift perimeter. They were faded but covered with familiar radiating starbursts and blooms of color. Grace had dyed them eons ago for the festivals and demonstrations that they went to so they could wrap themselves in defiance to the patriarchy, the corpocracy, whatever required defiance at the moment. She said they helped stake a claim to individuality—a sacred, fleeting, vanishing quality that required vigilance and nurturing. Secretly he suspected there was vanity involved as well. She liked the way they looked woven in her auburn hair. Not that he would have questioned it, being completely in awe of everything she did, regardless of origin or intent. And here they were again, coming around—her spirit still embedded within the mandelic designs. “Hi, Grandpa,” said Bryce, softly. Eric turned. There was a passive quality to the boy’s voice. It was how he said most things these days, how he approached most chores, most conversations, how he went through life, according to Marissa and his teachers—halfhearted, listless. Marissa was worried, and maybe for good reason. It had been nearly six months since their father had passed away and Bryce didn’t seem inclined to shake off the pall. Eric liked to believe this was okay, even appropriate. But Marissa and the others wanted Bryce to use the fuzzbomb to get the knots cleared away. Toward this goal she had dispatched Eric to the attic to offer grandfatherly advice and persuasion. “Okay, give it here, Champ. Let’s see what we’ve got.” Bryce handed over the fuzzbomb, watching Eric closely. God, the thing felt amazing. It was oblong, smooth and cool, not much bigger than a hen’s egg but with a satin finish and inordinate heft. It buzzed in his palm, reading his profile and fetching his data from the network. Personal therapy made available is how it was billed—able to isolate trauma markers and rearrange neural pathways for a more healthy and productive societal balance. So why did they make him so squeamish? They definitely worked. Anxiety was down nationwide, depression too; high blood pressure and heart disease were down, paranoia, bipolar disorder, violence of any sort was down, body dysmorphia, all the old bogeymen of self-destructive behavior: anger, mania, panic, down, down, down. Even dementia had taken a hit. All because of these dazzling buzzing eggs. But they gave Eric the creeps. Maybe it was because of their prevalence. You couldn’t glance anywhere without seeing one on its glowing pedestal or, more likely, in someone’s hand, being fondled and fiddled with. Maybe it was because of the absurdly low cost. They were practically free, distributed like candy. With redemption vouchers and promotions they were free. You could tell by holding one how much they must have cost to produce, never mind market and distribute. Somewhere, someone was making it back in spades. That was a capitalist credo that Eric intended to take to his grave. There were rumors about corporate underwriting, that the true goal was to create a generation of obedient, docile consumers. Well, same as it ever was in that regard. But to Eric there was something else. You used to see a kid sobbing quietly on the schoolyard or, worse, being tormented by his peers. Well, nobody wanted that! But at least there were edges to the world. Now they were cleared of stereotyping, discrimination. Kids saw no racial or ethnic differences which was a good thing, a societal goal Eric had fought for. But did they see differences at all? Did they see each other as anything other than parts of some vast impersonal machine? Eric shook away the lunatic musing. He sounded regressive and idiotic even in his own brain. Though he had heard rumors of a new resistance… He shook it away again. “Let’s give it a go.” Both Bryce and Cassidy were watching him with a bit too much interest. He pressed his fingers around the device, closed his eyes, and there was Grace! He nearly dropped the egg. Of course it was Grace. Every time he had held one and made an attempt to use it… there was Grace, waiting for him on the other side. “What did you see, Grandpa?” Eric wondered if he had made a noise. There was spittle on his chin. He swiped it off, annoyed. “Never mind. Come here. Pull in close, and I’ll tell you a real story.” He waved Bryce to the side and with a quick movement (as much to avoid bending his joints as anything) he dropped onto the puffy chair beside him. Bryce wriggled to make room, and Cassidy jumped in on the other side, not too old, yet, for a snuggle. “A long time ago there was a thing called revolution,” Eric began. “There’s still revolution,” said Bryce sharply, like he suspected a trick. “I’ve seen it in the headsets.” “Not like that. Real events, marches in the streets, like we wanted to tear the place down. And it was gorgeous.” He lowered his voice in ominous narration that he knew would keep their attention. “There was one time, okay? We had gone a little too hard on the gates of a server farm. Just wanted to get their attention. We got it, but in all the wrong ways. They fired gas and smoke and we retaliated with ordnance of our own.” He closed his eyes and was sucked back to the vortex of a rainy, sooty afternoon so dim and grim you