by A A Woods
You’re standing in the middle of the mess, alone, waiting for something.
But what is it?
You try to concentrate on a painting but the light shifts, seems to waver. The painting smudges into the wall, bleeding like a watercolor. And then, with a strange flash, the air is brighter, the yellow tint of morning rather than the red hues of dusk.
There’s a girl making her way around one of the stacks of empty canvases.
Was she there before?
Without being aware of moving, you’re sitting on the couch. Arms draped wide, feet kicked up on the clay-splattered coffee table, a coin dancing along the knuckles of one hand. Taxies zoom through mid-town like insects in the periphery of your vision, but your eyes are fixed on the girl. She’s young, maybe thirteen, and scowling with concentration. Black bangs chop bluntly across the pale skin of her forehead and long-fingered hands stretch out, a pianist playing invisible keys. Her eyes seem to focus without seeing. She pauses, hesitates. Her lips move but no words come out.
She takes a step, her legs about to knock over the stack of wooden frames.
“Peaches.”
Your voice vibrates through the silence and her head whips up, eyebrows crinkling with anger.
“I don’t need your help,” the girl snaps.
“You were about to hit Mom’s new canvases. Had to warn you.”
Her mouth twists and her fists clench.
“What’s the point of a code word if you explain it,” she says, stepping right and making her way toward you, edging slowly around the corner of the couch to plop down on the floor by your knees.
Your laughter is thick and rich with history. With love. Your thumb gives an expert flick and the coin glimmers as it twirls through the air. You catch it, leaning forward to tousle the girl’s hair.
“Shouldn’t you be working on something?” she says, swatting your hand away.
“It’s coming along,” you answer, stretching, languishing, watching your fingers return to rolling the coin across your knuckles.
The light seems to waver again, as if you’re underwater.
“Where did you put it?”
The girl’s voice is suddenly frosted, chilled, like something left outside in winter. Your body constricts, muscles pulling taut. When did the light become so assaulting? You try to focus on the paintings, but they keep moving, combining, like virtual amalgamations.
Something’s wrong.
Your eyes crinkle in thought, eyebrows pinching together. Your gaze picks through the room even as its pieces refuse to stay still, as the edges of things elude you. The girl is still staring at you, poking your leg with the sharp tip of her IRIS cable.
“Come on, Zhu, tell me.”
Suddenly, you shove to your feet. Step away.
Your voice comes sharp as the crack of a whip. “Nice try, Yasmin.”
For a moment, nothing happens. The air hangs still, lit from outside, dust motes glowing like snow. Then the girl’s face cracks into a sly grin, eerily mature for the childish face. The apartment begins to swirl, colors mixing like paint and then fading. Bleaching. The girl rises to her feet in a fluid motion, and as she does her body stretches, skin darkening, smile pulling into something impossibly cold and cruel.
“My best programmers worked on that one for two weeks,” says the girl-now-woman, brushing invisible dirt off her eggplant-purple button-down. “I have to admit, I was hopeful this one would work.”
Where before you were standing in an apartment, now you’re surrounded by nothing. A vast, blank expanse, empty but for the woman in front of you, her cropped black hair in almost violent contrast to the pale backdrop.
“Maybe you should give up,” you say, spitting the words at her.
“Maybe you should.” She cocks her head. “It’s been almost six months, Mr. Sidana. Don’t you want to go home?”
The emptiness warps and the apartment begins to re-form.
You close your eyes. “Stop it.”
There’s a distant chuckling and your arms pop out in goosebumps. But they aren’t your arms. Distantly, you feel the prickle of your cable, the vague irritation of braided Neurowiring spindling through your brain. This isn’t a memory.
It’s a simulation.
“Fascinating, isn’t it, what an altered cable is capable of.” Her words are like needles under your skin. “No wonder the Gamers love Yuri Gamen so much.”
You open your eyes and the blankness is back. Maddening. Empty. Broken only by her.
“I won’t help you, Yasmin,” you say, fists clenched against your thighs, against the white pants that make you feel like you’re disappearing. “Nothing has changed.”
“Always so stubborn. Even when you were nothing more than an assistant, you thought you knew better than everyone else.”
You take an aggressive step toward her. “Don’t you see what this program has the potential to do? Don’t you understand what kind of world it’ll make?”
“A world without death.”
Yasmin’s words are laced with fervor, but you shake your head.
“It won’t be that easy. People will fight it. It’ll drive a wedge between the rich and the poor. Something like this could tear our civilization apart!”
“I don’t care.”
You laugh mirthlessly and throw your hands wide. “Because you’ll get to live forever?”
Yasmin’s lips curl but it’s nothing like a smile.
“Not me,” she whispers, low and harsh.
Your arms fall. “Who could possibly be worth the end of the world?”
She scoffs. “You, of all people, should understand.”
“I would never do this,” you say in a low, pleading voice. “Not even for Mei.”
Something moves in Yasmin’s gaze like a shark beneath still waters. “We’ve seen her, you know.”
You flinch.
Yasmin goes on. “She’s thrown her lot in with the Gamers. My men are tracking her down as we speak.”
