This is a work of fiction. All characters are eighteen years of age or older.
----
'Unexpected item,' the robotic voice intoned. 'Please. remove. item. before. continuing...'
A burly red-faced man was standing back from one of the self-serve terminals, looking harrassed.
"I didn't
do
anything!" he protested as I approached. "It just...happened!"
"No worries," I told him serenely, resetting the scale. "It should work properly for you now."
"It
should
have worked properly in the first place," a woman to the left of him hissed as I walked by her on my way back to my station, re-setting her scale before she could ask. "Why do customers have to tolerate this?"
On any other day, I'd have thought: Why don't you try
tolerating
everybody's passive-aggressive comments any time a machine has something to say to them for a week or so and see how you feel? - but today, nothing could touch me.
I glided back to my station and stood staring into the middle distance, thoughts turned inward to my own personal 'unexpected item'...
* * *
Everybody has surprises in their life, twists in the tale, things they didn't see coming - I'm not so naïve I don't know that. It's just that some people seem to get
good
surprises, but until super-recently, mine had mostly been negative.
The crucial thing that I didn't anticipate was just how much
who you are
and
who you know
counts for out there in the big wide world. Everything else is secondary - all of it.
You can have the grades and score the scholarships to attend the right college and get the diploma to hang on your wall when you're done - but if you're from nowhere in particular and you don't have connections...short on uncles with influential friends who can recommend you for internships and with parents who couldn't afford to fund you through one anyhow? - then that's where the road ends for you. There's this future that you thought you had coming, because you
thought
you'd earned it, but...nope. Life's a bitch like that.
I was angry about it at first - of course I was - but it passed. Three years later and I'd become middle-aged at twenty-five. Apathetic, resigned to my fate, going nowhere in a go-nowhere town, hearing the echoes of that robotic voice week in, week out. I'd stopped dreaming, even when I slept. Like most of the folk around me, I was just existing - my future bland, featureless, and...small.
And then
Westworld
came along and everything changed. I was on fire from the day the pilot dropped. Suddenly there was something to look forward to, something I was mad for, something I had to try not to rave about to anyone who'd listen. So that was another curveball, basically.
I never thought
I'd
be a superfan. My mom's youngest brother was a Bob Dylan nutcase, always yapping about the latest bootleg copy of some random performance he'd managed to get hold of, and honestly he was as tedious as the trekkies from high school, with their weird hand-signals and made up languages...
What I hadn't appreciated is that a fandom is a
community.
A rag-tag bunch of other souls knit together by their devotion to this one specific thing that lights them up inside. And I didn't just want to talk about it, I
needed
to talk about it, to theorize, analyse, dissect - it was so complex, so layered, so deep. So much packed in there...
I inhaled every episode, I joined the fan sites, I stayed up late discussing minutiae on various subreddits. And at some point while I waited the eternity for the second season to air, stories started to come to me - backstories, alternative trajectories, ways for characters to have the happy endings I felt they deserved - or for some, the reckoning
they
deserved.
I wrote for - and eventually edited - my high school newspaper, so I guess I had some background. But that was always so rule-bound and planned - what should we cover this issue, how much space do we have, is it factual, is it fair? Whereas this? It poured out of me, redemption and retribution, cliff falls and cliffhangers, chaotic but fierce, clear as water.
I stayed up to 2am most nights absorbed in this world of my own making, arriving for work in the morning feeling more than a little shady, but despite that I was more energized than I'd been before. I had
things to do
and all this jazz was just filler, a means to an end.
Late one night and not even a tiny bit drunk, I posted one of the stories on my favorite w/w subreddit. Next day it'd blown up - there were like, ninety replies. 'OMG, awesome', 'That's what I'm talking about!', 'More please, more!' and so on. I didn't actually
need
motivation to keep going, but that was some sweet honey all the same. Outside of good grades, I'd never really gotten a whole lot of external validation for...anything.
With the same fevered energy I seemed suddenly to have all the time, I built a WordPress site and started posting there instead, putting teasers and links on various fan domains, writing my own ideas, and sometimes other peoples' suggestions as well.
Three months in, I got an email via my web contact form. Short and shy and to the point, it read: "I love 'Over and Out' so much. It's, like, my favorite story ever. I read it whenever I can't sleep and I keep thinking, what if it was a book? I know it's kinda short, but it's so good. Anyhow, I made you a cover. Hope you like." A link was posted below the message. I reflected briefly - very briefly - on how you're not supposed to just click on random links that're randomly emailed to you by people you don't know, and took the chance.
