The First Cycle

Ramone held his breath as the razor crept over his Adam’s apple.

The man in the mirror was almost a stranger to him, at times. When had he gotten so many wrinkles? Where had the gray at his temples come from? The eyes were familiar, but the wrinkles around his eyes, the relaxed skin on his cheeks, the slackening jaw—who did those features belong to? Certainly not the Ramone who lived behind the brown irises, observing the world like a kid hiding in a darkened movie theater. The old kind, back before the feeds took over.

He turned his head to inspect his hair. It was no longer the jet-black it had been. Now the short-cropped sides at his temples were more gray than anything. Pausing in his humming, he managed a little sigh. At least he had all his hair.

His eyes flicked up to the mirror. The sound of voices carried down the hall from the kitchen, but he ignored them, engrossed in this ritual. He swiped the razor slowly a few more times, then cleaned it off. He glanced at the clock on the wall. The unusual morning-shave method had taken him thirty minutes.

Ramone shook his head in dismay—he only had fifteen minutes before he needed to be on the road and he still hadn’t eaten breakfast. That was why he normally shaved in the car on the way to work. But today was so different that, as a finishing touch, he splashed his face with aftershave from a green bottle with a label that read Woodsman. It stung. It smelled … like the woods. A man in the woods. Women most likely enjoyed the smell of a man who went to the woods—it had been so long since he’d needed to think about those kinds of things: what women wanted. 

He hummed, looking at himself in the mirror, lost in thought. He was thinking about her, about her blue eyes. They were clear and sharp like ice. He thought about the dark velvet sound of her voice. And he let his thoughts wrap around his memory of the smell of her office and how she looked sitting at her desk, working. He breathed deep. What was her life like right this minute? That question drew him up short as he realized that through the power of the feeds, he could probably find out.

A chilling mortification pass through him. He reined his thoughts back in and focused on what he was doing: by imagining the woman in her private moments, he was becoming a watcher. Someone who viewed life instead of living it.

Ramone couldn’t afford to be like the people who watched the feeds. He still believed that everyone deserved privacy and he didn’t like realizing how voyeuristic his thoughts had turned.

He caught the sound of the voices coming from the kitchen again, and returned to himself. That distant sound accentuated the loneliness of the morning, despite how absorbed he was in his ritual and thoughts of the woman he was preparing to see. It would be the third time he saw her. The first two had been months ago.

The past weekend had brought the urgency back to him, the sense that if he didn’t do something now, no one else would. Cradling a dying kid in your arms would do that to you. Not for the first time in his forty-eight years, Ramone considered how having children made everything hurt more. His kids were all grown up now, but they still managed to make him feel like his heart lived outside his body. Their births made him vulnerable to everything. 

Death was never easy to observe. But the boy’s had been worse because he was so young, a kid Ramone’s son’s age. Nothing more than a child, really.

So today Ramone would return to her office, as he searched for a way to fix the mess he’d made.

“Woodsman? Yum,” a voice said, startling him.

He glanced to his side, but there was no one there.

It was the memory of his wife, Sue, remarking on his choice to use cologne for the first meeting of this nature that he’d attended.

Ramone shook his head and shoved away the recollection of Sue noticing how he’d focused on one of his previous meetings with the lawyer. He left the bathroom and padded across the bamboo floors to the kitchen. The smell of coffee wafted under his nose. The voices he’d been hearing came from the speaker in the kitchen, broadcasting a morning podcast.

Sue was gone. Everything echoed louder without her around. Ramone had always appreciated his alone time. He liked his own company, but without the option of Sue, there was something poignant and painful about so much alone time.

In actuality, he was never really alone anymore, was he? That was the fallout of the nanocameras and the feeds.

Never a private moment. The constant pressure to remember that someone, somewhere was seeing what you were doing. It was a new form of stress and the echoes of its fingerprint on society, not just himself, were still reverberating. No one quite knew where these things were heading.

But Ramone knew.

And he knew because the feeds had cracked his marriage in two.

* * *

She picked up on the tenth ring.

“What is it?” she asked. The impression of her voice on his ear was so familiar.

“Come home?” Ramone asked, plainly, cutting to the chase.

He knew what she would say. She would say no. He knew that, but he was still going to ask. He intended to ask until one day she said yes.

Or until she got a restraining order on him and he had to quit doing it. Maybe that was shitty of him to do, to refuse to leave her alone till she got the law involved. But they’d had two kids together. They’d spent twenty-six years together—did that count for nothing? The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the gray interlaced through his mop of black hair had formed with her at his side. She’d been his true companion. His soul companion. The feeds had screwed that up, it was true, and that had been partially due to him. But how could he have guessed what his beautiful, noble invention would have become? There were a thousand possibilities and he had never considered for a moment how it could get so twisted.

No, that required a special genius. The exploitative genius of Ethan Kirkwood. 

Sue. Your Samuel needs you.

He didn’t say that. Instead, he asked, without preamble or a “how are you”:  “Come home?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t do that right now, Ramone. You know I love you. But… things being what they are.”

“Come to dinner?”

He held his breath. Could she refuse him again? He’d been calling every day for over a month, asking. Sometimes she agreed to meet him.

She let out a long sigh, and he hoped that meant the answer would be yes.

“Alright. Alright. I will. I’ll be there at six-thirty, Samuel.”

* * *

Ramone cleared his throat again, breaking the silence. The lawyer glanced up from the tablet on her dark mahogany desk.