couldn’t tell what was roiling clouds and what was smoke, both red-tinged and flickering from drone sparks, from the cycling heli-pods, from the flares. His team was wearing tactical gear and gas masks and near-mesh shoulder-to-shoulder beacons to disrupt corporate comms, with big boots and haptic gloves to read ambient data and feed it to headsets. The squad surged and retreated, reformed and surged again, taking him with it, one big angry mass amidst a shriek of overhead drones, thuds of dispersion rounds, the shouts, the crackling flames and stench of burning polymers, the creak of the heavy iron gates as Eric, barely seventeen, was carried along in the anger and the passion of a generation determined to make a difference. He got separated, caught by a corporate patrol, and they worked him over with batons, kicked him, sat him in the back of a transport van, locked the doors and left him. Problem was, the next car over was in flames, heating the van like an oven. Eric wondered if they intended to bake him. As it was, his anger was spiked with fear as he kicked the reinforced windows, one arm numb from a blow to the elbow, one eye swollen shut. Someone threw a lavablast and the car on the other side went vertical on its nose, sending a new wave of heat and adrenaline through Eric. He tried to break out but had no leverage, no tool. Then there was the rock and clomp of footsteps on the roof, the metal buckling overhead, down the windscreen to the nose of the transport: a shadowed specter in cape and hood, backlit by the turbulent sky. The creature peered in at him, then reared back and in a sweeping gesture brought a goddam axe down on the glass. Everything froze; even the windscreen, as it shattered into a rainbow of shiny pebbles, seemed suspended, waiting. And Eric knew that he had been freed from more than just a cage. The figure kicked out the remaining glass, leaned in, and helped him out. Through the eyeports of a gasmask he saw that it was a woman, and she was grinning back at him as if amidst all the turmoil and danger all she felt was excitement. They stood side by side on the hood of the truck and watched the carnage below—the surging battle, the depot engulfed in flames. But Eric had eyes only for his companion. She had taken her mask off, and her hood; she was not much older than he was, and a lot smaller. But she was spectacular, a superhero sent to save him, a colorful bandana pleated through her wild auburn hair. There was a pause. Eric opened his eyes. Both Bryce and Cassidy were staring at him. Aghast? He wondered how much he had revealed. Had he mentioned that Grace had lost a finger in that skirmish, that the ax she held had been taken from a dead comrade? If so, he hoped he had included the other stuff too: how amazing they felt that day, victorious, how utterly fucking—for lack of a better term--alive. Well, maybe not quite like that. You had to be careful what you said to kids these days, how you worded it. You could get flagged for less. And Cassidy was too young to use a fuzzbomb to clear out confusion. She looked goggle-eyed. “Anyway,” Eric finished. “That’s how I met your grandma! And now it’s time for dinner.” He was relieved to hear Marissa calling from the kitchen. The kids scampered ahead of him down the ladder, bickering about who should get first dibs on something. Clearly they weren’t too shocked by his narrative to be hungry. It gave him a moment to regroup. He ran a tapestry through his fingers, allowing the silky material to slide away, familiar but elusive, like the past itself, dear but something you couldn’t hold on to. He placed the egg on its stand where it made a small, appreciative whirring sound and began to pulse and glow, recharging. He looked around one more time, shut off the string lights and followed the children toward the kitchen. *** “So,” Marissa asked. “What’s the prognosis?” “He seems fine.” “Did you get him to use the fuzzbomb?” “Why would I?” It was after dinner. The kids were doing whatever they did. He could hear them bickering from the other room, the occasional wail as Cassidy perceived some egregious affront to justice, Bryce calming her in his subdued, casual way. Eric stood by the well-lit, polished island in the kitchen, amidst an array of gadgets and appliances, hands deep in his pockets, feeling fidgety and dissatisfied. Marissa had the ability to do this, now: make him feel like a listless, itchy, contrary teenager, annoyed with the world. Well, wasn’t that the natural order of things? Soon enough she’d be treating him like a child, then an infant. “Because he’s unhappy, Dad. Isn’t that enough?” Eric shrugged. “When did unhappiness become a crime?” Marissa didn’t bother to respond, just cocked her head and gave him that small, infuriating half-smile that showed she quite well knew that even he didn’t believe the rubbish he was saying. But he did believe it, in a way! Okay, true, it would be difficult to make a rational defense of unhappiness, or why anybody would want that for themselves, for their kid, or their grandkid. He understood this. He wasn’t an idiot or a psychopath. But there was a deeper worm of logic that he couldn’t quite get hold of, couldn’t quite let go