The Rage Room Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE RAGE ROOM

  Wow, what a ride! Lisa de Nikolits has written a pulse-pounding thriller set in a troubled future that might just be ours. We see the seeds of The Rage Room in our own digital landscape. Mind-bending yet all too believable in the hands of a masterful storyteller.

  —TERRY FALLIS, two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

  Leave it to the wild imagination of Lisa de Nikolits to bring us the dystopian future of The Rage Room, an extraordinarily inventive speculative fiction thriller with a decidedly feminist bent. Fast-paced, funny, bold, and completely engrossing, The Rage Room is an allegory, a cautionary tale, and a rollicking good read that will stay with you long after the last page has been turned.

  —AMY JONES, author of We’re All in This Together and Every Little Piece of Me

  In her latest captivating book, de Nikolits proffers not only a rollercoaster of entertainment, but also, sharp political commentary in complicated times. The Rage Room is an intricately woven dystopian world, rich in strong female characters who easily whisk readers to a world of futuristic follies. Move over George Orwell—Lisa de Nikolits shows us how the future can be scary, exciting, and above all, female.

  —KELLY S. THOMPSON, National Bestseller author of Girls Need Not Apply: Field Notes from the Forces

  In turns unsettling and very funny, Lisa de Nikolits’s The Rage Room is a science fiction satire of toxic masculinity, narrated by your guide, Sharps, the neurotic, rage-filled Jason Bateman of the future. There are lines and descriptions that will stop you dead in your tracks and make you take notes.

  —EVAN MUNDAY, The Dead Kid Detective Agency series

  Dark, fun, weird, imaginative, The Rage Room is a dystopic ride perfect for the anxieties and conditions of the present day. The paranoia of Sharps Barkley seeps into you, propelling this thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end.

  —DAVID ALBERTYN, author of Undercard

  If dystopian speculative fiction is your thing, with the enticement of time travel, you won’t go wrong with The Rage Room. The world Lisa de Nikolits has built is utterly fascinating, and quite horrific, yet believable. I sympathized with the main character, even though he is flawed, but that makes the story even more interesting. What a ride! The plot ratchets up like a train speeding down the tracks out of control. Gripping tension, and at the same time, highly complex, with multiple time travel redos and memories overlapping. I found that fascinating.

  —MELODIE CAMPBELL, award-winning author of The Goddaughter Series

  We’ve all wanted to go back to the past to fix the future—but Sharps Barkley has messed things up so much in his own high-tech future world that he has to do it. Lisa de Nikolits takes us—and him—on a wild, high-octane ride into other times and places so bizarre, blighted, funny and wise that they just might seem chillingly familiar. She turns time travel on its proverbial ear and you won’t want to get out of the passenger seat until the last page.

  —CATHERINE DUNPHY, author of Morgentaler, A Difficult Hero

  With The Rage Room, Lisa de Nikolits takes a deep dive into dystopia. Prepare to be alternately chilled and thrilled as the hapless hero journeys backwards and forwards in time in his increasingly desperate attempts to right his terrible wrongs, and to find some sense in his rapidly disintegrating world.

  —LORNA POPLAK, author of Drop Dead: A Horrible History of Hanging in Canada

  Why would one go back in time? To make things right, of course. But every time Sharps visits his past, things change in ways he can’t control, and he keeps changing from a worrier to a warrior. I loved all the witty characters, and original, daring twists in this genuine reality fiction beyond the imagination!

  —SUZANA TRATNIK, author of Games with Greta.

  The Rage Room is an extraordinary, astounding, and remarkable read. A to-and-fro tale, shrouded in mystery … with ploys to destroy … tracing trauma … harbouring disharmony, mistrust, and betrayal, shattering at times.… Both terrifying and tender, nurturing and hostile by turn … power pummeling … altered realities and passages of change … of transition.

  —SHIRLEY MCDANIEL, artist

  THE RAGE ROOM

  Copyright © 2020 Lisa de Nikolits

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  The Rage Room is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover design: Lisa de Nikolits

  Artwork by Saul Granda, Getty, RAGE font by iStock

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The rage room : a novel / Lisa de Nikolits.

  Names: De Nikolits, Lisa, author.

  Series: Inanna poetry & fiction series.

  Description: Series statement: Inanna poetry & fiction series

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200331205 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200331213 | ISBN 9781771337779 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771337786 (epub) | ISBN 9781771337793 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781771337809 (pdf)

  Classification: LCC PS8607.E63 R34 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  THE RAGE ROOM

  A NOVEL

  LISA DE NIKOLITS

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  ALSO BY LISA DE NIKOLITS

  The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution

  Rotten Peaches

  No Fury Like That

  The Nearly Girl

  Between The Cracks She Fell

  The Witchdoctor’s Bones

  A Glittering Chaos

  West of Wawa

  The Hungry Mirror

  To Bradford Dunlop and Colin Frings.

  And to the world we really need to save.

  REAL TIME

  I COULDN’T LIVE LIKE THAT. And I couldn’t let my children live like that either. There was only one solution. I had to go back and kill them. I had never been so certain of anything in my life.

