Leaking Fluid

In the red light district of Under New York Joanna was hearing another one of the stories from her Wednesday night regular, Marcus, some John who had once engineered a bunch of RoboSpecialists for the New Football league, “A cacophony of screeching brakes, colliding metal and blood thirsty fans,” his high pitched voice sang out clearly retelling a story that had been told many times. Regardless, she really rarely heard a word he said. His stories drifted in and out of a variety of his glory days all amalgamated into some drunken narrative. Joanna was only obligated to act like she was listening to. Technically, she was working for Marcus. But she didn’t actually have to listen either.

She undressed before the man, stinking of bourbon and wearing nice clothes. On him the threads just dangled like the flannel and jeans you might find on some scrawny scarecrow, unimposing but certainly a hay-stuffed mess. After she took off her shirt and pants and she sat next to Marcus on the bed in her studio — a little tight but with the trundle bed folded up there was space to dine and an open area where she could do a tease or menage-a-trois for a customer. Then, when she was by along she could use the sofa to watch TV and spread out a little bit.

“I used to be able to make the most, most special bots,” Marcus was almost breathless from talking so much. “They could jump, juke, dodge — they couldn’t be brought down. The ‘Demons’, my line. They were the fastest, hardest bots to bring down — no doubt. For a few years, I mean for a while, my bots were preeee-miere.. I set them up to work with predictive AI. They could basically anticipate their opponents move. Or where the would-be tackler could latch on to them, my guys had great elusiveness. They just could NOT be taken down that easy.” The pitch of his voice elevated even higher with excitement, “You’d hear the collision as they tried to tackle them. But the crunch of some metal on metal followed by a roar of the crowd was often punctuated by an even louder roar,” he somehow managed to raise his voice even further when he put his hands up celebrating the coming score, “when my bot would slip the contact, escape the tackle, and then be off down the sideline for another touchdown.”

Joanna nodded dutifully as she listened. She really thought that her listening to Marcus was often more important to him than actually getting him to cum. Marcus could often seem disinterested in the sex he paid for. Basically, even like tonight when he came in stinking drunk talking about the glory days from decades ago, her main priority was to just to listen. She knew how to follow the tones of his speech to feign like she was listening to him. She also knew when she need to respond; to keep his story going, “So, you were pretty famous back then, yeah?”

“Oh man, everybody knew me. I was the microprocessor guru. But they didn’t care about that. They loved the oozing oil and twisted metal. They waited on it!… When some tube was popped or severed and the oil or lubricant would spurt out… The crowd loved that. Other bots slipping on the leakage, the dark murky thick fluid would spout forth like a devilish fountain of blood. It was like a person, they needed the fluids to live. There on the concrete… I mean, their bodies would eventually slow.. some bots stuck to the point of paralysis, basically dying on the field. But more often, you’d just tie some things up and refill them. But yeah, sure sometimes that would be it, there would be no more repairing them…”

Joanna kept trying to engage as the lights flickered outside her window, “I can only imagine. That sounds very exciting.” She turned and looked back at the window as he kept on with his story. The red light from outside cast a dark, crimson glow almost like fire whose light seeped in through the glass pane.

“The sensors I built were really the key.” Joanna looked back from the window and moved over to massage his shoulders hoping that might prod him into action. She really had heard a lot about the sensors before — some portion of every session was spent on the sensors. That, she knew, was inescapable. “They way I had built the outward facing sensors on my players, they would seemingly react to the would-be tacklers like they knew what was coming. This was never by accident though, no-no. I spent years figuring out how to build sensors that could then provide enough early information to the sensors. I started back in college but then I continued to work on them after. I was all about it. I spent so much time on AI calculations which could foresee the number of ways an opposing tackler might move. Some might say the potential for any variety of moves is infinite, but I actually made it so the bot knew how many options there were. The possibilities became predictable for my guys.” The words droned on. “It was all math and electronics, but I was so good at breaking it all down. Those outward inputs provided so much data and I was able to make the process so quick, faster and faster, the Demons got better and better. At my peak, we were hard to stop in any fashion. Those were good years. But Wesley, he was the best. Loved that guy. He was the greatest of all my work. I don’t talk about him much. I guess I’ve just had too much booze tonight. Everything after that has been downhill — definitely was my peak. I was paid so much bit, millions and millions of bit for him. He really revolutionized the way the game was played. I mean, they created new science just to stop us,” he concluded finally out of breath again.