of. Eric scratched his head. What he really wanted was a cup of tea, back in the more peaceful setting of his own home. The door-feed chimed and Marissa checked the console. It was her date. For a moment Eric could see some guy or woman (he couldn’t tell), grainy through the screen but waving gamely, grinning like a schoolkid and holding flowers or dessert, something to bribe the children. It had barely been six months since her husband died and she was on to a new companion, and everyone was happy. The fuzzbomb allowed for that, smoothed the edges, ironed the wrinkles, made it all okay. Marissa clicked the entryway release but Eric didn’t wait, headed out the back door to his car. *** He drove slowly, with traffic, down Merchant Street and through the modest art district, packed with cars and pedestrians at this hour crossing with the lights, calling to each other in their happy, cheerful way, hurrying to get to the next fun event. Students were back, in force; Eric wondered if he might spot someone he knew, a student or another professor, though most of his cohort were retired and any old students were long gone, deep in their own careers, hard to imagine. He had taught at the university for nearly forty years in the sociology department, had even taught a course called Civil Disobedience. It would never fly now, but the kids ate it up. Mostly it gave Eric an opportunity to tell his own tales but also (he liked to believe) to prepare the next generation for battle, to encourage them to remain vigilant, to remind them that the cycle would repeat, that the threats were always there: autocracy, oppression, disinformation—and that it was possible to fight, to make a difference. He remembered vividly the day all that changed, when one young woman stood up and asked, voice shaking with an indignance that took him by surprise, what gave him the right to interpret their concerns. The revolution he was so proud of had happened more than twenty-five years in the past! He was stunned, not so much by the audacity of her challenge, but by the math of it. He had had no idea it had been that long. She took his pause as an opportunity and turned to the rest of the students, asked if they felt that he represented them. And in their uncomfortable shifting and averted eyes Eric saw that he did not. After that, he wasn’t the same. He felt punctured. Grace, as usual, helped him through it. “They’re right,” she said in her matter-of-fact way. “It wasn’t meant to be forever.” She helped him map his next phase which, mostly, involved making space for others. After that he did much of his teaching (if you could call it that) from the background, urging students to take the lead if they were inclined, mentoring them, helping them prepare lectures, stepping in when needed. The administration didn’t love it, but his enrollment doubled. Eventually he was able to take pride in it. On his last day he got a standing ovation and a clatter of fists and feet on desks and floor. He knew they were drumming him out as much as cheering anything he had done. But it still brought tears to his eyes. Whatever. It was all over and past now, most of those concepts of resistance, of rebellion, shaken loose and rearranged into the peaceful pathways of the fuzzbomb. He watched a cluster of students waiting at a light, every one of them fingering a device, some smiling distantly with inner meditation, some with the telltale glow coming through the fabric of a jacket or pants pocket, some with features illuminated when it was lifted close to a passing face, all of them content and very goddam well adjusted. Well, who could begrudge them that? Not him. Not Eric. *** Back at his house, Eric let himself in and stood listening. It was silent. He headed to the kitchen, turning on lights, moving things just to make noise. He turned on the kettle, then turned it off and poured a generous measure of bourbon instead. He brought it to the living room, adjusted the valve in the fireplace so flames jumped in the grate, heating his face and hands. He had taken one of the old LPs from Bryce’s attic den and now removed it from the sleeve: a grooved black disk, meaningless to most people, another artifact of a bygone era, but looking at it he could hear the pops and hisses of the needle in the groove as clearly as if it were coming through a speaker. I’ll… wait for you. I’ll take my chances… The music came with a glimpse of himself and Grace, lying on their backs on the carpet in the old place, when they had first moved in, before it was even furnished, listening to this very album, their whole lives stretched ahead of them. Good Christ, how fast that had gone. And where had it gone? And when had the evening tipped so sideways into nostalgia? He jabbed angrily at the logs with a poker causing a torrent of sparks to swirl up the chimney and away. Ten years was more than enough, wasn’t it? He had a fuzzbomb, who didn’t? They basically handed them out on first release, some kind of government-sponsored wellness initiative, and they targeted single old people first, considered most at risk. Some volunteer do-gooders had come; one had even asked him outright if he was grieving the loss of a loved one, all while