The Bounty Hunters’ Rave

The Awakening was pure agony. As the gunk they had shoved in my veins thawed and was replaced with warm blood, as my muscles that had wasted over the past half a century softened and stretched and flexed, as my bones that were now five hundred and twenty six years old creaked…while all that happened I groaned in pain. Then the breath was forced back into my chest, reinflating lungs that had been in storage for centuries.

One star out of ten. I do not recommend cryosleep.

Sadly I didn’t have a choice in that decision, as the handcuffs over my skinny wrists reminded me. My foggy brain came to slowly but I knew from those manacles that I wasn’t here by my own choice.

As a welcoming video played in my pod and the blood flowed and warmed my body, memories began to flood back into my dusty old brain.

I was Andromeda Karsar. Born on Earth, I ran away from home to the floating colonies orbiting Mars when I was a teenager and scraped out a life as a bounty hunter. All perfectly legal. Until one drunken night I agreed to my then-boyfriend’s equally drunken idea to join in a shuttle run that everyone else in the bar seemed to think was a good idea.

Turned out we were smuggling illegal drugs and despite our protests that we were just along for the ride, Dann and I had been caught, hauled before a judge and sentenced to five hundred years in cryo. A standard punishment of the twenty-third century; we can’t afford to feed and house you in prison, the crime wasn’t bad enough to warrant execution, so we’ll freeze you and make you someone else’s problem in the future. Ta da! Prison overcrowding problems sorted overnight.

I hoped I’d least run them up a nice high energy bill keeping my beautiful arse on ice all these years.

The lid popped open with a hiss, matched by the sound escaping my lips as the light from the room outside hit my poor delicate eyes.

After a few seconds, a smiling woman with neat, pinned up blonde hair and a fitted white jumpsuit appeared.

“Andromeda Karsar,” she soothed. “Welcome to the year 2306. Today is Friday April 6^th and the time is 11:17.”

Well shit, I’d missed breakfast.

I lifted a hand, extending the chain as far as my handcuffs would go. “Any chance of getting these off?”

“Of course.”

She waved her hand at a panel outside my pod and something beeped. The metal around my wrists and ankles vibrated slightly then sprang apart at the seams of each cuff.

“What was that?” I asked as I sat up in my padded seat that by now was probably moulded to my body shape.

“Implant chip. You’ll be given your own. It links to a national database which includes your job and role and controls access to buildings and vehicles and such that are registered to you. It is also our method of payment; to purchase anything, simply swipe the chip and it will be taken from your account.”

“Ah, we used to have those. But they were external. Bits of plastic you would carry around, lose them all the time. Much handier to have them…uh, in your hand. Huh, handy.”

The woman smiled politely, as if she had heard this a hundred times. She probably had, unfreezing relics like me all day every day. “All of this will be explained in the orientation seminar and your orientation pack. Please follow me. Be careful, the first few steps are always the hardest.”

She wasn’t kidding. My legs melted underneath me like a puddle of jelly. By the time I was upright I swaggered along, holding on to walls for support as she led me to a small room with benches.

There, for two hours, I sat with half a dozen other ex-popsicles as we blinked our way through a bewildering run down of a world that sounded nothing like the one I had left.

Soon I was on my way. I was issued a pale blue jumpsuit and a chip was inserted into my palm. That was as painful as it sounds; the needles are not small.

Instructions of how to get to my allocated apartment were handed to me and I was given an appointment with my orientation counsellor to go through career options and to answer my questions. Today I was supposed to find my home, rest and take a walk around the neighbourhood.

So naturally I headed straight for a bar.

Everyone I passed was wearing a jumpsuit. Colours varied but style didn’t. There was no variation for men or women either.

Everything was so neat and clean. I didn’t remember that from pre-freeze; we had litter back then, graffiti. Nothing like that remained. All buildings were cookie-cutter perfect, with a small postage stamp of lawn neatly manicured.

Everyone I passed nodded politely but coolly to me.

I felt self conscious, wondering how obvious it was that I was a fish out of time. Water. Whatever. I didn’t belong. I could feel it like a dark energy hanging around me so I hurried past people and made my way into something that looked like it served alcohol.

“You don’t sell alcohol?” I spluttered.

The man behind the so-called “bar” lifted is head a little, obviously pissed off that I had raised my voice in his establishment. To be fair it was possibly my fault; I’d been expecting a bar, since it said “Redmoor’s Bar” above the door. But inside the tables had tablecloths and the clientele sat sipping drinks and conversing in hushed tones as if they were in a library.

“You must be a guest from the past?” he sneered. “I would suggest reading your orientation pack. Alcohol is a banned substance, has been for years. I can offer you any number of drinks, all alcohol-free.”

“Forget it,” I mumbled and slunk past a woman sipping from a goddamn teacup who looked at me as if I were a fly in her earl grey.

