I’m only floating in the pastel pastiche of 90s neon pink and teal telephones with chords still attached. Graham takes a long, loud breath, oxygen-thieving, and lays down next to me. He was just dancing to something I didn’t recognize, probably one of his weird post-gothic industrial rappers.
“It’s pretty lit, fam,” he comms me with his bio-mouth. I tap out Morse signals on my SNES pad. The Y is sticky because I accidentally put the controller in between the two faces of my PB&J sammy. Now I’ve got to pay the piper. My mega buster’s fucked.
Graham’s eyes flit left and right, trying to catch my bitcrushed audio waves with his Opticlear™ retinas. Each blip slips past him. He’s a slow hearer, an even slower seer. I know that from the beginning, and I’ve always known it, and I like to make him work for understanding. He’s one of them lazies. In a few years, we might call him a Millenial.
He leans over to me, whispering into my ear. “What?” It’s weird to feel the turbine-projected wind of a bio-mouth. I got mine removed years ago. No point. I couldn’t play Final Fantasy III with my old mouth anyway. I just got used to not talking. My pad-proficiency accelerated, craft-like, from constantly jamming buttons after I got back home for the day. Robo-tarantulas and fluidly animated slimes are burned into the backs of my pupils by now. Some people played the Secret of Mana. I know the secret.
The secret is that we’re going somewhere we’d never planned to go. And that all the robots from the 50’s are finally coming out of the woodwork, looking to outdo our high scores in Zombies Ate My Neighbors. In a few years, robots will build cars. Then a car company will make a robot that trips when it tries to go down the stairs.
—
We hit the mall. It’s Saturday and I’m broke so that’s what I do. Video games are like my job. The weekend is for relaxing. By the time Friday rolls around, I’ve hit so many walls in Geno’s maze that I feel sick to my stomach. Home feels like a plastic entertainment system. I feel like a cartridge. I feel the fierce wind of God’s bio-mouth blowing a jet stream of saliva-flecked air into my ass.
We strapped on inlines that day… did some radical flips out on the railings. The fat guard — Jerry, I think — tipped his hat to us. God damn Jerry looked spiffy in that hat.
It’s already night time and the mall is lit up like a checkerboard glow stick. Deco pink zigzags around the food court. It doesn’t make me hungry. It makes me high. Graham’s sitting down at one of the Sbarro’s tables, but he’s eating a Whopper. Graham’s a card. I won’t go home until it’s too late.