Trina had just edged around the corner of the park where the excellent Philz Coffee still stood, proud and extraterrestrial-free, when some kid called out to her.
“Hey,” the kid said. He was a pretty boy, young looking with dark brown skin and curious eyes.
“Hey yourself,” said Trina, firming up her gender identity through gesture.
The boy stared down at a booklet, some kind of Seep tech that claimed to hold all the answers. These things never did, not about anything that was actually important. The Seep had the nuance of a golden retriever. All the kid seemed to want to know was a good place to stay tonight that didn’t run on credit. The Seep loved giving you everything you wanted, in exchange for information about being human. The green flash of a credit stick, at a coffee shop or a bookstore or any number of places, was a marker of where you were and what you wanted, a little dot in a vast, ever-evolving data set. Trina had resigned herself to using credit years ago, to being a little dot in the aliens’ matrix, but she respected the kid’s wariness.
“Well, you could sleep in the park,” she suggested. “But it’s going to get chilly, and the grass does get dewy. There are quite a few communes who’d take you in for a night or more.”
His eyes lit up. “Which commune has the most undesirable, unsavory characters?”
Trina tried not to laugh. “House of Maybe gets pretty unsavory, or at least, they used to on a Friday night. That’s in Venice.” Her long hand, dense with chunky silver rings, pressed into the side of a building and a blue screen appeared as if from nowhere. The boy gasped like he had never seen an Electric Spirit console before. She quickly pulled up a map and showed him which public transit lines to take to get there. “You might need a password or something—they’re pretty showy—but if you bang hard enough, they’ll let you in. You can say Trina Oneka sent you, but I’m not sure if my name will carry weight there anymore.”
He wrote the directions down in a little notebook, real paper and all.
Trina raised her eyebrows. “You’re really not from here, are you?”
He shook his head.
“If you ever have a question, just ask the pamphlet out loud. It will tell you whatever you want to know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I have one, too.” She took out the pamphlet that busybody Blane had given her. Its title had now become so, you’ve decided to run away from all of your problems . . . Ha, very funny. It must have overheard her conversation with Blane. “It’s Seep tech. It creates a link with you, so whatever you need to know, you can find right away. It responds to verbal commands. But be wary of what you say around it—it can’t always tell the difference between a question and a private conversation.”
The boy stared at his pamphlet. Trina glanced at the cover. His read so, you’ve been ejected from the compound . . .
Wow, thought Trina. And I thought I had problems. She softened her tone.
“Hey, I’m going to a diner to get some real grub. It’s called The Shtetl. It doesn’t use credit, either. Do you want to come?”
“No, thank you.” He smiled at her, revealing shiny, straight teeth. “You see, I’m looking for something other than kindness.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, maybe try Instructions? That’s a commune over on Fifth.” She gestured to the map. “You could walk. They’re not interested in kindness, either.”
“Oh, thanks a lot!” he said brightly. Then he paused. “Sorry. And what do I do with this?” He held out his coffee cup. “I can’t find any trash receptacles.”
Trina wrinkled her brow. For someone who wasn’t interested in kindness, he sure was polite. For the past twenty-five years, every temporary container had been made both edible and compostable; you either ate it or buried it in your garden. Even toddlers knew that. Trina thought for a moment of Deeba being raised in this new paradigm. She wouldn’t remember another way of living. Trina had to save her empty packets of gum in a mason jar to have them processed once a year on Old Objects New Objectives Transmutation Day. (In her former life, she might have used the plastic packaging in an art installation about the permanence of impermanence, but now that kind of thing made her want to punch a wall.)
Trina made a big gesture of eating the cup, hoping to get a smile out of him, but he only looked more confused. Oh, well. She told him to consult the pamphlet for little questions like that. Her gum was starting to taste like old glue. She needed a coffee. A drink. To go to sleep and never wake up again in a world without her old lady.
The boy gave his thanks and wandered off in search of Fifth Street.
As soon as he left, Trina regretted sending the kid to Instructions, a truly torturous commune that attracted the most vigilant, inflexible types looking to drop in and zone out. She wandered around the park for a while longer, frowning at the perfectly clear sky and drinking a beer in a brown paper bag. On a great open lawn, there were several yellow-meeks standing in their filthy version of prayer. Their hair was matted in clumps, faces streaked with lines of grit, necks circled in grime as they sweat and urinated on themselves in the hot overhead sun. Trina hung out with them while she finished her beer. Man, they stank! Of course, they paid her no mind, nor did they interact with each other or anyone else in the park. Over on the next field of grass, parents played with children, a teenager strummed a guitar, a middle-aged woman sunbathed in the nude. If you ignored the yellow-meeks, it was paradise. But The Seep taught us that true paradise included all of us—no matter what, no matter what, no matter what. (There was a huge living mural of this exact sentiment in the Tenderloin, depicted by hundreds of flowers and vines.) All the yellow-meeks held still, almost motionless, standing and sweating and even shitting in place when they had to, like grotesque half-alive statues. Outrageously, Trina felt sad that there were no more drunks in the park, no more homeless people except for those who had renounced housing by choice, like the yellow-meeks, who had renounced everything, even their names.
Then she berated herself for thinking such a thing. The world was better now, of course. And of course she didn’t want people to suffer, unless they wanted to, even as some silly path toward divinity. She was so fucking selfish. But in that moment, she would have brought back late capitalism if it meant she were married to Deeba again. Goddamn it, she thought, swilling her beer. She splashed a little on her jacket and wiped it off with the back of her hand. Then she smiled. I guess there’s still one drunk in the park after all. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Then she decided to walk to Fifth Street to try to give that Compound boy some better advice. On her walk over, Trina got more and more excited about actually talking to someone from the Compound. Was life there really free from all Seep influence? What did people tell their children about the world outside? “Hey, the Compound called,” she muttered to herself as she walked through the paradise city of flowers and trees and animals with ascended consciousness. “They want their kid back.”