SCS Sidestory - Elegy Marie - The Artist - //

Part One - The Artist - //

Going to a gang’s HQ is... not something very wise, but it’s not the worst idea. Maybe.

Most of the time, a gang isn’t going to just blow the head off someone who steps in. There are... reasons why you don’t want a rep as someone that violent. If any of the gangs on the lower-forty (that is, the lower half of the Mega Building) gain a rep for being too violent, then corp security from the upper floors would come down hard on them.

The Happy Gangs, in any case, weren’t that bad as far as gangs went.

Technically, they weren’t even a gang. They were a cult.

The Happy Gang showed up some ten-ish years ago from a club called the Optimists. They went around and preached to people about being happy and having good cheer and all that. It was a whole thing. I never really jived with it.

Sure, optimism was nice and all, but it reached a point where it felt kind of... delusional? I just had to watch the news for a few minutes to discover that pessimism wasn’t all that bad.

I packed up my things. An old drawing tablet went into a small satchel I had, and I placed some art supplies in as well. A few small tubes of acrylic paints, some brushes, and a pallet. It wasn’t much, but I had all the basic colours and was actually pretty good at mixing them up to colour-match things on the spot.

I had watched the entire Bob Ross collection sixteen times. I knew how to paint happy little trees, and hopefully that would be enough.

Smacking my cheeks for bravery, I walked out of the door, and then started towards the elevators. Lucky Floor Thirteen was a space filled with tiny apartments, most of them no bigger than my own. There were two hundred of them in my quarter of the building, so eight hundred or so apartments on the floor. That’s not really saying much, since most were only about four metres square. Floor Thirteen was a sardine space, basically, and the corridors exemplified that. They were narrow, the ceiling so low that I could reach up and touch it without really having to stretch too much, and I’m not the tallest woman around.

Still, people had been decorating it for years... myself included. Lots of murals marked the larger, less-used walls. The number 13 was pretty prominent, but there was a lot of art of people playing cards or just hanging out. Lots of political art too, but that tended to get painted over quickly.

There was a section I loved. It was painted to look like a grassy field, with the ceiling painted as a bright blue sky. From the entrance, it looked like it was partly cloudy, but not like... modern clouds. Old, fluffy white ones.

The illusion and forced perspective broke a little as I walked into it.

That piece took me a month to paint, and I was amused to see that no one had covered it in graffiti yet, even after almost a year, though there were some doodles along the way, likely made by some of the kids living on this floor. I didn’t envy the families of three and four or more packed into the same size apartment that I had.

I crossed one of the communal kitchens, then made it to the elevator bank. A pair of old babushkas were sitting nearby, knitting, both of them connected to the same computer via ports built into the sides of their heads. Nearby, there was a food stall selling ice cream pops. They were expired, but pretty cheap. The teen selling them had been making decent credits from the job for a while now. And, of course, there were the ad screens. Massive TVs that took up entire walls, constantly flashing tits and ass and guns and explosions, with catchy tunes that I made sure not to stare at.

If I did, I might find my augs filled with adware again.

The elevator arrived, and then I rose. Floors ticked by, and eventually I hit floor thirty.

It was different.

The corridors were wider. The housing units were twice as large. That was eight times the space, and I was pretty sure they had their own washrooms on this floor, which was... kind of a big luxury.

And there were shops. Stores carved out of apartments, others that were designed into place. Automated fast food joints and the like.

The space was covered in Happy Gang markings; giant smiley faces, murals of people with huge smiles on, lots of AI generated video loops of people grinning and laughing played over hacked advertisement screens.

The people here were smiling too, but I could tell right away that it wasn’t all genuine. There was something about the eyes that made a fake smile obvious.

The Happy Gang’s bar was called the Happy Place. It had two bouncers at the front, both wearing gang leathers and ex-military plate carriers, but they had little flower patches on, and lots of little smiley faces. Their actual faces were hidden behind face masks. The mouths were painted into wide, kind of disturbing smiles.

“Hey,” I said as I approached one of the bouncers. There was music coming from inside. I didn’t know too much about music, but I had the impression that it was some sort of very poppy glitch hop. Kinda catchy, actually.

“Yeah?” the bouncer to the left of the pair asked. He had a long machete stuck to his hip and a budget SMG at the small of his back. I tried not to stare. “What do you want?”

“I’m a painter. An artist. I heard that you guys were looking for someone?”

The bouncer paused for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, you’ll want to talk to Chuckles for that.”

“Chuckles, right,” I said, a little uncertain.

The bouncer stepped to the side, then pointed into the Happy Place. “He’s usually at the back. Tell Mark that you’re here for Chuckles and he’ll let you in to see him. I’ll send him a text, too,” the bouncer said.

“Cool,” I said. The word hadn’t been in fashion for two decades, but it was something to say to fill the void. I nodded to the bouncers, then slipped past them.

The music was louder in the bar. There was some sort of sound baffling by the entrance that cut it off, but within there was no such protection. It wasn’t quite deafening, but it was definitely louder than I was comfortable with.

The worst thing was that there was no one actually listening. There were maybe a dozen people in the bar. Three sitting off to one table, talking over beers and drinks, another few sitting on their lonesome at the bar itself, and a last small group chatting by the back, next to a doorway that was tucked in a darker, less-lit corner.

I walked over to the bar. There was a guy behind it, as well as an android. The guy was fiddling with a small tube that fed into the droid’s arm, probably some beer pouring mechanism. “Hey,” I said. “Are you Mark?”