trying to peek past him to see if he lived alone. Eric weathered it okay, politely, firmly turned them away, resisted the urge to yell get off my lawn! Knowing it would only make matters worse, make them all the more concerned and determined to check on him, to correct his societally corrosive mood. But soon enough Marissa brought one for him, and he could no more refuse her than he could a black boot invasion. So he took it, although never really using it except every once in a while to get a glimpse of Grace before returning it hastily to the stand. While your perfume still enhances Through and through… Bah! A drag on progress, that’s what he was. It’s what they all were—his generation. Out with the old, make way for the new. He took the fuzzbomb off its stand and it purred in his hand, happy for the attention, reading his profile, pulling his data. The internal light throbbed to show that it was ready. Ten years was more than enough, by any reckoning. He sat back in the club chair, settled himself, squeezed the egg between both palms, closed his eyes, relaxed his mind to say goodbye. His phone buzzed. He considered it on the table beside his chair, then picked it up. “Hello?” “What the hell were you spouting at them?” Marissa’s voice surged at him sharp and accusing. “What?” “I’ve got Cassidy that won’t go to sleep. Says she has a stomach ache, but I know it’s more. What did you tell them, Dad? Flames? Was it about when you were trapped in that car? Did you mention Mom’s finger?” “I guess, maybe…” “You can’t say stuff like that to kids, Dad! You know Cassidy isn’t old enough to use the egg yet. Anyway, Bryce wants to talk to you.” “He does?” It was all disorienting, coming too fast. Luckily by the time his grandson’s voice came on the line Eric had recovered enough to be more coherent. “Hi, Grandpa.” “Champ! How goes it? Been thinking about our fishing trip? Just you and me? The river and the rods?” It was a running joke. Neither of them fished. Fishing wasn’t even a thing anymore. From a catch in Bryce’s breathing Eric thought he might be laughing, or at least amused. He took it as encouragement. “Yeah, I guess so. Hey, Grandpa?” “What’s up?” “Do you miss her?” “Who?” “You know: Grandma. Do you… miss her?” The words came hesitantly, like Bryce wasn’t sure he was using them correctly. “Oh.” Eric took a moment. Like Marissa said, you had to be careful. You could get flagged for less: abuse, endangerment. But what were they going to do, cancel him? “Yeah, Champ. I miss her a lot.” “Still?” “Still.” Now it was Bryce’s turn to pause. Eric waited. He knew what was coming. He could feel it, fluttering around inside the boy, like a butterfly looking for an exit. “I miss my dad,” he said. “And that’s fine.” “My teacher doesn’t think so. And neither does Mom. They want to fuzzbomb it out of me.” “And you can, if you want. Maybe someday you will. But Bryce, you don’t need to do it yet, you know? You can miss him for a while. As long as you want. It’s okay. Not until you’re ready, right?” “Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, thanks, Grandpa. I’ll see you soon. You’ll tell me more stories, right?” There was an edge to his tone now that gave Eric a thrill. He had heard it before, from his best students, the type that paid attention, that might still make a difference. “You bet I will.” Bryce was gone. Eric looked at the phone, amazed, then put it down on the table, beside the album. Marvel that. He stood up and turned a circle. He felt the urge to do a victory dance or a shimmy or something goofy. Instead, before he could reconsider, he pivoted on his good foot, did his best Cy Young windup and fired the buzzing egg at the fireplace. It struck the stone and bounced back, rolling almost to his toe. Eric nudged it. There was a crack in the carapace that allowed some brighter light through. For a moment he thought he could see something in there—a tentacle or an eyeball looking back at him. Surely it had already transmitted an emergency beacon to the mothership: help, help, madman here, send reinforcements. They’d be around tomorrow with a replacement, poking at his doorway, asking him: Was everything okay? Was it really okay? Well, hell no! Everything was not okay! He’d give them a get off my lawn. It was not okay! He’d throw the damn egg after them, too. He chose his favorite photo of Grace on the wall and hesitantly checked it. She was there. And she had that wonderful audacious half-smile that confirmed everything he believed in. She agreed with him. They were in solidarity on this one. They would fight another day of this battle, together. |
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Mathew Lebowitz
Mathew Lebowitz is a designer, futurist and member of The Long Now and writer of speculative fiction that explores the shaky alliance between humans and machines. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has stories in F&SF, The Missouri Review and other magazines. He's a grateful recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant for Fiction. His alien spaceship blueprint doodles can be found on Instagram: @mathatter. More info: mathewlebowitz.com.
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