Lon published "Kids Cost More" in the first issue of Spacesuits and Sixguns. Read his blog here. But read this story first.

The music in Dougie Franz's head swelled to an exultant climax as he completed the report and tapped the screen. He leaned back in the swivel chair and let his fists explode upward in victory, savoring the sweet bliss of a job well done. The lifetracked smell of lilac wafted through his nose as he spun the chair in a little circle. The walls of his cubicle swirled gaily around him.

Dougie jumped to his feet and skipped over to the coffee machine, humming along with his music as the tempo gradually slowed. Work had gotten so much better since his company had sprung for adaptive lifetrack implants for all lower level employees. Who'd have thought anyone could find so much joy in Accounts Payable?

No one congregated around the pot anymore because the music and smells were programmed to be so drab and flat there, but Dougie didn't mind popping over to get a cup when he needed one. No need to chat, or drag it out--not that there was ever anyone around to chat with anymore--just get what he needed and head right back to his desk to fit in another half hour of work before lunch time. If he was extra efficient about it, he might reach another climax before the lunch buzzer.

The music was already starting to liven up as Dougie rounded the corner of his cubicle, but when he saw his boss standing beside it, and the blankly neutral look on his angular face, the notes became downright somber.

"Mr. Blake?" he said, voice a little tighter than usual. "Did I mess something up on the report?"

"No, Dougie, you didn't. But do you mind coming by my office at the lunch buzzer?"

Dougie heard the downward spiral of a slide whistle from his lifetrack. "Sure, Mr. Blake. No problem."

Dougie let his boss slide by him. Blake smelled of real cologne, not something added in by the lifetrack. When the man and his cologne were past, Dougie slumped down into the chair, too agitated to work. The trill of panicked flutes was too loud in his head to let him think straight. He sat there doing no work at all, just trying to control his breathing and get the music to calm down. Finally, the lunch buzzer jolted him towards Mr. Blake's office. A finger of steam wafted after him from the untouched coffee cup, but all Dougie could smell was copper.

#

"Come in, Douglas," Mr. Blake said, waving one hand from behind a photo cluttered desk. "Sit down. But shut the door first. Please."

Dougie pushed the frosted glass door closed then took a seat in front of Blake's monumentally large red desk. "You needed to see me, Mr. Blake?"

His boss leaned forward across the desk, sliding some papers into a folder and tapping the workscreen off. He steepled his fingers and pursed his lips for a minute while somewhere within Dougie, the strings of a Spanish guitar were being struck harder and harder.

Blake wasn't a very big man, but the enormity of his red desk made him seem even smaller than he was. He had a dusting of gray at his temples and an angular face that reminded Dougie of some kind of sports car with racing stripes.

"Yes, I did," he began. "I mean I do. Doug, a position is opening up in management. My position, actually. I think you might be the right man for the job. The company prefers to hire from within, but there's one problem. Corporate policy is no lifetracks for management. You'll have to get yours deactivated."

"Deactivated?" Dougie smelled woodsmoke and heard the infant wail of an alarmed saxophone, but only for a minute. Soon as he thought of the pay raise that went along with the promotion he was smelling lilacs again, and being carried away in the loving arms of a string and woodwind rhapsody. "I mean, if that's what it takes, Mr. Blake. And thank you! Just say when."

"By the end of the week, I think. They're having some problems over in the Midwest offices and it's a big move up for me. But enough about that. Congratulations, Dougie! And welcome to management."

#

Dougie kept the big red desk, but decorated the walls with pictures of steamboats and painted fences. Getting the lifetrack deactivated by the company psychologist turned out to be a painless process, but the days since had been filled with dreary reports and the sort of administrivia that would knock out a roomful of insomniacs. Dougie missed his lifetrack, plain and simple.

He couldn't imagine how someone could ever get by at work without the continuous stimuli of music and scent to keep them going in the right direction. How he dreaded even getting up for work in the mornings!

