Pizza in Dystopia

“And for the final question – and for a large free pizza! – who can name all five Event Reasons as described by Arthur Pottis is his book Near-End Times: How It All Came About?”

The hisses of distaste were immediately evident.

“Boo! Boo!”

“Come on man, too close to home!”

“Ask another question!”

The diners at Terrific Toppings Pizzeria shifted agitatedly, and one or two stood up, postures aggressive. But the quizmaster knew his audience for that week’s trivia night well enough, and he quickly motioned for quiet. “The manager simply thought,” he said with firm and measured, but conciliatory, tones, “that a question prompting a review of our present circumstances, would not be totally out of place, given our situation, and –

“Are you even allowed to ask such a question?” a dark, scowling man interrupted.

“We are quite within our rights,” the quizmaster confidently replied. “Nothing in our current agreements state otherwise.” He smiled. “Now, why don’t we say we finish the night with a good multi-part question, get a little lesson, and someone wins a free pizza? Sounds good, right?”

The crowd simmered back down to its usual state wherein quick conversation interrupted by jocular outbursts was the norm. The few yellow lights hanging from the pizzeria’s ceilings cast a rather seedy glow about the place, and the windows in the front side of the building were so heavily tinted that what light existed from the setting sun was denied entry into the small world permeated by the smells of pizzas, calzones, and alcoholic beverages, smoke from cigars and cigarettes, and the sound of low music played through the building’s entertainment system. That world, if one would have walked into it at that moment as a hungry customer, would have seemed inhabited by fifty to sixty individuals, most no older than thirty-five. Males and females were represented in about equal proportions, with the women slightly outnumbering the men. There was a curious and almost misplaced energy in the air. Waiters and waitresses strode from table to kitchen, from kitchen to booth, from booth back to table, in a hurried and discernibly oblivious fashion that in most of them seemed ever so slightly impelled. There was a sort of frenzied, hungry urgency to the conversation at the various booths and tables scattered throughout the place; a laugh would break over the general hum of talk from one or another diner every now and then that would be too loud, too raucous, too wild, the end product of a conversation that itself was too loud, too raucous, too wild for a gathering of individuals at a restaurant’s trivia night. Almost all the men diners sat with at least one female, and more than a couple of them were more than a little overly expansive in their gestures; they clutched their female companions and brought them closer with a surprising immediacy and strength. Diners would look at one another and smile broadly, but there was little joy behind those smiles.

“Any takers?” the quizmaster asked. “For the final question remember, you must send a member of your group to answer publicly at the microphone.”

Dan Chenant turned his head from staring out into the black void that was the window and gazed across the room. So much laughter and noise and stimuli. So much sorrow and silence and deadness. Why didn’t he feel anything anymore?

“You should take the question, Dan,” his female companion said to him from where she sat beside him. “Come on, we know you know it.” She smiled at him. The smile was bashful and confident at the same time, the type of smile only young lovers share.

“Yeah, Dan,” said the other man who was at his table. “You always get a victory for us!”

Dan looked across the room again. His right hand reached into his pocket and tightly grasped whatever was inside it. His eyes fell across his menu at the table. He read once more the words written at the bottom of its page:

Customers Please Note: All Food And Beverages Were Made Without Recourse To Using Any Products From Animals Considered Pets By Residents Of Your Sector. Further, No Human Products Of Any Sort Are Used To Make Any Dish.

“All right,” Dan said decisively. He walked to where the quizmaster stood beside the microphone. “Here I go. I’ll try it.”

“Ah, only one taker tonight,” said the quizmaster with a smile. “And from the three-person team, Team Sphinx, am I right?”

“That is correct,” Dan answered. “We always use the same team name every week.”

“Well, can you answer the question?”

Dan reached into his pocket, let out a sigh, and then said, “Yes, I think I can remember. I read the book a long time ago.”

“Go ahead then.”

“Event A: The Gyrotopmic Pandemic. That was what started the unrest and the economic collapse. Event B: that actually constitutes a whole series of geographical and climate crises, culminating in the Western Disaster. Event C: The Culture Riots followed by the Secession. Event D: the Terrible Depression. And Event E: The Alien Invasion – I mean the Protectors’ Coming!”

“Excellent! Team Sphinx wins! Here is your voucher for your free pizza next week.” The quizmaster handed Dan the paper prize. “But I should note that you mixed up the order of Events B and C. And just to make it clear to the audience: we accept his answer for ‘Protectors’ Coming,’ and not for anything else he may have mumbled and which we could not hear.”

The young lady watched the leader from Team Sphinx step away from the microphone and return to his table. She rather liked him. His stride was long and confident, and for all that there was a melancholy about him, he seemed kind, understanding, likable. Not like most of the other diners there that night. And he looked good with the woman who sat next to him. Yes, they were an attractive couple. But look, he had dropped something on the floor!

