Daydreams In The Land Of The Magic Pill - CHAPTER 2
My 2022 novella serialized in nine parts
CHAPTER 1 RECAP: In chapter one we meet Beatty, our protagonist. We learn that he is trying to teach himself to paint graffiti and shares an apartment with his friends Alora and Mar Vel in a rundown part of the city. The government he lives under is more authoritarian than our current one. There is a new type of brain implant called Upthink that has been causing a side effect where people dream while they are awake.
The humidity was already so thick by the time the sun came up the next morning Beatty was practically able to swim the two blocks it took to reach the front door of Humaneyes. With a bag over one shoulder and a tall cup of Cafette in his hand, he approached the solid steel door, twisting the long handle that had lost one of it’s screws back into position so he could pull it open. It didn’t budge. He tried again, pulling so hard he felt the ache of his shoulder being tugged in it’s socket. The door was locked.
“What the hell?” he muttered, rubbing his shoulder. He took a brief glimpse down the sidewalk to his left, then began pounding on the door with his fist. It took a few tries before someone opened.
One of the managers who worked for the business on the ground floor popped his head out. He was a spindly guy with wispy brown hair, a bald spot, and sweat soaked armpits. His musty garlic aroma began wafting out onto the sidewalk, wrapping itself around Beatty and threatening to make him gag.
“Why’s the door locked?” Beatty grumbled. His tone was more nasal than usual because he was trying not to breathe through his nose. The man, who recognized the kid from upstairs, flung the door wide. Beatty pushed past as quickly as possible.
“One of the girls was having a bad day. Didn’t want her to slip out while I wasn’t looking.”
He accompanied this statement with a wide grin, revealing a mix of grey and yellow, plaque-coated teeth.
Beatty glanced over the manager’s shoulder to the open warehouse floor beyond. The place was archaic, barely altered from the time it was built back at the turn of the twentieth century. It had pitted wood floors, studs and unpainted boards for walls, and uninsulated ceilings where you could see the underside of the floor above. There was no natural lighting, only a sea of decades old rectangular LED panels hovering above the workers, casting them with a sickly bluish glow. The hum of the machines was deafening as about fifty women sat there sewing piecework. Their motions were swift and relentless, almost robotic, as they frantically sewed through piles of whatevers and tossed them into large buckets to their right. He recognized a few faces from seeing the same workers here day after day. They’d be sitting at those machines from the time he arrived to the time he left. Many of them seemed young, although he couldn’t ask because they were never not sewing. He often wondered how many of them were once orphans like him. Was he, in fact, one of the lucky ones?
Stitch Master was the name of the company they worked for, a contractor who farmed out their services to whomever needed them to sew the latest fast-fashion all the Elites were craving. PrivaTec-owned labels were their bread and butter, especially as the megacorp continued to eat up every competitor in sight. Even the company Beatty’s employer contracted to, Panacea, wasn’t immune to the glutinous juggernaut. Rumors had been floating around for months that PrivaTec was looking to add Panacea to their portfolio.
He gave the man—who the Humaneyes crew had nicknamed “Mr. Pits”—a brief scowling glance before turning to head up the narrow wooden staircase to his left. His feet thumped on the hollow wood treads as his hands slid along the cramped walls on either side. Voices filtering down from above became louder as he ascended, before finally reaching his home away from home on the upper floor.
His boss was there to greet him at the top of the stairs, standing just outside his office. Rayford was in his early-fifties, clean shaven with sandy nondescript hair and a thick physique. He reminded Beatty of one of those strongmen you’d see in early circus posters; not all cut and muscle-y per se, but the type of guy who could probably beat the shit out of you if he needed to. Lucky for them, Rayford was more like a stern father-figure with a soft core. It took a lot of mistakes to make him throw you out on your ass. Otherwise Beatty would have been homeless long ago.
“His Majesty, Beatty! Good of you to join us sir,” Rayford bellowed mockingly in his usual hoarse tone.
The slight jab coaxed Beatty to pull his tab from his pocket. He was five minutes late.
“I was here! Pits locked the door.”
His boss gave the faintest hint of a smile. “No excuses. Panacea is waiting on your proposals. I need them now.”
