Flux

by Jinwoo Chong

When you said it, the world was right. Your writers were genius. They kept us—kept me—coming back because, above all, we loved you too much to see you fail. That’s why the show worked.

You know why you only did two seasons? Your critics weren’t ready for you, they couldn’t take the blood and the bodies, too detailed, too ghastly for the 4:3 aspect ratio. Conservative pearl clutchers chided your drinking and sexing, the fact that you never smiled, not once, for forty-six episodes. Middle-aged nerds of today would’ve gone nuts for you, they would’ve dressed as you for Comic-Con and defended your abject womanizing to their wives and girlfriends.

Gil would have said something mean about it; he didn’t like my obsessions—any of them, especially mine for you.

My digital clock, same as Gil’s, was reading twelve midnight and blinking. I glanced at my phone and adjusted it. I glanced around the desks, each of our little digital clocks blinking midnight, on and off in imperfect unison.

I glanced at the clock above us. Nine-thirty. Running right on time, battery operated.

It had dawned on me that I would lose my health insurance soon. My 401(k). How was I going to pay my rent?

These were little objects that had orbited me without much notice but now, suddenly, could blink away and leave me destroyed.

Over the top of the paper I saw him reach a hand toward mine and lay his fingers delicately on top of my knuckles. “I’m here,” Gil tried. “You know…if you want to talk. Whatever you—” “I’m good,” I told him, smiling. “Really good.” I pulled my hand away. Gil nodded, cautiously.

“You’re back soon,” I heard behind me. Lee(?) was carrying an armful of binders. For a moment I imagined she was moving out of her desk, maybe she’d gotten an email like Gil had said. But she smiled, again, and I realized she didn’t know. “I’m back?” I repeated. “No almond butter in the kitchen? What happened to those fancy clothes, by the way?”

After the lights came back on we got a press bite from the president—the outages would continue, everybody seemed to agree.

I felt my severance check crumple on itself in the pit of my pants pocket. Eight weeks would be up real soon, I was sure of that.

“Are you Korean?” “I—” A rush of blood came to my ears before I got the rest of the words out. “Yes. On my mother’s side.” Min smiled at me, the creases around her mouth showed, along with a dimple on the left side. My ears were still pounding. “You remind me of my dad, is why I asked.”

My foot sunk lower; I felt the air rush away as my leg dropped out under me, the dark insides of the elevator shaft swallowing Min, the mall, and the rest of the light up along with it. I was really doing it—I was really falling down an elevator shaft, at present.

was thinking about the words this morning, the first words I’d heard when Gil woke with his head in my armpit and moved himself higher up, as if to kiss me. The words “go back to sleep.” I wished I’d listened to him.

The truth is, I haven’t seen an episode of the show in about two weeks, not since the Times article in which myriad reputable sources stated that Antonin Haubert once broke his first wife’s arm, nose, and index finger with a fire poker in an altercation on New Year’s, 1994. Things moved quickly after that.

It spilled out in a matter of days: several other incidents along the way, at least ten costars, production assistants, casting directors, extras, men and women, shattered drinks, flipped tables, knives wedged in doors and walls.

They were saying Antonin Haubert would face prison time. He’d had both Oscars rescinded, the Medal of Freedom shortly after. His socials went dark after it had all come out, not a single statement.

It made me angry to think of the way he’d treated you all these years, now this. He’d taken you and desecrated everything you stand for, and it was disgusting. Antonin Haubert was a fucking rat, he should die for what he’d done, but there was a piece of me that still loved him, because the same handsome face I saw was yours, forty years old now on the television screen.

I should let you go. I would if I could, which—I realized—was a very polite thing to say. Even if saying it hasn’t helped anybody with anything, ever, and never will.

“Right here, Mr. Blue.” “Don’t call him that,” Tor said as they piled inside. “It’s not even his name.”

Blue hadn’t yet been asked to explain why he’d agreed to do the exclusive, the only witness still alive and willing to talk on camera, and why now.

He took the compensation Tor offered but didn’t need it. Was it simply that he had grown accustomed to the attention? He didn’t like to think so.

“Okay, Mr. Blue, you lost the ability to speak when you were twenty-nine years old. It says here cerebral hemorrhage, correct?” Blue nodded, weakly, his head still spinning.

“The gear isn’t perfect. It’s an electro-reader that translates brain chemistry and vibrates your larynx at the right frequencies while stimulating Broca’s area to form the right shapes with your mouth.

“Well, you should remember, these are short-term implants, no more than six weeks. You’re not going to have much time to get used to it, not if we’re filming next week. In a month it’ll disengage remotely and pass through your digestive tract.

And what was one even to say about Io Emsworth? Flux’s founder, a billionaire for the span of thirteen months before investors bailed, now tried and living out a sentence of life in prison for the deaths of three employees approximately twenty years ago.