After two weeks of mind-numbing black misery, Dougie could stand it no more. The reports were beginning to pile up, but he had no interest in doing them. He tried bringing in a lilac candle to sniff at the completion of a major task, but the smell was never strong enough, never true enough to satisfy like a reward scent should. Playing soft instrumentals on the workscreen failed to engage him either. The timing was all off; either too upbeat and twittering like so many finches when he needed a constant chug-chug of drums and locomotive steam whistles, or martial and steadfastly sawing forward on the bows of violins when he really needed something more akin to the peak of a Rachmaninov piano concerto.

His new boss, Mrs. Yearly, had already called him on the carpet for letting some efficiency metrics drop and he was beginning to get the desperate quivering feeling in his stomach that he was losing control of his job and livelihood. He asked her about getting the lifetrack reactivated, but company policy was unyielding on this. "Management cannot be influenced in their work by any form of motivational implant," she'd told Dougie, giving him a look like one of her tofu wraps had soured in her mouth.

"I can lose this job for poor performance," he said to himself as he shaved one Friday. "Or I can lose it for getting another program for it--but only if they find out." That weekend he took a train ride north of the border and met with a long haired Vancouver kid with more tattoos than skin showing beneath his cut up black tee-shirt and jeans.

"Mister, this Man of Action is one sweet 'track, I upgraded it myself," the programmer said, pen-scanning Dougie's cash to make sure it was real. Dougie knew better than to pay a back alley programmer by credcard. "It won't turn on and off at the office entrance, or when you're in the crapper. The only time it'll turn off is when you enter REM sleep, then it's down for at least 6 hours or so. All the rest of the time--maximum ups and downs. I set it up to scale the endorphin hits even more, uh, cinematically, and the downbeats are tamped to keep them from making you all morose. Mr. Smith, I promise you'll never have another boring day."

With that, the kid slid the bitbeam up into the old lifetrack's dataport on the back of Dougie's neck. Within seconds, Dougie was feeling better than ever. He toasted strangers on the train.

"Here's to a new and improved rest of my life," he said, grinning like kid at Christmas. People edged away from him, but Dougie didn't let that trouble him. For the first time in weeks, he was happy.

Back at work, every spreadsheet and report was a banquet of sound and smell; quiet evenings at home held the delight of a day at the fair. Mrs. Yearly didn't pester him about efficiency or any other metrics any more. As far as Dougie was concerned, his company's brown slab of West Coast Modern was a little slice of lifetracked heaven.

Even now, walking home at dusk from the transit stop--he still couldn't quite afford to park a car in the city--past the crowds of young Student Militiamen and old Scottish ladies with their kerchief-wrapped hair and day's worth of groceries bulging out of canvas sacks, Dougie felt good. A crisp-sounding bass line buoyed him along the sidewalk and the smell of fresh cinnamon toast kept the sweet decay of the street at bay.

As he waited to cross the street he heard a thud and a cry from the other side of a linen truck parked on the curb. He wanted to ignore it, get going quickly and not be a part of it, but the idea was a total buzzkill. His lifetrack faded down to an annoying wet towels smell and scraping metal on metal sound. He couldn't just let someone be taken advantage of, mugged most likely, maybe even left for dead, could he?

Even as he wondered what good he could do getting involved, the music was already burgeoning up inside him. His heart was racing and he felt numb all over. He had to take action.

Dougie raced to the other side of the linen truck, grabbing an empty blue bag from the open back door as he came around. In front of him, the driver lay on the ground holding a bloody nose, his blue shirt proclaiming him to be NED from Haversham's Hotel Services. A thin man with a weedy mustache stood above Ned, stuffing a few credcards and a handful of cash into his jacket.

Dougie dashed right up behind the tough, opening the bag over his head in one big sweep of his arms. When his hands and the music reached their climax, he swung the bag down as hard and as far as he could around the mugger's head and upper body. Before he knew what they were doing, Dougie's fists were keeping angry time with the drums. He could barely hear the mugger's pitiful wails from within the blue nylon, and never noticed when they stopped.

