by A A Woods
Project Recollection
The Affinity: Book One
A novel by
A. A. Woods
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-951803-06-3
Copyright © 2020 A. A. Woods
All rights reserved.
Amonoux LLC
Cover designed by Rebecacovers
Proofreading by Baz
With assistance from Fowler Brown (fowlerbrown.com)
Other Books by the Author
The Star Siren
Vagabonds: Book 1 of the Scottstown Heroes Series
Hooded: A Young Adult Fantasy Retelling
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Author’s Note
This novel was crafted during a dark time in my life.
Back in 2016, I was a foundering writer, beating my head against the gatekeepers of traditional publishing, and watching as social media dramatically altered the way everyone interacted with each other (not for the better). National changes were happening that, no matter your leanings, made Twitter a pretty nasty place to be. I felt lonely and scared; lost in a big, cold, unfriendly world that seemed to roll forward like a tank, either ignorant or uncaring of what it crushed along the way.
So I wrote a book about resistance.
In many ways, Tora represents what I wanted to channel back in those bleak days before I blocked almost all social media. She’s tough, uncompromising, aware of how small she is and determined to act in spite of it. Creating her character was a gritty, defiant act of joy, her very existence in my mind a rebellion.
It’s surreal to write this addendum now, in 2020, which as we all know has been A Year. In times like these, it can feel frivolous to be writing fiction, especially genre fiction. But I hope this novel provides more than just escapism. I hope it inspires and emboldens. I hope that, like me, you find solace in Tora’s imperfect strength and use it as armor.
Above all, I hope that you enjoy her story. Because I’ve found that the best way to resist darkness is to create, and share, light.
Happy reading.
Tora
Monday, September 17th, 2195
8:49 P.M EST
I can’t see the room, but I can feel it.
It crackles with unspoken threat. Gamers spark against one another like live wires, like restless ghosts in the darkness of my world. The space around me is crowded, echoing, smelling of metal and sweat, takeout and cheap deodorant. The crowd laughs and taunts and jokes with the abandon of old friends. But beneath the whip-crack, bravado-laced voices is that familiar hum of excitement. Curiosity hangs like a fog. Everyone wonders who will step up to the Obaki Mat and rise to the challenge.
Unfortunately, none of those voices are Damien’s.
Whispers trail me as I make my way around the edge of Kitzima’s Gaming ring, following my memorized route with cultivated unsteadiness. I ignore the soft voices, adjusting my black Fuzz Specs to ensure no one can post my face on a private channel. Of course, recording memories is outlawed in here, an offense worthy of exile or worse. But it doesn’t hurt to be careful.
In the city of Nova, you never know when Project Recollection might be watching.
I shove through a thicket of Gamers, my body stiffening against the objections and the way they die too quickly. Sympathetic eyes burn holes in the back of my head and I try to pretend I don’t notice the way the hush seems to follow me. The way people shift to make way, moving aside so they don’t have any chance of tripping the poor blind girl.
I clench my fists against my sides.
Focus.
My ears are pricked, sorting through the myriad of noises for the arrogant tenor of Damien’s voice. But he’s nowhere to be found. A handful of Gamers sound familiar—beside me, a girl we defeated last week mutters something dark and uncomplimentary. Kitzima’s laughter drifts over her gathered subjects as she takes her place on the raised dais, preparing to announce the match. I can picture her, perched on her throne like a carnivorous bird, purple hair waxed into feathery ears, sharp-toothed smile flashing. Tonight’s prize—a memory-coded key to Project Recollection’s upcoming tournament—will be hanging in front of her, dangling over the Obaki mat. Her Vixens will be standing guard on either side, them scanning for trouble, her scanning for competitors. Fodder for tonight’s match. Only the few who’ve clawed their way up the ladder will attract her gaze. Those whose names are listed on the ancient, pixilated screens that coat the walls. Those willing to risk the damage of a cage match for the promise of riches and fame.
For the past six weeks, I’ve done everything in my power to make sure Damien is one of those Gamers.
So where the hell is he?
“Are you gonna challenge?”
The question is thrown past me, volleyed by someone who hasn’t noticed the black-haired girl shuffling along the periphery of the crowd.
“Naw, I’ve got enough plaques. Don’t need more.”
“But they say that the winner of ProRec’s tournament will get their newest cable. One with built-in Obaki compatibility.”
The second Gamer snorts.
“That’s just wishful thinking. Those corporate mooks are never going to lift the ban on Yuri Gamen tech.” A sigh. “But the money would be nice. I’ve been livin’ on Pueblo Pizzas for the past month.”
The first gamer laughs and I move on, one hand rising to my IRIS cable and pushing the sharp end deeper into my bun.
