UNCLE GOLM'S GINGA BALL RESCUE

In Search of Lost Scran

Aunt Kass and Uncle Golm should have been happy to see me go off to medical school, not least of all to have some more room in the cramped apartment. There were eight of us in a space fit for half that many and it would not have been bearable if Meg and Peg, the twelve year old giantesses, did not work night shifts and allow four of us use of their sleeping compartments in the evening. They were the biggest twelve year olds anyone had ever seen, and they were showing no signs of slowing down either. Aunt had taken them to the Thuy-Wolsey City free clinic and they were both completely puzzle and disinterested in figuring out what was going on when basic scans were normal (I thought it might have something to do with their favorite treat of expired and recalled Red Dwarf Taffy, which they constantly yanking on with their huge blocky teeth- they snarled like wolves at the suggestion so no one pursued it further). 

The one time of day that we were all at home and awake and together was the evening meal. The chaos was multiplied by it being the only practical time to introduce family business. Any new item was bound to provoke an explosion, as even a mild reactant will in a confined space. My acceptance to medical college had been no exception. It was assumed, though not discussed with me, that I would help with, and eventually take over, Uncle’s food cart. The family had significantly more warning about my grad school plans than I did about the food cart takeover, and yet my Aunt still opened her full battery of anger, guilt, grief, and resentment on me. It was not often that I, or anyone else for that matter, had stood up to one of her withering assaults but I bore it all stoically: the tears, the shrieks, her big spoon ringing on the battered steel table, centimeters from my knuckles.

So it was that on my last night with the family I shared my idea to help my long suffering Uncle and maybe even move the clan into a decent apartment. What a nice going away present it would be from me, to help show them this tremendous opportunity before going away to medical college.

“Uncle, one of my friends from university is a producer on Big Star One Access. You know the show where Chef Masuppo takes street food vendors and helps them start a restaurant?” 

“Gah! I’ve seen those. They mock the poor guy and run him out of business by making his operation look dirty. As if everyone doesn’t have a rat drown in the grease traps sometimes! The big restaurants are worse. I worked in them. You should see what those so-called chefs do when the customer can’t see their kitchen.”

“Ah be cool, Uncle. Chef Ma isn’t like that at all. My friend says he is very kind and loves to help out the little guy!”

My aunt placed a steaming bowl on the table and folded her massive arms across a dirty apron. “Let me guess. You think your Uncle can get rich and famous from his Ginga Balls and Duchaise Skewers and you won’t have to live in a cramped little rathole anymore?”

I put my head down, already regretting speaking up. Uncle swirled the ladle in the soup and a runny eyeball floated to the top. Why couldn’t Uncle cook at home too?

My aunt didn’t let up. "You think people are going to tie napkins around their neck and tuck in on Uncle's Ginga Balls in the finance district?"

"What's wrong with my Ginga Balls?" Uncle Golm roared. He went through life mostly impervious to anything his wife had to say ,but once every few weeks he would be suddenly piqued by some insult, as if he had never heard his wife speak before. The only sign of his fury was a quivering of the mouth. A strand of green mucilage wobbled off his chin onto the front of his golf shirt.

"They're fine, as good as any others." She replied quickly. She always softened when her husband actually defended himself, as if she had never considered he might be listening. "It's just that they eat silly fancy trash."

My uncle looked placated and picked something rubbery out of the soup, twirled it in front of his nose, and began chewing futilely. 

"Anyway I think you'd be better off helping your uncle. He would make more money but he gets overwhelmed in the rush. He doesn't need some stupid TV chef, he needs some more hands on deck. They crowd around his stand but have to leave off back to work before they get served, because he's so slow. He couldn't get out of the way of an alley slug."

I never could react in these situations the way I felt justified, with Aunt or with anyone. Despite all the pressure building inside I could never explode. I couldn’t even sputter and object, like dear Uncle. I could only go numb, and feel that lightning bolt go through to my hands and feet. My voice would change but it didn't make me menacing. It only made me sound as if I might be ill and should excuse myself.

I told her in my weird little voice, "I was accepted to medical school."

"Accepted, wonderful. Aren’t you clever? Do you even know what kind of hell they make it for a Downsider? You remember the Aran’s kid, the one born with the eyes on the same side of his head? Genius, they said, and he zoomed through his levels sure enough. Where did he end up? Right back down here. He didn’t take the elevator though, he jumped from the mid decks.”

My vision went dark at the edges. 

“Now when you drop out and can't pay the loans..." She crossed herself.

"That's his concern." My uncle spoke up. “He got in, he deserves a shot.”