“Leave my sister alone.”
“But it’s for her own good, Zhu. At the very least, it’ll get her away from their type.”
“Leave. Her. Alone.”
Yasmin’s lips curl. “Then join us. Help us with the Ankh Program, tell me where you hid the memory, and I’ll never bother your family again.”
“I won’t break.” Your voice comes out as a growl.
“Everyone does,” Yasmin says with a smirk. “We just have to find the right button to push.”
She turns away and you tumble forward, half-frantic. Yasmin’s digital shape is fading, leaving you alone in a desert of white. Again. Your voice rises, throwing words at the disappearing woman like hooks, fighting to draw her back. “Do you really think they’d want this? Whoever you’re doing this for, do you think they’d be proud?”
Yasmin pauses to look over her shoulder. In her expression you glimpse the lionesses of the savannah and the grizzly bears of the north. She is tamed wilderness, controlled ferocity, a targeted storm of things you can’t possibly begin to understand.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
You lunge for her, arms thrown wide, trying desperately to keep her here. But she’s already gone, evaporated like a body made of mist.
The whiteness presses in and you scream, your frustration the only company in an endless, empty prison.
Tora
Thursday, September 20th, 2195
6:10 P.M. EST
My room might be a sanctuary, but the abandoned car factory is a playground.
In the months following Zhu’s disappearance, as I was exploring the Tunnels and looking for a way to get inside the ProRec super-scraper, I stumbled upon several of the old factories and manufacturing plants that languished under Nova, built right on top of the original city. I read somewhere that the major businesses of New York created ten million jobs during the building boom that happened after Hurricane Tethys. The economy bloomed, the city prospered, stocks exploded like bottles of cha
mpagne. And then all of it was left behind as the city above grew and stretched, becoming more distant with every new project and contract and glittering idea.
The warehouses I discovered felt eerily like the MemHeads I would often see hiding in old buildings and living in forgotten stores, things that were once alive before they were abandoned and hollowed out. Stepping into these relics, hearing my footsteps echo through cavernous spaces, it was easy to imagine them thrumming with activity and noise. But now they sprawl like corpses in the act of dying, their walls collapsing one by one.
This place though—an assembly plant that once manufactured the hybrid precursors to the aerial vehicles that swarm Nova’s skies today—remains strong. Steadfast. Built by a German-American company named Edeken, it’s the only place I’ve found where the machinery still works, the ports are still clean, and the automated system remains intact, patiently awaiting instruction.
As I step inside, leaving the door open behind me, I take a deep breath of clean, metallic air, letting the familiar smells of engine grease, battery acid, and burnt plastic fill my lungs, calm my nerves.
Edeken has no idea, but their old New York headquarters has been getting lots of off-the-books usage lately.
Trying not to imagine the dribble of my time running out, I stride up to one of the manager stations, steps measured and memorized. In this lonely, unearthed place, nothing moves. No one comes. For as long as I’ve been escaping down here to practice and build my mental muscles—and my bike—there’s been nothing but my own breath and the grinding of vast machinery to fill the silence.
Until today.
The clicking of heels announces Khali’s arrival.
“Nice place,” she says, walking toward me with decisive, commanding footsteps. “But I think you should hire a new decorator.”
“You’re late.”
“Fashionably.” I smell lilacs. Hear a rustle. I imagine her tossing her hair over one shoulder, her rainbow IRIS cable swinging with it. “So, should I be worried that you’ve brought me to some secret bunker to murder me and grind my body into fuel?”
I throw her a look, eyebrows raised.
“Hey, I gotta ask.”
“It’s just an old car factory.”
“That’s fairly obvious.”
“I brought you here to practice.”
“Making cars?”
“Putting your mind into computer systems,” I say, ignoring her sarcasm.
Khali shifts next to me, stepping around the manager station and onto the main floor. The music of her shoes is sonorous, somehow enormous and tiny at the same time.
“This place is ancient,” Khali says, her voice coming from below, from inside, as if she’s speaking to me from the back of a cave. “How can we possibly practice here?”
“Edeken was the first company to use IRIS cables in their manufacturing line,” I answer, my fingers running over the controls in front of me. I pull the tiny recorder from the cuff of my jacket, hoping Khali doesn’t notice, hoping she’s looking at the factory or the roof or my moving lips as I plunge on. “It was created so instructions could be given real-time. They didn’t have to teach workers anymore, just give them the necessary memories as needed. Massively cut down on training costs.”
“Bet the employees were thrilled about that.”
I can picture Khali’s smirk, the way she throws the words over one shoulder. I try to shove the image out of my mind and ignore the flush creeping up one side of my neck. A part of me wants to ask for her help now, just throw my cards down on the table.
But I can’t trust her yet. Not when I still have no idea who she is. She could hand me over to ProRec and then everything would be lost.
So I continue. “The company moved to Albany after the city shut down manufacturing in the Tunnels. Luckily for us, it was cheaper to leave everything behind than tear it down.”
“So… we are making cars then?”
I allow myself a smile, showing Khali teeth as I find one of the two ports with my index finger, run my nail along the rim, and drop the tiny, grain-sized recorder inside.
