In Dreams Page 3

  For the four short years of study, the future looked bright for Franz. The top of his class, full of ideals, in awe by his peers -- Franz was what every student wanted to be. Then, in 2221, tragedy struck. Graduation.

  Franz's mentor, the renowned artist Virgil Novak explained exactly what graduation means to the aspiring. “It's like hitting a brick wall for most,” he said, his bald visage rippling with impertinence and fire. “The world never needs another artist. Especially nowadays, with the factory-made entertainers of Sector 3. So no matter what one is able to do, no one will automatically be dubbed an 'artist' by default. That only comes when one sells one's work. And one can't do that when unknown. In order to become known, however, one must sell one's work. A hellish catch-22."

  And Franz was no different. With little success in making enough from his work to live off of, Franz was left with little choice. He had to enter the real world. He had to go back home.

  "It felt strange to step back on Sector 5 after so many years," Franz recalled in an old letter. "Meeting my father, his first words to me were, 'I'll give you a place to stay. But you gotta find a job.' No hello, no welcome home. Just, 'A job in a week, or out of my place!' That's my dad all right."

  "This is the real world, I told the boy," Dante Scordato, Franz's father, explained to me in his bachelor chamber. With each word he spoke, he puffed on a stogie, lounging in the only chair in the room, his posture as rigid as a drill sergeant. "I mean, art is nice and all, but this world is about the dollars and the cents. Period. All those frilly things like feelings, entertainment, relationships, they're all fantasies. Illusions. The only thing that really exists is credits. And you've gotta fit into that.”

  Franz's list of skills, however, had little connection with the current job market. “We study to be something so long,” Franz commented in his log, “but when we're finished, all we are left with is a piece of paper and a list of openings completely unrelated to what your life has been built towards. No one wants an artist. They want five years of managerial experience."

  A week was soon up, and the day of his father's deadline had arrived. Franz, however, still didn't have a job. "I didn't know what to do," he stated in his log. "My father came to me. He had that look -- like a stone gargoyle. He knew I hadn't found anything. I was sure he was going to kick me out right then and there. But instead, he handed me a ticket."

  "I egged the squirt on," Mr. Scordato said, chortling. "I just stood there for a good minute. Looked mean. He looked like he was going to cry. But before the waterworks started, I handed him that reservation ticket and told him, 'You've got an interview this afternoon.' Yup, I saved his ass. As usual."

  "I was so relieved," Franz said. "I spent the whole trip to the sector welfare recruitment office wondering what my father had found. An art dealer. An apprenticeship? I would have even taken a sales rep position at a publishing firm. But as soon as I stepped through that door and saw the interviewer's company badge... I almost gave up then and there on all my dreams."

  “City Air is honest work,” his father stated in an old correspondence. “I don't see what the fuss is about. I mean, he can stay put on Sector 5. Where he should be, dammit. Safe, where all the sane citizens are. Not wallowing with that bohemian trash down on Sector 10. And if this art-thing never takes off, he's got this. It's stable, and it'll probably bring him better pay than those things of his. Hell, I've been at City Air for 30 years! And look at me. Stable. Satisfied. What else is there to want?”

  "I was devastated," Franz recorded. "That was the last place I wanted to work. A corporate job? Suit and tie? But what choice did I have? It was either that or live on the street. So I took the interview."

  A week later, Franz landed the job of Assistant to the Manager of Billing at City Air Limited, New Babel's sole O2 distributor. Quite a position to find straight out of the academies. Most would have jumped for joy to have the opportunity Franz was given. Franz, however, had his mind elsewhere.

  “Franz? Oh yeah! What a great bob,” said Kevin Tolvaj, Franz's boss. Bristling with stubble, barely contained by his crisp penitentiary uniform, this human mountain would be intimidating if it weren't for his constant grin. “He could always get things done in a flash. But I got the idea he had other things on his mind. I always saw him working on these wild designs and sketches whenever he had a free minute. Helluva lot better than I could do, that's for sure. Ha-ha! I even tried to help the poor kid out.”