Marcus talked about his exploits often but he was right, Joanna had never heard him talk about Wesley no matter how much he prattled on reveling and wallowing in his once grandiose fame. She continued to massage his shoulders and she looked longingly out at the red light pushing in through the window. She could see the billboard across the street which threw red light on the neighborhood. Each block of the Red Light ghetto had its own billboard. They were sponsored by the city as a public health service. They announced the type of sexual engagement of each area: same sex, bondage, group sex, anal, fetish and even the beastiality section, known around Under New York as “The Farm”.

Under New York was born in the mid 22nd Century. The ocean levels rose, New York Harbor and the boroughs being some of the first densely populated areas to submerge in the United States. The water rose quickly here once it began to encroach. Initially, engineers tried to waterproof many of the larger buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Some floors closer to the ground remained functional but were submerged; actually underwater. New entrances were built partway up buildings. Transit in the transitional time before the city moved underground was much like the archipelago of Venice from a millennium before with gondolas or boats making their way across the rising water’s surface.

Naturally, the wealthiest from New York, now referred to as Old New York or more colloquially as ONY, took their wealth and fled to higher ground in the Pocono Mountains and the interior valleys of Central New York. The city was then besieged by blight. Although engineers had developed a variety of ways to build a waterproof city, the citizens that were left were often jobless because of a lack of opportunity or training. This became more pronounced when the city was forced more fully underground. Although the city had managed to water proof buildings and protect underground transit from encroaching water, the water rose steadily.

Finally, rather than consider life above ground, the state and federal governments decided to focus on moving the remaining residents underground. Due to advancements in technology this process was cheaper because they could use existing infrastructure rather than relocating the residents above ground. This was a massive undertaking with mass excavations and retrofitting centuries of underground infrastructure. This was made much more affordable specifically because of advancements in technology related to underground expansion because this issue of urban inundation had become so wide-spread globally.

The shift was strange but impressive, flipping one of the world’s largest cities from it’s above-ground state to an underwater metropolis where houses, apartments, offices and businesses were sealed and refitted and then expanded downward. This created literal city blocks, which were stacked upon one another. The indoor lighting required was timed to match the light patterns above ground. In the old train tunnels and skyscrapers’ basements, new arteries began to push the residents of ONY into the new heart of Under New York. Those old tunnels and lower underground tubes became streets and thoroughfares while new domiciles and other structures were built deep into the ground under the floors of large tributaries like the Long Island Sound, the Hudson River, and the East River.

“Your shoulders are so tight.”

“I am so tense. Life used to be so great. I just drink through the days now. Makes me rigid, stiff. Oh well, I just try not to be angry. Oh, those glory days. But it’s all gone, the fame and the lifestyle. Sure, I’ve got plenty of money but what do I do with it? There’s no point. I just drink all the time. I never thought a life of doing so little could be so stressful.”

“Don’t be angry. Let me help you with the rest of your clothes,” Joanna said having finally and quietly wrested Marcus’s shirt from his torso. She could smell the alcohol not just on his breath but from his pores and tied up in the underarm sweat of his shirt. His pasty dark skin and freckles stared up at her like a hundred-eyed argus. Marcus was a black man with already light complexion. But his skin was also so light from such a lack of natural sunlight, it hardly looked any different from her white skin, particularly in the red light.

“I had some good ones before Wesley. I’m sure I’ve told you about them too.”

“I think so.” She lapsed for a moment and was honest. “Really, a lot of it blends together. But these are your bits, I guess. If you want to spend them by telling me stories, that’s up to you.”