Leaving the shadows from where she had observed the conclusion of the night’s trivia questioning, the young woman darted out to the main floor and picked up the heart shaped-locket that Dan had dropped. Engraved on it were the words

To Catherine, From Dan

I Will Always Love You

I Hope You Always Love Me

How precious! She must give it back to him to give to that pretty woman he was sitting beside at the table!

A hand grabbed her wrist and she was thrown back into the doorway of the kitchen. “Mina!” hissed her father, the quizmaster, “I told you to stay working in the kitchen. Don’t come out here! Not with this lot! You don’t want to deal with them!”

“That man just dropped this locket, Dad!” Mina replied, apologetic and a bit frightened at seeing her father look so worried. “He’ll want to give it to the woman he is with one day, I’m sure, and I just wanted to give it back to him.”

“Oh, poor girl,” the quizmaster sighed and tried to smile. “You can’t yet tell the differences between them can you? The real and the –

There was a sudden electric hum and a slight shudder rippled through the building. The lights flickered and then everything went dark except for one light, left faintly glowing in the center of the ceiling.

“Well, its closing time, at any rate. Power is off. Time got away from me! We will talk more tonight,” he said to his daughter, and turning away from the kitchen, he addressed the customers in a harsher voice. “Come on, you know that means its time to close! I know you all have already paid, so let’s head out!”

The ten or so individuals – about eight men and two women – sulkily stood up, as if reluctant to leave. The music had vanished and quiet reigned in the pizzeria, along with a feeling of apprehension. The RAWSS – the Robotic Assistant Waiting and Service Staff – stood poised where they were in mid-stride, now as still and suspended in time as the living statues that had been Medusa’s victims once upon a time. Most of the other diners too sat lifeless in stooped positions at the tables and booths or at the bar, their faces glowing like ghosts from the central holographic cube each one had implanted in its hardware and which never completely powered down, even in its ‘sleep mode.’ Servers could be more crudely fashioned with a minimum of facial displays; HACs, or Holographic Automatronic Companions had to have a suppleness and dexterity about them, both in their programming and their visual presentation, hence their advanced software and their holographic cubes. To mimic human friendship and camaraderie in days where the word human could be applied without irony to less and less was an expensive and complex endeavor, but one that could still be afforded by a few fortunate sons and daughters of the powerful. The holographic images that gave the human diners’ companions’ their faces and temporary personalities never completely disappeared unless the holographic cubes existing inside them were completely turned off or removed. They slumped now with flickering, spectral smiles planted across their faces, paused until the next night’s revels.

“Come, come,” the quizmaster exhorted. “I don’t have patience with you lot looking so glum! You are the scions of those still influential enough to get you into the City where things like the Terrific Toppings Pizzera are created for you so you can pretend you are all back in the Old Days and life is normal and fun and without worries! You men can drown yourself in real booze and pretend women, courtesy of our fine HACs, and you can play games and laugh and everything else! You don’t have to work or scrape or survive, the City is under the protection of the Heaven’s Fall Treaty, so you don’t have to see many Protectors. You don’t have to live under their watch closely, like those outside of the City do! They are dead meat there – hahah, pardon the black pun! There, if you are not enslaved to the Protectors, you are either working for us to keep the City functioning, or else on your own. So don’t look so glum! And hurry up! I hate being stuck outside in the dark!”

The small number of living diners exited the restaurant, with the quizmaster and Mina remaining behind to lock up the building.

“I never gave the man his locket,” Mina said emotionlessly.

“Never mind that now. He’ll be back. Just put it over there with that HAC.”

Mina went over to the table when Dan had sat and looped the locket’s chain around the outstretched hand of the HAC that had played the part of Dan’s friend for a few blissfully, forgetful hours.

Once he was out the door of the restaurant, Dan walked away from the Terrific Toppings Pizzeria in a hurry, drawing his jacket close about him. It was now dark outside, and it was cold. Why did he go to such outings? The few real humans there he did not know and could not make friends with easily. Still, as the quizmaster had said, his life as it existed was better than most. He shuddered and drew his jacket even closer about him. He heard howling in the distance. The wolvar would be out on the hunt. He missed Catherine. But she had died in the Plague. Event A, as it was called. Perhaps that was best. She had not lived to see anything else. A Class 2W alien craft passed above him – to hell with calling them Protectors – and he quickened his pace. Yes, he missed Catherine. But he had known love. How many could say that? In a world of artificiality and mimicry and dryness, where trust had starved and the survival instinct became all-ascendant, in a world of desperate pleasure and hovering worry, he had known love.