“No,” I say, relishing the trill of excitement. “We’re going to fight.”
Khali’s coming back, shoes clicking up the stairs. “But we don’t have an Obaki Mat. How can we duel without a Yuri Gamen system?”
“You need to work on your creativity if you’re gonna make it as a Gamer,” I answer.
She chuckles. “Alright, I bite. What do you have in mind?”
“We fight,” I say, sweeping one arm out toward the factory, gesturing to the vast expanse of machines humming with energy from the city’s solar power grid, “In there.”
Khali whistles. “You really know how to show a girl a good time.”
“It’s simple enough,” I continue, reaching up to pull my IRIS cord out of my bun. “There’s a car in the middle of the conveyer belt with a white X painted on both wings. Find it and bring it back.”
“And you’ll be trying to stop me?”
I grin. “Exactly.”
“Careful, Tora,” Khali says and I feel her arm against mine, a brush of warmth over my brother’s jacket. “My teachers always called me relentless.”
“I hope so. I haven’t had a fair match in ages.”
Khali laughs and I smile, but three words pulse in my brain, the question that follows Khali like the smell of lilacs.
Who are you?
“Ready?”
“Always,” she says, and I hear the grate of a cable sliding into a port, the slight grinding sound as the tip of her IRIS hits the tiny recorder and pushes it into the grooves.
My lips twitch.
Soon enough, I won’t be working with such a stranger. And maybe, if I’m lucky, something on that recorder will give me the leverage I need.
“Just like with the bike,” I say, pulling my own IRIS cable around as my intestines writhe with something that feels suspiciously like guilt, “you’ll need to fight the tide. Lean into it. You should be able to see through the warehouse cameras, but don’t try to see through all of them at once. It’ll be too much.”
“No such thing,” she says, her coarse voice almost a purr as we both tense with excitement, with apprehension. It doesn’t matter that we are strangers standing on the edge of society, alone in a place that built the very city we can’t be a part of. This feeling of stormy calm before a fight draws us back. Keeps us here. Makes the risk worth it. I’ve seen it in Damien’s eyes, heard it in Kitzima’s laugh, watched it on the mats. We may not be MemHeads, but the thrill is no less addicting.
We’re Gamers.
It’s in our blood.
I slide my own IRIS cable into the port and blink through a thousand cameras.
The lights flicker once and then burst to life, throwing illumination into every crowded corner. And it’s like looking into a frozen anthill, a place of industry and movement locked in time. The machines are thrumming insects, hard exoskeletons guarding sensitive technology, mechanical arms cocked and jointed and stretching toward the ceiling. Everything shimmers and gleams in the light, the auto-dusters still humming as they spin up the far wall. A massive conveyer belt stretches through the center like a tightrope, hung heavy with half-built wings and enormous, detached fans in the act of being installed. Peppered along the ceiling, ground, walls, floor, are the moving parts of an automated army, mindless soldiers waiting for commands from this very station, from the buttons and levers built for some unskilled laborer a hundred years ago.
Little did they know…
“Do you see the target?” I ask, my mouth strangely distant as my mind flexes, like fingers sliding into a glove.
“Yes.” Khali’s voice is strained, trembling with effort as she struggles to push her mind into the machines, extend her sense of self into something distinctly other. She’s a toddler, learning to crawl and stand and stumble forward.
But I’m a dancer.
This is my stage.
“I’ll give you
three chances,” I say as the factory thrums to life with lubricated efficiency.
“I won’t need that many,” she throws back.
I chuckle. The lights flicker with the sound. “Whenever you’re ready then.”
An impatient silence fills the factory, every robotic arm like a racehorse straining to be free. I shift behind it all like a fog, my mind a swirling, moving thing. I am everywhere and nowhere in this contained system, an omniscient sculptor of code.
And then Khali strikes.
One of the arms slips out of my control as she dives into it. Yellow-painted iron fingers brush against the target, the hybrid car with its wings spread wide, almost completed.
I could knock her out of the arm, but that wouldn’t be sportsmanlike. So instead, I flit into the conveyer belt. It rumbles, churns.
The marked car moves out of her grasp.
“One,” I say.
Khali only growls in response.
She doesn’t wait this time, leaping like a monkey to the next machine, the intricate webbed contraption that attaches massive fan blades. I slip into the arms around her, fingers closing around the spider-like appendages. But she’s ready for me this time. The unguarded blades of a half-built fan begin to spin. Tilt. And I feel the distant, painless rip as the arms are torn out of their sockets, their wires snapped and metal bones thrown wide.
“Impressive,” I say.
“Of course,” Khali snaps, but before she even finishes speaking, I’ve slid into a crane and I’m lifting the fan-attachment machine away from the conveyer belt, throwing it into the far corner. It lands in a crumpled heap, twitching as Khali throws her mind out of it.
“Two.”
“You’re savage,” Khali says, voice tight.
“I thought you liked a challenge.”
“I like to win more.”
“You have one more chance.”
Khali’s laugh is glorious and throaty like the ringing of rusted bells. It echoes over the grinding mechanisms.