Zoey was still agitated from her conversation with Shae when she crawled into bed a few hours later. As she tossed and turned, she thought about a sign on the wall of her old workplace, posted back by the coats and Department of Labor notices. It was a supposedly motivational quote that said:
[A] flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
KURT VONNEGUT
The manager had hung it there because she was always complaining about the staff not cleaning the espresso machines properly and it was probably the only “inspirational” poster she could find that seemed to be scolding people for not taking care of equipment. But Zoey thought about that quote constantly, especially in light of the turn her life had taken in the last couple of years. When you get sick of what’s in front of you, yeah, fixing it is never as appealing as just walking away and starting fresh. It’s the reason the landfills are choked with stuff that could easily be repaired and it’s the reason action movies are always about killing psychopaths instead of helping them get better mental health meds. It’s the reason Zoey’s supposed soulmate, Caleb, had decided to just go find a girl with better genes and it’s the reason, according to Will, that the city of Tabula Ra$a exists.
Mankind, he had told her, had spent much of the twentieth century dreaming of colonizing the stars (why fix civilization when you can just run away and build a brand-new one?), but by the 1980s or so everyone had soured on the idea. Colonizing Mars, everyone eventually realized, would be unbelievably difficult and the only reward for interplanetary trailblazers would be that they’d have to live on goddamned Mars. By the early 2020s, a new and better idea started to take hold among the ultra-wealthy and powerful: just recolonize the earth instead. Go find some sparsely populated area with a weak or disinterested government and just start building a brand-new city that would function under its own rules. Everything could be fresh, new, and efficient, free of the baggage and stagnation that was weighing down the rest of the modern world. And really, what’s the worst that could happen, other than the new city descending into a dystopian hell of poverty, terror, and bloodshed?
These ludicrously expensive social experiments were often called “charter cities” and soon, every obscenely wealthy and/or powerful clique wanted one to call their own. Scientologists started one in Taiwan, some famous Communists did the same in Northern California, and a bunch of Libertarian tech billionaires were, at the moment, building a floating island nation off the coast of French Polynesia. Tabula Ra$a, by far the most successful and well known of the bunch, had been planted in southwestern Utah by a cabal of flamboyant criminals, apparently over a petty grudge.
Spearheading the project had been Arthur Livingston, Zoey’s biological father, a self-made crime kingpin. And here, “self-made” means he gave himself a fake, WASP-sounding name to conceal his connections to his own wealthy Armenian gangster father. Arthur’s group had been run out of Las Vegas and, mostly out of spite, planted their flag in a spot positioned to siphon away Sin City’s most profitable tourists and whales. The founders played up the new city’s lawlessness, Arthur doing media appearances telling potential residents and developers alike to stay away if they couldn’t handle it. “Tabula Rasa,” he’d say while grinning and stabbing a finger at the camera, “is not for pussies. If you’re not man enough, well, there’s a loser’s train to Vegas that leaves every hour.” People couldn’t move there fast enough.
Zoey stared at the ceiling. She really wanted to roll over, but Stench Machine was sleeping in the hammock formed by the blanket between her legs and disturbing him was, of course, unthinkable.
She didn’t ask Will much about Arthur’s early years; when she did what she got back were anecdotes that everyone at the table thought were hilarious but that Zoey found sickening. She knew that several years after Arthur got Zoey’s mother pregnant, North Korea fell into civil war (the two events are thought to be unrelated). Arthur then used the war as cover for a human trafficking scheme that blatantly violated the laws of the DPRK, the United States, and common human decency. In the process, he encountered Will Blackwater, Budd Billingsley, and Andre Knox, who were doing equally illegal off-the-books PSYOPS work on behalf of the US government. Once back in the States, Arthur recruited all three to ill-defined roles in his organization that would take advantage of their unique training. Arthur had apparently once confided to Will that if one possessed the skill to craft sufficiently elaborate and convincing lies, then no other skills were really necessary.
Yet, over the next fifteen years, Arthur apparently began to have some minor regrets about the fact that his business practices had caused untold human suffering across several continents. He joined a church, started charities that actually gave money away instead of just laundering it, and grew an elaborate mustache (that last one may seem unrelated, but he saw it as a crucial part of his personal rebranding). This attempt to go legit, unfortunately, steered Arthur into unfamiliar waters he was ill-equipped to navigate. His enemies closed in, now possessing the power to make bricks shatter like glass and steel melt like wax. Thus, the man whose high school class would have voted him Most Likely to Leave a Giant Smoking Crater When He Dies had such an award or his high school actually existed, did exactly that.
It was only after his murder that it was discovered he had left his entire empire to a daughter he’d only spoken to once in his entire life. Arthur had not discussed this decision with anyone and, predictably, chaos ensued. On several occasions Zoey nearly joined Arthur in that part of the afterlife reserved for people who die particularly weird and gruesome deaths. But she made it through, much to everyone’s surprise, and that’s how in the autumn of the following year Zoey wound up standing in her foyer trying desperately to explain herself to Shae LaVergne and probably doing a terrible job of it. Why had she stayed there, sleeping in the same home as her infamous father and doing a job with duties so alarmingly vague and varied that the news usually just referred to her as an “heiress”?
The real reason was one that she rarely articulated even to herself, because it was probably the same reason Arthur had left the business to her in the first place: sometimes, the story of your life gets so jumbled and messy that you just want to erase it completely. Like some kind of a, you know, clean slate.
Stench Machine found a better spot at the corner of the bed and Zoey rolled over, finally feeling herself drifting off. She thought that she’d dream of superpowered nerds smashing into her room and twisting her head off. Instead, she plunged immediately into the nightmare she’d had a hundred times since moving to the city. She was back in Fort Drayton, Colorado, late for her shift at Java Lodge. She was trying to start her old car and it was giving her that Battery Discharge error and she’d already been told if she was late one more time that she’d be fired and Cassie was managing and Zoey knew she wouldn’t cover for her and she kept hitting the start button over and over and she was crying as she watched the time tick down on the dashboard clock and—
Zoey jolted herself awake. She rolled over and the last thought she had before drifting off again was that she’d rather die than go back there, to that place she was in her life less than one year ago.
Literally, rather die.