  I held my wrist out. The gates opened and through I went.

  But when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in my house. I was in the rage room. I smelled plastic, oil, and diesel. I held a hammer and I was poised, mid-swing.

  This was all wrong. I was supposed to be back in my house, back in the clean world where I’d be in control. What was going on?

  And then it all came back to me.

  BOOK I

  TO THE MELTDOWN

  1. THE RAGE ROOM

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT YEAR IT WAS. We weren’t allowed to know and, really, I couldn’t have cared less. I was in my safe place, the rage room, focused on doing what I did best: breaking things.

 
; Thwack. I brought the baseball bat down on what was left of a kid’s wagon. The room was full of wagons, broken toys, junk furniture, and discarded office equipment—garbage, all of it.

  The robo-voice made its usual announcement as I entered the room: Screen-based materials are forbidden in the rage room. Glass cannot be utilized or destroyed in the rage room. We always consider your safety first! Because we care about you! All in accordance with Docket102.V, Health and Safety Code 0009: By Order of the Sacred Board, Gloria in Excelsis Deo.

  Yeah, man, I knew all the rules. And here’s what I thought of them.

  I attacked the wagon again, and the cheerful pink plastic replied with a slight ughh as if asking me if that was the best I could do, but it didn’t give. I came down harder and scored a crack that mocked my feeble efforts. Story of my life.

  My soundtrack was maxed. “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana on repeat, volume pumped. Sometimes it’s “War,” by The Cult or “You Lied” by Tool or, incongruously, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with a disco twist and added bass for power. Rage Against the Machine is a good one too. Thud, thud, thud, yeah. I chose my soundtrack, and I liked vintage—none of that auto-robo music for me.

  Thinking about music choices made me think about my life choices or the lack thereof, and my wife’s beauty badge, previously known as her profile pic, flashed unbidden across my crystal path. Celeste. She looked angelic, like vintage Farrah Fawcett in the days of Charlie’s Angels, only a hundred pounds heavier, with two chipmunk teeth perching on the lower lip of her overbite. Celeste had ordered those teeth, paid premium to get her primaries longer than anyone else’s. She thought it made her sexy.

  I raised the bat higher and split the wretched wagon in two. Sweetie, honey, baby, sugar. Thwack. Was it possible for the woman to utter anything without coating it with saccharine, glucose and fructose, and then deep-frying it like an Oreo at a fun fair? Celeste had fried my brain all right. So why did I marry her? Thwack. Because she offered me everything I wanted, the sum of which boiled down to one thing: I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be The King of Normal. And, for her part, Celeste’s marrying me was the act of a desperate addict trying to set her life straight, topped up with a deep-seated desire to please her father, Daddy.

  I thrashed at an impervious lime-green keyboard, finally picking it up and slamming it against a workbench. I grunted as if I was up against the heavyweight champion of the world, and my thin white protective plastic suit tore like old wallpaper. But it was not all my fault; the suit was torn when I got into it. That’s the government for you. Step into this used piece of shit—so what if it’s slick with the sweat of some other angry dude who came before you? The rules say you have to wear it: Docket809.V, Health and Safety Code 0009.12: By Order of the Sacred Board, Gloria in Excelsis Deo. The rules should say you each get a fresh new suit, but that would cost too much money.

  We looked like giant Easter bunnies, hopping insanely behind one-way mirrors, covered from head to toe in white disposable Tyvek coverall suits with elastic wrists, booties, and hoodie. All we needed were big floppy ears and little bobbing white pompom tails. Hop, hop, hop in a plastic room and break plastic shit to make yourself feel better for a tiny piece of your stupid, meaningless life.

  I was a clean freak, and I liked my life to be scrubbed and tidy—it was an anomaly for me to find my safe place in a rage room—but I was also an anger addict, giving in to chaos at the drop of a hammer. And the hammer dropped a lot in my life, which I had come to accept. But what I couldn’t accept was that the white suits disgusted me. They were damp when you pulled them on, and it was like trying to wriggle into someone else’s just-discarded swimsuit. I also hated the smeared and greasy goggles with scratches as though some kid used them for skateboarding, which is still a thing.

  I’d offered more than once to buy my own suit but it’s against regulations.

  It was also against the rules to self-harm in a rage room but more than one person has tried to commit suicide. I imagined them rushing in, falling to their knees, and hacking their veins open, wanting to die in a thick red sea of gushing blood while their fave hate song drums out the dying pulse of their lives. Trust me, I’d thought about trying too. It would have been a fitting place for me to meet my end, but the person behind the window watched just enough to not let that happen.

  Sometimes I yelled profanities at the blacked-out glass window but I’m sure whoever’s watching is so used to witnessing the pointless destruction that they don’t even bother to look or listen most of the time.

  I smashed on, chasing release and finding none. Then the music stopped—just like that—and a cop-car siren sounded. Whoop, whoop, whoop! Red lights flashed across the room. Green lights signalled go, red for when your time was up.

