Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (3 page)

“Open it up, daddy,” Maggie said, bringing Baggs back to
the present. He realized that he had been staring at his cast for a minute or two, procrastinating seeing what was inside.

“Er, yeah. I’m just thinkin’ of how to do it best,” Baggs said, and his right hand moved over to open up the cast.

Don’t scream.

Shut up!

If you can’t play piano anymore, I’m sure the emperor would love to compensate you for an entertaining death in Outlive.

SHUT UP!

Baggs put his fingers into the crack that Mr. Krass had created, and pried it open. He was surprised by how badly his arm smelled. The skin was pale, wrinkled, and his arm had shrunk slightly from not being used. His arm slipped out of the cast and he held it up to the light to examine it.

Tessa, who was standing behind Mr. Krass, bit her lip.

Baggs wiggled his fingers back and forth, standing up simultaneously.

“How does eet feel, Meester Baggers?”

“Good, doc. You did really well.”

“You can move it, daddy?”
Maggie asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Where are you going?” asked Tessa. Baggs had moved towards the door.

“I’ve got to go to Greggor’s. I want to see if I can play.”

“Do you think you can?”

“Oh, yeah. My hand feels great. Sorry to rush out, Mr. Krass. See you tonight, Tessa. Girls.”

“Bye, daddy,” Maggie and Olive said in unison.

“Baggs, wait just a…” came Tessa’s voice, but Baggs didn’t wait to hear what she was going to say. He shut the door as though he hadn’t heard her and threw open the door to the stairwe
ll. He was out of shape, but he ran up multiple flights of stairs until he came to the roof of Apartment Building 5160. He went out, shut the door behind him, and slid to a seated position with his back against the door.

He didn’t mean to be rude to Tessa in leaving so abruptly, but he felt he had to get out of there. He didn’t want to scream in front of his children.

Now, sitting alone and examining his hand, he didn’t scream, but instead began to hyperventilate.

“I’m done. I’m done. We’re done.” He whispered to himself.

The harsh light from the sun above did not flatter Baggs’s pale left hand. His suspicion had been right; Mr. Krass had not properly set the radius back into place. The misplaced bone stretched the skin on the underside of his forearm. He could indeed wiggle all of his fingers, but for some mechanical reason or another, the range of motion of his left thumb and pointer finger was limited to tiny back and forth motions.

I will not be able to play piano at the required standard.

Tessa, Maggie and Olive will starve. We will be like the McKesson family. Maybe they’ll shoot us too. Maybe they’ll kill my girls on the street before I die. Maybe I’ll hear their screams. Or maybe the bullets will go through their heads and there won’t be much hollering.

“NO!” Baggs shouted. A crow took flight off the roof.

Baggs panted for a moment, sweat running down his face. He supposed that he should at least try to play piano before thinking that all hope for his family was lost.

Not all hope is lost—there’s always Outlive.

Baggs shuddered. He tried to move the thumb on his left hand in small circles. The task was impossible.

Maybe I can still play. I w
on’t know until I try.

He stood up on trembling knees and walked over to the side of the roof. He took the fire escape down the side of the building and walked the back way, down the stinking alley and towards t
he suburbs that stood between his apartment and Greggor’s shop. As he walked, his hands were shaking so badly that it took him a long time to light his cigarette.

2

              Baggs walked through London. After ten minutes of walking, he had calmed down some. There was a cool breeze blowing through the streets. He lit another cigarette; this time his hands weren’t shaking as much, and so it was easier to light.

             
Smoking two cigarettes in a row was odd for Baggs, but he was remarkably stressed, and felt that the cigarettes were necessary. He knew that he would be upset later for not spacing his smokes out more, but didn’t really care.

             
If I enter Outlive, I won’t have to worry about cigarette rationing anymore. Corpses don’t care much for nicotine.

             
SHUT UP!

             
These thoughts made his hands tremble again. He knew that if he entered Outlive he would have a better shot at making it than most people, because of his size, but that didn’t mean that the prospect was good. He looked at his deformed left wrist and wiggled his fingers. Since he began his walk, no magic had occurred and his left thumb and pointer finger still would not move more than slight wobbles back and forth.

             
Baggs weaved in and out of the weeds that were taking over the road, and looked up at the high-rises that dominated the London scenery.

