Sugarcoded

Sugarcoded 2.0

By Koobie Wyatt

Copyright 2020 Koobie Wyatt

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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We need flight

To feel the light

Light is life

And we're in flight

- ACR80

Chapter 1

Gran, you're such a bigmouth!

There she sits at the head of the table waving her fork around, saying the most outrageous things. Here comes another one now.

Years ago, she says, years ago before your Mum and Dad were even born, everyone thought the world was going to end. We were all going to be blasted to dust and shadows, and that would be the end of that.

So she reckons, so she claims.

But it never came. Her final day never happened. There was no blinding flash. Nobody's skin was fused to nobody's bones. Leastways, not until Murmansk – and that was when Feo was a little kid, easily six or so decades on from the main event.

And that was like a total accident, he beams. "Damn thing wasn't actually pointed at anyone when it went off, yeah? I mean, there was no target or anything."

Dad thinks maybe they were just cleaning up, but what does he know?

So poor little Murmansk was no big deal really, not compared to what Gran is talking about.

Anyhow, says Dad, plenty enough will die when the earth gives way and LA collapses in on top of itself.

Feo grins massively.

Bad times, Dad! Real bad times.

All this talk of destruction and death is getting him more and more excited by the minute.

Tell us more, Gran! Tell us more!

Hayla hushes him up and reaches clear across the table, unauthorised and uninvited.

Hey, big cyst!

Feo is indignant and acts all wounded.

Big blister, you just shouldn't, right?

Still heaps left on her brother's plate there is, but it isn’t for her greedy face. At least not yet. Not whilst it’s still warm.

Dad snaps at her, which makes a change. Feo gestures sharply and shakes his head.

I can't picture it, Gran. You know, you just marking time like that, acting all paralysed and trembling before the Almighty Bomb as if before some great and vengeful God.

The old woman's gaze moves from a print on the wall and onto Feo, her expression fixed.

No shelters were deep enough to hold a future for any of us. And we had no real life to dream of other than those last four minutes. So together we would hide and huddle in the long grass, me and my happy friends – just a bunch of kids like you and Hayla – our bright summer days tainted by this one stark certainty, scaring one another witless with tales of fallout and lingering death, of still births and running sores.

She cuts a potato down to size and dips it in the green sauce.

We asked ourselves: were our treasured, radiant lives to count for nothing?

Feo shakes his head again.

Nuclear war must have seriously messed with your heads, Gran, what with being so young and everything. I know I couldn't have handled it. And that's the truth.

At least not without his wire.

Why didn't your parents send you down the mall? Just pop some old coins in your pockets and send you shopping or something? That's what ours do! Or what we ourselves choose to do when none of us is able to face up to what we should be facing up to.

Here and now it all seems insane to Feo, sixty some odd years distant from his grandmother's mutually assured nightmare, tucked up safe and sound and way in the clear. But the minute he starts to openly chuckle and daresay laugh, incredulous at the enormity of it all, Gran takes it entirely the wrong way and comes on dead stroppy with him. Very soon she's cranking out that you-young-people cliché of hers, cutlery poised.

"Liberteens," Feo cuts in, correcting her yesteryear way of speaking, in a teasing, grandsonish sort of way.

The youth of today, she perseveres, "the youth of today have neither the grace nor the wisdom they think they have. They're only interested in what's on the outside. Proofs not truths."

(She's saying all this as if he's not even there.)

They are unable to see or fear the true nature of anything. For them there is no danger. No danger in anything at all.

By now the top of her voice is echoing loud in Mum's ears from Sunday lunches long gone, when someone older and wiser and totally unknown to Feo used to sit in Gran's creaky carver. Written all over Mum's face it is, grim as grim. Feo is just having a bit of fun. He doesn't pretend to understand.

Why, asks Gran, why are you so eager to throw your lives away so uselessly, so easily, so unlived and unfulfilled?

She's seen it on the telly, so she has.

And is it really so very many...?

Don't point with your knife, Mother. It's rude.

It's all the reply she gets. For a mouthful or two there's a lull, then up they rise again for an argument about genetics, about ordained destiny, which Gran doesn't believe in at all, and about Heavensight, in which Feo doesn't believe but Hayla most certainly does.

Sis, it's all big laughing nutmegs, yeah?

Hayla ignores the slight and reassures Gran in a grand-daughterish kind of way that genetics is something she will have very little understanding of because she didn't have to learn about it at school back in the day.

Unlike us.

And then Gran comes back all wild-eyed and proud, drumming hard at her bony chest.

I was born the year DNA was first well and truly unravelled, I'll have you know! she proclaims.

Feo is pretty sure this is a lie. But like who knows?

