Smoking weed not only helped with Emma's palliative care - the
pain, anxiety, lack of appetite and insomnia, but it also helped
reduce the frequency and duration of her seizures. She took CBD
sublingually and hits from vape pens strewn around her
messy dorm room.
The weed also helped her work. Stoned, high, medicated or baked,
whatever-the-fuck you wanted to call it, she worked best after adding
THC to her system. After the first few puffs, the chatter in her
head died away and she could see far into the future.
She bought her weed from Fazal. It was still illegal in her country.
She couldn't understand why the politicians didn't want to cash in on
that billion-pound industry, but it was easy enough to get hold of. She set up a crypto transfer to his wallet and he delivered straight to her
dorm room every Tuesday afternoon. She'd been buying off him for a
year and a half, ever since her fist week at uni.
One particular Tuesday, Fazal arrived all out of breath. He looked
frightened as fuck. His clothes, usually crisp, clean and perfect,
were all out of sorts. His shirt was untucked and a button was
missing. He kept glancing at the door whenever there was a sound in
the hall.
He brought out the weed, moving jerkily like a broken robot, and
reached into the bag for a bud. He twitched so hard that crumbly
buds spewed out through the air and dropped like rain into the
carpet.
'Fazal!' said Emma. She touched his shoulder and he looked at her,
wide-eyed. He bit his lip. He was shivering.
'What is up with you, dude?' she said, shaking him by the
shoulder.
He mumbled at her through his bit lip.
It took twenty minutes of gentle prodding to get the story out of him. She
rolled them both a joint, picking the green out of the carpet. Fazal
took it from her, took a big hit and leaned back, blowing a
sharp stream of smoke at the ceiling. He took another drag. The joint
tip glowed like a fat cherry.
'I fucked up, Em.'
She saw a tear slide down his cheek. She assumed he'd lost money. Fazal was always gambling; be it the casino or the
latest Reddit bubble, he was always one trade away from
the big one.
Over time he did make money, but moment to moment, life was a
roller coaster for Fazal Sayed. One minute he was up, enjoying the
dizzying heights of cocaine and Airbnbs full of fake friends.
Then he was down, wrecked in the hangover aftermath, penniless and
full of self-loathing and pity.
So when he leaned forward, passed her the joint and said, 'Em,
I killed a guy,' at first, she didn't believe him.
*
As Fazal told his tale, his voice cracked and he sniffed and began
to cry. He twisted his hands in his lap. The joint lay forgotten,
smoldering on the edge of the coffee table and Emma watched the wood
darkening under the cherry. She took the joint and docked it.
She tried to keep up with his fragmentary outbursts. She built up
a picture piece by piece. He met a guy at El Rio. They went back to Fazal's. They began fooling around. The guy said he was going to
take a shower. Fazal followed him and found him posting pictures
of them kissing.
Emma picked up the joint and relit it. She imagined her friend,
all six foot six of him, losing his shit in his luxury bathroom. Sitting there, on her threadbare couch, Fazal put his
hands over his eyes and began to cry. He made weird noises
and blew bubbles out of his nose. She saw there was blood on his
hands, more on the cuffs of his shirt.
*
Emma had never gotten rid of a body before, but it turned out to
be disturbingly easy. Expensive, sure, but easy. She found the worst-reviewed
mortician in town then paid him ten grand for the paperwork and
procedure.
A cop the coroner knew took another ten grand for a fake
suicide report, while a family doctor took another ten and a local
judge took twenty. It all took less than twenty-four hours and Emma
was left with the uneasy feeling that it was all some kind of regular service.
*
Fazal and Emma collapsed on the couch and she sparked up a fatty.
They were both now thousands of pounds in debt and had been
introduced to the nasty underside of a free market economy, but a seed of
friendship had been planted in that dark netherworld, somewhere
between lifting the dead guy out of Fazal's shower and cleaning his
blood from the tiles. And that seed blossomed into a beautiful
business partneship the likes of which the world had never seen.
*
Starting from Emma's dorm room they disrupted every industry in town. First, it was social media then security, banking and
cloud computing. Emma's code was so tight and Fazal's sales pitches
so audacious that soon their client list included major corporations,
national governments, and security agencies worldwide.
With time, they were able to expand and control a wider portfolio. One of their tentacles began researching and
developing automated vehicles, while another drilled into artificial
neural networks and machine learning software, while yet another, the
Emergency Climate Response Unit, or M-Crew, began fertilizing the ocean with iron to
combat the increasing levels of atmospheric carbon.
With newfound capital and processing power, Emma dove into experimenting with nanochip technology. She was
trying to come up with a device she could implant in her brain to help eradicate her seizures once and for all.