He ignored the backhanded response and continued on his usual trip down memory lane, “Wesley was perfect. He was the final iteration of my Demon collection. I named them after “Speed Demon” — that was how I always thought of them anyway. But he was so much more than just fast. Anyone could be fast. Wesley, oh he was more elusive and powerful — stronger — than my other Demons.”

Every time he mentioned his “Demons”, Joanna thought nothing of the players on the field, instead thinking of all the lousy clients she had to manage there in her home. But she stayed focused on the task at hand. She tugged at his pants. As she did she caught the smell of cologne, alcohol and general human funk that emanated from underneath them. She was used to the strange odors and in this moment she actually felt more comfortable focusing on those foul odors instead of paying too much attention to Marcus’s story.

“They would announce his name and the crowd would jump to their feet. They wouldn’t stop yelling when our names were announced: Wesleeeeeeeeyyyyyyy!” His voice tailed off in the same way the public address announcer’s voice might at a game, “programmed by Marcus Kallus. I loved it. I would stand up in my box and wave. After a point the money meant nothing. The adulation, the cheering, the throngs of fans that would follow my every move, my every programming upgrade… At some point it was hard to keep any of my advancements a secret. But with Wesley, it didn’t matter. Even when they knew what his best abilities were, he was too advanced for that to even work. My skills with his Deep Learning, Ensemble Learning and Fuzzy Logic ability made his predictive capabilities so hard to beat.” He held the phrase for sometime. He was reliving the days in his own mind. His squat face pressed in tightly as if he was trying to see into the past.

Joanna took her hand and reached inside his underpants, moving his penis around. Marcus just sat there as if in some virtual reality program, his body sensing the touch and caress of another object but his mind was in some alternate reality, almost not really there but in another place long lost to him, a place where he seemed like he would prefer to spend eternity, if allowed. She held his member and worked it around until he was fully erect. “Those were certainly the days. Under New York has become such a hard, difficult and impoverished place to live. But that just made my successes all the sweeter. Down here where the New Football League plays all it’s games, I had everything I wanted. Security, adulation, comfort. Not just comfort, no. I had luxury. I still have the money, the wealth, but it isn’t the same. Just being rich is not the same thing as being adored.”

Joanna had no idea what that sentence meant. She had never been wealthy nor adored. She moved to Under New York from the mountains of West Virginia, another higher altitude place that had been gentrified by wealthy climate emigres. Her family lived a quiet life in those backwood mountains but her father had sold their house to pay off debts after her mother died. She was fifteen at the time and after her father sold the house he gave her a few thousand bits and told her that she could go wherever she wanted. “I don’t give a fuck what you do anymore but I’m heading South to the Sonoran Desert. Ain’t shit there. It’s supposed to be nice. You won’t get in the way of my drinking in a tropical environment like that,” were his exact words. Joanna remembered them.

“He’s an asshole who I can’t trust with a single goddammned thing — not even a feeling — so this is better anyway,” she thought to herself. The land was cheap and he was going to quietly live out the rest of his life there as a drunk probably beating up on some other girl — probably more than one. He made it clear to Joanna there was no more room for him and she actually felt a little relief knowing that.

Her mother had worked long hours supporting the family as a nurse. Her father drank and gambled, often on the New Football League, and her mother spent whatever time she could working in order to support the family and her father. One time, after a particularly tough stretch of drinking and gambling, her mother was forced to work all the overtime she could, logging over 100 hours a week at the hospital. She didn’t mind because it meant she wasn’t getting roughed up at home. One of the times she was grinding out long hours to care for her and her father the Northern Malaria hit. Temperatures got warm enough to accommodate a different variety of mosquitos. Certain southern imports of bananas and papaya (newly very popular in the United States because of changing climate patterns and agricultural capabilities) brought the mosquitos to North America from Amazonian climes. Her mother was one of the first in the area to get it, well before any treatments for the mutated virus had materialized.

