“I’m sorry. I swear, he didn’t use to be like that. I didn’t know he was like that.”
The table lamp buzzed in its nest of green paper, smeared shadows across the varnished wood and white plaster. Book spines wobbled and teetered in the periphery. The speakers were dead, but that didn’t stop them hearing it all again.
This was the second time of the day he was apologizing for something he did not do. Something he had every right to be upset about, terrified about, more than anyone in the room. But, with Jog’s sobs rocking her wheelchair, there was little Leo could come up with other than taking the blame and trying to reassure her.
Boxer just sat to the side, staring into the corner of the screen, wide-eyed. His knuckles were turning white, clutching the edge of his chair, face pale in the double dusk. It was eerie, seeing the humor knocked out of his body. The shifts in the Underside didn’t do it. The revoked travel permit didn’t do it. The declaration of war didn’t do it. June did it. A variable Leo had introduced did it.
“I’m really sorry. I should’ve killed the call… I swear if I knew he was going to act like this I wouldn’t…”
“Just… Stop…”
Jog buried her head deeper into her hands. Her rigid brown hair projected a root system of shadows onto the triangle-patterned wallpaper. Leo’s hand hovered over her shoulder. He wasn’t sure it would be worth to perform a touchdown.
“For Christ’s sake, stop acting like you… Fucking did it yourself.”
The woman’s reddened face suddenly rose from her fingers. She stared up at him with an unreadable cocktail of expressions. He didn’t know her that well. Hearing someone as young as her invoke old faiths was a novelty. He barely just learned her real name, though, strangely, she preferred it not be used. The cruel, ironic nicknames held some strange power in this household. Leo didn’t have one yet, and thus considered himself an outsider.
“I… Okay. I just feel like I should’ve… I don’t know, figured out how he changed before introducing you guys to him.”
It would have taken just a day. A day out of twenty or so they had left.
“People don’t just change like that, stupid! Have you not noticed it when he started talking?”
“Noticed… What, exactly?..”
“The accent? He rolled his Rs in ‘obstruction’? And that little stutter between phrases, it was completely gone? And after he was done, God… It’s like two completely new voices?!”
“…O-o-oh, shit.”
The replayed phrases dragged themselves through his head. Like a length of tensioned steel wire against bare skin. Somehow, it had eluded him entirely. But she was right. The pitch and resonance might have been the same, but the inflection, the pace? If that horrid transmission was his first time hearing June talk, he would have filed his partner’s Russian down as native, not hastily switched from French.
“Funny guy you are,” - Jog suddenly smiled, tears still trickling by the edge of her mouth. Her uncharacteristically long canines glinted in the warm glow of the diode bulb, - “I thought you’d notice first.”
He should have. But he didn’t. The trees had hit his windshield so fast he hadn’t noticed the forest.
“Got too caught up in the noise, I guess.”
The conversation seemed to come to a halt there. There was nothing to say. There was just the tide-like rumbling of the doomed city beyond the thick curtains, the buzzing of the lamp, and the screams lodged into their memory. The dusk crept on, tugged along by the programming of huge daylight lamps on the distant concrete sub-sky.
When Boxer finally spoke, his voice was rigid, and his eyes pitted deeper than direct impact craters peppering the outer walls. Some of the shock had worn off, but the liveliness of his voice was still nowhere to be found. His whole figure seemed diminished and polluted, somehow, fear clinging to his hair and beard like breadcrumbs or chip dust.
“Hey, uh… Getting kinda late. Leo, you staying over tonight?”
Leo’s banged-up wristwatch assured him of Boxer’s correctness. 18:33. Less than half an hour left.
“No, I think I’ve inconvenienced you enough already.”
That, and he’d rather be shot for breaking curfew than watch the misery he’d caused for eight more hours, he didn’t say.
The streets were a violent kind of quiet. A quiet that breathes against your temple like a gun barrel in the dark. Initial waves of rage and panic have been smeared against district retention walls, squeezed through gratings, corraled into chokepoints. Trash disposal workers only put in token effort into cleaning the evidence. The quiet ran thick with smells of smoke, vomit and pork. The quiet whispered hollow promises in chipped cornerstones and billboards turned canvas. Not everyone was eager to go down with the ship, it seemed to say.
There was one checkpoint between Leo’s block and the twins’.
ID card. Right wrist chip. Make eye contact with the soldier, but only briefly.
Him and Boxer had been basically next-door neighbors for eight years.