“Give me a half hour,” he promised while taking off toward his workstation.
Beatty wove through the gauntlet of mix and match desks and tables, mostly scavenged during trips through the wealthier Ranks’ neighborhoods on garbage day. All of his coworkers had their heads buried in the glow of their computer screens. A few glanced up with a nod or a wave, including Alora who looked surprisingly chipper after a night spent on the couch.
The upper floor of the building was similar in basic structure to the floor below: wood on every surface, including the round support posts full of nicks and gouges that supported the roof. Most of the space was open save one room near the front where Rayford kept his office. It’s door contained a panel of frosted glass with the title ‘Floor Manager’ lettered in gold on it’s surface, behind which Beatty needed to find himself ASAP so he could hand in his latest ideas to be passed along to the higher ups at Panacea.
The real advantage up on this floor was the dehumidifier, something they needed to keep the computers from aging out too quickly. They also had actual windows, although many of the small glass panes they contained had been broken and boarded up rather than replaced, creating spotty access to sunlight in certain areas. Beatty was lucky to snag a spot near one of them, far enough away to not feel the radiant heat they gave off, but close enough to avoid the soul-crushing glow of the institutional lighting that lined the ceiling.
At his desk, he leaned over and pressed the button to boot up his tower before settling in. He would need to forward his proposals to Rayford for approval, then meet face-to-face about corrections before submitting them to Panacea. Rayford was old-school that way. Long back-and-forths via messaging made him grumpy.
Beatty’s job at Humaneyes was to mine the internet, mainly social feeds, and come up with ideas that Panacea could piggyback off of to fabricate problems then offer purchasable solutions. Beatty was part of the Research and Development Team, while some of the other staff, like Alora, were part of Virality and Marketing, tasked with managing multiple profiles of non-existent Elites. By exploiting the social platforms’ built-in biases, they’d generate viral threads to seed the discourse with the fake problems, then promote the products Panacea sells to solve them.
Tech related gadgets and fake medicine were Panacea’s main focus. Some of their greatest hits were things like a thin, chrome, horseshoe-shaped device you wore around your neck that was supposed to block “nanothread signals”. Nanothreads were a purely theoretical technology that conspiracy folks were convinced was being implemented for mind-control. Then there were these boxy reflective hats that were supposed to create an energy field around your body and disguise you from drone cameras. The disguising part actually sort of worked, unlike a lot of Panacea products, but they looked so stupid that trading one’s dignity wasn’t really worth it.
Another absurd looking wearable—one of Beatty’s big ideas—were special orange-tinted glasses that claimed to protect your eyes from “microradiation” supposedly emitted by the newest type of device screens. And, in addition to your already bat-shit crazy outfit, you could slip into Panacea’s line of clothing dyed with chlorophyll which touted the ability to deflect and synthesize UV rays.
Beatty’s absolute favorite Panacea product though, was a device called Woomby. Just the name alone made him laugh every time. It was a stretchy belly shell for pregnant women, embedded with wire that promised to protect the developing fetus from the “microradation, hemotoxins, and dangerous free radicals” that grifters were claiming penetrate the mother’s tissues and lead to her baby potentially developing every ailment under the sun.
Beatty hadn’t met too many pregnant people during his 22 years of life, but the thing looked stiff and uncomfortable, to the point he almost felt a little guilty. But, in the end, it wasn’t doing any real harm as far as he could tell. People were going to worry about whatever they were going to worry about. They craved simple solutions—a magic pill that would solve all their problems. If they were too brainlocked to realize putting wire mesh around their stomach wouldn’t make their baby immortal, was that really his problem?
His monitor sprung to life, still populated by the same morass of tabbed windows he’d left behind the night before. This latest pitch he’d been working on was triggered by a thread posted to the social feed of a famous actress he’d dug up a few weeks ago. It peaked his interest due to many other instances of the same thing that he’d seen crop up lately. In a way, it was different that the other ideas he’d worked on over the years. It had the potential to really help people, not just take their money, while also helping to repair Panacea’s slightly tarnished reputation as of late.
