12
Warm Felt

The auto pushed through the street into a small glass villa. A group of four was checking, and prepared to leave as the auto stopped in front of the porch. It was the only feature of the house that jutted out of the cube.

“Miss Ferrule.” A gray-shirted representative waved to the girl materialized out of the left door.

“On your order.” The rest of the group slowly cleared out of the vehicle as the man held out a fingerprint and handed her a small remote as the scanner flashed white. “Thank you. If you need anything, the button works too.”

“We’re moving you guys into something more comfortable.” Luna borrowed Irene’s left ear. “Do you mind letting them know?”

“I’m pretty sure they will be very happy to take off the mortgage payments. I don’t know, maybe Carl needs it?”

Kayla pushed the door in and the lights came on. They find themselves in a square room. The lights to the kitchen in front of them, and the combined shoe storage-and-toilet on the left. Their eyes moved to the ultra-tall ceiling of the factory-manufactured house. The corridor to their right is split into two. The left fork is a carpet-covered staircase that goes up a yard and a half with a foot-tall pane of glass that went across the perimeter of the second floor. The vertical space below the glass embeds a small wardrobe. The right fork is a small hallway that homed a desktop with a cuboid housing an emergency manual switch jutting out from the front of the house.

“There will be meal pickups at nine, noon, and six everyday.”

Kayla and the group climbed the stairs. The soft wood floors was patted with a mink fuzzy carpet in the center. The nine-foot tall ceiling cast a warm white glow to the hall. The right wall was constructed with giant glass panels reinforced by black steel bars. Next to the glass were four chairs that surrounded a small table. 

The opposite end of the hall were a felt-covered couch with fiber-reinforced armrests, with a metal cube pointed at wall in front of it on the table which legs sat on top of its own little rug. Five doors sat flush to the wall, painted in their own pastel colors, set themselves apart from the conformist white that stood for the main bathroom adjacent to it. Bulbs were hung low to provide better lighting, vents that supplied the air-con were cut just below the ceiling.

A nine-foot-long pool table occupied the center of the hall. It was inlaid with blue tournament felt glowed from its rails and its display embedded on one of the short edges flickered. To the right of it, propped against one section of the glass that stopped in mid-air for a person to peer over, was a rack that held a few cue stick, one glowed with a blue ring that bisected its pure white inlay area marked only by its logo in black. Mechanical racks hung near the board that also laid chalk. 

Kayla looked at it as if the stick beckoned for her.

The clock hung above the gray room in the center read five twenty-five. 

“This is tall.” Kevin noticed his voice reverberated through the room. “How much down?”

Irene took one look at Kayla.

“Don’t you have our stuff at the auto?” She looked at the vehicle that stopped in front of the door.

“Oh yeah, right.” Kevin followed Alex into the space to the right of the white room, which is a small carpeted spiral staircase that led them to the ground floor to the left of the second story. The door swept open and the three went for the auto outside, as Luna and Angel sat on the couch.

Angel dug her hand into her tote.

“Coffee cake?” She offered one of her two to Luna.

“Thanks.” Luna tore into the packaging and slid half the brown product out of the makeshift sheath.

“You’ve been meaning to ask me or Alex something? Is that, um, so?”

Kayla laid her hands on the stick with the glowing blue ring. The ferrule behind the tip of the cue is gray. She held it out in front of her to inspect the logo. The beveling was smooth with the logo etched onto the wider white area.

BoltAction Rifle Synthetic, it read. It was artificially weighted, and stabilized itself as she took the diamond off the cue rack. She laid the stick on the felt as if she is tucking in a loved one. She walked to the short end of the table that faced the glass wall, and a blue glowing virtual button on the rail she pressed released the balls into the drawer below the bed. The diamond rack went on the table, and a white indicator lit up for her to align on top. A whirring sound came from the drawer, and six balls were withdrawn back inside to the deepest echelons of the table. 

1-ball in front, 9-ball in the center, and everything else filled the diamond, the rail in front of her glowed red as the rack pressed into itself to tighten the rack. It turned white, and Kayla stared at it for a second or two before slowly raising the rack. A drawer popped out, and she deposited it into the table. The timer began ticking.

The cue almost flew out of her loop bridge with its fluidity, and what she thought was a weak break spread everything across the table. She looked at Luna, who looked back at her after their attention arrived from the loud noise that came from a full-force break.

“Liking it so far?”

“The tech from the future…” She placed a hand on one of the short rails.