by Olga Werby
“Are you good, Lizard Girl?” Gattara asks me. It’s like she knows, groks, my frustration.
It’s a little repetitive, I say to hide my discomfort at the vanishing memory. How do people navigate these streets? Everything is the same. But that’s the thing about fractals—everything is the same at every scale by definition. I think even the colors here are fractal, displaying similar recurring patterns at every level of detail.
“People can get used to anything,” she answers. “And we have map apps to help us get where we want to go. There’s no need to remember charts and atlases.”
That’s true, but I can’t help but feel like some vital spatial processing ability is being wiped out from the generation of map app users. I try to remember the grid layout of the Ring City, but it’s useless. Did we pass this screaming magenta complex before? Or is it just remarkably similar to the last one we saw but new to us? I can’t tell.
The thing about the Ring City is that all the streets are rings. So this box fractal is twisted and stretched into a circular form. In just a few turns—fewer than I would have guessed—we come to the inner moat. The black castle looms above us.
From a distance, the castle looked like it was made from black marble. But up close, it looks like a dense network of dark spidery connections. Once in a while, blue sparks pass between adjacent webicles, jumping from one set of tangles to the next. I feel it in my pulse before I realize that the whole castle beats like a heart. It’s not stone; it’s living tissue.
We stand by one of the gates—the one at six o’clock, I believe, but we had walked a tangled path and I could be wrong.
“We wait here,” Gattara tells me and sits on the multicolored pavement.
For what? The bridge from the city to the castle proper is right in front of us just a few steps away. I want to go across. I want to find Ghost in that dark, breathing web. I feel a pull towards the black castle. It’s like I could just float there. The feeling is so strong, that I have to dig into Gattara’s shoulder to anchor my little dragon body to her.
“We can’t pass until the shadow from the central tower is cast over the bridge,” Gattara says. “Then the neurons will sleep and we can safely cross.”
Neurons? Is this thing a brain? It looks like a castle. But it does pulse like a biological thing.
“The recollections and dreams move from the Ring City and into the memory castle and back over the two bridges. If we walk over it now, we will get tangled up in her thoughts.”
I look at the gentle explosions of ideas flowing across and through the bridge. I don’t want to be lost in the black castle of memories. I’m having a hard time remembering my own.
“You don’t have to worry about getting lost, Lizard Girl. Not as long as you are with me,” Gattara tells me.
It is not the right thing to say—I don’t trust the old woman, but I’m more scared of the castle. If Ghost was with me…
“We’ll meet your friends soon.”
I keep forgetting that she can hear my thoughts. I try to quiet my mind, but it roars loudly. Something about the black castle makes me anxious, makes me want to yell out my name. I’m a great and powerful dragon! I scream.
“Of course you are. And so much more,” Gattara adds, oh so quietly.
I beat my wings and Gattara’s apps get agitated. We are like a nest of wasps now—an angry buzz set in motion, waiting for the right time to swarm.
Gattara murmurs something to her fuzzy daemons and they relax. I still hum with excess energy. It’s as if I’m making up for my lack of mental control with movement. Then I feel the energy ebbing. I see the dark shadow of the central tower moving towards us. Time is different here. It speeds up or slows down on a whim. The shadow is racing towards us. It is moving so fast that I worry we won’t have enough time to cross the bridge.
“Ready, Lizard Girl?” Gattara gets up and leans into the bridge. From this perspective, I can see even more purple-blue bursts of energy within the bridge tangles. So many thoughts are passing in front of us, streaming to the black castle.
The shadow sucks in all of the color from the Ring City. It rushes in. I’m ready. Gattara jumps on the bridge just as darkness touches it. The mind of the black castle quiets. Gattara runs. I feel the tangles of neurons reach for me. They try to pull me in, but the apps are crowding around, protecting me. We make it halfway across, then halfway again, and again. Every time we cover half the distance to the end. Half. Half. Half. Half.
The shadow has almost passed. Already, the thought explosions start up at the far side of the bridge. They are tentative at first, but ideas start to pulse rapidly up and down the length of the whole bridge. The tower’s shadow simply jumped forward in time. We are exposed on the fully functional mind of the Ring City castle. A tentacle of castle dreams grabs me. The apps’ protection is not enough. I can feel Gattara struggling to pull free and get across. If you halve your distance to a destination each time you move, you will never get to the end—you will always be infinitely far away, even as you get closer and closer. I am ripped from Gattara’s shoulder. I flap my tiny bright orange wings. My necks stretch to reach the other side. But at the last moment, Gattara gets across and I fall into the deep web of thought.
It’s dark. The darkness inhales all light. I can’t see. I can’t feel. I don’t know time. The space is confining; there’s not enough room to breathe, but fortunately, I don’t need to. Not here. Claustrophobia is just an idea. I can ignore it. I don’t need space.
I sit still and try to figure out what’s next. Stillness is good. After a while, I begin to see flashes of purple. They are distant at first but come closer with time. I wait; I am in no hurry. I watch the fireworks with my many heads and many eyes. Each is unique; each carries different information. Each is a visual representation of data transfer. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. I’m inside the black castle brain. I got sucked in when I was riding Gattara’s shoulder. I vaguely wonder if the witch made it. But I don’t really care. Gattara is not one who dies. She is part of this universe. Just as I am. Just as I want to be.
