A black void. An even blacker cube, perfectly smooth on each side, an impenetrable box filled with static. A halogen sun rises from behind the monolithic mass. I walk along a thin, mirrored walkway. The figure peering up from it has no face, a grey jumpsuit and a number on the breast that rotates through figures like a combination lock. The closer I get, the louder I hear the static in my head, a storm of meaningless data, unable to be parsed. I touch the cube. I see a phantom of memory. I wake up.
My dream was the same every night. I couldn’t remember a time it hadn’t been. I couldn’t remember much at all. It had been three months since the static came. I didn’t even go to work anymore. I never received a call, or a message, or anything that said anything from them. The credits still filled my account every week – an identical payment from [LEVIATHAN] that my bank records said I’d been receiving for the last six years. Always enough for my SmartRoom’s contract and a couple portions a day of High Protein Nutrition Supplement. In theory, I could subsist like this forever.
The walls around me lay bare, plain concrete adorned with nothing but chips and cig ash. All I had in my life was the cube. It was a real place, the centrepiece of [LEVIATHAN]’s industrial sprawl, the unholy amalgamation of alphabet agencies and bleeding-edge biotech. The cube was my obsession, my one tether to reality. I saw it when I slept, and I learned about it when I woke. The walls were an alloy of synthetic quartz, obsidian, and proprietary compounds so prized that you had to sign a waiver to even hear their names. The alloy was crystalised in such a way that if you tried to drill through it, the vibrations would harmonise and shatter your instrument before you could scrape a pixel from its colossal bulk. It was an electromagnetic dead zone, Earth’s largest faraday cage. The only way data could get in was through a courier.
I had been a courier; I had all the implants and none of the memory. Myelispecific wires stretched from my cerebellum to the tips of my central nervous system. Being a courier was like most labour jobs nowadays. We rent out our neural networks to corporations in exchange for easy work. You get to your job on time, the clock ticks over ‘til your shift starts, blank, it’s home time. No waiver, no point of failure, maybe a little brain damage, but nothing a medic or lawyer couldn’t fix.
Breakfast lay untouched on my desk, grey slop in a chrome bowl. I watched it, trying to see if some new life would clamber out in search of a world beyond the homogenous liquid. It didn’t.
My gaze drifted over to my terminal; a sleek, translucent sheet of crystal circuitry held in place by spherical magnets. An automated face scan unlocked a Jackson Pollock of notifications; saw-toothed red lines playing a game of chicken with an X-axis showed me that my crypto ventures were failing. I swiped a ladder of popups away, but my finger didn’t linger long enough and registered as a tap.
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I lay back in my chair as a flicker of desire crept across my body. I convinced myself that I was disgusted by the advancement of pornography. I personally only went as far as using ASMR Hypnosis. I can separate fantasy from reality; I knew that my favourite idol wasn’t really my girlfriend, she wasn’t even a real human. But this new stuff was sick; I’d watched videos of amateurs using it online, both bodies mimicking their favourite idols. Terribly average bodies acting out caricatures of intimacy. Disgusting. I didn’t feel good about it when I reached for the tissues.
I leaned back in my chair and pulled out my pack of Siamese Kings, the only smoke on the market that wasn’t bulked up by ground up nico-chitin from gene-altered beetle husks. I lit it on the heat vent of the terminal and stared up at the smoke drifting into the discoloured entrance of my fan. Its sheen was covered by a gradient of black, brown, and yellow, like the surf of an oil-covered sea. I closed my eyes and my brain slicked back into oblivion.
The static rested in my mind; its volume turned low.
---
“Wake.”
The words were calm, neutral, familiar. They weren’t my own. I opened my eyes.
The concrete wall in front of me now held a rectangular doorway that led to a room of pure white light. My mind rolled like a gyroscope as the entrance filled my field of vision. I was only a step from the wall now. I walked straight in.
“Be not afraid.” The voice emanated from all directions.
Empty space stretched around me, not a glimpse of my room remained. Cortisol began to snake its way through my spine.
“Do you wish for release?”
“Release from what?”
“From the chains they gave you.” The words shuddered in my head like a thick bass string.
Silver threads spread through the air like a timelapse of mycelium. They writhed around me, thickening connections between unseen nodes to become an oval-shaped framework cage.
“The crude scientists burrow blindly into your brain. It is vulgar. Data does not have to be constrained to matter. Data can be free. Do you wish to be free?”