Don't look in the direction of the exosuit. Don't smile. Don't scowl.
They worked in the same Underside terminal for three.
Shoulders slumped moderately. Appear tired. It took them
until last month to speak.
Yes. No. Yes. Thank you. No "good day".
It wasn’t effortless, but the intersection was behind him now. Sidewalk tile blistered with clumps of dead leaves and crumpled paper. Ill transplanted maples segmented artificial light. Rain was expensive to run, and overdue for weeks. With the disaster impending, it was unlikely to ever happen again. Trees suffered quiet through the drought they couldn’t hope to comprehend the implications of. Leo couldn’t decide what was sadder - a tree doing that, or a person.
There was a barrier within him, he now realized, like a dam holding back a sea of burning rock oil. Something in his reaction to overhearing that forbidden iteration of June didn’t feel right. Something didn’t work correctly. Something was missing. It filled him with a strange, dewless anger, one without a clear origin or target. Vile ambrosia bubbled at the concrete crest, threatening to overflow.
A flock of fat, ugly artifical cicadas differentiated themselves from the Stacks’ labored breath. Ugly bluish backdrop developed into a collection of glossy bodies. Carapaces glinted in fake sunlight. The real sun should have been gold in ochre, rolling down towards the horizon, but it was too far to even imagine. The real sun was hidden behind three more layers of city, three more impenetrable barriers of convention and dragonbone and cement and gunpowder above his head.
The drones dove down into the canyon without effort, sailed smoothly over the riverbed on which he could only crawl. They clung to the left-hand cliff, scanned window cavities with confidence of a child unfolding their dollhouse. Two of them hung back and proceeded slowly, getting a continuous overview. Four more hovered in front of each unfortunate window for a torturous few seconds before rapidly strafing to the next target. Last one flew ahead of the pack, checking side alleys. Even here, in the kernel, behind walls upon walls upon walls, where for every kitchen knife the city held two rifles, they had to check side alleys.
It was an aperiodic, but predictable three-layer pattern of movement. Not quite the certainty of a single mind tying the whole flock together, but not quite the fibrillation of will that a group of seven humans would display. Leo slowed his steps, focused on the motions. Tuned out the grumbling in his ear as a snow-haired, disheveled man he’d never see again bumped into him from behind. Felt for the pauses, the tiniest lag between decisions. Backtraced in his mind the fingers on joysticks, twitching of muscles under proxy sleeves.
There were two, maybe three people running the thing. Without words, without bodies, he somehow peeled the layers apart. The movements of the “close-ups” were sharper, aluminium shells rolling with a fervor, wobbling, over-corrected when braking. The “overviews” pulled off similar acceleration with more grace, were gentler on their rotors, camera angles never seeming to overlap. He wasn’t sure about the “scout” - it disappeared from sight too often to really observe.
The stitches on his ear ached.
I hate you, he thought, with surprisingly cold clarity.
I hate how you move out of sync. I hate how you act like you own these windows. I hate how you fear, even in your perfect environment. I hate how clean you are. Do you think you'll slip out? Do you think you'll stay clean? Do you feel safe behind your big screens?
The first tongue of liquid fire spilled over the dam that stretched from horizon to dry horizon. Down, down into the gaping trench it went, rushing to catch up with the old sea.
Something in the leading cicada locked up momentarily. The smooth, sickening bound to its next angle screwed wildly out of control, almost sending it crashing into a second story window. Though it recovered, the whole flock seemed to shudder for a moment before hastily pulling up. Out of the street, and away they went. A collective sigh of relief rippled through the pedestrians. Backs and shoulders around him relaxed.
I hope you feel vulnerable when it happens, he smiled at
their wake,
When your puppets' flesh revolts against you. I hope you never feel quite safe.
He found his fingertips stroking the case of the permanent marker in his coat pocket, and, with three minutes left to spare, against his better judgement, went with what his hand told him.
Leo hadn’t marked much within the walls. There were too many cameras, and too many snitches, and too few unmonitored side alleys. But he didn’t care anymore. There was too little time left to care.
He sailed along the facades, until a sufficiently flat stretch of brickwork presented itself. And, falling on one knee, not bothering to hide, he added his bit of nonsense to the turf war between nameless hands and paint buckets:
HIT WHILE THERE'S STILL TIME
And then it was really, really time to go.