Fazal loved his job promoting the company. And after a few years, he was able to fulil his
lifelong ambition of blasting rockets into space. Tin Can Rockets was his trillion-dollar pet project. Ever since he was a
kid, he wanted to send a rocket into outter space and that's exactly what
happened at 05:45 on Tuesday the 28th of July when he
became the first person in history to privately launch a rocket into orbit from
a launchpad on an island in the Outer Hebrides off
the west coast of Scotland.
Granted, Major Tom was only a basic three-stager delivering a payload of scientists, researchers and
private space tourists to the Second International Space Station, but
to Fazal, it marked the beginning of the best part of his life. Watching the exhaust cloud erupt at the
base of Major Tom, tears sprang into his eyes. He looked like a dad
whose kid had just scored the game-winning goal.
From that very first successful launch, it was all systems go. One
after the other the rockets improved and Fazal whipped the media
into a frenzy by promising to have operational moon stations by the
end of the decade and a Mars base by 2045.
'Before the middle of this century, we will put women, children and men on Mars,' he said to the podcaster Pearl Hunter and her 1.2
billion listeners. 'When I look into the future, I'm optimistic.
'I see humans populating the universe, hopping from planet to
planet, system to system, pollenating the universe like benevolent
bees.' Fazal laughed. 'The alternative is to die out having
never left this planet and that just isn't exciting.'
*
Emma got high in her atrium office. It was an old
Victorian palm house she'd had installed on top of a skyscraper on the banks of the River Thames in London. Inside, it looked like a set from Jurassic Park with
oversized palms, flaming lobster claws and Cobra lilies. Ivy dripped off everything and it was hot, humid and
steamy.
Round about stood weed plants at various stages of development.
Some had green leaves while others looked more purple and orange. One was so
covered in chrystals it looked like white cotton candy on a stick.
Here and there were also Emma's work stations – a meditation cushion
here, a yoga mat there, a hammock stretched between two palm trees.
An ice tub and a cedar sauna stood by the edge of a plunge pool at
the base of beautiful waterfalls.
A few parakeets flew over and landed on a low-hanging bough
that drooped over the pool. They called back and forth, chattering to
each other over the hubbub of the water then flew off with a few wing
beats and disappeared into the dense canopy.
The wooden door to the sauna opened outwards and Emma stepped out, her body glistening and steaming. Without a pause, she climbed up the steps of
the ice bath and lowered herself into it, exhaling until her shoulders, neck and head disappeared under the resettling
ice.
Minutes passed. The parakeets returned. One flapped down
then two then the whole gang joined them, preening themselves and chatting.
*
Underwater, the bird calls were muffled to practically nothing.
Emma wasn't listening anyway. She was inside the maze of her mind,
chasing an idea so quick, so elusive and yet she was sure so valuable
that she needed to have it, had needed it ever since it popped into
her mind that one winter's day long ago.
This was where she came to think. Her mind raced along nicely
riding the THC wave with a few thousand micrograms of CBD to take off
the edge. She'd taken some 80% dark chocolate along with a
bulletproof coffee ten minutes before getting in the sauna and the
caffeine was rushing along nicely.
The silence, the slight pressure, the millions of prickles from
the icy water all over her skin, coupled with the drugs in her blood,
provided her with the rocket fuel she needed to push through the next
series of problems.
She was working on a tricky one to do with lowering the impedance while simultaneously increasing the charge-carrying capacity of the nanochip's interface. The
poly-ethylenedioxythiopene doped with polystyrene sulfonate was
showing promising signs, but Emma wasn't
sure about its long-term biocompatibility.
She was halfway to the solution by the time she hit five minutes. She was aiming for seven. That would make it three days
in a row.
Six minutes and thirty-six seconds in and she was about to grasp the tail of
something real when she was hit by a massive tonic-clonic seizure. She could feel it coming on. It was like she was fading into it. She tried to stand up, to pull herself out of the spiral but she knew there was nothing she could do.
*
Fazal was pissed. The voice in his head clanged alongside his footsteps on the wrought-iron steps as he climbed the spiral staircase up to Emma's fucking weird-ass office with her stupid fucking
plants, the fucking hypocritical cunt. He stormed in, knocking over a couple of weed plants on
the landing. He looked around wildly.
Nothing. No Emma sitting in one of her weird little nests. He even checked the
one on top of the huge air filtration system where she'd built a
depressing kind of bed out of blankets and beanbags. He kicked over a
bong coming back down the ladder, swore then stopped moving when he heard splashing water. He
looked at the ice tub and his heart just stopped.
A pale bony back breached the surface like a weird kind of whale
but it was unmoving and he knew shit was fucked up.
He looked down on himself as he took long strides over to the tub and plunged his arms in, wrapping them
around his friend and pulling her out. The whole tub came over in
the process but he didn't feel the icy water cascade up his legs or the bang
on his elbow as he fell back. All he could feel was the cold,
slippery corpse in his arms. Emma's lips were purple. Fazal pride
open one of her eyelids and she stared at him unseeing.