My cable looks like theirs. Bands of black tape snake up the wire to imply that it’s been tampered with, hinting at smuggled foreign wires and unstable, damaging connections. I wear the physical markings that separate Gamers from the rest of society like a badge, a shield to hide behind. But my cable is different, and if anyone in this room ever found out…
I think of my brother and the past few months, of the way my life has become so tangled with the goliath company. Somewhere in the snarl of my cable’s altered code lurks the secret of Zhu’s disappearance, answers to the questions he left behind. But I can’t access that code without ProRec equipment, equipment that can only be found inside their headquarters. I don’t care about the promised fame or money or the legal pardon for a life already lived. I don’t care about the dangled trophies of the clandestine tournament.
All I care about is the hairline crack in their armor, the one way to get inside.
I have to win that invite.
Damnit, Damien, where are you?
A hush falls. Pointlessly, instinctually, I look up. The darkness doesn’t change, but I imagine heads tilting, feet shifting, and Kitzima standing over it all like a nightmare queen.
“Welcome, friends,” comes her high voice, childish but for the undercurrent of malice. “You all know why we’re here.”
A rustle moves through the bodies around me as they turn, circles dissolving, merging into a single ring of spectators. The Obaki mat hums to life, filling the cavern with static. I grate my teeth together, disentangle myself from the watching crowd and move faster around the edge as I continue to hunt for Damien, silently cursing my unreliable teammate.
“Tonight, we are offering ProRec’s second-to-last invitation to whoever wants to step up and claim it.” Kitzima titters. “Since my Vixens have accrued their fair share, I have decided to leave this match open to challengers. After all, someone needs to show up for the tournament.”
I want to rip off my boot and throw it at her. Kitzima rigged the last five matches so that her Vixens claimed the keys. The ringleader herself snagged the first one without even the
semblance of a competition. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Kitzima had announced that she had no intention of even going. She plans to hold more than half of the memory-fingerprinted invitations and make sure no one else can use them. Her own attempt to sabotage Project Recollection’s mysterious plans.
I have to risk everything for a chance to enter the tournament and Kitzima is just going to throw it away.
“So, friends,” Kitzima’s voice continues over rising mutters. “Who will step up to the mat?”
Panic bubbles through my chest as the bodies around me shift and whisper. My time has run out. Damien—damn him—isn’t there. Anger prickles over my skin like goosebumps as I imagine him lounging in his apartment, recording memories for his private channel. Or peeling apart Anastasia Vasquez’s latest recollection about her stupid cat. Whatever the reason, he’s abandoned me. But my anger is swallowed by the ticking clock.
I have to make a decision.
Risk exposure or lose the key.
If anyone in the cavern is recording, if ProRec gets even one hint of where I’ve gone, they’ll be crashing through my door in hours, whisking me to a secure facility for the kinds of ‘interviews’ they’d conducted on Mom and Dad. But where ProRec found nothing in my parents’ cables, I know they’ll find plenty in mine. If I’m captured, their wireologists will find whatever my brother hid in my core code. They’ll take both software and hardware and I’ll won’t ever know what Zhu left there for me to keep safe.
Never let them see what I did, little tiger. Never let them find you.
But if I don’t step up now, then I might never find out what happened to him.
“I challenge.”
My voice is sure despite the flutter of uncertainty that beats against the inside of my ribcage like the wings of a tiny bird. The air around me shifts as Gamers step aside, away, their attention hot with surprise it falls on me like so many spotlights.
Kitzima’s chuckle echoes.
“Look at this pittie with delusions of grandeur. Where’s your champion, little Gamer?”
“I’m on Damien’s team,” I say, stepping forward, for once enjoying the power as people scramble out of my way. “I’m allowed to fight in his stead.”
“Certainly you’re allowed,” Kitzima purrs. “But can you? After all, it seems to me that being able to see is rather important.”
I force my lips into a sharp smile, angling my face in the direction of Kitzima’s voice.
“Do you plan to follow your own rules or not?”
For a moment, my defiance hangs in the air. Thickens it. I know Kitzima is weighing her options, wanting to send me away. It’s never settled well with her, allowing a blind girl in Damien’s pit crew. Especially when that blind girl became Damien’s only pit crew. And then Damien started sweeping the competition away. Before our last match, Kitzima sent her Vixens down from the raised dais and had them run a cheating diagnostic. Hypocrites. But we’d come back as clean as the Tunnels were dirty and she’d been forced to let us compete.
Now, standing alone in a sea of voices, I sense her hunger to turn me away, toss me out of her ring. But she can’t. Not in front of everyone.
At least, I hope not.
I hold my breath, wishing I could see her purple-tinted eyes.
“You can fight,” she says at last. I wait, sensing the caveat. “But who will fight you? After all, there’s no honor in beating a cripple.”
She might as well have slapped me across the face. I hold my shoulders high, my jaw tight. I fight the urge to spit on her floor and everything she lords over. This monstrous little creature has hit me where I am most vulnerable. Because it’s my choice to step up, plug myself in, risk my identity in a cage match for the slim chance to infiltrate ProRec’s headquarters. That falls on me.
But there’s nothing I can do if no one agrees to fight me.
It will be a forfeit match. I’ll lose the key, lose the last chance to find out what happened to my brother.
The silence is deafening, pressing in on all sides, crushing me.