A scathing article had come out a few months prior debunking some of Panacea’s products launched during the early days of the Provox outbreak. Back then, panicked people were scrounging for ways to protect themselves from what was looking to become the next in a relentless series of all-out plagues. Special tonics, bracelets that emit radio frequencies said to repel viruses, head enclosures made from anti-viral plastics, anti-viral mouth and body rinses, mosquito-proof body suits—the “quick and easy wonder products” went on and on.
Selling this crap had turned Panacea into a billion dollar company, by pedalling the age-old illusory balm of simple answers and magical thinking that human beings had clung to despite the fact that things were almost always more complicated than we wanted them to be. If pressed about whether what Panacea did was ethical, Beatty would always offer a strong “no”. But since the bulk of the people buying Panacea products were privileged Elites with money to burn he had a hard time feeling too bad about it. It facilitated the redistribution of wealth by creating jobs for Ranks like Beatty and his cohorts. Plus, personal responsibility had become the cornerstone of everything under Traditionalist rule, an idea pushed heavily by Elites themselves. The agency that used to regulate the testing and marketing of Panacea’s products was quickly deemed a hindrance to the economy and shuddered. The general consensus now was that it was better to allow the consumer to decide whether companies like Panacea were selling them snake oil or not, since the internet supposedly gave them all the tools they needed to make proper choices.
As far as jobs were concerned, Beatty had little choice. Decent jobs were scarce amongst Ranks and the system they were living under kept him focused on his own survival. This new idea he was working on, though; this was something different, something he was proud of. It was inspired by the feed of a petite, brunette actress named Mila Horne. Just a year or two older than Beatty, she had recently guest starred on the reality tv series Night and Day.
Night and Day was non-scripted, you simply followed the life of one of your favorite stars for a month, switching between a micro-camera installed from their point of view and one of the hundreds of cameras installed in their homes. There was also footage from Observer feeds and from micro-cameras the entourage that followed them wore.
Beatty found the show dull and tedious, but it was mostly because the people they followed lived fairly dull lives for his taste. Mila was different—a little naive and sheltered? Sure. But she seemed earnest and humble for someone who was famous, relatable. One of the main plot lines of the series was her deciding whether to have an Upthink implanted, something that was only available to people over the age of twenty one. The final episodes documented the implant process and initial results. This was the part of Mila’s story that had Beatty keeping tabs. There’d been a lot of anecdotes on feeds and in the news recently, more and more people falling victim to this mysterious side-effect called “dreamlinking”. He was curious to see if Mila would be one of the unfortunate victims.
Normally an Upthink implant gives you surface level notifications—things like directions or messages dictated directly into your head, an experience that Beatty had seen described as hearing without actual sound. Visual overlays were harder, still in their nascent stage. Scientists were hung up on the brain struggling to reconcile what it’s being told is there with what it is actually seeing. Dreamlinks were third phenomena, entirely unintended and not fully understood. Victims would start out normal, but then something about living with an Upthink for a while caused certain users’ brains to adapt and rewire. In those cases the victims would begin to see and hear things that weren’t prompted by their device. They said the visions weren’t scary, but rather comforting or enticing. Often it included remnants of fantasies and ideas they had brought up consciously at some point that would then reappear out of nowhere. Over a short period of time the visions would become fuller and morph into something more like daydreams. The victims would begin to lose track of what was real and what was fake. Many would become lost in these daydreams for long stretches of time. Some claimed to be able to turn them off and on while guiding the content to a certain extent; others said it would happen at random and was uncontrollable. Whatever the truth was dreamlinking was addictive, like a drug, eventually destroying the people’s lives. Beatty couldn’t understand why anyone would want to take that kind of chance just to have their pings dictated into their brain rather than reading them on a screen.
Soon after hearing about the phenomena he became obsessed with learning everything he could about it. He was following dozens of accounts of folks who talked openly about their experiences with their implants, waiting to see if any of them showed signs of dreamlinking. So far no one had reported whether it helped having Upthink removed, although if the brain had rewired to accommodate the device there was no telling what taking it out might do.
Beatty’s initial thought was that Upthinks needed some sort of on/off switch, one that could either be activated by the link’s owner or someone they trusted. It was crazy to him that users were given so little control over something that fed messages directly into their brain. You could mute things if you had a meeting or something, but you could never turn it off. Muting didn’t stop the dreamlinks from coming on.