He felt her neck. No pulse. He shook her and yelled at her. She wasn't breathing so he got to his knees and bent over
her and brought his mouth down onto hers.
To perform rescue breaths correctly, you're supposed to pinch the
person's nose while keeping their head tilted back. Breathe into
their mouth, making a seal with your mouth on theirs. Each breath you
give them should be about one second long.
After five rescue breaths, do CPR. To do CPR, place the heel of one hand on
the casualty's chest and your other hand on top of it. Push down firmly about five or six centimeters. You want to aim for about a hundred and twenty compressions per minute.
Doing CPR to the tune of 'Stayin Alive' by the BeeGees can help you
keep pace. Repeat thirty chest compressions and two rescue breaths
until the person starts breathing normally.
Fazal didn't know that. He only knew was what he'd seen on
Netflix and he was lucky as fuck because after a couple of puffs,
Emma coughed and Fazal's mouth filled with warm watery spit. He fell
back, coughing and spitting.
'What the fuck, dude,' said Emma, sitting up and wiping her mouth
then covering herself with her arms and turning away from him.
He tried to speak but the adrenaline was making it hard to put
thoughts together so he staggered over to the bar by the pool and
drank straight from a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. Emma
pulled on a blue onesie and sparked up a joint. Fazal took another
long drink then remembered why he'd come here.
He no longer felt the rage that fuelled him before, when he'd
found out from his lawyer that
she was cutting him out of his own company, he'd seen red.
Now, he only felt tired and wrung out as if he'd just run a marathon. He was starting to wonder if it was all just a mistake.
*
The truth was, Emma had been planning to cut Fazal out of the company since day
one. She had no room in her plan for a partner. He served a purpose
and that was it. So, an hour and a half before Fazal saved her life,
Emma had completely written him off, electronically severing his
ownership and rights in the company in a smoothly-executed,
methodical coup.
*
Fazal reeled into his automated roadster. He felt sick as it
whisked him out of town through the industrial district to the
airport where the runway stuck out like a tongue into the bay. He
read his own obituary on social, flicking back and forth between
profiles while simultaneously watching his portfolios crumble.
He watched his dollar value crash almost as fast as his
reputation. By the time he climbed aboard his Learjet and collapsed
into the cream leather seat, he'd lost two hundred and fifty billion
dollars.
Flying over the Atlantic, he drank half a bottle of Blue Label, puked and cried himself to sleep.
*
When Fazal woke, he felt hungover and depressed. He'd gone to the
only place he could think of - the only place where he was still in
control: his Scottish launch base, Ground Control. Driving
up in an old Land Rover Defender, he bumped over the grassy turf and
potholes in the old access road.
There, standing silhouetted against the horizon was his very
first rocket, Major Tom. He smiled a little, seeing the sunrise
glinting off its smooth silver sides.
*
The launch pad was long disused and he shone his phone on the steps as he started to climb. By the time he got half way, he'd made his
decision. He wasn't going to lie down and take it. He was Fazal. He'd
killed a guy and gotten away with it, damn it. Who the hell did she
think she was trying to outmanoeuver him? He was born for this
moment. It was his future to reach out and take by the throat.
He was running, taking the steps three at a time. He knew why he'd
come here. He could see it in his head: under the pilot's seat in the nose, a stashed phone full of crypto and kill codes for all the accounts.
*
The pilot's seat was positioned in such a way that he had to lower himself
into it and almost fully lie down. He looked up at a bank of
monitors and fumbled under the seat. For a heartstopping
moment, he couldn't find it, then his fingers touched plastic and his
hope was restored.
He tapped his way through the security systems and in ninety
seconds he was soon gloating, sitting on top of a mountain of crypto
with the kill switch firmly in his digital grip. He reflected for a
second, a little surprised that he felt no doubt nor sadness at all. Instead, he
felt a hot rush of dopamine as he mashed his finger down on the
button.
Nothing.
He hit it again, sending the signal that would regain control. But
even as he did so he knew something was wrong.
Very gently, a tremble whispered through the seat under his back. Or was it
just his imagination? No, there it again, the slightest
vibration. But this time it was more like a shudder that juddered
through the whole cockpit. Lights blinked on in the monitor screens.
A little motor somewhere whirred into life.
Fazal reached up and turned the handle to open the door. It didn't
budge. He jostled it, trying to jimmy it loose but it was definitely
locked. He took it in both hands and twisted it, gritting his teeth and making a small squeak with the effort.
'Fazal,' said a voice through the speakers. It was Emma. She
was there, on the monitors. He could see a wall of plants behind her.
'I could say I didn't want it to happen like this.'
'You are so fucked,' said Fazal.
Emma smiled. Her eyes were bright. She leaned forward and blew a kiss at the camera. The screens went blank and Fazal was left on his own,
staring at his hazy reflection. Then all the lights
went off, a terrible roar filled his ears and
he felt himself begin to jitter and shake.