When she died her father’s debts became insurmountable. After selling their property, West Virginia land newly in demand, she had only her mother’s diamond wedding ring to remember her by. She had to hide it from her father and once she got to Under New York she never took it off. She considered it literally and figuratively the most valuable thing she owned. Never mind that the ring was dirty and jagged now, the cuts of the diamond now more exposed from a broken prong in the setting. She even used it to open a beer bottle or two occasionally. Using it for the occasionally mundane activity made her feel closer to her dead mother.

She often reflected on this so that she wasn’t left to focus on the work she was doing, in this case working her mouth in and around Marcus’s cock as she tried to keep him erect for the end of a blow job and, if he lasted long enough afterwards, sex. She certainly did not think this would be her life. When she escaped to the city she ran out of money quickly. In the almost anarchistic city she tried waitressing and bartending since she didn’t know what else she could do. The clientele was too unruly, too drunk, too crazy, probably because of the insulated darkness of the city. Between the bar fights and terrible tips she was both scared to go to work and broke. She drifted among couches of friends in tiny studios before she started squatting in an old building that was retrofitted to withstand the rising water. These buildings we’re too old to retrofit safely for living, at least for any government to legally allow people there. So, they were walled off and condemned but people lived there anyway. This was an old tradition in and around Manhattan Island going back centuries, of course.

_________________________

“You don’t ever seem to come out this room,” a stranger said to Joanna one day as she tried to slip back into her apartment. She’d hopped like a scared rabbit for a loaf of bread and a stick of butter being handed out at a church sponsored food drive for the needy. She’d known about it from a bartender she worked with who had also told her about the chance to squat in the old building. “That doesn’t look like much to eat,” the woman spoke again as she looked judgmentally down at Joann’s groceries.

“I’ve got nowhere else to go. All this,” Joanna said looking down at the bread and butter, “is just from those old religious geezers that meet in the Underground, way down there.”

“I know them.”

“Well, thanks anyway. Have a great day.” Joanna tried to slip through the door she had managed to get ajar.

“I’ve got a way for you to get out of here. You’re young and very pretty. Such a wonderful face. I mean, nothing personal but you could actually afford to gain a few pounds, give those boobs a little bump,” the woman said sticking a finger probatively into her left breast and then her right one. “Yeah. Those are cute. Could be cuter. Anyway, we need to actually make money and get you a place of your own.” The woman looked Joanna up and down again, clearly taking into account her dimensions despite the rags and dirty clothes she had on. “You’re sure are a pretty one, yes. Have you ever tried to make some real money? Because, I honestly can’t have you living here if I can help it.”

“Here? Me? Real money?…,” Joanna paused trying to make sense of this woman groping her as if she was a piece of fruit.

“Look, here, I’m Paula. I kind of run this building. The owner needs someone to keep an eye on the building just in case anything gets too dangerous. I’m like the unofficial super… since, well, no one is actually officially supposed to be here. But the owner is liable for anything dangerous that happens here with the building. But a girl like you… You’re so young. So pretty.” Joanna blushed this time. She was happy to hear anything positive from anyone. “It’s not safe for a girl like you here. And really, if something happens to you, my boss gets mad at me. But you, well, it ain’t great but it’s legal work and that’s one heck of a rack you got. I could put you in touch with my friend who runs one of the Red Light District buildings over in Underground Queens.”

“Red light?,” Joanna paused. “I don’t think that’s what I need to be doing. I don’t want to have to sell myself.”

