Chapter 15

Trish’s top hung off one shoulder, revealing a hot pink bra strap. The black cotton top she cropped by hand, she had sliced a chunk from it with kitchen scissors. Her stomach looked tight, and a belly-button ring drew the eye to that sliver of skin between the top and a plaid pleated skirt. Her blonde hair was tied in a tight ponytail, and a pair of thigh-high socks and combat boots gave her the feeling she was about to step into a fight. Dark eyeliner added a hint of menace to her face. Trish felt ready for battle. She stretched her neck and looked into the cracked, grimy mirror in her bathroom. Her expression seemed cold, distant, but inside she burned with energy. Rage and nervous excitement. Years of hating CaliaCorp coalescing into something dangerous. A chance to strike back against something that felt like an omni-present set of eyes, watching her for her entire adult life. Trish smiled, thinking to herself how much she wanted to poke those eyes, rile them up, see what would happen if that gaze wasn’t on anyone else, just on her.

There was a hint of arousal too. She bit her lip, smearing her purple lipstick, thinking about her plans. Marc and Theo and Sam could do their little projects in the shadows, but Trish wanted to show everyone what was going on, and in the process, be seen. She gripped the sink and leaned forward, peering into her own reflection. Trish knew she looked attractive, enjoyed people looking at her with those glances before staring down at their feet. She wanted to catch their eyes, and she smiled, pleased with how big her makeup made her eyes look, how a line of barely noticeable freckles peppered her nose and cheeks. With a swift, deft motion she pulled her hair down and let it unfurl down her back. Soft, pale yellow hair framed her face, and Trish was ready to go. Ready to show herself, and to show everyone exactly what CaliaCorp was.

Cold air cut through the streets outside as Trish left her building. A rush of chill wind threatened to send her skirt flying upward, but she didn’t care. She knew exactly where she was going, and what she was going to do. Her first stop was a small shop a few minutes’ walk from her apartment. Not many places were still open in the Circuit District. A few of the clubs were still playing music, which thumped in the background, bass booming from deep underground. Revelers from the wealthy part of the city fell out onto the streets occasionally, drunk and smiling, eyes glazed over from what Trish assumed a lack of sleep, or satisfaction. The clubs were happy to allow sexual services to be bought and sold and for the people of the rich part of town, they were cheap, easy thrills.

The Circuiters that were walking around were the owners of breakfast places and small stores, the kind of place a person might go after a night on the town. Most were near-empty. The CaliaCorp folk stopped going to them, instead they arrived, partied and did whatever sexually deviant thing they wanted to do, and left. It was another nail in the coffin for the district. Those little breakfast bars serving rice and eggs, where everyone sat around a bar with a cook in the middle making orders that machines took from the customers, they were going the same way most of the people were. Far away. To where, Trish didn’t know anymore. The countryside had become focused on two things; growing vast volumes of trees to improve air quality, and industrial farming to provide food. CaliaCorp had even taken over agriculture and forestry. There was nothing outside their reach. The kinds of things governments should do, all done by a gigantic, calculating corporation.

Trish first thought faceless, but that wasn’t quite right. CaliaCorp had a face. Always had that face. That same smiling, beautiful, horrible woman. Her visage was on posters about hiring and positive growth and whatever the latest product was. She appeared everywhere. Even in the Circuit, Calia’s face smiled out from torn posters hastily slapped on the walls of buildings. In the wealthier areas, she adorned digital screens, moving and speaking and reminding people that CaliaCorp is their friend, their family, whatever other nonsense the rich morons who worked up there believed. Trish knew there were other companies around that part of town before, banks and computer companies, but they were gone. She wondered if this was how it went in every city, every country. The information was all online to check, but she didn’t trust CaliaPedia to provide unbiased facts either.

A boarded-up diner marked the corner Trish turned to find her destination. One she had fond memories of visiting with family years before. It closed down a couple of months before Ben vanished. The sign above what was now a plywood board, but had been a large window to people watch from, was falling apart. Cheap Eats now read Chea t. Trish walked around the door and onto a side street and paused, immediately buffeted by a fierce wind that made her shiver and think for a moment that her outfit may have been a poor choice, but she shrugged it off. The clomp of her boots on the ground made her feel powerful and she’d already drawn the attention of several passersby.

The side street lay empty. What had once been a carefully maintained, but small road, was now cracked and bumpy. No cars were left in the city to drive down it, just people on bicycles and scooters went on wheels. Almost everyone walked, and in the other districts trains slid by silently on magnetic rails. An eerie silence hung over the quiet area Trish wandered through. Nothing was left open here, save for where she was headed. She passed so many places she might have gone, if they still operated. A pet shop, with empty pens in its windows and moldy bags of dog food. A gallery, with torn canvas paintings scattered on the floor. A clothing store with decades-old dresses and jackets hanging on headless mannequins. It all told a story of urban decay, in a city with a skyline reaching beyond the clouds. Some rose high, others were left to fight for space and lose, near the ground.