In a thread a few weeks ago, Mila began to show the first signs of a problem. She mentioned a cat, one that looked just like the one she had as a girl, showing up in her apartment earlier that day. She barely caught a glimpse of it skittering across the floor before it disappeared under her bed, then spent an hour trying to find it, only catching brief glimpses as it seemed to teleport from one side of a room to the other. Eventually she realized it was all in her head. Her Upthink was causing the visions. She knew nothing about dreamlinks until her mutuals started filling her in. Despite the manic tone of some of her fans, she was comparatively calm. It was here that she mentioned the same idea Beatty had, a switch that could be flipped if you needed to disable the implant.
That took Beatty down a days long rabbit hole, eventually finding a few semi-anonymous internet folks who’d had the same idea. Two of them were actual engineers who were trying to develop a jammer that would shut an Upthink off completely. Beatty thought if Panacea could fund their research, help create a product to give people control over their links, everyone involved would not only make a fortune, but Panacea could finally do something to atone for their dubious ethics.
This was the first idea he’d had while working at Humaneyes that made him feel good about his job. He’d spent all day yesterday polishing the proposal to make sure the higher-ups had everything they needed for him to make the best case for his idea.
Fingers flying across the keys, he added the contact info for the last of the independent developers he’d found on his favorite tech forum.
He was so zoned out, inside his own head, that it took awhile before he noticed the looming presence behind him.
“That your new pitch?”
Beatty nearly leapt out of his skin at the sudden, close invasion of Eeep’s low-pitched drawl.
“Yeah,” Beatty uttered breathlessly as his heart thudded in his chest. “Can you not do that?!”
He twisted in his chair and eyed the black-clad wall of human looking over his shoulder. Eeep’s expression shifted from amiable interest to furrowed confusion while spooning what looked like oatmeal into his mouth out of a faded plastic cup.
“Do what? Eat?” he asked with a mouthful.
Beatty paused, trying to decide whether to bother getting into it. Eeep was one of the most un-selfaware people Beatty knew. Somehow, combined with his wide and imposing six-foot-five stature, the trait was almost charming.
“Forget it,” he decided. “You got anything good going today?”
Eeep shrugged. “Not really. I’m going through a bit of a dry spell.”
“So is that why you’re creeping up behind me? Boredom?”
Eeep shoveled the last spoonful of oats into his mouth and slammed the empty cup down on a nearby table.
“Basically,” he admitted. “What’s got you so jumpy anyway?”
Beatty sighed and looked back at his monitor. “I dunno. Lack of sleep?”
“Hey everyone! Eyes up here,” their boss hollered, cutting them off.
Rayford had just emerged from his office. The two employees turned to face their boss as he continued with his announcement. “Panacea just informed me they’re sending someone to update your Provox inoculations tomorrow. You all need to be here at nine a.m. sharp. No excuses.”
A few groans emerged from the group of about thirty, causing Rayford to raise his arms in exasperation. “What?! So you want to die instead? Maybe you all need to hold a séance tonight. That way you can ask Marta and Knoll what it’s like being dead before you decide to go get lazy on me.”
Fourteen Humaneyes employees had died from Provox over the past eight years. The two he named were just the most recent. Beatty had worked with both of them, even dated Marta briefly. Her death was something he’d never fully processed.
Eeep let out a quiet whimper then confessed to Beatty, “I don’t wanna die. I just hate those needles, man. Panacea needs to stop wasting their time inventing garbage medicine and put all that money into designing shots that don’t hurt.”
Beatty’s lip quirked in amusement. “They already exist, Eeep. They just don’t give them to people like us.”
Eeep’s head whipped toward Beatty, revealing wide-eyed shock. “Are you serious? What the hell?”
“I think the stabby ones are a lot cheaper,” he theorized. “It’s in their interest to keep us alive, apparently, but they’re not going to pay one microcredit more to do it.”
“Right.” Eeep squinted his eyes, greeting this newly discovered truth with a menacing glower. “Bunch of sadists.”
Beatty chuckled. “It’s not that bad. Come on...tough it out.”
Before Eeep could respond Rayford interrupted them.
“Beatty,” he snapped. “You ready yet?”
