Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits Read Online Free Page B

“There’s construction everywhere. After dark, it looks like the half-finished buildings are full of fireflies, all the crews in there working through the night, welding the metalwork—”
    â€œDid you see that? What that man just did?”
    Jacob glanced toward Doll Head Man. “Yeah, there’s no smoking on these trains. You want to tell him or should I?”
    â€œNo, he … nevermind.” Zoey decided the guy must have had a match hidden in his palm or something.
    Jacob stared at the guy in amusement and asked, “Are those tiny heads glued to his crotch?”
    â€œYou know what the scariest part is about people like him? Everything he’s doing makes perfect sense in his own mind.”
    â€œHa! Though I guess that’s true of all of us.”
    No one else had noticed the Doll Head guy doing his cigarette trick. Yet just in the time Zoey was looking in that direction, two other passengers had craned their heads around to look at her. She knew she wasn’t just being paranoid now—one at a time they would glance around their seat or raise up a bit to see over, peer back, then quickly turn around again when they saw she was meeting their gaze. The bathroom door bumped Zoey’s seat. The black girl shuffled past and she made a point to look down at Zoey again. She felt to see if there was something in her hair, but then remembered she was still wearing the knit cap she had pulled down over her ears during the bus ride to Denver. Were they making fun of the hat? Or maybe they were looking at Jacob? Was he a celebrity?
    â€œAnyway,” Jacob said, “it’s amazing how fast they can build them now. You leave for vacation, and when you come back a week later there’s one less gap in the skyline, you have to stare at it for a minute to figure out what they added. They’re amazing to watch, the way they work. They never stop.”
    â€œâ€˜They’? What, like robots?”
    â€œNo, Mexicans. All of the crews are immigrants on work visas. Great workers, though.”
    â€œOh … that’s kind of racist, isn’t it?”
    â€œIs it? I mean, I guess some of them are probably bad workers. Anyway, it’s kind of mesmerizing to watch them go, they have these huge fabricators right there on the job site, like big 3D printers that just ride up the side of the building and stamp out whole sections of wall, ready to assemble.”
    Zoey tried to figure out if Jacob was hitting on her or if he was just bored from the train ride. She imagined the scary doll guy coming back and pulling a weapon or something, and Jacob punching him out like one of those old-timey boxers.
    Jacob continued, “One Friday on the way home from work, I made an offhand comment to my friend about how I wished we had a Falafel Fusion joint in our neighborhood. Then, when I was on my way home from work Monday evening, there it was! They had built it over the weekend, almost like they had heard me say that. It went from vacant lot to open business in less than seventy-two hours. That’s Tabula Rasa in a nutshell—you blink and the landscape changes around you. It’s like an American Dubai, back when Dubai was Dubai.”
    Zoey mumbled, “Yeah, that’s weird,” and she knew Jacob picked up on the fact that she wasn’t really paying attention. He fell silent.
    Thinking desperately of something to fill the lull in the conversation, Zoey said, “Do you like your glasses? My ex-boyfriend couldn’t live without his, but they always give me a headache when he let me put them on.”
    Occasionally Jacob’s eyes would dart up and to the right and she knew he was refreshing an inbox that was only visible to him, otherwise she had no idea what he was actually seeing out of the glasses. They made games where you could bounce a little rubber ball off the faces of the people in the room (the ball was only visible to you, of course)