The whole table went silent in surprise, and I felt some of the feeling coming back into my hands. It was a rare occasion when he defended himself, much less anyone else.

"It is, it is." She conceded. "At least he's not like that little friend Seljuk. He's going to end up on platform."

"Oh him. He might as well." Uncle shrugged, not too concerned with what happened to Selj.

Quenie, one of the smaller cousins, had a fishbone in her throat and started to cry. Meg punched Peg in the arm, harder than usual and Aunt Kass stood up from her stool which toppled to the ground without her actively counterbalancing the missing third leg. She drew the charred wooden spoon from the soup and held it with two hands like a dripping greatsword. 

This was the customary signal for everyone to vacate the kitchen, for the twins to shuffle off to work and everyone else to cram down into sleeping compartments and leave Aunt Kass and Uncle Golm to whatever it is they might talk about alone. If I didn't know better I might have thought they would sit silent, but through the paper walls of the tiny apartment I could hear them murmuring into the night, sometimes until it was time for him to go to market and begin prepping the breakfast rush. 

I don't know if they carried on that night though, because I went straight down to the arcades and I never came back. Downstairs I found Seljuk where I expected him. I didn't even bother to send him a message on his flip. At 9 pm I knew he would be on the stairs hawking his gimmick colognes.

"One whiff and the girl literally can't resist!" The only customers for novelties were Upsiders that came down here for a laugh, and I didn’t see how there could be enough of those to make it worth his trouble.

"It would be pretty disgusting if that crap worked." I called out. 

"Of course it doesn't. It's just a gag."

"You need a gag." 

"I have one, over Chez Luis. A green skin girl straps it down real tight and-"

I waved him off. He was joking about Chez Luis. He never spent money on anything other than necessary to keep up his hustler image: new clothes, smokes, and drug that he didn’t take himself but gave away strategically. I don't know why my Aunt and Uncle had such contempt for Selj. He worked way harder than I did. He hadn't been to school since primary, but I could hardly see how that bothered my aunt and uncle since they thought my own schooling was a waste of time.

"Ok, look, I know you don't care about women-"

"It's not that-"

"Yeah, well whatever the deal is you aren't even trying to get laid so you can’t speak for my target customer. But maybe this could interest you." He took out of his pack an orange hat, wide brimmed with the sides pulled up to the crown like a cartoon cowboy. The front had a screen, currently an idle blue without any content loaded.

I groaned. "An Ad-Visor? I thought your whole deal was looking cool."

"You know what's cool, playboy? High end pharmaceuticals, all basically legal but high margin retail. Antibiotics, stimulants, dick pills, steroids. Those shitty pain killers that kind of half ass work. Low risk, for me. I get paid commission." He took out his flip and keyed up a menu on the hat. 

Pretty soon a pedestrian stopped to scan one of the codes on their own flip and kept walking briskly. 

I didn’t feel like teasing him about how this was the third gimmick this week because I felt like I needed my friend on my side that night. Instead I told him about the fight at my aunt and uncle's house.

"That's not really a fight is it?" He asked. "It just sounds like every dinner at your house."

"Well yeah no, it's not a really a big deal. But Uncle actually stood up for me."

He laughed. "That old bastard doesn't want any help with that stupid cart. He wants to lay down in the street and get hit by an Upsider’s limo."

A group of guys dressed in high end club clothes came staggering down the strip toward the arcades. Fishnet tights, hard leather brassieres, and masks of intricately machine metal were de rigueur now thanks to a pop star I had seen projected on the sky over the gulch. I had even heard a snatch of Miko once, blasted from a taxi boy’s boombox. "Just Love" was the song title, and the irony was lost on no one when an Upsider woman came staggering over, screaming that he didn't know Miko or what his music meant and he needed to turn it off now. The guy laughed her off and she took out the broadsword she was wearing with her club costume and ran it right through the guy. A bunch of outraged people wanted to tear her apart, but the glowing green shield on her right shoulder warned them off. All we could do was file a report and watch nothing happen. 

Selj wasn’t intimidated by this group of men though. He had even come to be on a familiar basis with some frequent visitors. I felt a wave of menace coming off of them, myself. Two of them hung off the same girl who could barely walk and two others looked like they really would have liked to hang off her as well and were kind of weaving around the two bigger guys, looking for a way to insert themselves into the triangle.

One of the costumed Upsiders came over to Selj and laughed at the novelties he had on display. He selected a powder you were supposed to sprinkle on your crotch to stay hard, and Selj pressed his advantage, gesturing to his Ad-Visor screen and scrolling through some displays of pills that legitimately treated impotence. 