Oh. My. God. I didn't just like. I
loved.
It was a charcoal pencil-type depiction of a pivotal scene in my story, exactly,
precisely
as I'd imagined it, gorgeously rendered - it was the work of somebody who'd entered my world completely, been where I'd been, felt what I'd felt...
I had to express my gratitude...and awe. Even though I wasn't gonna turn my story - any of my stories - into books. I got a reply to my reply, offering to send me the original. I felt weird about that and declined, but it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, a many-times-daily back and forth that quickly wound up accounting for ninety percent of my whatsapp traffic.
It was amazing, having an online bestie who was into all the same things as me. For the first little while, we were so busy Westworld-ing that we barely bothered with anything much about ourselves. All I knew was that her name was Halley and that she was a pastry-chef in a hotel kitchen somewhere. I never asked
where.
The real world barely mattered.
That changed when the Westworld Roadshow's schedule was announced. There'd been rumors in the subreddits for a while, but when the program was actually unveiled it was
just everything.
I knew I was gonna go, or die trying. Halley, lucky cow that she was, lived in a real city with convention centres and stuff - a city that was on the tour schedule.
A city that turned out to be Omaha. Literally only a hundred miles away from me. I couldn't believe it - of all the places in the world she might have been hiding out...so I wasn't gonna have to die trying after all. I wouldn't even need to quit my job and clean out my accounts to pay for flights and accommodation! Instead I was going to call in every favor I had to get my weekend shifts covered and head on down to Omaha to crash on Halley's sofa for a couple of nights.
The program opened with a Friday evening session that sounded as un-missable as all the rest, so I went into debt on favors and found somebody willing to swap an early shift for a late one. By two-thirty I was out of my crappy uniform, showered, shaved, packed, and on the road. I'd arrive too early, but I had nothing else to do with my energy. Besides, it didn't matter - Halley had told me that her work was all early starts, and that she was done by three at the latest, so I wouldn't need to sit around in my car waiting when I arrived.
I'd amassed a few more details about her in the weeks leading up to the roadshow, so now, in addition to her address, I knew that she lived in a basement flat under her grandparents' house which had its own entrance if you followed the path at the side, and don't worry about the dog, he's so old he barely gets up anymore...
All of which was handy to know, but...
I knocked on the side door and two seconds later it was wrenched open by a long-limbed guy with messy dyed-black hair, two delicate silver skulls quivering from a ring at each earlobe, and a fat bar shot through his right eyebrow...
His face lit up. "Bede!!" he exclaimed. "My man, you made good time! Musta
ate
up that road!"
I tried to come up with a response, but nothing happened. My heart hammered in my throat. This...doesn't compute...
He saw me floundering and grimaced momentarily. "It's Halley," he said, pointing to his chest, sounding it out as Hal - Lee, "not Hay-ley.
Halley.
Like that ye olde astronomer guy..."
"I - uhhh..." Nope. I was still fresh out of words.
"Come in, dude," he enthused, opening the door all the way and flattening himself against it, gesturing me over the threshold.
I found my tongue. "I, um...might just grab my things from the car first..."
"Sure thing," he agreed. "Want a hand?"
"I'm fine," I squeaked, scuttling up the path, clicking down on my key fob over and over, watching my car's lights flicker as it unlocked then locked then unlocked then...
Oh god oh god oh god...get yourself together, Bede! It doesn't
matter!
You aren't here to go on a date!
I can do this, I told myself, lugging my gear back toward the house. I just need to re-set my head.
And my expectations? Well...yeah, maybe.
Maybe
I had thought...or hoped...or wondered...what might happen if we ever...y'know,
met.
But...No. Doesn't matter.
I was obviously still coming off kind of flustered, because the first thing Halley said to me, relieving me of one of my bags as I wrestled with the door, was;
"Hey...are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I assured him. "It's just - this is all a little bit weird..."
He grinned, and there was something slightly provocative about it. "Good-weird or bad-weird?"
"Good-weird, obviously," I blurted. I mean, what else was I gonna say to somebody who was hosting me totally for free for the next two days?
But an hour - and two beers each into a six pack - later, I'd concluded that it