  “Yeah, Kevin was the only one who seemed to get me,” commented Franz in a 2224 Indiezine interview. “He often brought me boxes of spare scrap parts. I always wanted to ask him where he got them. But he was connected with so many firms, because of his position, it wasn't a huge wonder. It was actually because of Kevin I could finish the first piece that made me feel remotely like an artist."

  The Prison, Franz's self-proclaimed first major work was a imprudent diatribe on society. In his own words, "it is what our world does to bots, those poor souls. Given consciousness only to realize they are slaves to this social machine we put them into. It's sad.”

  Franz continued the story of its creation in his logs, “The day after I told Kevin what I couldn't find enough material to complete the piece, I found a box on my desk. On it was a small note, 'Hope this helps,' written on it. The box was filled with a coaxial reflux capacitor, a row of compound tubing, and on top of the pile, a three-fingered hand, with red wiring. Everything I needed! I could have never done it without Kevin.”

  Despite Kevin's encouragement, a duality evolved for Franz between the job and his art. “I hated the job,” Franz stated in a brief appearance in the underground bohemian documentary For Art's Sake. “'Can you get this replicated?' 'Fill this up, no cream.' It had nothing to do with what I was interested in, what I was good at, what I was made for. It was suffocating really.”

  It was then Franz's delusions of grandeur began. It is usually when the misguided face reality that they fall into their fantasies. That is when their dreams become obsessions. As the years drew on, the reality of Franz's job made his obsession only grow worse.

  “I was sent out on Recall today,” Franz recorded in his log. “It happens at least twice a week now. Today, I had to go down to a housing project on Sector 8. To the Robinson family. Their building was so sad, if you could call it a building. They were three months behind on their O2 payments. They greeted me at the door with tears. That's always awkward. It's funny, people always joked if corporations could, they'd charge for the air you breath. New Babel found a way how since the entire city is enclosed. Hell, they even got it so that the bots need O2 to function. To keep their circuitry from getting snuffed, as they like to say. Bastards.

  “Anyway, after a few uncomfortable minutes, the Robinson's decided to leave their apartment, and I shut down the air. They are homeless now, because of me. Undesirables. Stuck with that label on their record, forever. You can't find a place to live anywhere above Sector 9 when you've got that on you. And that horrible outcome was a good result. I can't take this... causing such destruction. All I wanted to do was build. I hate this job.”

  Yet despite this tenuous equilibrium, or maybe even because of it, Franz didn't give up. He worked late into the night each day making his Neo-Gordian statues. Inspired to make an ultimate masterwork, he fantasized it would let him escape the trap he had let himself fall. "If only I had time enough to focus on my real work," he stated in a log. "Then I could actually make something that could sell. Then I could actually become a real artist."

  What he didn't realize was that the art world doesn't work that way. For as any true artist knows, forming connections, not withdrawing into work, is the only way to become a real artist. And the only way to do that is to pay ones dues, work ones way up the ladder, play the game -- then, and only then, can one get one's work seen. Franz, however, lived in his own reality.

  “The work should speak for itself," Franz stated in his log. "Shouldn't an artist become acclaimed because of his work
? How'd it become the other way around? All this other stuff has nothing to do with making a good piece. Art is about expression. Creativity. Humanity. That's it. Isn't it?"

  With these kinds of simplistic ideals, it is no wonder Franz could find neither comrades nor an audience. Because, as taught to even the most basic of art students nowadays, art must serve a purpose. It must cater to an audience, a product to a target market. So it is unsurprising Franz's work went almost completely unsold. "I try submitting them to publishers for replication...but they don't care," Franz stated. "All that matters is if I'm some star. If not, they just throw my piece in a warehouse of others. And then I wait six months for a reply. Six months! Just how am I supposed to ever make a living in a system like that? How can I ever quit this job? How will I ever be able to become an artist?"

  Yet the reality was, he was an employee of City Air, not an artist. And by this point, he no longer lived with his father. He had to earn money to live. He had to be at City Air. This fact left an everlasting scar on Franz.

