Unexpected Item

This is a work of fiction. All characters are eighteen years of age or older.

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'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 was good. And no longer weird. Much better this way, I told myself. Less complicated. Halley was still Halley. He had the same zany sense of humor, same turns of phrase I knew so well by now, only housed in a different shell than I'd pictured - lean, sprawling, porcelain-skinned, and capped by that shock of emo-dark hair, adorned with intriguing jewellery...

He caught me appraising him, making comparisons to whatever cute bunny I'd conjured up in my imagination...

"What, bro?"

"Did it hurt?" I asked him. "Getting your eyebrow done like that?"

He shook his head. "Nah, not much. Nor this one," pulling up his t-shirt to expose another thick dumbbell nestled through the skin immediately above his belly button. "Buuut...that's as far south as they go. I don't have any really daring ones - too much of a wuss for that."

Uh...okay...I desperately needed something else to think about, something that wasn't a mental visual of what might be 'further south' of that svelte white abdomen, pierced or otherwise...

"Did - do you think your parents were like, into astronomy or something?" I said. "I mean, with your name..."

Halley snorted. "Well, given they were both seventeen year-old high school dropouts, I doubt it..."

Oh. Um. Whoops. "So have you always lived with your grandparents?"

Halley shook his head. "Not always-always. We all lived here together - like, when I was a baby. And then...Mom kinda had a rough patch, with uh, y'know, drugs and stealing and shit, and my grandparents got custody of me. I don't really remember that, I was too little. She got cleaned up, though, and got herself through college, starting when I started at school."

He pointed at the floor between his feet. "We lived down here while she was doing that - Gran and Pops had the basement kitted out so she could be mostly independent. And then...so, she graduated when I was nine, and when I was eleven she got married, and I went and lived with her and Carl instead. And that...honestly, it was never awesome - from my perspective, anyhow. But there's no reason my mom shouldn't get to have another go at life."

Stretching out straight, locking his hands behind his head, he confided; "The thing is, they're both super-religious, and by the time I was fifteen, it just wasn't working. They didn't like my video games, didn't like my music, my t-shirts, my friends, and Carl especially? He really didn't like this sorta vaguely androgynous vibe I've got going on. He was worried I was gonna warp my little brother's mind, and I was like, how? Tell me how am I gonna screw with a three year old's concept of masculinity?"

"Yeah," I stuttered, "I mean, that's..."

"Anyway," he sighed, "it all just got quite...extra for a while - but my grandparents kind of intervened. They still had custody, and so they brought me back here and they just...fucking...let me be, because they're amazing awesome people - and look!" He flung out his arms grandly. "I turned out great!"

I laughed. "You sure did..."

"You're so full of shit, Bede," he teased, tossing the last beer to me, popping the ring on his own third can. "I could be an axe murderer for all you know. I could be planning to dismember you in your sleep tonight..."

"Leave it 'til tomorrow night, eh?" I advised him. "Then at least the journey's worth it to me. Plus I'd like to see some of this roadshow before I die..."

Halley choked on his beer, put it down, blew his nose, laughed some more. His laugh was surprisingly high-pitched, close to a giggle, and it made me feel kinda glowy inside. Actually, that was probably the three beers...

"You're gonna get to see some in, like, two hours," he pointed out once he had his amusement under control. "Meantime, we should get something to eat. You wanna head out, or shall we sit here like a pair of slugs and order in some pizza?"

"I vote for option two," I said. "I'm gonna turn into a beer conduit pretty soon."

His face screwed up in confusion, causing the eyebrow bar to protrude very slightly at the top. "A what -duit?"

"A pipe, basically," I told him. "An object through which liquids pass..."

Halley laughed again. "You have all the words, don't you, Bede? Which I guess I already knew from reading your stuff. You an English major?"

"No, economics. Or - I was. Business management and all that..."

"Um, why?" he queried, his expression suggesting a gross taste in his mouth.

Why? Yeah, I'd asked myself that a few times...

"I don't know! It - I thought it was...I went to Wharton, okay? That's what you do there - it's a business school."