“Um, ok. But then what else are you going to do? You’re young. It’d be a lot safer with my friend over there. She takes care of her girls. Look, I go down there myself. I’m real into the same sex ghetto they have. I have some real preferences, as you can imagine,” Paula winked at her and tossed a lascivious eye toward Joanna — the glance that says, “I’m not undressing you with my eyes, I’m just looking at you naked.” Paula’s sturdy frame without much curvature stood in overalls, the tool belt hanging to the side, her thick arms fingering the hammer resting on her waist. Joanna didn’t know how to feel except that she was hungry and tired of barely surviving from day to day. “And let me tell you, my friends are tougher than I am. But it’s one of the softer, typical parts of the district. Not like The Farm. Sure, you’re sleeping with strangers for money. But my friend works with good Johns, respectable, clean. Most importantly, she says, they pay… ahead of time — she has a whole super secure system, they require palm prints and money just to get in your door. She just had them installed!” Paula said, winking softly at Joanna.

Between a rock and a hard place Joanna looked down at her loaf of bread and soft, mushy stick of butter that had warmed to room temperature, even in the cold, dank hallways of this squatter building. In that moment, the decision had been made. Joanna knew anything was better than the way she was living now. After she moved into the Red Light District she realized that the comfort of a roof over her head and a food in the small kitchenette of her work studio was worth the stinky men and their tired requests for sexual favors. She felt way more secure selling herself at her new home than she did hiding out and starving uptown, although she also realized that wasn’t saying much either. Regardless, what Paula said was true. At least they always paid in advance.

_____________________________

“I remember watching the old guys play football on old videos and stuff, you know, back when humans actually played football themselves I used to watch those vids all the time when developing my Demons. Because no matter how strong or fast a robot was there was nothing like watching a human improvise. My whole passion was to try and get a robot to have that same sort of… sort of… well, just that ability to do the unexpected.”

Joanna was spitting and rinsing her mouth out to get rid of Marcus’s cum. But he kept talking in the background as she rinsed and spat a few more times. “I always wondered why they would put themselves through such physical pain. The concussion and wrecked knees, you leave the game without a body and then without a mind, sometimes. I mean, that’s why they switched to bots.”

“Uh, huh,” Joanna said as she spat out the mouthwash again. She walked back over to Marcus but she hadn’t really been paying attention.

“A guy like me, small, short, slow… really slow. I was never going to be a ball player in any sport. But I guess when football figured out they had the technology for Robots, guys like me had a chance. I can’t throw either. I can’t swing a bat. I mean, I’ve played tennis and I can’t even hit the ball most times. But when you put that circuitry and interface in front of me, I really am talented. I was on the first official ‘Bot team at MIT my senior year. That was after human football had really fallen off and it was clear the Robot league, the New Football League, was going to last.”

“Human football? I don’t remember that,” Joanna came closer to Marcus but she could now tell he wasn’t interested in anything sexual anymore. He was caught up in dwelling on his glory days, swimming in the ether of the “good old days” and spending the currency of his rich past.

“Yeah, when the waters flooded and the climate refugees were being swallowed on dangerous boat passages to the nearest high ground, Florida getting submerged, parts of the whole Pacific Coast as well as Texas and the rest of the gulf states, well, life was a little more precious. Fewer bodies to lose to the almost mutilating tendencies of human football, travel a little more restricted, but entertainment all the more valuable… I don’t know, sometime in the late 2100s, maybe a little over fifty years ago now, the National Football League realized that while there was still an audience for the game, the strategy, people just weren’t willing to play ball anymore. The NFL didn’t really care until the product on the field suffered. The quality suffered… meaning that a lot of people stopped watching what had become an inferior product. So the National Football League became the New Football League and since it’s offices we’re already in Manhattan, the NFL became the New Football League, they built that amazing underground arena. I mean, that’s where I came in. They went full robotic, localized the development so that many of us were all located here in Under New York. Then they slowly began to switch the broadcast to the world from the old NFL. Throw in the rowdy local fans we have down here and the new football spectacle was born.” The pitch of his voice spiked again, “It was like car accidents and complicated surgery combined in one. Oh it was amazing. Like I said, when the fluid leaked, when the oil surged from a tube and a robotic arm twitched with electricity having just been pulled from it’s socket,” he gnashed his teeth, “the crowd loved it! The viewers at home couldn’t stop watching it. That never changed:replays of the carnage, of players demolished on the field while some other robot did a preprogrammed celebratory dance in triumph — oh, us humans love that. I mean, I loved programming my touchdown celebrations. It was all great fun.”