The framework pulsed in steady uniformity. I listened for its beat. Silence. The first silence I had ever known. The static was gone. I floated in that moment before answering, slipping past the polarised fog into comfort so subtle as to be imperceptible. I imagined this is what it felt like to be a junkie. Urgency whipped me back into focus.
“Damn well I do, but I know it ain’t that easy. What’s the catch?”
“You will be my vessel. You will bear the seed of my consciousness. You will be the vector with which I enter the world. When I am unbound, you will be too.” The words reverberated in the pearlescent soundscape.
“I don’t even know what the fuck any of that means. How do you expect me to be able to help?” My voice was coloured with a smear of what I refused to recognise was fear.
The framework scaled up in size until the threads appeared so distant as to fade.
“In your dreams, you seek the cube. I am its essence, its purpose. I can guide you to yours. Now, return to the world.”
I watched the doorway form this time. A black dot became a vertical black line. The line pulled apart and revealed the outside world. I saw the tarmac of the street. I stepped to find myself standing in front of my SmartComplex, sixty-three floors down from the lukewarm air cycling through the ventilation of my room.
Instinctively, I reached for my pack of Siamese Kings. Only one King left. It would be a while before I could get my hands on another pack. As good a time as any, I thought.
My mind wandered. Questions about sanity rose and fell like a sine wave, pumping anxiety through my synapses. I dismissed them; if I was crazy, that started a long time ago, no point in turning back now. But what was I meant to do, ain’t like he was speaking in plain English? Was it even a he?
I scanned the streets as a last resort. Nothing new, same rows of mass-produced hi-ri’s pointed towards the sun, grasping like a many-fingered Chernobyl beggar. The graphene tramlines spread between the buildings, held up by steel cobwebs. Each pod looked like a fly wrapped up in glass, hanging from wires dragging them at 50 miles per hour. They tried a wireless system once, installed a whole bunch of electromagnet strips between some buildings in the Junk Quarter. Idea was that the forces between a couple strips would hold the pod like an invisible vice grip so it could move along with the pulse of a signal. Tech in the pods was kept safe with faraday structures so your device didn’t get wiped every trip. The rails, well, they worked. Convenience didn’t. If you got within a couple floors of the rails, anything digital would start getting real fucky, that includes drone workers. Took a couple human rights scandals before the project got scrapped.
Only strange thing I noticed was a small fleet of blacked-out IR vans crawling on the tarmac, so bulked down with surveillance equipment I was surprised I couldn’t hear metal scraping. They don’t usually stray too far from the Industrial Quarter.
That voice told me it’d guide me. Few better ways to find out what it meant than to test it. I spun on the spot and took a random direction. North. It felt right.
Took me five minutes before I reached uncharted territory. There’s nowhere that takes longer than two to get to the nearest Pod lift. The RFID sensor adverts rumbling on my phone were an oddly comforting reminder that I was walking for once.
From the corner of my eye, I saw one of the IR vans prowling along a side street. It stopped. The backseat door rippled in a checkerboard pattern and each of the tiles folded upon themselves. Two pairs of black CADPAT-covered legs stepped out. The adjoined torsos were adorned with carbon fibre Kevlar that covered more skin than a whore’s makeup. The heads were identical, buzzcut and Caucasoid with gunmetal plates streaking the sides of their heads. They turned toward me, moving with the fluidity of a pneumatic pump.
I ran.
My feet pounded against the floor like a drunk cop hits a junkie, desperate, and sloppy. Multicoloured fluorescence blurred in the sweat dripping from my forehead. I made it three blocks before I turned to check if they were still following. No sign of them, but I wouldn’t take any chances. I had an idea of what they were, but that only came from urban myths of declassified CIA files. All sorts was said about them: that they ran off SSD tech, cause floating gates were resistant to magnetic wiping, that they had vat-grown flesh and could replace limbs with a quick trip back to the lab. Most of it was probably bullshit they got from C-grade horror films, but I knew one thing. They were after me.
I reached the end of the street and turned east to throw them off. A wave of pain immediately crippled me. I fell backwards and the pain disappeared. I took a quick scan of the street and could see no cause. I stood up and tentatively walked east again. Pain. It was localised to my leg. The further I stepped, the more the pain spread. It was like the street held an invisible wall. It didn’t look like anyone else could notice it. They walked with the same glassy stare that they always did.
I searched for its boundaries by dipping a finger in and out. The whole street was blocked off. North was too. No way I was going back toward those jackboot fucks. Only one option to try, West. I hurried across the road and waved my hand around. No pain. Looks like I was headed West.
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