Gran is making them both giggle now and she has to bang the table to shut them up.

Oh, come on, Gran, exclaims Hayla. You know you're not the punchline!

But their facetiousness is becoming tiresome to her and a weary look of defeat passes across Gran's face. She retreats to her food visibly reduced in size. Poor Gran. Hayla and Feo can't keep a serious train of thought going for more than five seconds, she ought to know that. Feo knows he winds her up more than he ought, and far more than she deserves, because he just loves listening to what Gran has to say.

Poor Mum and Dad, look at them. Becalmed in the middle as usual. They've heard all this about a thousand times before: the appalling contrast between their children’s lives and those of the generation preceding their own. And no one is the slightest bit interested in anything either of them has to say. For sure. Recent history is the most contemptible form of history, after all.

Feo's world on the other hand, Feo's world is now so gloriously bounding, bright and wondersome that Gran's commonplace recollections are a strangeness to be savoured. And they're funnier, too. They spank Dad's cheesy old nostalgia any day. Listen.

Things were so downright primitive when Gran was Feo's age. Ten times unbelievable, some of it. What she comes out with sometimes, it floors him completely. All the way down. If someone casually deleted ten or so things from Feo's life – really essential things – that Gran didn't even have back in the Sixties when she was a girl, he can't imagine how he'd, you know, cope. Function. Whatever.

If he could, if he really had it in him, Feo would probably apologise for the total pathetickness of it all, meaning the whole of Gran's woeful, homeless kid type list. But anyway, here goes, straight face and no violins.

In her house there was:-

- no phone (roamer or otherwise)

- no computer (which he kind of knew anyway)

- no wet room (just a cold steel bath, the very idea of which gives him the shivers on account of all the giant hairy bastard spiders therein)

- no central heating (can you believe, the first thing Gran had to do when she arrived home from school was to make an actual fire – by hand, with paper and coal!)

- no fridge

- no dishwasher

- no washing machine or tumble drier

- no microwave (so everyone’s houses must have smelled of cabbage and eggs, right?)

- no music system (well, just this manually operated contraption, sort of like a meat-grinder, which played things about the size of a family pizza – and with an actual needle for crying out loud! – Feo would die without constant music: he's always got at least one earbug in, even at the dinner table, like now for instance)

- neither were there any bodyworn all-action cameras nor even that crappy video thing that Dad brings down from the attic every once in a weepy while

- and – get this; this is deluxe – all she had was a monochrome box television set made of wood, on legs with only three channels and no broadcasts during the daytime.

I mean, Feo had once asked her, what on earth did you do when it rained? Play snap or miserable board games or something?

Gran's impoverished life didn't end there. There was more. Plenty more.

Until she flew off on her honeymoon, Gran had never been abroad or on an airliner in her entire life (Feo has been on twenty, minimum). And in those days glow and pollen were still totally beyond law (though that's no bad thing, should anyone ask Feo that particular question). And, if it's possible to even believe it, there was only one place in town you could actually buy a burger: in a real life restaurant, all brown and scarlet plastic inside with waitresses to match. Nasty.

No word of a lie, Gran told him. "You honestly had to sit down and eat it off a plate with a knife and fork – bun and fries and all."

Like it was a serious meal or something?

And then Gran tried telling him there were no shopping malls at all. Not a single one in the whole damn town – in any town – just sort of ranks of uncovered shops along either side of the cold and windy streets. She reckoned browsing used to mean going into each one of these sad little places in turn to see if you liked what was on offer. There were no pop-ups, no alerts or nudges, no persuasive virals or auto-calls, no man-to-man marketing or anything.

"You mean, there was no pressure? It cracked him up. It really did. No mall! Sounds worse than nuclear winter, yeah Gran?"

But of course the afternoon has to sour. It always does. The Reids have been sitting there together for a couple of hours nearly, Feo and Mum and Big Cyst, Dad and Gran, all having a wonderful laugh over mild curry and light wine, when the rain starts to hit hard against the window. It’s not Feo's fault.

Don't pin it all on me again, yeah?

The whole afternoon falls right out of the sky because Gran has had too much to drink – like she always does – and then Dad has to go and mention the etherworld. Feo's netherworld.

Oh, great! Like thanks, Dad. Feo leans forward and hisses. So now she's going to have a right go at me for being hardwired and stuff, and how I'm sure to kill myself before I'm twenty and had children of my own.

Well, you are!

Sure, Gran. Sure. Feo picks up the pace. He can't help himself. What is it? What exactly is the arch-problem here?

Out of the blue Mum sticks up for him, though kind of half-heartedly.

It's just another phase. He'll give it up soon enough.