Outside the sun was too bright. The air was too clean. The world was too quiet. I hated it. I wanted to go back. I couldn’t live here.

The door behind me opened again, and a small square of paper was slipped into my hand.

A male voice in my ear: “Opens after ten. Tell them Francus sent you.”

I looked up to find a figure walking away. He wore the usual jumpsuit but for some reason on him it didn’t look as polished. It hung on his frame wrong and didn’t look as if it had been ironed into oblivion. His hair was shaggy too.

The paper in my hand had an address and basic directions. To what?

I pocketed the paper and headed for my new “home” to rest.

I people watched for the rest of the day. I sat at my window in my tiny apartment as people went about their business as if it had been programmed into them. In the evening people came home and were greeted at the door by whoever had arrived home first. Children played quietly in gardens, at peace with their siblings, giving each other a go on swing sets.

How long could I cope with this?

The paper caught my eye; it was my only possession so that wasn’t hard. What was it? A club I guessed. But who? Why? What?

I’d already been made to feel unwelcome at a “bar”, so why did this Francus person think I’d do any better there?

No. No point in setting myself up for more disappointment. I didn’t need more people staring at me, feeling like I had a neon sign over my head saying “out of time”.

But the paper tugged at my mind all day. The loneliness crept in slowly but deeply, rotting me from the inside out. If this was my life now, would I really cope? I was terrible with rules, I’d been arrested and frozen for breaking them. I’d never fit into this utopian society.

Those thoughts turned over and over as I lay alone on my bed. By ten o’clock I was ready to find out where these directions led.

The streets were flooded with fluorescent white light that seemed to soak into every corner. It was another trick to make everything safer and welcoming I was sure but for whose benefit? The streets were empty. All good little sheep tucked away in their government-issued homes.

My orientation pack explained that homes were no longer bought; the government gave each person or family a home with square footage determined by how many people in the family. For a singleton like me, I got a teeny apartment with the necessities. All homes were built in the same style, nobody had a better home than they were allowed. This promoted the “fair and just society” that I now lived in.

But where was the fun? Where was the soul? If everything was the same, if there was nothing to live for…

I stopped outside a door. I’d passed a few restaurants, all dutifully closed and silent now that it was past bedtime. But this building’s windows were blacked out. And the door seemed to vibrate with energy, or pulsing music. What was beyond here? My fingertips brushed the steel bolts; so unwelcoming, repelling to the normal folk of this world. Yet compelling to me.

The door had a name printed neatly on a plague: Time Warp Club. Members only.

My pulse quickened and a wave of adrenaline ran through me. Were these people like me? Refugees from another time, stuck in a sterile world where they didn’t belong?

Only one way to find out.

I knocked.

The door tore open and music spilled onto the street. A man in a black jump suit greeted me, his face not the surgery-perfect smiling face of everyone else. He was from another time.

He gave me the once over, didn’t like what he saw. “Get got.”

“Uh, actually, Francus sent me.” I held up the little slip of paper as if it were an invitation card.

“Hn. You’re new.”

“Just defrosted this morning.”

He stared at me a moment longer, then stepped aside. “Get in.”

Well that was more welcoming that “get got” so I stepped past him and the cool night air cut off behind me as the door shut.

“Down the hall, to the right.” He said, then leaned back against the wall, waiting for the next knock.

Feeling like Alice in Wonderland I slipped down the rabbit hole to the crazy, disordered world within. Hark, what was that? Noise! Glorious noise! Music, loud for the sake of being loud. Frivolous laughter, shouting voices…alcohol fuelled? You don’t get that loud unless the old wheels have been oiled.

There were perhaps thirty people. Some sat at circular tables (no tablecloths – scandalous!) while others danced on a space cleared aside. Dancing might be generous; moving just out of time to the music and grinding up against one another in lustful abandon is probably closer to the truth. That said I found myself bopping along to the hideously incoherent rave music pounding through my skull.

There was a bar, even if it was only a metre long. I elbowed my way to it and leaned over to the man doing that stereotypical bartender thing of polishing a glass. He was doing an awful job of it and I loved it.

“Dare I ask…vodka and coke?” I yelled over the music.

Instead of arresting me on the spot he nodded and set the smudged glass on the counter, poured into it from a bottle labelled “vodka” in marker pen and then filled from a tap to top it up with mixer.

I waved my hand. “Sorry I’m new. How do I?”

“Just palm down here,” he pointed to a filthy, grimy glass window on the counter, smeared with a hundred handprints. Without a care in the world I added my own prints and the drink was mine.

Looking at the elixir in my hand I downed the thing in one, then slammed the glass on the bar top.

The guy grinned. “How is it?”

“Awful,” I said. “Just like I remember. Hit me up again.”