Yes, that’s what I want. I want to live here forever. It is a relief to know the answer to Gattara’s question.
I wait and keep track of the approaching purple lights, but when one explodes next to me, it’s a surprise. Isn’t it always that way? You wait and wait, and when it comes, you are not ready. I didn’t close my eyes and now I have many afterimages: yellow blobs—purple’s complement—floating in my vision, blocking everything out.
“Jude?”
The blobs fuse and break and merge again.
“Jude? Can you hear me?”
It’s like being inside a lava lamp…
“Jude? It’s Slick. They sent me to find you.” I can’t see the little ball of fur. Where is he? And why Slick? I hardly know that, that—
“Jude? Ghost sent me.”
Ghost?
“Yes. He told me to help you find your way home. They don’t need you anymore. Your work is done.”
I am home. The purple blobs are finally dissolving and I see the little kitten. His fur is of different lengths and of random colors. And yet it has a reason behind it, some mathematical system of patterning. Slick belongs in the Ring City, I decide. He fits there.
“Would you like to leave here? I can take you to the city or the castle, whichever you prefer,” he says.
I consider. The Ring City was interesting but dead—well, at least deep in slumber. I want to learn things. I guess I would rather go to the black castle. Where’s Ghost? I ask Slick in my head. He seems to know how to cyber talk mind-to-mind.
“He said that he would find us wherever we go.”
That’s true; Ghost knows the way. Why did they send you? I ask. It’s a strange choice—I don’t know Slick. Not really.
“I was expendable.”
It makes me angry—no one is expandable. I must have screamed that, for Slick explained.
“I didn�
�t know her. Not really. There wasn’t much I could do to help with her memory reconstruction. So, they sent me to find you.”
He must mean the girl. The dead princess. I calm down. I like when explanations make sense.
“Please, Jude. Come with me.”
Who’s Jude? The sound is familiar. I am experiencing a strong feeling of saudade, but I don’t know why. I decide that I simply don’t like being confined in darkness. I am a creature of life and flight. It’s time to move.
Let’s go, I tell Slick. And just like that, we plummet into the dark filaments of the black castle’s mind.
There is more and more purple, flashing all around us. Some flashes are like lightning—bright and fast then gone. Some are deep, prolonged glows. Slick is taking me toward one of those.
It’s a memory, I decide. We enter the purple haze and everything changes. I sit on top of the fluffy, multicolored cat. I’m a tiny, seven-headed, orange-winged dragon. I roar with laughter; it sounds like a tiny bell ringing. Slick chortles in response. We are both happy to get out of the darkness.
Slick jumps into some bushes, and I hang on. I do not want to fall off his back. We are in front of a building that I think I used to know well. A boy is standing at the door, almost punching buttons to get in. He looks familiar. Dude! That’s Dude! He looks frightened, unsure of himself. He steps up then backs away from the keypad, raising and lowering his hand, and never actually touching any buttons. He rocks on his heels, turns, and walks away, then he runs back and almost does it this time. But then he makes a growling noise and drops his arm. Shoulders hunched, he walks away for good. Wuss!
Why didn’t he go inside? I ask.
“Scared,” Slick says.
Of what?
“He wants to ask a girl on a date but is he scared of talking to her dad,” Slick says.
Makes sense—it’s hard to talk to parents. I get a momentary sense of dancing and a crowd cheering. I was a great dancer. Dude was lucky to have me. But he’s such a noob. Wait. What? What was that? I shake my many heads and accidentally bang my glass neck with one of the eel heads. That scares me and the elusive memories of dancing slip away. I can’t bring them back.
“Come, I’ll show you other sutaffu,” Slick says.
We walk down a normal street—regular trees and lawns and footpaths—but I start to see subtle changes, distortions in reality. A tree is covered in purple leaves. A bush has arms instead of branches, and each arm is holding bouquet of flowers in its tiny hand. One arm accidentally hits another, and soon there’s a flower fight, petals everywhere, like pink snow. A gust of wind picks up the broken flowers and whips them up into the air. They surround a little girl walking with her dad, hand in hand. And now she has a pink petal tutu. It’s lovely. But it breaks my heart. The flowers are all smashed, dead. It is sad.
“I want you to talk to someone,” Slick tells me and turns down an alley. I don’t remember an alley so close to my apartment building.
As he runs, the walls of the alley converge, forming a canopy above us. Now we are inside a tunnel. There is a door at the end. When we get close, it opens. It’s the white room. I don’t want to go in, but I don’t jump off Slick’s back in time. The door slams shut in my face.
There are two chairs facing each other. I take one—I have played this game before. The eels float darkly inside my body; the snakes on my head are restless. Slick hides underneath my seat. We wait.
“Hello, Jude,” he greets me and sits down. At least we’re the same size now.
“Hello, Tom.” I am still angry with him for calling me a nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he says as if reading my mind. But people do this a lot in cyberspace, apparently. Mind reading is not a hard trick out here. I try to blank all thoughts from my immediate consciousness. This man doesn’t deserve to know anything about me.