It's more to mollify herself than her mother, or so Feo believes. Then Hayla pitches in, contradicting Mum outright:

"Hardwire's basically evil. He shouldn't be doing it ever."

Shut the –

Why don't you put Feo's name down on one of those new head transplant lists or something if you’re that worried?

Shut up, you big bloater!

He’s already had it shrunk.

Dad laughs at his own joke.

Get lost, Dad!

Now it's Feo's turn to bang the table.

Plates are cleared, silence grows. Sphincter muscles tighten. Bowls of dessert appear. It only remains for Dad to start persecuting him, which he does, as soon as Mum is out of the room.

Feo half listens to a couple of minutes of this rubbish of Dad's masquerading as dazzling perception, before waving it all away and making to leave the table.

I don't have to put up with this garbage so I don't, not for one minute. He turns to his big blister. You're welcome to my pudding.

Only Dad has to restrain Feo from shoving it all down Hayla's front when she flicks half a teaspoon of her own pale pink goop at him and chirps all sarcastic, don’t forget Andrena's portion!

Feo has had enough. He stomps upstairs.

The door is slammed; Feo removes an earbug and dials Andrena. When she picks up there's no greeting, so Feo just piles on in.

"Why do they have to go on at me like that? Why can't they just let things glide and ride? Why can't they just accept? I don't do bad stuff. You know, bad stuff to other people, stuff to harm the general population. And all my key performance tests come back fine or thereabouts, term after term, so what's the big bleeding deal? Anyway, life's not a bottomless pit, is it? So what if I throw myself in as hard and as far as I can? They know it's what most liberteens end up doing."

Andrena grunts into his ear.

What's it got to do with any of them, anyway? It’s my pissing life!

This earns a snort of sympathy.

"I count my own time!"

Dolts.

Thank God you understand. I'd go mad without you, Ands, I really would.

He spins round and flops onto the bed.

Why do we bother with them? They squeeze us into this world of theirs and then spend forever complaining because the rails they’ve set us on are never ever quite straight enough. You know, one pesky micron off true. And always we come toppling off and they make such a big fuss and flap of setting us right back on them again. There we go! they say. Right as rain.

Pat-pat.

Good as new.

Right as rain, my arse.

Feo laughs.

Dolts!

Yeah. See you tomorrow?

Yeah, yeah.

Alone in his room Feo lies down on the floor and jacks the wire in behind his ear. The countback is set at four. Just a little one. Just enough to flush the stress out of his system, to block out the sound of Gran crying below. There was a time when they would have chased him up the stairs, shouting at him, pleading with him. But not any more.

Andrena understands. So what more does he need?

Green lights flicker at his mind's horizon. Feo hits the switch and a golden light receives him. He smiles. He his so very welcome.

Chapter 2

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Sorely sick of this dull, drab waiting room is Feo. He sniffs the air.

And such a horrible fug of air fresheners and cleaning products, too.

Andrena pulls a face. She's looking like she wishes she hadn't agreed to come along to give her talkative friend support. Andrena hates hearing him carping on, moaning, moaning without end.

Feo picks up some magazines and lets them spill back onto the table.

All dog-eared and dead. Not even any good pictures in them. Testily, he flicks a page. Look at this one here: how old is it, for God's sake?

Its bombast cannot go unmocked.

Behold! A stardust empire for the whole of mankind!

He indicates the fat typeface, all bold and crowish above a phoney image of some astronauts struggling to raise a flagpole.

"Bunch of pinheads and no mistake. Two years left at school we have and still they haven't reached Mars."

Dolts.

Andrena has pressed a button. The reaction is instantaneous.

I know we're supposed to look up to them and everything, but our elders and betters are such an utter disappointment, aren't they? And like every time, too. Without fail. And it's all because of them I've been harbouring these dangerously high hopes and expectations, for years and years. Totally embarrassing really. I blame them entirely, all of them, without exception, for making me feel the way I do. And these scientists, yeah? Their idea of a cosmic breakthrough is to toss up a probe in that direction every once in a while and stir up some dead orange dust. Awesome, as Dad would say. It doesn't even make the news.

Andrena chews a nail and picks at the corner of a grey carpet tile with her toe. Feo yammers on.

Space sucks. It really does. Endless void full of junk and urine crystals, that's all it is. Time was it used to be exciting and everything, looking up at the stars, dreaming and wondering. Like back when I was a little kid maybe, all eager for Dad's promises to come true. One day, he'd say, one day there'll be this magnificent glass and aluminium colony of frontiersmen up there somewhere. Heroes to a man. And then he'd get me all bouncy and gleeful about rockets with fiery tails, things like that, and how I'd get to fly in one. Some day. But it doesn't excite me now. Not any more.