  I was out of time, but release was denied. Shit. I pulled my face gear off, hearing only my frustrated breath. My face was dented from the goggles, and I ran my fingers along the ridges and bumps.

  A guy opened the door and dragged in a trash can. He ignored me, and I just stood there. I wasn’t ready to leave, but my time was up. The siren sounded again, whoop, whoop, whoop, and still, I stood there, goggles in hand, looking at the useless crap I had broken.

  Another guy came, a big fella. “Buddy,” he barked, “you know the rules. You gotta go. Come on now.”

  I turned to him, and I couldn’t help myself—tears spilled down my face and I heard myself sobbing. He said, “Oh crapola, we got ourselves a wet one,” and he left. The guy behind me carried on cleaning. I had nowhere to go so I just stood there, crying.

  The big guy came back and handed me a roll of paper towel. I pulled off three sheets, blew my nose, and handed the roll back to him. “A bunch of us are going for a drink,” he said. “You wanna come? You need a drink. Come on.”

  I thought about Celeste, waiting at home and about my baby boy, Baxter. I thought about how carpet needed vacuuming because the robovacs never got into the corners and how Bax wasn’t eating properly and how Celeste wouldn’t listen to me when I panicked about his nutrients. I needed my boy to eat properly, and no one cared but me.

  “But honey,” Celeste smiled, “we’ve got science, you know that. Science takes care of us. Minnie’s got everything under control. It’s not like the old days. We don’t have to worry anymore.”

  She was right. It wasn’t like back in the early twenty-first century when the news was filled with illness, devastation, human loss, and natural disaster. It was, however, thanks to the pervasive fears of that time, fears of illness, aging, and dying, that politicians had secretly funnelled billions from the taxpayers’ pockets into the science labs, and the results, once uncovered, were astounding. The powers-that-be knew they were killing the world by denying the existence of global warming, and they’d collectively and secretly developed labs to create food and fuel, motivated not by altruism, but by the fact that none of them wanted to starve or die in a flood or drought or fire or get taken out by the newest raging disease, caused by alpacas or bearded dragons or, in the most deadly of cases, the family cat. Scientists had developed surgeries and scientific solutions for any manner of ailment or disease and Minnie, the Supreme World Leader, and her Sacred Board of Directors, shared this wealth of knowledge with the world.

  So Celeste was right. Bax would be fine.

  I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was lie down on the floor and carry on crying. Yes, the carpet at home needed cleaning and yes, I was worried about Bax not getting enough protein but, weighing on me more heavily than anything, was the fact that my paternity leave was over.

  I was due back at work the next day, the thought of which tore through my gut like a tumbling drum of sharp nails and broken glass, all sloshing around in an icy pit of poisoned, oily water.

  So I mopped my face and figured it would be best to follow this guy to a bar and pull myself together before I went home. I couldn’t let Celeste see me like this. Sh
e thought I was Mr. Strong and Steadfast, solid as a rock, and I couldn’t let her know any different.

  But I realized I needed help, so I flashed a comm to my best friend, Jazza.

  Need to see ya, buddy. Follow my CP.

  I wondered if Jazza would even respond, given that I’d sorely neglected him since I ran out of the building into the waiting arms of my pat leave.

  My CP. My Crystal Path. By logging in, Jazza could access my bio-hard drive, the neural implant microchip embedded in my brain. We all had them. Every interaction from my, and everyone else’s, Crystal Path moved across The Crystal Lattice, which was like a large invisible digital spider’s web around the Earth, connecting all the satellites and all of us. Even the weather was satellite-controlled and every strand of the information was part of the Crystal Lattice.

  Implants became the norm shortly after Minnie took power. Even Bax had an implant that recorded his birth. The minute babies shot out into the world, red-faced and wailing, they were zapped and assigned a number. No race, no gender, just a number. There’d be no patriarchy or discrimination of any kind on Minnie’s watch. We never used the numbers; I figured they were simply part and parcel of Minnie’s extensive spyware. Hardly a reassuring thought, but there was nothing we could do about it. A lot of parents went wild with implants, hooking their newborns up so they could be monitored in their cribs, at childcare, at preschool, and in the playgrounds. It was important to keep an eye on the nannies, don’t you know, and make sure that the robo-carers and humans weren’t subjecting their beloved offspring to any horrifying abuse or disturbing discipline. Expensive software developments also allowed parents to access the kiddies’ bio-stats to make sure their heart rates, blood sugars, and serotonin levels where all where they should be.

  Of course, when Minnie took the throne, metaphorically speaking since royalty had gone the way of the dodo, she assured us that implants were optional, apart from birth record chip, but after she assumed control of the internet, how else were we to communicate? She dominated the service providers and established regulations that didn’t let anyone else provide access. The Crystal Path wasn’t exactly pure; it had its own form of the Dark Web, just like the old days, and despite my body being riddled with every manner of software that I could get my hands on, I wasn’t sure I wanted Bax to have access to any of it. And yet, the creation of those implants were the very thing that gave me, and thousands of others, jobs.