“Ghost wanted me to tell you that it worked,” he says. What? What worked? I hate puzzles. I think I already told him that. He sees my anger and confusion and continues to talk gibberish. “We were able to save Jude. We pulled the missing pieces from you, the ones that the disease burned away from her, and she will make it. She’ll be slightly different, but she will live.”
I’m glad. Didn’t I tell Gattara I wanted her to save the little girl in the pink tutu?
“You helped,” Tom says. “We used your personality patterns and memories to patch the holes in Jude’s.”
And they didn’t ask my permission? I don’t say anything because I am so angry with him. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t hold on to any of my memories. The moment they surfaced, they took them. They didn’t ask for my consent; they just took them. And now, Tom is about to say something bad to me. I can feel it.
“But now she doesn’t need you anymore. She’s getting better.” He’s uncomfortable. I can see that he wants to do something that he thinks is wrong. I want to tell him he’s done wrong already. “I’ve decided to let you go,” he says finally.
Let me go? He never controlled me! How can you let someone go when you never had them in the first place? I want to scream. My eels spark inside of me, outraged and raging with fire and lightning. How dare he?
“I can’t tell your dad about you. You understand, don’t you? He almost lost his little girl. He won’t be able to handle this. So, you’ve got to just go.”
I can see it pains him to talk to me this way. But I don’t care. He is telling me that I can’t see my dad anymore. Why? And who is that anyway? Is it the man holding the hand of the girl in the pink tutu? He seemed like nice man, but I don’t remember him. I don’t know him. I don’t care. I don’t care! But for some reason, I want to cry. I don’t know why. The little girl is saved. That is good. She can be with her daddy. Daddy’s little princess. The tears fall. They make the sound of rain on a tin roof.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Tom repeats over and over. Then he gets up and runs away.
I wait for my tears to dry then ask Slick, “Who was that man?”
“No one,” he says. “Ready to go, Lizard Girl?”
Liz. The name just came to me in a flash—Lizard Girl is just so na-beu; there’s nothing memorable about it. A powerful dragon like me merits something more. Liz is good. I like the sound of “Liz.” It makes a nice buzz on my tongues as I say it. My snakes love it too. “Call me Liz.”
“Sure, Lazard Girl,” Slick says. He is so annoying, but I let it go. I have all the time in the world, why waste it on being irritated by a cyber fuzz ball? “Ready?” he asks.
“Sure. Where are Pixie and Ghost? Sleazy and Doc? Should we find another adventure to play in?” I rub my neck. There is a thin ring of glass all around.
“You should get one of those fruits from the forest to heal you,” Slick says. I know just the ones—the sapsuckers or life givers.
“Did Pixie get her arm dealt with?” I ask.
“Of course.”
It is good to know that the effects of the nasty glass snails were only temporary. Pixie should have told me. But as long as I can get that strange fruit… “Ghost said something about going to the Alice in Wonderland world. I’m game,” I say. I am sick of hanging out in this stupid white room. I hope it gets erased.
“Not Alice in Wonderland again,” Slick whines.
“Ghost likes it,” I say and get up. And I like Ghost, I add to myself. The eels explode in fireworks around my heart. I like him a lot. My neck is brilliant with multicolored lights. It is almost worth keeping the glass ring…but no.
I feel euphoric. Forelsket is almost ripping my chest open. How did I not notice how I felt about Ghost before? Perhaps dragons feel love differently. Well, I can explore that, too. I allow my eels to burst into heads and my snakes turn back into powerful wings. I drop to all fours—I love the power of a dragon avatar. And here they are—my feelings for Ghost are still there. Good. I hate to be fickle.
I pick up the colorful kitty, set him on my back, just between my shoulder blades, and stride out of t
he door into The Far Cinct.
There’s a word for that?
A Dictionary of Cool Words That Hide True Feelings & Meanings from Parents or Other Clueless Adults
Much of the strange vocabulary that Lizard Girl, Jude’s avatar, and her friends use arise from their need to create a sense of linguistic privacy from the grownups. These are real words and come from hard-to-translate ideas from other languages, professions, or subcultures.
Age-otori—a feeling that you look worse after a haircut. (Based on a Japanese word.)
Ataraxia—a sense of stoic calm. (Based on an ancient Greek word.)
Backpfeifengesicht—a face in need of a fist. (Based on a German word.)
Chingada—a hellish place where all who annoy you are sent. (Based on a Spanish word.)
Cinct—encircled, bound, bordered, surrounded. (An Old English word based on Middle French succincte and Latin succinctus.) There are other meanings too, but you will need to wait for the next story.
Desenrascanço—the ability to find a creative way out of a bad situation. (Based on a Portuguese word.)
Dépaysement—the sense of displacement one feels when visiting a foreign country and being far from home. (Based on a French word.)
Doppelgänger—a duplicate of a person. (Based on a German word.)
Dustsceawung—the contemplation of the idea that everything turns to dust eventually. (Based on an Old English word.)
Eudaimonia—a deep fulfillment and the resulting happiness, even as it goes through periods of momentary frustration and pain. (Based on an ancient Greek word.)