Joanna had practically fallen asleep, so she just nestled into Marcus’s shoulder to let him talk. He wasn’t interested in her body anymore and that was fine. She checked the timer on the wall to see how much longer his session was. With almost 20 minutes left she just tried to physically comfort him by being close. She had checked the account transfer and his money had come through the payment lock to her bank account — her device had notified her.

“Anyway, I’m not a human athlete but I can sure make a real good machine. And machines playing football was my lottery ticket. I miss those days… all the time. The glory, the adulation, the comfort of being wanted. Then those damn sensor blinders and the blinding paint got invented,” Marcus’s tone changed. “When one of the kids from… where the fuck was he from? Was it CalTech? I don’t care anymore. Some hot shit kid invented Sensor Blinders and black blocking paint. So, when my sensors, especially the ones on Wesley, and the lasers I used were the best… So, when my sensors tried to function they got blinded, the electron emission from the defender would blind all sensor input, like a flash or a strobe light. And when they sent lasers the paint would swallow the beam. So like, the predictive technology stopped working. When they introduced them against Wesley, it was like Wesley was blind. I mean, those sensors were brilliant, they were everything… and in the fucking Super Bowl, man. That was so terrible. Dub-D got so blasted on the second play of the game. Nothing was ever the same for me after that happened to him.”

Joanna’s ears perked up when she heard Dub-D, “Did you say Dub-D?”

“Yeah, Dub-D, that was Wesley. I called him Wesley because he was like my own family, my creation. But yeah, that’s what everyone else out there called him: Dub-D. That’s what all the fans called him. It was short for Wesley Demon, you know? He was listed on official programs as W. Demon. So after a while, everyone just called him Dub-D.”

“My dad always talked about Dub-D.” Joanna reflected back, when her dads’ drinking and gambling were at their worst, when her mom was carrying them but working all the time, right before her mom died. “Mom was really keeping all of us alive,” Joanna whispered to herself as she flashed back.

“Huh?,” Marcus said, barely overhearing her whisper. Then he kept talking about himself, “But yeah, Dub could do anything, For Sure.” His drooping and drunken eyes slowed but his mind persisted in memory, “But those blinders. Well, the worst was how embarrassing it was. Here we were, in the Super Bowl, the AgriCo Oaks had contracted for Wesley that year. They paid us over 100 million bit that year. And I got another 50 million if we won that game. We were huge favorites going into it too. Tell the truth, the money had nothing to do with it for me though. I had money stashed everywhere then. I mean, I do now too. Some people don’t even know about the accounts I have. Like the one saved here to pay you: hookers? It’s not a good look, even in 22nd century. The money on from this account is completely anonymous, untraceable, and it’s got enough on here to keep me set for life, should anything really crazy happen. Anyway, lots of money. That didn’t matter. But it would have been Wesley’s 3rd title in 3 years with a different team each time. That would have mattered… That would have matched only a couple other players… He was so good.”

“Dub-D,” Joanna mumbled under her breath but Marcus paid no attention to the festering trauma that Joanna was suddenly processing. Joanna started thinking more deeply about her father; how he liked to talk about the “wins” and the “losses” and the “good old days.”

Repeating himself but now in more detail, “So the defensive bots, well the ones in the back, the defensive backs came out entirely coated in a black paint. And the paint was specially designed to absorb all light. This meant that the lasers and reflectors and all the data mining and processing Wesley could do in a nano-second was like nothing because his sensors couldn’t receive anything. They were blind to any incoming movement. And then yeah, the second play of the game — ourteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds on the clock in the first damn quarter — Wesley, out for a pass in the middle of the field and their best player,” Marcus started to stretch his arms up as if he was trying to make the elusive catch in slow motion, the way he had rehearsed it in his mind endlessly. “But no. Electro-Mike, he comes straight for Wesley and breaks him almost literally in half. Wesley couldn’t read any of the movement because he had become so reliant on his sensors. I mean, that was how I built him, I guess he was kind of a one-trick pony at the time because he was so good at that — structurally he couldn’t really take a big hit….Well then, there it was, Wesley just on the middle of the concrete field, leaking fluid from his main lubrication tube; the oil and brake fluid and even a couple ball bearing were just there rolling slowly around on the ground spilling out some form of ooze. The crowd was so loud and then so silent when they saw the best player in the game immobilized instantly.