Two more and I was feeling pretty damn happy. Perhaps this world wasn’t so bad after all? Maybe I could make it work, playing straight-laced during the day, then whiling away my evenings here with people that understood me. The bartender understood me. He listened to my story of how I was convicted with a sympathetic ear (so long as I kept buying drinks).

This was nice.

“So the job thing,” I said, sipping my fourth drink. “I’m going to need to pay all of these drinks back. The pack said I would be assigned a job. I don’t like that. What if I get arse doctor or something?”

“Arse doctor? I can’t say I’ve ever heard of anyone assigned that,” the bartender said. “No offence but guys like us don’t get any jobs that require thinking skills. Doctor of any kind – arse or otherwise – is left for those born and educated in this time. You’ll probably get sewer cleaner.”

“Delightful,” I said. But I supposed someone had to do it. “What if I wanted to, you know, do my old job?”

“Bounty hunter, wasn’t it?” the bartender said.

I nodded, hard and long. Maybe I was getting a bit tipsy.

“They don’t really have bounties anymore. They don’t have crime here. You may have noticed that everybody from this time is an upstanding citizen.”

I stuck my fingers in my mouth to feign vomiting.

He cracked a smile. “Exactly. Not much call for a bounty hunter, just for the unfrozen that don’t adjust and cause trouble. We already have one hunter and that’s more than enough.”

My ears pricked. “Oh, who?”

“Marcus, over there.”

I followed his gaze to a huge guy sat I the corner, playing cards with three others.

“Well, I might just ask him for some tips,” I said.

I stood, I almost fell over. My body was still recovering from defrosting and four vodkas was now looking like a terrible idea. The music sounded faraway and my legs were not entire solid. I waved my arms a bit and giggled at the silly movements.

Marcus looked up as I approached. “Yeah?”

“You’re a bounty hunter. I’m a bounty hunter. Was. Am? Was. Want to be again,” I said, then realised I was rambling. “Any tips? Apparently I’m not qualified to be an arse doctor, so I’d like to do my old job. I was good at it. Until I wasn’t and got arrested. But that won’t happen again. Probably. Hey, do you need a side kick?”

The silence was palpable, broken only by the rhythmic pounding of the music that went through the floor and into my bones, making me feel like I was vibrating too.

Then Marcus stood up, eyeing me coldly. “You want my job, that it?”

“No, well yes. But we can both do it.”

“Not enough crime, little lady. I don’t need competition.”

“Well we could divide it up? I could do Monday though Thursday, you get Friday and the weekends?”

“You’re not listening,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Oh, maybe you like weekends? That’s cool, I’ll take weekends. I don’t have plans yet anyway. Hi, I’m Andromeda, I just got unfrozen this morning.”

“Well maybe I’ll get you frozen again.”

It was then that I noticed just how tall he was. And broad. Breadth is very important in these encounters, when a man who is nearly a foot taller than you and twice as wide is glaring down as if he wants to snap you like a matchstick.

“Um, you know, maybe I can read some textbooks and become an arse doctor, how hard can it be?” I said, backing up with my hands in front of me.

“Now listen here,” Marcus said, matching me step for step. Since his steps were so much longer, he was soon in my face.

The music had stopped, I noticed distractedly. That was a shame; I’d liked that song.

“I am very sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Marcus. I no longer have any wish to become a bounty hunter and am looking forward to a career change. So please continue your work and keep our spotless streets even spotlesser.”

He growled and curled his beefy hands into fists. Whatever he was going to do next was cut off by a bark of laughter. An arm landed on my shoulders and pulled me close.

“Marcus, give it up. She’s no threat. And she already has plans to be a…uh…doctor, was it?”

“Yes,” I muttered, wondering if the newcomer also wanted to pound me into oblivion.

“Get her out of my sight,” Marcus said, turning away from me in disgust.

The newcomer steered me back to the bar and bought me coffee. Probably better than another vodka.

“Hello, I’m Francus.”

“Hey, you’re the guy with the paper!” I said. “Or without the paper, since you gave it to me. Thanks. This is great!”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “You just almost got pounded to a pancake.”

I grinned and sipped my coffee. “Exactly. I felt alive. Nothing else so far has made me feel that. This is…nice. Reminds me of home.”

Francus nodded and smiled at me. “That’s the idea. An oasis of chaos amidst the order.”

“That’s profound.”

“It’s also bullshit,” Marcus laughed.

I laughed too, content for once. “Well, nice to meet you. I’m Andromeda.”

“Nice to meet you too, Andromeda. I hope we’ll see you often here.”

“Oh, you will,” I said, meeting his gaze.

Shaggy hair. Unkempt clothing. Mischievous spark in his eyes.

Oh yeah, I’d be here for my daily dose of chaos.