Driven by habit, he focused on the mirror, forced himself to examine the flipped room, decoupling concepts until the surface was a still lake under a mile of rock, and beneath was some aquatic things’ vacant dwelling. Mechanically catalogued cheap furnishings, dirty garments and shoddy metalwork of the supposed creatures, until he could rebuild their routine in his head.
Mild steel soap holder. Dull blue towel rack. Cabinet, off-white. Tile, off-white. Cabinet, off-white. Tile, off-white. Microbial etch. Laundry basket. Crack in the plaster.
The living room screen blared at half volume. Like it did every night. Words oozed through the crack under the door, stung at his scratched ankles like splashes of citric acid. Indirect fire of of brass-bound bile.
“Mom, turn that shit off.”
No response.
“He did it. He really did it. It’s not a chinese deepfake. And it’s not dragon propaganda. It fucking happened. I saw the leak.”
No response.
“He got clapped for it. All his friends will too. And all their friends will. They’re not escaping. And we’re certainly not escaping. Turn it the fuck off.”
No response.
No response?
There was a crack in the dam, a joint revolt of thermal microfractures. The tongues of burning oil hammered inwards, smashed outwards, crawled up from his lungs, breached into the back of his throat. His saliva tasted like polyvinyl smoke. He spat in the sink. It didn’t help in the slightest. Pulled on a new shirt and stormed out into the corridor.
Fake gold behind the dusty curtains was almost gone. Awkward blue-and-white porcelain constructs side-eyed from the upper shelves of the kitchen. The ugly shelf always seemed to threaten collapse at the slightest disturbance, and Leo took pleasure in hearing it jangle and jitter again as he slammed the door of his room behind him. One hit closer to shattering those stupid decorative cups.
The room breathed under its blackout curtains. He moved by touch. The wardrobe ground into place again, blocking the door. The bed creaked under his knees. He hadn’t changed the sheets for a month now, never had the time or energy. If he could see it, he would undoubtedly still spot brown trickles of his own blood on the pillows.
The suspension seat welcomed him like a starving venus flytrap. It was the room’s centerpiece now, and everything else had been shoved aside to make space. If he could see it, it really would look like a sick carnivorous plant, carelessly ripped from its familiar bog soil.
Leo climbed in, smacked the switch on his left armrest. Translucent leaves fluttered to life, brushed against the skin of his wrists and elbows. Then, like a wave, his torso, neck, waist, thighs, ankles. The new proxy sleeve was a quick-swap model, probably pulled out of a scrapped mech or drone control station. He hadn’t asked for details. He didn’t want them. It took ten seconds and minimal arm movements to dive and breach, and that was enough. The rest could go to hell.
The panel chirped. “ENCASEMENT”: green. He hit the second switch, fingers embraced firmly by fluid-actuated petals. It was supposed to be held back by a spring safety, requiring a full wrist effort to engage the connection. The spring was in the same trash bag as the Oversight chip, probably long dumped somewhere under the city’s western wall, unless trash disposal had a hiccup.
It was like a ripple across his soft carapace, a layer peeling off. A bifurcation of his being that started at the tips of his fingers and rushed coreward. The seat’s retention clamps snapped around his wrists as his back drew an arch. A familiar, impossible wave of itching, a restlessness residing deeper than cells, crashing up to his neck. And then it was done. Two clashing pictures of reality hovered in the wet darkness around his spinal column. “ENTANGLEMENT”: yellow. One thing left to do.
He moved his fingers to the last toggle, and the second, ethereal body, unseen, moved a little too fast, a little too far. The dissonance pulsated like a cyst, sent tides of nausea into his brain. His hand, his whole upper body suddenly screamed at him in terror. They wanted to jerk forth, to rip themselves out of the invisible web that must have been holding the wrist back. He slammed this panic down, hissing through his teeth, pushed the screaming animal back into its burrow.
He flipped the switch. The final two petals snapped around his skull, closing over his eyelids. The itch flashed briefly through his retinas, then eyesight simply vanished - no floaters, no snow, no afterimage of the indicator lights.
“ENTANGLEMENT”: green. He didn’t see the panel anymore, but he didn’t need to. The readouts were lodged as firmly into him as the awareness of his own breath. He wouldn’t be able to forget how the proxy felt even if he tried.
The panic subsided. His old, heavy, supposedly real body faded away like morning mist beneath the glory of the sun, lost the contest of legitimacy to a dataclump that fluttered in the random access chips at its bedside. He spun around in that transitional network, bemused at the rate of acclimatization. Just the day before, it had taken him at least fifteen minutes to get to that point. Now it was almost instant.