             
Baggs was thirty-three years old. The year was 2082.

             
Baggs inhaled smoke as he walked up the road. He was the only person on the street. He could hear helicopter blades clipping through the sky far away, and the hum of air conditioning units installed in the old windows of the surrounding apartments. Something about that moment made him feel surreal. He reflected on his society and life, trying to make sense of what could have brought him to this situation.

             
He connected it all with something he had once read in the library.

             
Baggs and Tessa spent a lot of time in the library with their daughters. The libraries in London were old, dusty, and unattractive, but contained a lot of readable material. Since Olive and Maggie couldn’t go to school (school was far too expensive for a family like the Baggers) Tessa and Baggs took on the responsibility of educating their daughters. The library was the ideal place to foster Olive’s and Maggie’s intellectual growth. It wasn’t hard for Baggs and Tessa to find time to take their daughters to the library; Tessa didn’t have a job, and Baggs’s piano concerts only took up three nights a week, if he was lucky. They taught Olive and Maggie to read, write, do basic arithmetic, and gave them history lessons. They usually spent the first few hours of a day roaming around the library, all of them reading what they each liked. Then, they’d come together at one of the tables in the middle and the parents would hold lessons for their daughters. While researching a history lesson for Olive and Maggie, Baggs had come across an article written in the late twentieth century in which the scholar predicted that computers would be smarter than humans in 2020. Baggs found this humorous in the same way that he found all the recent false predictions of the apocalypse (2000, 2012, 2020, 2041, 2050, 2066) humorous. Technological development had come to a standstill around 2030, and at that time computers were nowhere near as sophisticated as the human brain.

             
Baggs liked to consider himself a bit of a scholar who didn’t have any degrees. He had only been in school until he was ten, but he continued his education outside of traditional academia, always finding himself most content and stimulated when learning something new. People were often taken off guard by his vast stores of knowledge, probably because his large stature and overtly masculine appearance came with certain prejudices. Baggs didn’t mind. He loved learning because he loved learning, not because he wanted people to think that he loved learning.

             
Baggs had a theory about the way the world was, which came out of years of study and his experiences as an impoverished citizen; he believed that technological development had reached a certain threshold, and then had caused a chain reaction that stopped technological development. “Hear me out on this!” Baggs was accustomed to telling people, after they heard his introduction to the theory. “Just listen to me through on this one, and if you don’t like what I have to say, I’ll let you have one of my smokes. How’s that for a deal?” The argument went as follows: Technological capacity led to fewer people working. The reason that Tessa couldn’t go and get a job at McDonalds was because a robot flipped all the hamburgers. Why would a restaurant owner want to pay Tessa minimum wage to do a job that a machine could do for practically nothing? Robots built houses, they crunched numbers to do taxes, they gardened, they cleaned houses, they drove cars, they flew planes, they were cashiers, telemarketers, they were greeters at stores, they knit quilts, they filed forms, they cleaned swimming pools, they washed clothes, they purified water, they painted boats, they printed documents, they refrigerated food, they were installed in cardiac patients’ chests to restart their hearts should they fail, they killed cows for fast food burgers and then cut and packaged the meat, they walked dogs, some of them looked and acted like dogs, they performed vasectomies, fixed plumbing, they repaired automobiles, they changed oil in other robots, they fixed robots, they built other robots, and they did much, much more. Tessa and Baggs weren’t the only people that robots were pushing out of the work force. Unemployment rates were at an all time high. At the same time, however, some people were becoming very rich. These were mostly business owners, who owned the robots who did taxes, cleaned pools, flipped hamburgers, and so on. The gap between wealthy and poor grew with unemployment rates. The emperor and his council recognized that the wealthy had all of the power in the society of New Rome, and so they made policies that aligned with the upper class’s views. For instance, the government deemed it unfair for a young child to be granted an education just because they live within the borders of New Rome. And so, a law was put into place that allowed only the highest echelon of taxpayers the right to send their children to school free of charge. The rest were only allowed an education for a high price. Less than one percent of New Rome’s youth was being educated. This led to a less skilled population, and halted technological development. “So you see,” Baggs was accustomed to saying, “Technological development stopped technological development, in a roundabout sort of way.”

             
Baggs smoked, frowning as he looked around him.