Her destination was a stationery shop. How it remained in business, Trish had no idea. It sold a lot of things, so that helped. Paper, pens, paint, but also snacks and drinks, and she was sure some illicit items too, though those were carefully hidden and she had never actually seen them, so it may not have been true. The place seemed to be a chaos of things. Shelves overflowed with dusty items that no-one wanted or needed. The owner was an elderly man, and as she walked in, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose and nodded. He never said much. Trish walked around picking up the things she needed. A large sheet of white cardboard, a brush, and a small pot of black paint. She placed them on the counter and the owner looked down at them over the rims of his glasses. Wispy white hair hung loosely on either side of his otherwise bald head, and his blue work shirt was stained with paint and ink in many places. A nametag hung awkwardly from his breast pocket, but the name had long since faded. Trish could make out some of the letters, but the best she could guess was his name was Alan or Ang or Akira.

“What are you doing with these?” he asked. His eyes were half-covered by the glasses and only served to make his quizzical expression more pronounced. Trish bristled at the question.

“Just some art,” she said as she handed over a small pile of coins. The man took them, counted them, and grunted. That was the last thing he said to Trish, she took her supplies and left the shop.

Back on the street, the wind threatened to send the cardboard sheet rocketing into the sky. Trish gripped it tightly to her chest, pressing the brush and painting against it. Scanning the street she saw a small alleyway that offered shelter from the blustering wind. She walked into it, and into a dark, damp sliver of concrete between two apartment buildings. Ancient, creaking air conditioning units hung from windows above her, whirring and wheezing. Laundry hung on lines above her head, hooked between the two apartment blocks. Damp rose from the ground right to the roofs, tainting everything with black mold. She placed her cardboard down on a dumpster lid and opened the paint pot. Trish was no artist. The brush she dipped into the black liquid and sloppily slathered paint onto the white cardboard, spelling out a message in black and white.

CaliaCorp is Brainwashing You

It felt absolutely silly to have painted it on the card. True or not, she wondered if this was what protestors always felt, if they wrote their messages and then second guessed themselves, wondering if maybe things were ok, if maybe the world wasn’t as bad as it felt. Maybe it was just her. Maybe Ben was right.

She caught herself. Of course it wasn’t right. The paint dried fast and Trish picked up the crude sign and held it to her chest, hoping that it wouldn’t stain her clothing. The alley led out at its opposite end to the main strip of the Circuit, and on reaching it Trish smelled the street food carts immediately, they were getting ready for the day and the workers moving from their tiny apartments to their tiny workplaces. The ants beneath the CaliaCorp tower. It loomed over the strip, a monolith. The tower looked out of place even surrounded by other skyscrapers. It was so tall, so unfathomably huge, that it could contain the population of the city within it. The place where almost everyone from CaliaCorp worked, those who weren’t in something that demanded they be outdoors like construction or farming. Sometimes, when the wind blew strong enough, the tower swayed. Trish always hoped a strong enough wind could knock it down, send it crashing to the ground and have it take CaliaCorp and the empire they had created with it.

It never happened. The building swayed, seemed to bend, but those inside were unmoved, and those outside could only hope.

The strip seemed less busy than usual, even for the early hour. Steam rose from grates on the street and wafted into the air before dissipating into the sky. The few people who were around walked with heads down, rushing past the food, hoping to get out of the cold.

With the cardboard held against her, covering most of her body, Trish felt at least a tiny bit insulated from the driving wind, but it barely helped. Her legs felt stiff and tired. She felt tired. It was as if something, somewhere in her mind, told her to stop, to turn back, go home and accept the inevitable. Another part of her screamed not to. To rebel, to fight, to tear down the walls and show everyone what was going on, to make herself seen, to be the face of the resistance, the queen of the counterculture. It was a little ambitious, but Trish always wanted that, to be known, seen, perceived. As a child, she wanted to be a performer, a dancer or an actress. It never worked out, never enough money, never a place to go. The void that left had never truly been filled, the empty space where her dreams were supposed to go.

Being alone with her thoughts for so long wasn’t good. Usually she would listen to music, watch TV, go online, or do something sexual but out on the street, hands full with the sign, there was nothing else she could do. Perhaps it would have been better to keep distracting herself but wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t that the reason no-one did anything? It seemed as if everyone had become completely addicted to their screens. It terrified her to think that she was much the same, but how else could she quiet the doubt and fear and disappointment. She lived in a damp room in a dying part of a city being trampled beneath the spiked heel of a woman whose entire existence was shrouded in mystery.

Trish reached the train station that marked the end of the Circuit District, and the start of Calia’s city. A gleaming, bright, clean building. Slick, gold-hued, safe. She walked up to the platform and waited for the train to arrive and take her into the belly of the beast.