  “I can't take it any more, the Recalls. Invading peoples homes. Turning off their air. Turning off their life. I always say they can leave, but it's crazy the amount that stay. They say their life is over anyway. Being an Undesirable, it's impossible to live a normal life. So they stay. They die. At first it was too shocking to process it, the bodies. Now it's somehow become... normal. What's happened to me? I never wanted to be like this. Their corpses still haunt me. Always such a strange color. That's when I got the idea for my masterwork.”

  The sum of events of Franz's life –- the duality with his job, the isolation from his peers, the inability to achieve his obsession -- had taken its toll. Through it came the pinnacle of Franz K. Scordato's artistic life –- his final piece.

  “I'm not needed,” he stated in his log. “The person I am, this artist I've been programmed to be, it isn't needed. I'm only wanted to server other's purposes, like some kind of bot. And what good is a bot that cannot fulfill its programing? It is scrap. Just scrap. Sometimes I feel there's not enough air... For too long, I've been forced to be something I'm not. I am not this job. I am not this man. I've done this for my father. I've done this for society. I've done this to survive. But what about me? Is this life not my own? Should I not live it for me? No air... I cannot breath... I cannot continue this lie. I must breath. I must express. I am not a bot to be used! This... this piece will be my purest form of expression.”

  Kevin Tolvaj became almost quiet when I approached him about this final piece. In a mouse's voice, the bear-of-a-man explained. “He had become so secretive with his work towards the end. He rarely let me snag a look. But when I brought by a box 'o parts for his little hobby, he wasn't at his desk. So I took a peek at some of his sketches.” The imposing man sat in silence, his eyes becoming glossy. “Those drawings. It was inhuman... what he planned to do.”

  It wasn't until the new recruit arrived in his division that Franz would attempt to make his madness a reality. “I was working on the layout of the figure when a new guy stumbled into my office," reported Franz in his personal log. "This twiggy redheaded schmuck. Phil was his name. I showed him around the place. He was fresh out of the academies, asking what this was and that. Always grinning like an idiot. When we got back to my office he tried looking at my drawings, but I grabbed them away.

  “'You're into the Gordian Method?' he squeaked. Turns out he had gone to the Corinthian School of Arts too. I told him to go load the coffee machine just to get him out of my hair, but he ended up burning himself. 'That's not how you do it!' I yelled. 'You gotta turn off the steam array first.' But he just smiled that stupid grin at me and said, 'Thanks. Hopefully I'll master all this stuff soon.'

  “Suddenly, my throat got so tight. I didn't have enough air. I had to sit down. After about a minute, all I could make out was, 'A master of pouring coffee. Is this all I am?' And that was it. That was the moment I made the decision. I was committed.”

  “He had lost touch with reality completely,” Novak recalled. “When he told me his idea -- The Christ -- all I could say was, 'Who do you think you are?' 'No one has ever done this,' he said. 'There's a reason for that,' I yelled back. He looked at me, with crocodile tears swelling and said, 'This is my statement. This is what the world has become... and this is what it has made me. To be sacrificed. Sacrificed in order to continue their ideals. Sacrificed to prolong their system.' His last words were the most haunting. 'It takes this to get noticed.' That was the last time I saw him.”

  The Christ -- an accumulation of all the methods and craftsmanship of Franz's previous works. The designs varied widely, but all revolved around a pieced-together figure hanging on a cross. The final note read: 'My parts, my soul -- shattered.'

  “Instead of using bot parts, he planned to use his own body to create his figure. Dissected into pieces, then reassembled,” Novak stated. That was the key to the piece, he would become part of the work. It would be the first of its kind, the end of the life of Franz K. Scordato and the beginning of his legacy. But something happened.

  “That night I was going to begin," Franz recorded. "The programming was finished, backing assembled, all I needed to do was execute. But Kevin sent me on a surprise Recall at the end of my shift. I figured, 'Hell, what's one more family on my list...'”