Bastards.
I could challenge them all, beat any one of them in a program of their choosing.
But not if they refuse to fight back.
“Looks like you need to go home and let the real Gamers—”
“I’ll challenge.”
A new voice cuts through Kitzima’s smug words. Low. Husky. A beautiful sound. I turn toward it with bated breath as someone moves out of the crowd and steps onto the Obaki Mat with the clacking announcement of hard-soled shoes. The crowd rustles, a whispered question sweeping around the circle.
Who is that?
“Excuse me?” Kitzima snaps, her frustration obvious.
The stranger laughs.
“I challenge. Unlike these fine people, I have no problem hitting a blind girl.”
Tora
Monday, September 17th, 2195
9:01 P.M. EST
I move before Kitzima can interfere, shouldering between the Gamers too slow to have already moved aside. My steps are deliberate and careful as I make my way toward the middle of the cavern, toward the Obaki Mat.
Someone once told me that this great, branching chamber in the bowels of the city used to be a famous place. Before the hurricane that destroyed New York, people would flock to this center of light and civilization, papered with flashing screens and carpeted with the residue of previous visitors. Times Square they called it. It was supposed to be a great wonder of the world, visible even from space.
Well, it’s not even visible from the surface anymore.
When the new city was built, it sprouted on top of the old one like a fresh coat of paint. What once were roads became tunnels. Buildings turned into underground warehouses and factories and were eventually forgotten. An entire network of human development now rots beneath the bustling Nova super-scrapers like layers of a compost pile.
And in those layers lurk the Gamers and the MemHeads and all the other addicts. We are the insects beneath the rock, the residue society doesn’t like to acknowledge.
I move through these social outcasts as I step onto the mat. Here, my steps grow less certain. The Obaki Mat is raised, rolled out in what was once the center of the square. I’m used to standing behind the Gamer’s stand, plugged in to do damage control on Damien’s Yokai avatar. Up until then is familiar ground.
But this time, I must go further.
It takes me two tries to plant my foot on the mat and lift myself up.
“Do you need help?”
Kitzima’s voice rolls over me like a tide of broken glass, sharpened by the nervous laughter of the crowd. Gamers are moving, pressing against the edges of the mat. Their excitement is a palpable thing.
“I think she’s fine,” the newcomer answers for me, light, airy, almost mocking.
I want to tell her I don’t need her help either, but I swallow the words.
There are some things that are better shown by example.
I reach into my bun and pull out the pointed tip of my IRIS cable. Black hair tumbles down my shoulders, catching in the open zipper of my brother’s jacket. Hating the way my feet hesitate, nervous with uncertainty, I step forward until my hips hit the edge of the Gamer’s stand.
“I’m ready,” I say.
“Are you sure about this?” Kitzima asks, words laced with malevolence. “A cage match is dangerous. You might lose more than your sight.”
“I. Am. Ready.” I drop each word like a stone in water.
Kitzima’s soft chuckle reaches me, but I’m already facing across the mat, imagining what my opponent looks like.
I’ll find out soon enough.
“And you?” Kitzima asks the newcomer.
My opponent laughs again, the sound strangely canine, as if she’s one breath away from a growl. “Don’t worry, this won’t take long.”
We’ll see.
“Challengers,” Kitzima says with an edge of glee in her voice. “You may now plug in.”
&
nbsp; I take a deep breath, curl my fingers around the edge of the Gamer’s stand. And then I speak. “Tora, signing on.”
Sliding my IRIS cable into the port on the Obaki Mat feels like breathing fresh air after a lifetime of drowning. Electricity ignites my spine and travels to the tips of my neurons. With a swan-dive cascade, I tumble down my cable and into the mat like a child running home.
Sometimes I wonder how normal Gamers feel when the illegally braided-in Yuri Gamen wires spark against barely-compatible ProRec technology. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable, even painful, to enter the Mat with a banded cable. And with foreign wires tangled into the deepest parts of their brains, the inner lobes where ProRec technology refuses to venture, the risk of brain damage is ever-present. It’s the reaper they must live with, the demon on their shoulder.
But Zhu’s update to my software allows me to make that side-step easily, without risk, the code he wrote forcing my native IRIS Neurowiring to braid into my cerebellum and see the mat—and everything else I plug into—as an extension of myself. Instead of the constant, dizzying shift between body and system, I can project myself into the networks of my world as easily as a Tuner can watch a memory. To give me back my independence, my brother made the unnatural natural.
For me, at least.
I close my eyes beneath their Fuzz Specs, take a deep breath, and open them again in the head of my Yokai avatar.
Just like that, the world blurs into glorious focus.
I can see Kitzima on her dais, leaning out over the Obaki mat with her feral smile and her purple hair, waxed into twin fox ears and tumbling in schoolgirl curls around her ripped t-shirt.
I can see the crush of Gamers staring at me with a mixture of disbelief and nervousness, all of them waiting to see what kind of mental instability compels a disabled teenager to step up to the chopping block.