Rayford had stopped to consult with Beatty’s coworker at a nearby desk and was now standing directly in front of him.
“Yup. All done,” Beatty offered casually, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands across his stomach.
“Well, why don’t I have it then? We can’t keep our paying customer waiting. You got some fancy new job lined up for when I fire you?”
If anyone but Rayford was saying this it would sound like a threat, but Beatty knew he was just talking shit.
“Alright. Let’s go, old man,” Beatty replied as he hoisted himself to his feet.
Rayford chuckled and started toward his office. “You better watch it. You kids have no respect for your elders. Your life is in my hands and you disrespect me like this?”
Despite his joking tone, Rayford was not entirely incorrect in this assessment. Rayford—or rather, his company Humaneyes—owned Beatty’s apartment, paid for his food and clothes. There were very few job options for twenty-two year-olds with no connections in a city like this. Without Rayford on their side most of the workers in that room would probably end up like the women downstairs. Beatty would be standing on an assembly line or processing meat, sharing a room at night with five of his coworkers. The thought of it made his stomach drop.
He followed the boss into his office.
“Pull the door shut,” Rayford commanded.
Rayford plopped down in his padded rolling chair and grabbed the edge of the grey metal desk to pull himself in. He propped his elbow on the surface and ran a hand across his lips as he navigated through a series of application windows to unearth the one that would take him to Beatty’s proposal.
While he waited, Beatty’s eyes drifted around the room. He had always liked this space for it’s retro vibe. It felt luxe compared to the rest of the floor—like the office of some hard-boiled detective from century-old pulp novels. Dark brown beadboard wainscotting ringed the walls, above which hung a peachy painted plaster. Multiple six-drawer file cabinets inhabited the walls around the desk, creating a cozy nook for Rayford to settle into. There was a cracked and peeling faux leather sofa tucked into the corner closest to the door. Then there were the piles, on almost every surface: a lot of paper, which baffled Beatty since they almost never used paper on the job.
“What’s in these file cabinets anyway?” he asked, hoping it might lead to what the deal was with all the paper.
Rayford’s tanned and craggy face was lit by the glow of his screen. Tiny squares containing Beatty’s words reflected in his eyes. He seemed to not hear him at first, but then roused, looking with surprise from his employee’s face to the cabinets, then back.
“What’s it to you?” he grumbled.
Beatty shrugged. “Just curious. Or are they full of...whatever all this is?” He gestured around at the piles of mysterious papers.
“They used to be,” Rayford replied cooly, turning back to his screen. “I had to make room to store the heads of former employees who asked too many questions. Speaking of, there’s a drawer over here with your name on it.” The last line was delivered deadpan as Rayford shuttled his chair backward toward a black cabinet in the far corner.
Beatty grinned. “Har har. Forget I asked.”
Rayford raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Smart man. Now let me finish, ok?”
Beatty took the hint and walked over to a section of wall lined with framed pictures. One contained a drawing that looked like it was done by a kid, depicting some sort of primitive superhero scrawled in either colored pencil or crayon. The name “Mac” was written in all caps in the lower right hand corner. The next frame held a photograph of Rayford when he was close to Beatty’s age with his arm draped over a multi-monitor computer set up. Beatty didn’t know much of anything about his past. He’d never mentioned any family, or what he did before he started Humaneyes.
He had so many questions, but obviously Ray wasn’t in the mood for an interrogation. It was weird that these little hints of a past life were even on display since they opened up a portal into a private life that he wasn’t sure Rayford wanted anyone else to enter.
After a few minutes Ray finally let out a loud sigh that Beatty took as a signal to re-engage.
“What?” he asked, wandering over to the desk. “Is it bad?”
“No,” Rayford insisted. “In fact, it’s fucking brilliant. You’ve done your research, made it easy for them to set something up without too much investment...they always like that. I’m just jealous I didn’t come up with it.”
Beatty usually managed to maintain an aloof attitude at work, not wanting to seem too eager or try-hard. But this new praise set off fireworks in his brain. Being told he was smart or clever was always the quickest way to Beatty’s heart, an assurance that his life had some value or purpose beyond merely existing. He fought to control the wide grin threatening to take over his expression as Rayford went on.