             
The implications of technology and of a lower class that couldn’t rise up out of poverty were everywhere. These were the quintessential features of New Rome. To Baggs, the consequences were forced upon his every sense.

             
He could smell the consequences. They smelled like the Thames River, which used to have fish in it. The smell of the river now reminded him of a time when a rat had died in the walls of his apartment. The smell was sharp and nauseating. There was also the smell of the streets, which reeked of garbage, especially when you passed a gutter.

             
He could feel the consequences. The mega-rich had put in place legislation to make breaking the sound barrier legal over certain parts of the city of London. These corresponded to the parts where the poorest individuals lived. Baggs would be lying in bed at night, sleeping, and would awake with the floor trembling, and the sound of saucers and plates falling from where they were placed in the kitchen to shatter on the floor as a jet broke the sound barrier low over the city. Baggs could feel the consequences of the new technologies and the legislation in his stomach when they couldn’t buy any more food until he had another concert. He could feel it in his pounding heart that morning as he watched Mr. Krass cut his cast off, wondering if his family would starve. Baggs could feel the consequences as they manifested themselves in terrible remorse when he denied Olive a slice a cake every year on her birthday.

             
He could hear the consequences. These usually came at night, when the man in the apartment above them beat his wife. The sounds included her screams, sharp slaps, slurred and angry yelling from her husband (“you bitch whore slut!”), and the sound of heavy objects, such as the woman’s head, being slammed into the walls and floor. The screams were terrified, begging screams. On one particularly bad night, Baggs had gone up the stairwell to see if she needed help. He knocked on the door to the apartment that stood exactly one story above them, feeling silly as he did so. The woman on the other side continued to scream, and the man that lived there continued to call her names, as though no one was knocking. Baggs continued to knock. He was nervous now. No one answered. The woman’s cries of “Please! No!
No
!” grew louder and more desperate. Baggs knocked harder, feeling a mixture of apprehension and disgust for what was happening behind the door. No answer. Baggs proceed to kick the door with the bottom of his shoe, throwing his body into the barrier so hard that it bent in with each blow. He was trying to break the door down. After a few of these kicks, the door did open, and a young man greeted Baggs by brandishing a steak knife in his face. The youth was tall and wiry. He didn’t look nearly as strong as Baggs, but there was a crazed aspect about his speech and flashing yellow-green eyes that made Baggs recoil a bit. “If you don’t stop banging on the door, I’m going to kill her! I’m only playing with her! But if you keep banging, I’ll kill her! Swear to God! That what you want, mate? Blood on your hands, you psycho? ‘Cause I’ll kill her,” the youth said. He was shirtless and most of his torso was tattooed. Baggs retreated, not wanting to get stabbed by the rusty knife, and yelled, “I’m calling the police!” The youth laughed, and shut the door. Before he did so, Baggs got a glimpse of the youth’s wife. Her lip was bloody and so swollen that it looked like it had sustained multiple bee stings. Over half of her skin was darkened with contusions. Baggs had gone downstairs to the payphone on the street and called the police. The man who took his call was attentive at first, but after hearing where Baggs lived, sounded like he was only half listening. “Yeah, yeah, we’ll send someone over, pronto.” No law enforcement officers ever showed up. They saw no reason to waste their resources on some girl who probably didn’t pay a dime in taxes. No one was reprimanded for the negligence. Twelve years later, Baggs still heard the same screaming, hollering, and pounding two or three times a week. The sounds didn’t stop there, though. There were also gunshots, out on the streets and sometimes they heard them in their very apartment building. When there were gunshots in the building, Olive and Maggie knew to come and sleep with their parents—it was a rule they had. There were also the sounds of hungry babies crying, of wild dogs snarling at unattended children on the streets, and of the raspy voices of the beggars. These weren’t the worst, though. Sometimes, Baggs and Tessa heard the sound of the handle on their front door jiggle in the dead of night as criminals went in armed packs from door to door of Apartment Building 5160, systematically looking for an unlocked occupancy so that they could storm in and take whatever goods were inside. Baggs had a neighbor who had forgotten to lock his door once; they didn’t kill him, they only knocked him out by stomping on his head. Each night, the Baggers locked their front door thoroughly; they locked the door handle, two deadbolts, two chain locks, and also lodged a chair underneath the handle. When Baggs went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he always checked to make sure that his daughters were still in bed and that the door was still secure.