“Yeah,” the guy, Mark, said without looking up. “Gimme five and the bot will be able to take your order again.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m here to see Chuckles.”

“Oh,” Mark said. “In that case... door back there, look for the door with Erato on it.”

He just waved towards the back, and... that was all I had to go on. I was tempted to ask for more details, but he seemed busy, and not exactly in a good mood. I heard a few muttered swears as he fiddled with something on the bot.

“Alright, thanks,” I said before stepping away.

I made my way around the empty dance floor, slipping past the one table with a few people at it. They eyed me, and from the big smiles and colourful clothes, I took it that they were members of the Happy Gang too. So I put on a smile and hoped it wasn’t too fake.

The door at the back yielded into a long corridor, one filled with doors that were covered in art. They were all artistic depictions of smiling women, but in like a sort of... Greek-ish style? Some had augs and cyberware, but they were all still in togas and the like.

I went down the corridor, then came back up. There were nine of them. I had no idea which was supposed to be Erato, so I started by trying to open one of the doors at random.

It led into a room filled with racks and racks of guns.

“Hey!”

I jumped, my soul almost leaving my body and my hand coiling back and away from the handle as if it was a hot pan. “Yes, sorry!” I said.

There was a man half-out of one of the doors. He was smiling, but just with his mouth, his eyes firmly set in a glare. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for Erato? I mean, Chuckles,” I said.

“I’m Chuckles,” he said before tapping the door. “And this is Erato. Come in here.”

Swallowing, I did as he said and followed him into... a very ordinary office. If it weren’t for the low thump of glitch hop bass in the background, I might have been able to imagine it in just any old office building.

Chuckles moved around and sat behind the desk, elbows on it and hands clasped before his mouth. “So, what do you want?”

“Oh, hi, my name is Elegy Marie,” I said by means of introduction. “I’m an artist here in Mega Building 501.”

“Alright,” he said. His brows knit together, and I could tell he was a little confused. It was time to really sell him on what I could do... and convince him to pay up.

“I’m a physical artist. I do paintings, murals, even some speed painting. I’ve done several pieces here in Mega Building 501, but recently a few pieces by the Happy Gang caught my eye. I really enjoy the unbridled enthusiasm and passion for sheer happiness your artists have brought out. But I’m a little worried.”

“Worried?” Chuckles asked. He seemed interested, which was a fantastic sign.

“Worried, yes! You have a lot of non-human-made art, and I don’t mean to be... well, unkind, but that kind of art does tend to lack soul. I think that the pieces of artwork you have that were made by real artists, local artists, convey so much more to the people that see them. They create a much stronger...” I glanced around the office. It wasn’t that decorated, but the computer was of a good brand, and I was pretty sure that Chuckles’s chair cost more than a year of my rent. He valued quality, then. “Brand identity. If the Happy Gang wants to stick around, be memorable, and attract more people, then you need more art to speak to the souls of the people that live here.”

I reached into my satchel and pulled out my drawing tablet. A few clicks, and it was open to a file with pictures and samples of my previous art. Some of it was kind of lame, but I was proud of a few pieces. I handed it over.

Chuckles looked over the art, idly swiping through them. “Huh... and you want to help us with this?”

“I do! I love seeing nice art. I’m aware that you hire locally, which is kind of you. My prices are very reasonable, I assure you. We can even start with something simple and small. I’ll only charge you material costs for the first project, and going forward we can negotiate a better price.”

I smiled, as confident and reassuring as I could.

Chuckles eyed me, then shrugged and tossed my tablet onto the end of his desk nearest me. “We have had problems with other artists recently.”

“Are you speaking of, ah, that young artist who passed away?” I asked. I could feel the sweat pooling at the small of my back, and my cheeks hurt from keeping the smile up for so long.

“That’s right. Honestly, that was entirely on him. But yeah, your deal’s not so bad. Tell you what, you’ll stay here for a bit. Maybe work on something quick in the next room over, and if the boys like it, then we’ll see.”

“You want me to stay here?”

“Just for an hour or so,” Chuckles said. “You don’t mind working in front of a crowd?”

“Haha! No, I don’t. But I should maybe pop out? Uh, to go get more supplies. I left my... favourite brush at home. It’s a good one, really expensive, and handcrafted. Good stuff, you wouldn’t understand, not being an artist and all, hah! Anyway, I shouldn’t stay any longer than I have to, right? I wouldn’t wanna get in the way, and, uh, you can trust me. I wouldn’t tell anyone about anything I saw here today. Not that I saw anything.”

I suspected that I might need to shut up now.

“Right,” Chuckles said. “How about you follow me, instead, hmm?”

Chuckles stood up, and I took a small step back. Somehow, when he opened the door, there were two guys waiting there.

I was escorted to a room three doors over.

It was a small room, with a chair in the middle. It was bolted to the floor, with a shower drain under it.

“Here,” Chuckles said. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked around. “How about you do us a bit of art, huh?”

“Here?” I asked.

“Yup,” he said. “You can prep the room, right?”

“Sure,” I said with a smile.

I glanced around the room. There was nothing. No canvas, no walls to paint on, not even a light switch in easy reach. Just the chair. Bolted down. With the drain.

My smile wobbled. “Right. Great space. Good bones. Real industrial-chic. This’ll be... something.”

Chuckles raised an eyebrow. “You can work with this, yeah?”

“Of course,” I said. “Totally. I just need to, uh... improvise. Art is about limits, after all. Working with constraints. Big constraints. Claustrophobic constraints. Hahaha.”

No one laughed.