  “I sent him down to Sector 10, to MPAC [Mechanized Psychiatric Analysis Center],” Kevin recalled. ”I had some associates there I did business with. They wanted me to, um, take care of something for them. So I sent Franz to do his thing. I'm glad I chose to do it that day, for Franz's sake. It was supposed to end differently for me,” he said, pointing to his starchy penitentiary uniform, “but hell, that's life.”

  “I knocked on the door,” Franz recalled in a letter to his father. “No one opened. It was a strange building. The rusted shack looked like an anthill with MPAC looming next to it. It was obviously temporary housing. I knocked again, but nothing. I even tried punching in the override code so I could deliver last rites. But it didn't work. I was about to enter the termination code when the door slid open. Inside, a one-armed bot slouched against the door.

  “'You've failed to pay your O2 bills,' I said, then stopped. Inside were dozens of half-broken bots. Faces missing, severed limbs, hallowed chests -- the room looked like a living scrapheap.

  “'What happened?' I asked. Nobody answered. But something was strange. There was no way that many bots lived in such a cramped space. They'd been gathered there.

  “I asked again, 'Why are you here?' One finally spoke, 'We cannot pay MPAC.'

  "I didn't know what to say, what to think.

  “'We can't pay for our repairs,' he said. 'At MPAC, if you can't pay, they repossess. Then what good are we?'

  “Then it hit me -- I had been sent there to terminate these poor bots. I looked over the poor fools. They were broken. Of no use. Unwanted. It was all too familiar.

  "And while I started at them, I realized -- they looked familiar. Their designs, their pieces, their parts. The bot at the door then tried to adjust his missing arm's connector with his remaining hand. It was three-fingered... with red wiring... the same as the hand I used on The Prison.

  “I looked back at the other bots. It all came back to me then. That bots blue stripes, that one's rigged grating -- they all had been part of my creations. Kevin had been giving me their repossessed parts.

  "At that moment, I felt so hollow. I felt so confused. I left without terminating. I couldn't be their executor. I had already done too much. That was the end of my old life.”

  That day Franz disappeared from Sector 5. His friends, family, and co-workers never saw him again. But that wasn't the end of Franz. If you are ever on Sector 10, wandering the cramped maze of vendors and screaming merchants, at a little shop in a small back lot, Franz can be found working away in his new life. He makes replacement parts and prosthetics for the unfortunate, infusing his art, mixing man and machine, making those who were broken whole once
again.

  “My father couldn't understand it,” Franz said while welding a plastoid panel to a T7 forearm. “He can't understand why I took a step down to Sector 10. I feel I've taken a step up in my life.”

  Franz was forced to give up his life on Sector 5 because of his misconceptions about art. He had to change in order to finally become what he wanted to be. And symbolizing his transformation is The Christ -- no longer a man on a cross, but one with head held up high. Instead of sacrificing himself, it is made from donated parts, sacrificed from some of his many thankful customers. A plaque below the statue reads: 'Like so many sacrificed for the greater good, together we now stand.' And in a pleasant twist of fate, in association with the Mentor Foundation's program to bring exposure to new artists, City Air has sponsored The Christ to be exhibited at the A.R.T. Exhibition Promenade in Easter Square, all this and next month, a thank you for the work Franz provided.

  Franz's day in the sun seems to have arrived. According to the craftsman, his customer base is thriving, much in thanks to his once solitary disciple’s continued support. "Been spreading the word about Franz and his work for years," Kevin said with a smile. "Wouldn't think there'd be much of an audience in here," he pointed to his uniform, "but I guess it don't take an artist to know when something is really good."

  Now Franz works daily with a smile. He may not have become a successful master artist like us on Sector 3, but we can end this sad little tale of what not to do happily. For no matter what one believes, success only comes when catering to an audience -- the Mark of a True Artist.

  The citizens were unhappy, without hope or answers. So few could remember what the questions to life even were. Meaning was completely lost from the roles of society. Franz was but one of a great number who saw this all too clear.

  Yet whether one agrees with Jones' assessment of Franz, or Franz's assessment of the world, one fact is clear: Franz's masterpiece was yet to reach its final purpose. It was to be the icon of the Easter Square Incident. It was to be forever burned into the minds of the people.