Note to readers: “2200 Blues” is a novel in progress, and each chapter is an early draft in its unfolding journey. Your thoughts and reactions are invaluable, guiding its evolution and refinement. 2200 Blues © 2024 by G.R. Nanda. All rights reserved.
Steve stepped back and hunched over, drawing his hands, including the one held in his sling, towards his face, drawing attention to his wide eyes and the words coming out of his gaping mouth.
“I’ve been around before the Ether!” Steve rasped in a quieter but more exasperated and emphatic tone. “Remember? I’ve got years on you! I’ve seen more—a better understanding. I’ve seen the world before the Ether. Wasn’t worth saving.”
“Back before the Ether, before a single Ether for the whole world, we were trying to find ourselves in our separate screens. Interlinked but separate. There was no way to see the world, see how and why it was falling apart. Many ways! You couldn’t get anywhere! You didn’t know what to believe about the wars! Except to hope you didn’t get drafted with the nuclear arsenal!”
“We went through televisor after televisor. They got better, and you felt better for what you saw on the screen, but it wasn’t enough. You still had to step outside, deal with the world fogging up with pollution even outside the Atlantic canyons! Can you believe that? And ya’ didn’t know what to believe.”
“Then the Ether came online,” Steve said, his eyes becoming softer but remaining wide in a kind of ecstasy. “It changed everything! You could finally leave the world forever! Without getting killed or killing yourself. And you knew what to think!” Steve smiled. “And look for in the world. How to see the world—it was the world. It was now all there was to see!”
“I’ve known that I can get back there,” Steve husked. “I always thank the Lord of technology for that, for giving me a second chance at living my life.”
“It’s a better world than the one we have,” Steve said. “I was twenty-four when the Ether Realms were created. As soon as I joined Realm Three, my life changed forever. I had a way to see the world. I could understand my place in it. Understand the future.”
“Give me more pleasure than I could want, more women than existed in real life. I could try every face I could imagine. Real or not.”
“Then it was taken away from me!” Steve snarled. “The expedition ship I was a cook on was supposed to deliver us to a greater Ether artifact—a beacon for greater connection to the Ether. I was supposed to become the Ether!”
“We plumbed the sky to clear it from mining silicon, and we were lost!”
“I see the million faces I lost and the singing sorceress, Nickel! She’s calling to me!” Steve waved his hands aggressively towards himself. “Hedonim is all I have!” Steve leaned his head and torso towards Nickel as he spoke those last words.
Nickel backed away, leaning further into his cot, sitting upright on its frame and scooting away. He looked down at his legs, shaking his head and sighing.
“It’s all you have too!” Steve protested. “Why do you think different now? Why don’t you want to go to Hedonim anymore?”
Nickel had followed a crazed, desperate old man bereft of a livelihood and clinging to the Ether. Farrul had told him that Steve was crazy, and Nickel could see the inkling of that expression. But Farrul wanted to return to the Ether as well, just abandoning Steve while he was at it.
“I don’t want to go back,” Nickel said.
“You’re not going back to the Eagle!” shouted Steve. “You’re going somewhere new! Hedonim is new!”
“I don’t feel whole in the Ether,” Nickel said. “I do for a while, but it always leaves me empty. You may have felt connected in a Realm, but I didn’t. It’s been so long since you were in the Ether, Steve! A lot has changed!”
“Nothing has changed!” Steve said. “Except that I’ve been without the Ether for longer. I knew what it was like! The Ether was a dream, a luxury that I may have been able to access if I could find a terminal I could afford to pay for. Then the Ether-banks came out. They were so big—as big as a house!”
“Did you buy one of those?” interrupted Nickel. “Is that how you used the Ether?”
“I did when I could,” Steve said. “I rented out the banks that other people, richer people, bought. I wanted that so bad.” Steve motioned with his hands, clawing the air towards his chest. “The phones and computers I had then were too small for all of the Ether Realms.”
“We needed something bigger,” Steve said. “Something that could let me be in the Ether longer than a few hours. I needed a device that could be with me always.”
Steve stared at Nickel with wide-open eyes, silent as if he was impressing that need of his onto Nickel, waiting until it registered in Nickel’s mind.
Nickel opened his mouth slightly to speak, closed it in fear. He clamped his mouth shut, weighing Steve’s story and the question Nickel wanted to ask in turn—the one he was afraid to ask.
“Well,” Nickel said, gulping, “did you get that device?”
Steve’s eyes stretched, becoming glazed as his face relaxed, loosening as his face became slack, a delirious slight smile forming on his face. He extended his back, raising his head higher, drawing back from the close proximity to Nickel’s face. His smile grew wider, though his lips barely strayed from each other, only slightly opening. He smiled wider, and his face slackened even more.
“I did,” Steve muttered in a voice much softer than before, nodding his head. “Two years after the Ether Realms went online, everything changed. That’s when the first hovercraft came out.”