“I can’t see many downsides for them. Plus it would be great PR after that article. I’ll send it their way today and let you know when they get back to me.”
Beatty stood motionless for a second, thinking maybe he’d missed a few words. “That’s it? No edits.”
Rayford shrugged. “Looks fine to me. Go get working on your next big idea, genius.”
Beatty nodded and turned to leave.
“Oh, shit. Hang on a sec!”
Ray’s exclamation stopped him in his tracks and Beatty pivoted to return to the edge of the desk.
“So, I’ve got a new guy coming in. Name’s…” He paused to squint at the form on the screen. “Rick...no Brick? What kind of fucking name is that? Anyway, I’m outta flats at the moment so were gonna need to find room for him at your place.”
Beatty greeted this new information skeptically. “All the rooms in our place are taken.”
“Uh, now, from what I remember your unit’s got that little space off the kitchen no one’s using, right?”
It took him a moment. “That thing?!” Beatty argued, incredulously. “Ray, that’s basically a closet. The ceiling is slanted so you can’t stand up all the way. There’s no window. I don’t think there’s even enough room to lay down in there.”
“The guy’s small. I’m sure you’ll make it work,” he insisted, as if that solved the problem. “Make sure it’s cleaned out by tomorrow.”
Rayford turned back towards his screen and started typing while Beatty stood there struggling to come up with something that would convince Ray this was a terrible idea.
Feeling his glare, Ray paused and turned to look at him. “Something wrong?”
Beatty held his gaze a beat longer, all the while knowing he had no ground to fight this on, then turned and walked out.
Heads popped up, greeting him with curious glances as he maneuvered his way back to his desk. When he passed Alora, he felt a hand grab his arm.
“No good?” she asked, pulling him in toward her.
Beatty looked down at her pained expression and realized he must have been scowling. He tried to smooth her worry with a weak grin. “Actually, he loved it. Wants to put his name on it.”
She met his response with a confused look.
“So what’s with the face then?” She drew a little circle in the air with her pink lacquered fingernail.
Beatty sighed and shifted, brushing back the hair that slipped down over his forehead. “Some guy’s moving in. Probably tomorrow.”
Her eyes grew wide with panic. “What?! Gah...where’s he gonna sleep? I’ll die if I have to give up the sofa.”
“He wants us to put them in that storage nook behind the kitchen.”
She took a moment to process what he meant, and when she figured it out she had to stifle a snort of laughter. “Where we keep the trash? No! Is he serious?”
“Says he has no other units free right now,” Beatty explained. “We have to clear it by tomorrow.”
“Pffft. He’s got other spaces,” Alora barked while shaking her head in disbelief, then reconsidered the sad, trash-filled closet. She scrunched up her nose and shuddered. “Geez...ok. Whatever.”
Part of the reason Beatty got along so well with Alora was because they both accepted their plight and knew how to roll with the punches. Still, cramming a fourth body into their 400 square foot apartment was not something either of them were looking forward to.
They shared a moment of silent ennui, glancing around at their coworkers, before picking up the conversation again.
“I’ll take out the trash as soon as I get home then mop the space and leave the door wide overnight,” she decided, sullenly. “Hopefully that will get rid of any bugs and smells. Are you home tonight?”
He nodded. “I’ll help. We’ll get it done right after dinner.” Then, after no reply from her. “Ok, I gotta get back. Ray wants me to start working on another pitch.”
Alora rolled her eyes and spun herself back toward her monitor. “Of course he does. Good ol’ Rayford.”
She had never agreed with Beatty’s assessment that Rayford was essentially a good guy just trying to get along in a shitty world. Ray amused her, for sure, but her ire for the man’s less charming qualities extended much farther than Beatty would allow himself to go. He owed Ray, after all—like a lazy son’s obligation toward a half-assed stepfather. And despite his reluctance to admit it, he wanted to impress the man, prove himself worthy of something other than the hand he’d been dealt.
Back at his desk he scrolled through social feeds searching for new leads until his eyes ached along with his empty stomach. By the time he looked up again, the moon was high and Rayford was calling it for the night. His tab read nine p.m.. Only twelve hours until he’d be back here again.