“I was in a press box. I came down and met him in the repair tent underneath the field but there was nothing I could do. I went numb. I didn’t even watch the rest of the game. But I knew the result before it happened. We lost the Super Bowl. We lost by a touchdown. It was worse than the score suggested. We pretty much got blown out. The rest of our bots made adjustments, tried to come back but Wesley was too important. They got down too much too early. It was just… well,” Marcus had re-lived this moment so many times.

Joanna reflected back on this same game now that the connection had been made in her mind between Wesley and “Dub-D.” She flashed back to her father who was always talking about Dub-D. “Can’t lose with Dub-D. They don’t make a spread high enough. That team doesn’t lose and it’s never close,” she remembered him saying. “I’m gonna make a bundle on the game today. Your mom is working, she won’t know. Come sit with daddy and watch him make us some vacation money, Sweetie,” her father said to Joanna. Her mind projected the memory of him motioning for her to join him on the couch.

The memories came pouring back more quickly as she remembered the foul alcohol on his breath and the stink in his clothes like Marcus: both of them foul, sweating out the poison through their pores and into their clothes for the whole world to smell. She knew better than to cross her father though. So she settled into her father’s shoulder to watch the game. Then she remembered the moments Marcus had just described through the eyes of her father as he watched in their West Virginia living room. The game started. Her father was intoxicated but so excited. Then almost as soon as the game started he was yelling, “Dub-D! Dub-D! What the fuck?! Dub-D!… The game just starts and Electro blows up Dub-D? That don’t make noooo sense. The fix is in for this shit. Get up, Dub-D, get up!” The memory was crystal clear for her in a vision of trauma from her adolescent years she’d not remembered in a long time. The video in her mind played on; him yelling at the TV but to no avail. Joanna looked and saw exactly what Marcus had described: a bot in two with fluid spilling on the ground. It was captivating, Joanna remembered it all again now.

The game continued with so many things that Marcus never saw, things from deep in those Appalachian Mountains. This was the game that Joanna experienced through the eyes of her drunken father. The AgriCorp team kept giving up scores. Her father watched in horrified anger, his temper surging and the beers emptying until around halftime the misfortune had put him in a rage. The anticipated outburst of her father finally arrived. He could no longer control the rageful river flowing through him, the banks breached by a flood of beer. He took an empty beer bottle and threw it at Joanna. She ducked but her father wasn’t deterred. He took another one and threw it at her torso to make sure it hit her somewhere. When she flinched from the contact, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her back to the couch, “What is this shit? Can you see this fucking game?” He yelled at her and then hit her several times about the face. “Fuck, I’m gonna lose so much money. It’s all your fault Joanna, you little bitch.” He hit her a few more times, “And don’t you tell your momma none of this. You tell her and this’ll happen to both of ya.”

She sobbed as he abused her, “I won’t Daddy! Stop. It’s just a game.”

“Just a game? This is real life. This is real money I’m losing. You ain’t got no job, do ya!?!?! Don’t act like this isn’t nothing. What do you do around here? Just eat and shit, that’s what yudooo. But I’m losing money on this damn game. Real damn, money, you bitch.”

“I won’t tell Momma, promise!”