Whose name, twenty years later, inexplicably had become the number one search trend for the past six months and counting. A genius. The most famous person in the world at one point or another.

/ / I don’t need this. You could’ve hired an interpreter. / / “Yeah, and have you karate chop the air for an hour on live television, right. Split screens kill engagement, you know that.

Flux was streamlined, optimistic, and dangerously sexy. All the best ideas were. A twenty-five-year-old business school grad had invented the closest mankind had ever come to perpetual energy. Once the media had kicked in around her, it didn’t matter exactly how. A single Lifetime Battery could power most appliances and other tools for longer than the tools themselves could survive habitual wear and tear,

The cargo yard on which fifty million dollars had been spent building a glass office space that Io Emsworth and Flux’s board of directors had dubbed “F1” was cleared of property, taped off, and left to rot.

“Site visit. Nobody’s been inside F1 since the feds shut Flux down. We’re getting a skeleton crew inside and letting Mr. Blue here do a walkthrough, show us the back doors, tell us stories.”

Blue had seen a photograph of F1 taken just last year. The glass—bulletproof all around on Io Emsworth’s insistence—had fogged all the way over with dust and rain. The lots out front where they’d all parked their cars had started to crack, moss and weeds coming in on all sides, climbing up the empty light poles.

“I just fell,” I said, “is all. I’m fine.” “Sir, you’re exhibiting symptoms of a concussion.” “I feel fine.”

“Hey.” I turned around. It sounded like Gil but wasn’t. The man holding my new belt bag in his hand was a couple inches shorter than me and decked in all spandex, which bulged—extra padded for comfort—around his dick and balls. The biking jersey was Toyota brand, and he lugged a gym bag on one shoulder. His head was a shock of silver hair that didn’t match his eyebrows.

“How did you know about that?” His lip curled ever so slightly upward. “I work in markets,” he said, shrugging, without bothering to hide the fact that he was completely and unashamedly lying.

“Come on now.” He said it theatrically, every word enunciated, like they do all the climactic arguments in Hallmark movies. “Give me a reason why I wouldn’t.” I stopped short, hearing it for the first time.

waited for him to admit he was playing an elaborate prank on me. Or maybe just cruising. I was into that, I admitted. He was short but looked like fun. I didn’t suggest any of this, in the end. I just pulled my bag tighter over my shoulder and said: “I’m seeing someone.” “You sure?”

He spoke Korean to them, something he only used to do in front of their grandparents, adhering to some code, determined to impress their mother’s parents with the sight of a white man grasping the language the way that he could.

Bo felt his back seize, afraid to see an establishing shot of his school, his picture, even. It was late enough that it might have already made the headlines. It was news enough for their town, he was sure.

Bo conceded to his brother most days when the television remote lay in contention. But he wanted to watch his show. Perhaps Hal might even be convinced to watch an episode if he went to the cupboard and took out the tapes.

Jacket Guy is young, a little too young to be in this line of work, and it has never seemed to bother him until now. It is perhaps the first time Jacket Guy has been confronted with a situation to which he perceives no immediate solution. The camera lingers on his face through the bars, he would scream, were it allowed, but he is too much of a man for that.

He remembered the day Hal had set the tapes in front of him, just a few years earlier. “The greatest TV show on the face of the planet,” he called it. “I loved these when I was a kid. I’ve been waiting to show them to you until you were old enough.”

a yellow bus parked haphazardly on the curb and a small crowd around the drop-off zone. He didn’t recall what was said, or even much of the view himself, as he had been near the back of the crowd and had only gotten a glimpse

Because it had been his fault. His mother wouldn’t have come to school to drop off their bagged lunches if he hadn’t forgotten them in the first place.

Hal had sat them both on each knee and told them Umma was very hurt and wasn’t awake right now, that they were going to have to wait here for the doctors to tell them what was going on.

an old man in a white coat had met them in the lobby, with families and other doctors and nurses milling around, and let them know that their mother had died fifteen minutes ago, without ever waking up after the moment in which she had lost consciousness on the side of the parking lot, fifty feet from Bo’s classroom.

Lev wasn’t allowed outside the building without an escort. His food was brought in at the beginning of each week. As of yet, they hadn’t barred visitors, or so Blue thought.

the possibility that they had finally decided to just cart Lev off to a proper prison. Even if there had never truly been enough to criminalize him in the first place. It was an affordance granted by the media saturation around Io Emsworth that her lieutenants had by and large escaped blame.

Lev wore a spindly velveteen robe off his bony shoulders. His hair was nearly gone. He’d started to look this way in the last few years, Blue suspecting a cancer that Lev wasn’t telling him about.

“Have you ever thought that the concept of taking a walk around a predestined course, day in, day out, down to the exact number of steps, calories burned, joules of work produced, is perhaps the most fascist thing any of us could ever do?”