The guy’s companions began taunting him, and I realized with horror that Selj's sales pitch had landed as mockery and now all depended on the target’s sense of humor. I could see him weighing the two routes to saving face: joining in the joke, or violence. He split the difference by slapping Selj on the shoulder, but so hard that he lost balance and stumbled. He danced a couple steps, avoided falling down the steps, and bowed obsequiously. The gang paid no notice, already moving on to the sex market.

We looked at each other and simultaneously breathed a sigh of relief, only to be interrupted by a blasting tone from his cowboy hat which had fallen to the ground. A terrible face appeared on the screen, a live manager with purple skin, a cosmetically sharpened nose and neck muscles that seemed to pile atop one another like warts.

"AGENT C719!"

Selj snatched the hat up and bowed to the manager. 

"Yes sir! Already a sale sir!"

"YOU ARE NOT TO SELL OTHER MERCHANDISE WHILE WEARING THE AD-VISOR! YOU WILL ADHERE TO SCRIPTED PITCHES FOR YOUR PRODUCT LINE."

"But the brochure said-"

"DO NOT ARGUE OR YOU WILL BE TERMINATED! YOUR COMMISSION FOR TODAY IS FORFEIT."

Then the foreman was gone and the screen was once again blue.

"Goddamn lying ass brochure," he muttered. I had in fact tried to tell him that they wouldn't let him do his own pitch or other hustles because I had already seen someone get lit up by a manager in the university canteen.

He tore the hat from his head and threw it down on the steps and stomped it furiously. The first boot heel crushed the display but none of the rest of his flurry of stomps gave any real satisfaction. The hat was made of foam. When he finished it lay on the ground all of ten seconds before a punk snatched it up and was up a wall on graviheels. 

"Fuck," I muttered. It was lock-up for Selj if he didn't have the cash to replace the hat for his now former employer.

"Yeah, fuck it. Fucking bullshit." He was huffing with rage and weirdly I felt some of it directed at me. He was hoping I would remind him how I warned him but there was no way I was doing that.

He turned to me. "You know you should listen to your aunt. Your dad's food is zapped. I would eat it everyday but I can hardly ever get any because he takes a million years to serve. I once saw him stop right in the middle of making a guy's plate. He said he was tired and laid down on the ground right there. But the dope can cook, everyone knows."

The lightning bolts and numb hands again. I had never felt that way with Selj, despite him always ribbing me for going to school and not having a hustle.

"I'm going to medical school," I said between gritted teeth.

"Yeah, and when they fail you out for being a greasy Downside worm they'll liquidate your organs to pay the tuition off." He snapped. "You won't even get to go on platform, they'll just put you in a surgpod and you'll slither out like a gutted fish.” 

He started laughing this meanspirited laugh that he had only ever used against me one other time. It had made me cry then. 

"Shit, man. You'll probably end up in one of sleepyhead's Ginga Balls."

I laughed. A genuine laugh. I had been bracing for one of my meltdowns but it had not come. The storm welling inside me had just passed right over. I started laughing because I was laughing and then Selj couldn't help but join me.

"I have to tell you I've been thinking about the platform," he said. 

"You? No way." I was honestly stunned. We hadn't really talked about the platform before, other than as a passing joke. We might say, oh well if it doesn't work out there's the platform. But Seljuk had always been so confident, at least outwardly, that he was going to make it his own way.

"It doesn't sound that bad, I don't know why everyone is so weird about it." He said.

"It just doesn't sound like you. You said you would never go in the box and push a button for twelve hours everyday. Now you're thinking of giving away your whole life."

"You have to do that anyway, even if you get a real job!" He snarled. "You think it's any different?"

"You never see anyone again." As I said it, I tried to weigh the seriousness of the consequence. How bad would it be to never again be crammed in the kitchen with the aunt and uncle and the cousins trying to kill each other, being always frazzled to the brink of catatonia? To never again lie in one of the sleepers that were so close you learned everyone’s individual breathing pattern??

"No one cares about that. You can barely ven remember. You have every book, game, song, movie, everything ever recorded, always there. You have the other platformers too."

"But you're not really there."

"Well, not to get too philosophical but are we really even here?"

"It's a one way ticket."

"Is there really any other kind of ticket?”

I pretended I had not had similar thoughts. I pretended those thoughts had decreased with my recent acceptance letter. I think I did a better job convincing myself than my friend.

“Let's get a beer.” He shrugged the whole thing off and he didn’t discuss it anymore,e ven though we stayed out drinking until the early morning hours. Skunk beer, a year past its supposed shelf-life was half off at Map's.