But he heard the sirens, sure enough, and they were followed by terrified cellos that sounded like they were trying to survive a night atop Bald Mountain. Ned the linen guy looked up at him wide-eyed, his nose still red and messy. His mouth hung open and blood rolled into it. He moved his lips, said something that Dougie couldn't make out over the percussion.

He nodded anyway, loving the shift to rock and roll from his lifetrack and the scent of hot cherry pie. Dougie sprinted away into the night without a word, his lifetrack riffing so loud he could hardly hear anything else.

#

If he could just stop finding things to get excited about, Dougie thought a week later, maybe he could get some work done. But there was so much wrong with the world. He couldn't look at the morning paper or make his regular reports at the meetings without feeling the uncontrollable urge to seek out the problem causers and rain heavy metal vengeance down upon them.

He couldn't sleep anymore because even in his dreams the lifetrack loomed. There it was so loud it made his bones hum. And the smells! Oh god, they were enough to wake him up in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by the feeling he was suffocating in a monkey house or choking on peppermint oils.

It wasn't supposed to feel like this, was it? Was it?

#

By day he rode an endorphin high that left him edgy, breathless, and unable to concentrate. He wasn't getting anywhere near enough sleep and the only thing that held his interest was jumping out there, taking risks. He should have seen it coming when Mrs. Yearly had a pair of security buffalo escort him to the company's work psychologist.

"Mr. Franz, I need to see your dataport," she said, leaning her lithe young body toward him. One of the beefy security men pressed him back into the plush leather chair before he made it half way up. She held a stylish chrome wand to his neck, and grunted at him almost immediately. "As I thought. Mr. Franz, you have violated company policy by re-installing motivational software, and from the looks of things, it could be damaging your nervous system."

But he was too transfixed by the pouty curves of her lips and the exciting fit of her satiny vest to respond. Dougie couldn't concentrate. The heady aroma of pumpkin pie and sultry Latin music made words useless. He stared deeply into her eyes until, disgusted, she called for Mrs. Yearly to bring him his severance check. “Your possessions will be shipped by next day mail,” she told him.

As the security men drug him along between them, Dougie giggled with joy at one of the girls from his floor, already moving her things into his office. He wondered if she knew how bad things would get without her lifetrack. At least he had his.

But the check had enough zeroes after it that Dougie could go without a job for a couple months if he combined it with his savings--what little he hadn't forked over to the car dealer, the gas-man and the parking lot attendant. (The music on the day he bought the car had been so amazing! The delicious smells of new leather and plastic--all augmented by the lifetrack--were enough to make him slobber like a hungry dog. It was all he could do to keep from rushing out to buy another one every time he thought of it.)

Or maybe, he thought--once, just once--he could drive north and get the lifetrack program toned down some.

Over the next few weeks, Dougie ran out of money; he'd spent it all at the pistol range and parachuting from skyscrapers and sponsoring youth baseball teams and pursuing every whim that brought with it an engaging tune. He'd left the car behind somewhere, running from the dullness of a traffic jam with no accident victims to aid.

After four one morning at the end of a long alley prowl that yielded not even the faintest excitement, he found the locks changed on his apartment door and a pink eviction notice taped to the buzzer.

He kicked and kicked at the landlord's door, feeling the bleat of trumpets and the crash of cymbals rattling his innards. He kicked and yelled until the police finally showed up and the fight song was arcing through him and all he could smell was blood. A forked electrode blazed down the hall and embedded itself in his stomach. The last thing he heard before it all went black was a long sad bassoon moan from his lifetrack.

#

A cool breeze lapped over his face, and he could not hear. Dougie felt so tired, so drained inside. For the first morning in weeks, there was no gentle lifetrack pastorale to guide him into alertness. Dougie opened his eyes to a hospital room. A metal handcuff secured one wrist to the bed. Dougie felt his insides grow heavy and cold.

A wide-hipped woman stood at the foot of his bed, dressed in off-green scrubs and fanning him with an old plastic clipboard, one thumb over a thick pad of paper to keep it from flapping all over. She moved her lips at him, but still there was no sound. He could smell confectioner's sugar, though; as real as if he had a mouthful of it.