“What is it?” she asked, fixing a powerful stare on him.

Her name was Blythe. Blythe Anderson, he thought to himself. He avoided looking at her as much as possible, feeling that somehow if she glanced into his eyes, she’d see all the thoughts he’d had of her. He’d be exposed and obvious.

He needed to be a vault. He needed to be unreadable. Not just for her, but for the nanocameras. If they saw something interesting in his interaction with her, he’d be pegged and who knew what could happen.

Thousands of idiots watched the feeds, including the Editors, and they chose what would catch fire, and that ranged from love affairs and porn to impossible and dangerous stunts. Want to be rich? Fight a bear. No, fight ten bears and live to tell about it. Anything. Corrupt a priest. Corrupt your innocent new neighbor. Whatever.

Ramone doubted that what someone might see in his eyes for the patent attorney sitting across from him was anything beyond respect, but then, he wasn’t amazing at social cues. He was awkward and somewhat shy and he bumbled along, doing his best, but invariably he felt like a character in a Hemingway story, where he talked past people and they talked past him.

He cleared his throat and shrugged in response to her question about why he’d cleared his throat the first time.

“Sorry. Something caught in my throat,” he said, squeezing the tops of his thighs like they were footballs. His hands burned holes in his jeans. “Please, carry on. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“There’s a water fountain in the hall,” she gestured vaguely to the door behind Ramone. When she looked up, he shifted his gaze away automatically to something neutral—the jade plant in front of the bookcase. “I’ll just be a few more minutes and then we can start, Mr. Ramone.”

“Sam, please. Or just drop the ‘mister.’ Makes me feel old. And thanks, but I’m fine,” he lied. His voice clawed its way out of his throat, sounding gravelly and dry, and it embarrassed him. But even the thirty seconds it would take to go get a drink was more than he wanted to waste. They only had an hour for this. 

“Actually, I should probably call you Dr. Ramone, shouldn’t I?” she asked, not looking up. Though he noticed she raised an eyebrow.

“I wouldn’t,” he said, his tone soft. “Haven’t taught in ages.”

She didn’t respond, rather flicked a casual finger across the tablet’s screen. She was quite a few years younger than him—eight, maybe more—with the kind of face that provoked myths about gods and the creation of rivalries between countries. But it was her mind that really sparked Ramone. So far he had yet to say anything that she didn’t catch onto in a matter of seconds. All his explaining, his inferences, his references to references—so many of them vague just for the benefit of the feeds.

Blythe understood his language and therefore, him.

But . . . that’s what a lawyer did. Like a car salesman or a psychic. So maybe it was nothing. 

Her brow furrowed for a moment as she concentrated, her bottom lip tucked beneath her front teeth, a strand of hair falling loose from its hair-clip and into her eyes. For Ramone, thinking straight around her bordered on the impossible.

He leaned forward and absentmindedly drummed his fingers on the mahogany desk, watching her, his heart racing.

Finally she looked up and pushed her tablet aside.

“Thanks for waiting,” she said. “Now, what can I do for you this time? Last time we met—according to those notes—you had a lot of concerns and that’s why we never did anything. Besides, you have multiple reasons for not working on any projects.”

He nodded. She had everything right. “I have this idea. But… I work for someone, and I’ve signed a non-compete agreement with them.”

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He rubbed it and glanced around the room, wondering how many nanocameras were on him and if an Editor somewhere would be setting off an alarm. That footage of Byron being taken away disturbed him even more than he could admit. His colleague had disappeared in a puff of smoke—was that the fate that awaited Ramone if he tried to move against the system?

He just had to act naturally. Pretend that no one was watching—perhaps the alarms would never be triggered if he was nonchalant.

Blythe seemed to guess what was bothering him. “Everything you say to me here is confidential.”

“Is it?” Did she not understand that the nanocameras followed everyone? Even into lawyer meetings and doctor’s appointments. Just because the Editors didn’t broadcast all that material to the feeds, didn’t mean they weren’t seeing it and reporting on it. Someone was seeing this meeting. And for all he knew, they even put this on the feeds. Maybe they edited out the legal details. He wasn’t sure, because he’d sworn off partaking of the feeds years ago.

“Of course it is. Attorney-client privilege.”

He leaned forward, fixing his gaze on hers and holding it steady. He needed her to understand the gravity without him explaining how serious it was.

She leaned forward as though she read something important in the intensity of his gaze.

“Is there a way around an agreement like that?” He finally asked, spelling it out slowly.

“I would need to see the agreement. Do you have it?”

“Just tell me how good you are. What are the odds that I could create something and get rich on the patents right now?” Getting rich was the least of his concerns. It was a red-herring that he put out there so that no one could guess his real intentions. He was already rich and lived well below his means because that wasn’t what mattered to him. The Aston Martin was a one-off.

“You’d only be limited by your own imagination,” Blythe said. “There are always legal loopholes and I’m a shark at finding them. They’re like blood in the water. I zero in on them with a sixth sense and feast. So, what is it? What’s your idea? I’m very curious.” Her eyes glittered inquisitively.

He shifted in his chair and touched his mouth with the tips of his fingers. He lifted his eyes from the front of her desk and his gaze collided with hers. He could have sworn it made a sound like thunder, like the earth moving beneath his feet. Did she feel it too?

He didn’t have time for this, for a ridiculous crush. He was an old man. Too old for her.

He dropped his hands to the armrests of his chair and leaned forward.

“How badly do you want to know?” he asked, taking a deep breath.