We talked about the Hunter League tournament and whether we thought Shock Jackson would hold onto the leader slot when they passed from mounted to melee stages. Last week's episode of Wet Bikini Cowgirl. A girl Selj was trying to chat up. Whether they would ever draft data mules again and if it was even worth it to climb a rating. In truth we were unable to hide our boredom at the things we would have been hotly debating a year ago. Or even a few months back. The taste had gone out of life, so mostly sat silently and let the longnecks pile around us. 

We parted as we always did, without definite plans to meet again but knowing where to find each other. Selj went to a flop where it was easier to sleep during the day than night. I started off in the direction of our apartment tower, but when I got there I just kept going. The purple sky was starting to lighten, at least the sliver I could see through the climbing decks. 

I kept going past the G-ball courts, stepped over legs sticking out of alleys, passed all the clinics and shops that never closed but took a pause at dawn to spray the sidewalk, pushing a new tide of refuse toward an already clogged gutter. I even passed Uncle Golm shuffling to the market for beef paste, ghee and ginga. I knew it was him by his gait and crawling pace. It confused the eye to see him walk, as if the modest effort he made hardly translated into movement, as if he walked through a viscous medium. I gave him a wide berth, knowing I couldn't say no if he asked me to help him carry set up shop. I probably could have walked right by him without him noticing but I couldn't risk it. If I had stopped and helped him I knew I would be doing it everyday for the rest of my life. 

I didn’t stop until I reached Thuy-Wolsey corporate. There I finished my pack of cigarettes, the first I had ever bought, flaunting the loitering code one last time. I went in through the lobby, where the data core contained my acceptance to T-W Medical One, and accessed instead the kiosk to request admission to the platform. By 9 AM they had reviewed my physical data, accepted me, and sent a decon team down to sedate and transport me. I woke in my dorm and I have been here ever since, about two years by my count, but far less time for everyone off platform. 

The experience is mostly as advertised. Free entertainment, comfortable and private living, everything inclusive. And in theory you have the company of the other platformers, but no one talks much. We don't ever talk about the real world, and, by design we have begun to forget it piece by piece. The thing everyone wonders, doesn't it bother you that it's all make believe? Doesn't it bother you that someone else is running around with your body while you are locked away in your mind? 

It doesn’t. You have asymptotic time scaling that allows you to live practically forever if you like, even if your body is used for a crash test dummy and destroyed in a week. But what good is it if nothing is real? I can't explain why, but nothing about that seems important once you get here. It's what came before that seems illusory. But like I said, it is possible for something to punch through the fog of degraded memory and remind you. Usually it’s only a moment of panic that quickly passes. It is a bit like the feeling of running into someone you know and do not want to talk to, with that queasy awkwardness amplified to genuine terror. That happened once, when I ran into Seljuk in my dorm. We looked at each other, froze, and returned to our terminals without speaking. I reported the anomaly and he was reassigned. Or I was. It doesn’t matter which.

That was nothing compared to this present crisis, that brings me night after night to this blank page where I try to purge those memories and only succeed in dragging up more, while waiting for an engineer to deal with my ticket. It happened one day as I was viewing old cooking shows. It was odd, in retrospect, for me to seek those out, since I never cared that much about food. I was especially fixated on a show from twenty or so years ago, where the host was a snobby Upside chef who went to the Downside to find aspiring talent, but usually ended up eviscerating the struggling vendors in a mean-spirited way. Whether they reacted with rage or tears, the aspiring cooks were universally pathetic, so it was hard to say why I was so fascinated. I could not stop watching, though, as the chef worked his way through a line-up of gaunt faces serving Duchaise Skewers (“This meat isn’t vat grown? You can’t seriously mean- I’m going to be ill”) and grilled Taba Melons (“I guess you can grow veg where the light doesn’t reach but I can’t advise it”). 

My obsession ended when he visited a cart that was supposed to have the best Ginga Balls on the strip. The host had to wake the cook up, then proceeded to heckle him as he sluggishly prepared a skewer.

"God alive man this is really miserable. Oh no. Right in the cold oil. The ginga isn’t fresh, that’s just mush there. Vile."

The old man didn't even look as if he heard the host. He just stared at the camera with a gummy grin.

I shouldn’t remember that last night before the platform, but now it nags at me so that I opened this document to try to purge it, preset to delete at midnight on the chance that my ticket is finally addressed by platform engineers. 

Not only was my experiment unsuccessful, I fear I may have only made matters worse. Going to the canteen just now, I found several platformers complaining about an overwhelming odor, which emanated from no source, but was pervasive and growing steadily. None of my co-platformers could identify the aroma, and few even recognized the spicy root that was its chief constituent. I, on the other hand, could never mistake Ginga Balls, the finest you can get Downside or anywhere else.