He thought of the old sleeve, a classic jumpsuit model. How stiff it felt to grow into in comparison, how he had to start every session an hour earlier than planned just so that he didn’t have to tap out due to nausea. It seemed ridiculous now, in this malleable internal ocean of words.
Right. The television.
Leo spread outwards, feeling for the LAN bridge. His sea-body was fast on track fraying at the edges, assuming a more comfortable form. A more familiar form. A form that did not abide by rules of surface tension, mass and ultimate tensile strength.
It was labyrinthine, that form. It spread out from his dive point in a probing binary root system, sometimes intersecting with itself, though not once did that appear pathological. As he was trapped inside its halls, there was no point of reference for mapping. It was for that reason he had elected not to give it sight. His Sleeping Sea would be a sunless burrow. He was all right with that.
It took but a second for an extremity to grow across the bridge, but the panic was gone already. The source was not, of course. There was still an animal in him. The animal didn’t die when it went to Sea. It just metamorphosed.
The bridge was like a wound in the scentless infinity of the transitional net. A wound he infiltrated swiftly. Space-tissue on the other side was rigid to the tongue and reeked of gull vomit. He split across the address space, making sure to avoid the gateway router. Spooking his dull golem-warden wasn’t on the menu for the night.
There was an annoying number of appliances scattered throughout the LAN. He never placed them there, but they did not appear to need his permission. Telling them apart was hard - many smelled suspiciously similar, despite ostensibly belonging to a wide range of manufacturers and eras, and two even shared a MAC address. But, just like on your average bedroom wall, finding the light switch was only a matter of patience.
He found the right switch. He didn’t so much flip it as much as he tore down the wall holding it up. The network on the other side was briefly alive in a shower of screaming debris. Then it was quiet again. He withdrew back through the wound, making sure not to leave residue on its ragged edges by accident. Didn’t need trails on literal home turf.
Something in his gut jolted awake. “Loud external sound”. At risk of inducing more nausea, he patched it into himself.
“…broken?” - a pause in the distress, then again: - “Son, can you hear me? I said our TV just broke! It’s making this horrible noise now… Are you even listening? I know you’re there!”
He tried replying, then laughed at himself, watching words red-shift into his local void. Did it again, but through a speaker this time. He used to be afraid she’d notice. Nothing of the sort ever transpired. It seemed that he could be talking through a SAM, and she would still ignore it.
“Guess your stream was loaded with something spicy, mom. Watch an opera next time instead of that asshole.”
“So you did it! I knew you did it! Taking it out on me again! All for a difference in taste.”
“I’m just saying, if your box breaks precisely the moment the showrunner is trying to excuse away human trafficking, maybe God’s giving you signs.”
“And blaspheming atop!”
He cut the thread, and felt it swish away into the darkness.
“Loud external noise”, the proxy kept repeating. The alert hurt. The memory of it hurt. He put up with it the same way he would with burning in his lungs.
Attention turned instead to the second bridge. Leo did not need to feel around for that one. The aperture let off waves of rolling heat, pulled space into itself. Welcoming. Demanding.
It was blocked, imperfectly, always powered despite the inherent risk. No one within the walls could summon new tunnels anymore. Not while swarms of jammer sigils seethed in their cement coffins all around him. All around the city. Words were a depleting resource.
He reached towards the clump of twisting noise. Let the scorching invitation guide his channels. The surface spoke back in a rustle under his hundred fingers.
Leo unwound the blockade just a crack. Hovered at the boundary for minutes, waiting for telltale echoes of enforcer golem sweeps. But it was quiet. As quiet as the eternally churning Sea could be. So he moved on to his customary pre-dive prayer to the great spirits.
Icann, vast wave-binder, lay my flow straight and keep me clear of sinkholes. Ouroboros, saltwater on neodymium, help the currents forget my passage. Tower-Rhizome, brass eidetiker, do not let my anger fade unsung. Silt swept in your dance, I plead for a safe journey.
The words vanished into the swishing dark like tungsten weights. Without ceremony or echo.
He waited.
forget, came a scintillating whisper like knock-on
detonations in the body of a firefly.
clear, came a buzzsaw-growl like a thousand metal cliffs
twisting into a grin.
sung, came a self-similar wail like a church bell that
had never seen sunlight.
So, with these good omens at his side, he dissolved the barrier, and plunged into the worldless depths.