Ricki

🅑🅛🅐🅒🅚🅦🅐🅣🅔🅡 🅕🅘🅛🅔🅢

Part of the Blackwater Files, a collaborative writing project started byThe ChroniclerEach story follows various characters participating in an experimental project by the enigmatic Elysium, a company searching for immortality. They never sleep. But you might.

Opening your eyes, a lime and rose velour banquette stretches and curves across a great room, looping around thick plastered pillars like a Möbius strip. Probably designed to keep us off balance you think, feeling unorientable. Sitting down slowly with strange intention, you wonder if it's really you thinking anymore. The hands seem familiar, so you run them along the pink upholstery and pluck at the ornamental buttons that punctuate the long velutinous lounge sofa. A level twelve chandelier refracts tiny prisms overhead, you swear it's swinging a little bit. No. Must just be the drugs. 

"Just get here?" asks a man in an oversized houndstooth coat sitting nearby. Never Fall In Love Again is warbling through a speaker somewhere. It takes a few seconds before the realization hits that he's talking to you. 

You nod your head in an indeterminate motion and scrunch your mouth hoping to look less approachable. The impossibly tight, hip-hugging white leather jumpsuit probably isn't helping. But the chunky gold ray gun holstered to your utility belt should deter most of the unwanted attention. This guy though is unfazed.

"Had a piece like that once," he says glancing down and back up in that discreet way that makes you feel like he's barely taken his eyes off of you for a while. He keeps one hand in his coat and points at the ceiling with the other, "You should check out the rooftop when you get a chance—it's quite a view."

You stay cool—don't respond. Happy he's changed the subject and indicated a possible next move, you use the opportunity to get up and leave. The skin between your ear and jaw twitches, as you prowl past him, and you smell something malodorous, like wet cardboard and dead fish. You know his eyes are following as you head toward the front desk but when you decide to look back, he's gone. The amigdalian impulses tweak down the base of your neck but you hold it together for a moment.

"Can I help you miss?", says the mousey concierge

"We'll see," you purr and slide your passport across the counter.

Someone shuffles impatiently behind you, mumbling useless complaints. You rotate imperceptibly and side-eye a pudgy suit checking his watch like he's performing for an audience. He has no idea, he's about to die.

It was Carmen who found the Elysium ad, though you knew she would never go through with it. She only wanted your sulky ass out of the apartment. With you settling into a mid-winter malaise munching Shrimp Crisps™ coupled with a fairly steep drop in grey market personal security gigs, you were a restless and terrible flatmate. Besides it was a hell of a lot of money for a six-week sail. It's not the first time you've dipped your toes into the brain wake. All the undergrounds have Splashpads™ in the backrooms—mostly for sexplay and horrorgasms, though it's more of a utility for psychos like you. This Blackwater thing sounded academic at the very least.

A memory pop buckles your focus for a moment: 

"See you in six weeks!" says Carmen dropping you off at the clinic.
"Not if I see you first," you sling back

"In your dreams Ricki," she sings with a wave and starts to roll away.

"No. In yours," you deadpan, ending the goodbye and getting in the last word before she sweeps into the traffic. 

This Elysium place seems to cringe pretty hard, but you're used to dealing with techwads like them since the late 30s. It's not like you intend to play by the rules. You doubt they are. Made a big deal of the setup but you are more than ready to dive in. You've been spidering through theta waves long enough to stay in charge of your consciousness and aren't afraid to elim anything that gets in your way. Maybe that's why they called you an 'exceptional applicant'.

No one makes places like this anymore. The elevators, a gilded triptych, the bellhops, tapping across the black and white checked marble like a Broadway musical and a parlour palm in every corner. You see the concierge notice your middle finger tracing the engraving near the grip of your firearm. F is for Florence, your first love. L is for luck, O is for Opal, your birthstone, the double Vs are double victory, D is for death and a reminder of an ever-present danger, 4 is your compass and 8 is for infinite possibilities. 

The insufferable man behind you clears his throat impatiently. This was his last utterance. Your ray gun was too good for this gumhead. So in one smooth motion, you unclip a four-inch shiv from your belt, spin your arm around behind you, entering the chest cavity just below the sternum and with surgical precision uncouple his heart from the major blood vessels. He slumps and you let him down to the floor slowly, your fist still inside, squeezing the warm organ mud between your fingers. No one seems to notice, except the concierge who passes you a wad of tissues for your hand.

"We'll take care of it, Miss," he says, nodding to a couple of bellhops that scurry over with a brass-tubed luggage cart and dash Mister Impatient away to Elevator 3. 

You tilt your head politely and shift the weight in your ivory boots, "So, a room for me?" you inquire, but it sounds more like a command.

"Yes ma'am. Penthouse Suite #5—with access to the rooftop," he hands you back your passport and a keycard which you tuck into your belt and walk toward the lift, taking care to step over the red smudge on the floor.

Your mind is calm but you can't help but feel like you're not alone here. Was Elysium using illegal combojack tech? Were the dreamers connected? It was one thing, to satisfy your mandatory murderlust with figments, but another to suffocate the beating pulse of some unsuspecting napper. You look back at the blood and pick some tissue from your fingernail. Elevator 1 opens as you approach so you walk in. As the doors are closing you pull out your keycard and rub your thumb over the graphic of an eye set in a dark pool. It winks at you like it knows a secret.

Check out the next chapter Otto ——

Thank you for reading and diving in to the Black Water Files with Ricki. Please consider subscribing if you like what’s happening here and want to stay up to date with this unravelling universe.

Welcome to the Blackwater Files, a collaborative writing project started by

The Chronicler

. Each piece follows the trials of the various individuals desperate enough to seek out help from Elysium, a company searching for immortality in the darkest recesses of our minds.