Dougie shook his head imperceptibly, then with more vigor. "What?" He felt the vibration the words caused inside his head, but couldn't hear the sounds at all.

The woman nodded and scribbled something onto a pad of paper and held it up in front of him.

We gave you something to block your auditory processes for a few min. Your lifetrack is malfunctioning, has been for weeks. We need permission to remove your corrupted dataport, so we can help you get better.

Better? This had the odor of rusty, tar-crusted nails. How could going back to a dull and scoreless life be better? Dougie shook his head back and forth briskly, despite the ache in his neck. He forced himself to swallow his own vile saliva, nearly gagging on it as he did so.

The woman wrote again on the paper. Why not? You know they'll go harder on you if you don't! Moisture welled up at the edges of Dougie's eyes. "But I need it," he said, hoping the words were coming out understandable, and feeling as small in his deafness as Mr. Blake had ever looked behind that big red desk. "I can't go back to the way it was. I won't be able to make it without a lifetrack." The tightness in his throat made it hard for him to finish. "I just can't--"

The woman leaned forward, putting one hand on Dougie's handcuffed arm. She moved her lips very slowly so that Dougie could read them. He felt the vibrations of her voice against his face. "We can help you."

Dougie's eyes widened momentarily. "Risks?" he said back to her, just as forcibly slow.

The woman scribbled again on the pad as a police officer walked into the room behind her. The cop was lean and trim, but with a bit of a smirk hiding just behind his impassive face; the kind of guy who looked like he didn't quite make the cut for State Trooper, but would never ever admit it. The air was thick with ozone as if lightning were about to strike. Dougie couldn't tell if the smell was real or lifetracked.

Wondering about the smell made Dougie feel his momentary deafness even more. What kind of music went with considering an unscored life? Probably a low, lonesome saxophone. And maybe some slow accordion in the background. He could almost hear it now.

The woman started writing something, but the police officer took the clipboard from her and wrote a message of his own. Dougie stared at the clipboard a long time. In the woman's handwriting: Possible paral--. In another, blockier hand: LET THEM TAKE IT OUT, MR. FRANZ.

Dougie sat up in the bed, feeling anew the soreness in his belly from stun gun's jolt. He looked into the cop's eyes and then into the nurse's. She wore her hair in a short brown bob cut over a wise-beyond-her-years freckled face. She reminded him a little bit of Ravel's Bolero. The cop stared at him, looking impatient and constipated all at once.

Dougie was scared, but the smell of rust and tar had long faded and now all he smelled was cedar. Possible paralysis? Live every day unable to move, and with no choreographed dance of endorphins to make the most mundane things somehow pleasureable? On the other hand, how long would he last in prison if the lifetrack pushed him over the edge again?

He thought back to the time he had spent behind Blake's red desk. The painful boredom of unadorned accounting and neverending meetings, blah-blah-blahing over worthless performance indicators—all of it bore down on him like a million lead angels. He'd be lucky to get an entry level job with rudimentary benefits after all of this. He'd be starting over, struggling every day to reclaim a place for himself in the world. Maybe he would do nothing more than learn to play an instrument for himself with his hat out on the curb before him.

That could almost be a kind of adventure, depending how he looked at it.

Dougie slumped down against the pillow, eager for the drug they'd given him to wear off. They wanted to cut the music out of him, to mug his soul in some sterile little room while the doctors all hummed worn out showtunes behind their masks. He imagined one last great--no, epic--orchestral explosion and collapse.

The music whispered back to life. He squeezed both eyes shut and took a quick deep breath without planning to. Dougie wanted to feel like he was taking the big risks, righting wrongs and reaping the rewards like some two-fisted movie hero. But all that was lost to him, lost in the first mournful notes of the funeral march in his head.

"Take it out," he said over the dirge, all too sure that what he was smelling was his own salty tears. "I've heard enough."

~Fin~