Future Hair

    Future Hair
    (in the "Baldie Stories 1" collection - on sale at Amazon.com)

Capping Aisle G88 hummed.

Wire tests crackled, nose height; blossoms of sizzling points - carbide, magnesium, ozone-fire, yellow and orange-blue, the signifiers of sparkling efficiency in a diode haze within the pure white light shrouding the conveyor.

Crinkle and crackle and a few moans and groans when Alph jammed a finger up his nose with a smirk. Otherwise, follicle replacement and synaptic cleaning, replacement, cleaning - more and more of the same.

"Sixty-eight!"

"He's on it!"

"One-twenty two!"

"Lost!"

"Five-eleven!"

"Who?"

"Fiver one one!"

"Hang on, Fred...Fred? Who’sit?! We didn't wire a fiver one one!"

"Short guy, bald....Har! Haha!"

"Haha! You kill me Fred! Seven hundred years later - it still cracks me in half! Bald! Rich! Creamy rich!"

"Five-one-one - Q-zone, section eight-six-six, bank B3-R," suicide, triple - receding hairline: affectation, loss of job, wife, self-esteem, blah-blah-jam a finger up his nose, sniveling loser!"

"No dice!"

Alph didn't look like he enjoyed hearing it. He sniffed, looked about to sneeze but making like over there to a single empty seat on the conveyor, "Jeeze! He's got away!!"

The alarm was louder than it needed to be, just to incentivize, and the LED emergency lamps were digitally programmed to cause muscle spasms. The pulse would take down any living creature with proper electro-synaptic gap junctions. Even with the helmets and glasses, both Alph and Fred did a little involuntary jig down below the knees. A bright queasiness, unknown in the natural world, twinkle-toed in their guts, beneath their privates. Duodenal excitement, adrenal prompts, shots from groin to mouth causing spontaneous lymphatic drainage - shits and drooling giggles.

Scare - from Scary, the rhyming rib of Nary, poetic for Never, which his Mom found amusing and his dad, well his dad was done before Scare was born, done and gone, forward or backward in time, but gone all the same - Scare called himself Scare, but his real name was Never. 

What a name. Never. But Scare? Even worse!

His mother had gossamer hopes for the boy. She wished, white-knuckled and shivering in her birthing bed that the boy would never ever have to feel the pain of unnerving groundlessness that has plagued her life, the life of her parents, and the generations of unhappy souls that came before them. She cursed her time, the discovery of "past-presence," "future-bringing," the models and mechanics that allowed for such witchcraft. 

But Never would, and always prevailed. The universe didn't care much, and Never worked out just fine, in fact better than fine, and better than the future foretold! Mama was nervous about nothing! Ha! Just goes to show.

It was Scare that got loose in the future hair conveyor. Never, who stood up and slid away - bald, anxious, just fine!

"Five-oner-one!" 

Never smiled, one nose-picking stroke away from a good mind-cleanse and a healthy head of hair. 

"Here Baldie-Baldie-Baldie!"

"Peckerhead."

"Alph, my head feels like jelly."

The strobes had been disengaged, capping aisle G88's flow was rerouted to G89, and the locator sensors had a fix on Scary.

"There he is, behind the pallet of styling mousse."

"I see him."

"Five-oner-one," announced Fred, "Mr. Never Ever!"

Alph stopped. "That's his name?”

Fred checked his tablet. "That's it.”

Scary interrupted. "Future-presence shows I'm walking out of here, bald and intact. You guys smell like shit!”

"Security is on the way, remain where you are.”

"You mean future-bringing," Alph clarified.

"No," said Scary, stepping into the aisle to face the two make-over specialists. "I mean future-presence. A bit different, huh?"

"What's he talking about?" Asked Alph."

"I walk out of here, and I will be the first Baldie in seven hundred years to do so. I'll live out my life bald and as fucked up in the head as I can be!"

"He really does need a cleaning!"

"And some hair."

But Alph and Fred both had a strange and uneasy feeling as they listened to Scary. They were feeling reality shifting against its natural course. Scary was in the process of bringing about that shift. Seven hundred years of perfect coifs, spotless attitudes, endearing social graces, and undiminished enthusiasm for the cause of greater good was about to become a part of the real past.

"You feel it! All that hair coming undone one pretentious follicle at a time, one affected and totally brainwashed lock after the other!"

They could hear the Baldie Police at the conveyor entrance, bashing at the sealed security gate. Scary continued.

"I did something none of you thought to do! So simple! I brought past-presence INTO future-bringing!"

"What?"

"Seven hundred years! Idiots! I took a ride back and brought it forward! It's happening now! Look at yourselves!"

"Alph! Your hair! What's happening?!"

"Fred! You've got a shadow on your chin! Something's wrong with your head! I don't feel well!"

"You'll start feeling real angry in a moment. Ouch! That's gonna hurt!"

"You don't know what you're talking about! That's why your here!"

"The anger you know is controlled, just like all your other emotions and thoughts! Like your hairline! Like your attitudes about everything from what you eat to how you dream! No more! I stuck before, after! Turned always into never-more! Me! Scary Never Ever!"

By the time Baldie security got through the gate there was little left of causal notion. A few drips of adjustment and neatness. Mostly there were angry bald men with no sense, no reason to be, no pretense to righteousness, which was replaced by another false righteousness, the old one, the lousy little one that might be overcome by kindness and compassion.

And then:

The rest followed.

The safe-line lineage of Never-wrecks, the suffering stream one blood relative to the next, knowing and not knowing the past and the future. Scary, finding solace in distress, bringing about the final shift, ending the new horrors and bringing back the old, pressing the reset, bringing despair upon his mother, worse for his father, and the weight of universal clarity upon himself, a bald and insecure Adam in a groundless place. All that and more!

The End