It was like a bar of solid ice slid down Nickel’s chest, freezing the innards of his stomach while twisting them in knots. Nickel felt the edges of his mouth weighing down in a somber frown.
“It changed everything,” Steve said, almost in a whisper. “It was an Ether-bank and an aircraft all in one. You could finally bring the Ether with you everywhere. You could live in the Ether!” Steve shook his hands, nearly bouncing up and down in giddiness.
Nickel’s mind swarmed with buzzing. His thoughts spun around, barely swimming through the cascading hot flashes of memory and the accompanying confused and agitated emotions that accompanied them.
“Well, I,” Nickel started before breaking into a nervous chuckle as his face melted in apprehension. “I never thought of my hovercraft that way all this time… all these years.”
All the time lost to the hovercraft, all of his life lost to the hovercraft. Year after year since the age of twelve, when he could first fly one. The bright flashes of light that surrounded him in the hovercraft; its screens waking to life the sunrise of the only world he really inhabited.
“That’s why I need you, Nickel,” Steve husked, coming hard on the middle of the sentence, heaving his chest in a wheeze at the middle of the sentence, emphasizing it with a big smile. As he spoke, he stooped closer to Nickel again, moving his hands down the air as if he was about to squeeze him. “I haven’t been inside a hovercraft in so long! Until you came into my life!”
Nickel’s heart nearly stopped. His face steeled over, and his frown deepened. He felt as if his whole body froze as dread creeped ever so further through him. Steve’s words smarted through Nickel’s mind, forming a shocking revelation that sent the icicle hanging in his chest plummeting further into his gut, causing a painful constriction and flare at its impact.
“You saved my life, Nickel,” Steve croaked, his voice broken up by a lilting mirth that edged on laughter. His smile was bigger now, his crooked stained teeth showing wide across his gums. He brought both of his palms up, holding the sides of Nickel’s face with them. The cold, calloused hands, marked by faint lines of worn use and age, touched Nickel’s cheeks.
“You gave me a chance to go back to the Ether,” Steve said. “To live a life again.”
“B-b-but this is life,” stammered Nickel. “We’re living right now. That’s what we’ve been doing these two months, Steve.” Nickel’s heart began to thud loudly.
Steve looked at Nickel with an empty, disbelieving expression. He frowned in disbelief.
“What are you talking about?” Steve grumbled. “There’s no living here,” he said, waving around the nearby area with his hands, turning his body with the motion. “I thought I told you when I first met you—the orange fog makes you see things.”
“Are you talking about me or the Thraíha?” Nickel asked in a louder voice, crossing his arms. He still couldn’t keep the shakiness out of his voice, but he spoke louder.
“Is there really a difference?” Steve asked, cocking his head to the side and giving Nickel a skeptical side-long glance with arched eyebrows.
Nickel’s face contorted in the inklings of a defensive response but stopped short of opening his mouth.
“Before we crashed your hovercraft, I think yes,” Steve said, nodding. “Two months later, I think no.”
Nickel frowned, and the edges of his mouth twitched. But he still didn’t respond yet.
“Not wrong, am I?” Steve said, shrugging his shoulders.
“You—” Nickel started, breaking into an exasperated scoff. He shook his head. He knew what he had learned from the Thraíha—a way of life Steve seemed not to understand. It seemed Steve may have been so incapacitated or unconscious during his stay with the Thraíha shamans that he hadn’t been able to live with the Thraíha lifestyle and follow their rituals of living as Nickel had. Although Nickel couldn’t tell if it would have made a difference for Steve. If he wasn’t already too corrupted by the Ether. If Nickel journeyed to Hedonim, would he wind up like Steve as well?
“You don’t understand, Steve,” Nickel said. This was the first conversation where he addressed Steve by his name. He never felt inclined to speak with him on terms other than following and working together for survival. “I’ve lived in the Ether too… I mean, you don’t get to be me, so distracted by screens that I don’t notice my hovercraft getting pulled into a windstorm in the middle of nowhere on low fuel—without living in the Ether for a long time!”
Steve nodded. “I know,” he said.
“You know,” Nickel repeated in a suspicious tone. He sighed. Was that why Steve joined Nickel? Why he took him under his wing? Why he helped him so much? Nickel was afraid to ask. “You said you helped me and Farrul,” started Nickel, watching the moon dial tucked under a car across from him, “because you couldn’t help your sister—because we remind you of her.”
Steve hesitated, and Nickel eyed him, knowing he’d asked a sensitive question but yearning to know the answer to the statement he’d really posed as a question.
“You’re like my sister,” Steve said. “That’s why…”
Nickel frowned, unconvinced. “Really?” Nickel said in a louder voice. “Tell me the truth! Is it that or that you’re addicted to the Ether?”
G.R. Nanda 