“Oh, I know you won’t. I’ll make sure of that.” He raised her up with the hand that had latched on to her hair. When his forearm was close enough to her mouth she lunged and bit him deeply. She could taste the blood that seeped from the broken flesh. He released her hair for a second to grip it differently. But she pulled away. She ran. In that one moment of respite she darted away from her wounded father and ran off down the street to the woods behind the park where she played. She hid there all night. She slept in the cold, Winter morning outside. When she finally came home the next morning her mother was there, breakfast on the table, and bruises about her face and arms that matched Joanna’s.

Even here in Under New York she didn’t have to sleep outside. But that night sent a shiver back through her spine, which tapped into a forgotten rage darkly nurtured by the violence she received at the hands of her drunken father.

Her eyes teared as she came back to the current moment in her Red Light Studio buried beneath all that melted water, the earth submerged to such injured depths. She looked up at Marcus who seemed to finally noticed her for the first time this session — not when she undressed him, not when she pleasured him — but now, when she was an inflamed and gushing wound. “Are you crying?” Hardly a question though — he asked almost dismissively.

Joanna saw in Marcus’s eyes the empty concern, the inability to care about anything other than himself, like her father. She bundled her anger into a violent rage that she had never felt before. She took the ring her mother had given her, her one heirloom and the only keepsake she had been able to keep from her mother. She turned the jagged edge exposed from the missing prong setting and put it softly to Marcus’s fleshy neck. He thought she was just going to caress his face because she sometimes did that in an effort to keep him focused on the sex. But instead she dug her finger and the ring into his neck, piercing the skin. She pulled back at the puncture ripping open his jugular vein. Blood squirted everywhere. It made a terrific spectacle as it burst forth like a fountain. In her rage, she reached to the other side of the neck and yanked the jagged little stone through the other side of his neck. Now the dark, red blood came from his body so forcefully it did not spurt. It vigorously leaked and quickly flooded the floor. The fluid poured from beneath his face, onto his shirtless body and into a puddle on the floor, the same puddle into which he fell once the life and power had completely left his body.

Joanna did not panic though. The years of trauma had taught her to cope with certain moments in an emotionless way, like her father, like sex work, like much of her life. She was steeled to the emotions of the moment. As she had as a girl with her father, she knew she needed to get away as quickly as possible — there was no time to hesitate.. She could say that Marcus attacked her. But denying that she murdered Marcus was not where her mind stayed. She looked at his limp palm on the floor and she thought of his millions of bits that he had won over the years, in games, in Super Bowls, in some other contest of his mental might over another’s. She took that lifeless body and with a strength that surprised even her she dragged his body to the doorway. She opened the door and slid his small frame outside, streaks of blood across the floor of the studio and then into the hallway. She went to the kiosk next to her door and made a deposit request to transfer money from his account to hers as if he were paying for another session after this one expired. “100 million bits. What did this dead jerk say? That’s what one of Wesley’s season was worth?” she thought to herself. “And his account wasn’t traceable?”

She had never even imagined having that kind of money. She entered 100 million bits as the deposit amount and then activated the transaction with his lifeless but still warm hand on the payment scanner. Then she dropped it to the floor with a thud as the message appeared on the screen: “Authorized.” Then she dragged his shrunken frame back into the studio.

She had no idea what to do now except that she had more money than she ever imagined and she needed to escape quickly. She checked her own account on her phone but the deposit still hadn’t gone through. Although she had some time until anyone noticed Marcus was missing, she hurriedly packed a backpack. She probably had 24 hours before anyone discovered that she was no longer taking clients and that Marcus had never left her room. She stared out at the red lights from the district, her pale skin soaked in red light. It had been ages since she’d seen the sun and she wanted to get this icky red light off and away from her. She rinsed herself off and put on another fresh set of clothes before making her way quickly to the local tube for a train out of town, somewhere above ground. She would make it back to higher ground somewhere. She would get back above this surface now, somewhere new, somewhere safe, unburdened by the shackles of men’s needs, even, even if their trauma was forever built into her soul. As she closed her studio door behind her, she felt the notice buzz on her device. She checked and saw that Marcus’s money had just been transferred to her account.