He was suddenly all alert. "Wait - you mean Wharton- Wharton?"

And now I work in an Aldi. I nodded miserably.

"Whoa," Halley said quietly. Then, "Fuck. I am in the presence of a..." he trailed off.

"Of a guy who peaked too early?" I suggested. "Who never reached his potential? Who clearly wasn't as great as he'd thought he was, if he couldn't sell himself even with a degree from Wharton...? Who's getting to learn about management from a whole other perspective nowadays?"

I suppose he thought I was cut up about it. I wasn't, really - I've already told you that. Just...jaded. But he jumped up and flung himself at me from the sofa opposite, crouching between my knees and gripping my shoulders, shaking slightly.

"Stop it!" he commanded. "Stop dissing yourself like that!"

When my eyes met his searching stare, he let go of my shoulders and instead gently wrapped his long fingers around my each of my wrists.

"Bede," he pleaded, "Bede. Don't do this. Don't give up on yourself. You have cart-loads of talent, even I can tell that. I can't - I don't understand why you're sitting here talking like anything that's ever gonna happen to you has already happened..."

"Because that's what it feels like," I told him. And then my eyes started to prick. Yeah. That one got under my skin.

He closed my hands together, covered them with his own, squeezed. "He-ey..." he whispered. "Hey. C'mon. You know that isn't true..."

Well. I knew it possibly wasn't true...

"We were gonna order pizza," I reminded him.

"Oh, yeah..." He let go and stood up, unkinking his limbs like some insect, and tugged his phone out of his pocket.

I might've felt some embarrassment about how he'd, uhh, touched me - I mean, he was basically holding my hands for a moment there - but the fact that he obviously felt none made it seem pointless. So I cheered up and ate pizza and pissed out most of the beer and let myself get infected by Halley's steadily rising enthusiasm...

He twitched really badly through the process of standing in a long line to confirm our registrations and get the lanyard and badge which would allow us to bypass all this shit tomorrow and Sunday - it was like waiting with a two year-old, only with slightly less whining and a lot more profanity...

He also had close to no focus. Once we were inside and faced with a cornucopia of stalls and tribute acts and live Q and A's and green screens and VR booths and selfie opportunities, he continually darted here and there as he spotted some amazing new thing, grabbing my wrist and towing me along with him if I was slow off the mark...

I wasn't mad. Although I'd have been loving the experience even by myself, Halley was definitely adding a touch of magic to it. With the excitement, he had almost a quicksilver quality to him, iridescent and fleeting. Hyped up and completely unfiltered, he was kinda...bewitching. I gave myself permission to be goofy and immature alongside him as we put on headsets and plunged into the future-past, took thousands of dumb selfies, photo-bombed very serious groups of cosplayers...

We got back to his a quarter after eleven, and Halley said to me;

"I forgot to tell you earlier - I couldn't get my shift covered tomorrow. So you'll have to do the morning sesh without me. I'll try not to wake you when I head out."

"Shit, that sucks!" I felt so bad for him - the only weekend ever that something like this is happening...

He shrugged. "Well, you can't hardly blame people for not wanting to take on an additional early shift. I have Sundays off, and I probably wouldn't offer to cover for somebody unless they were on the verge of death...anyways, the weekend chef is a good guy and he said I can leave early if I get everything done, so let's hope it's a slow day..."

I remembered he started work at 5.30am. "We probably shouldn't have stayed so late..."

Halley was unbothered. "Eh, who needs sleep anyway?" He joked, tossing a couple of pillows in my direction before heading into the bathroom.

Me? I thought, eyeing the sofas, neither of which were large. I do. I wonder how this is gonna work? But once I'd wriggled into my sleeping bag and stretched out as best I could, I fell asleep almost instantly.

I woke up three hours later, because I'd had a dream. That's right. A. Dream. The cast of which was; me...and Halley. Fortunately - thank god and Loki and whoever else - it ended before there was a giant mess to clean up, but still...

I pushed myself upright and sat hugging my sleeping bag-swaddled knees. What. The hell? What was that all about? I don't dream of anything for close on two years, and then...this?