Three Grams of Elsewhere by Andy Giesler

Author:Andy Giesler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andy Giesler

THE LONGEST RIDE

By the time I left my room at 2:00 p.m. for a light lunch, my early morning kali dose was definitely tailing out. Dred, who was standing outside my door where I’d left her, led me to the elevator and up to the restaurant.

Multistory buildings are hard on me. Kenning radius varies with lots of factors, but it’s safe to say mine is wider than most folks’. A multistory building gives me three dimensions’ worth of people to endure instead of the usual two. For lunch I was able to drink a tall glass of whole milk and eat a spinach and feta omelet. The omelet was tasty, but I wasn’t able to give it the attention it deserved.

Dred and I didn’t talk about much of consequence; I wasn’t able to give her the attention she deserved, either. I settled on an easy story, one I could tell on autopilot since I’d pondered it so often through the weary decades. She was too young to remember the whole to-do with Rosies, the augmented reality company Dys founded back in the mid-forties. Tens of millions of people bought those signature rose-colored glasses that reconfigured the world to look however the user wanted. When a bunch of angry people—tired of their partners and spouses secretly making them look like somebody else—filed a class action suit, it looked like a nuisance. But then Dys got cocky, and I lucked into a steaming, fly-infested pile of financial and information crimes thanks to her hubris. That’s when she lost her taste for public attention. It’s when she stopped being Candice Altamirano and started calling herself just plain ‘Dys.’ And it’s when I made my name in Dane County Safety Services, paving the way for my private agency…which Dys later joined.

I kenned that Dred couldn’t decide how to feel about the story. That was okay. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

When we finished, she took me down the elevator to ground level where an annoyingly cute, lime-green, white-upholstered, vanilla-scented lozenge of a car was waiting. The anime eyes displayed on its hood winked at us adorably. I moaned. “We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes,” Dred said as the gull wing doors sealed us in with a hiss.

“If it’s not too personal, where are you from?” I asked, hoping for anything to distract me from the stress of my MEPA anxiety, and of all the minds we were whizzing past.

“Too personal? Hon, personal makes my job more interesting. Besides, I’ve got access to your whole life story, so it seems only fair. Louisiana, originally. Little town called Mamou. I’ve been in Trust City over twenty years, so now this feels like home. But my heart’ll always be in Mamou.” As she said that, I half imagined her accent slid briefly toward Acadiana.

My anxiety was cresting. I needed something to hold on to. Dred was tense, too—for me, I thought—and it felt like she wanted to help me somehow. I decided to help us both.

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