8801: Journal entry, day 7, cycle 7

The voice was heavy, silken and somehow deadly, I remember it now and the gently falling rain. It felt like a weight I could not escape and I feel terror now, as I find myself here, damp and smelling like night again. As though something has happened to me and I don’t know what, I don't know where I have been.

Words on a wall, incantations that seem like salvation, bleaching away all knowledge of something that was too terrible. They are the whispered threads through things I do not understand, something only the city itself knows perhaps?

The night is a world I barely know or remember, I only know if it’s existence by the smell of rain in my damp hair and clothes. And always the feeling of something just on the edge, something that I almost know, that I should know but do not. It’s pressing into me like the echoes of a dream. A riddle of sorts, but is it something that I am supposed to find or is it somehow forbidden?

I went past the clone tanks on the way to Ancestral Glimpse - I was hoping there was time for me to use one of the pods. I look at their blank memoryless faces under smooth glass, behind them it is dark, as though they are coming up from deep in the ocean. I saw it then, in the darkened spaces between the tanks, perhaps an artifact caught like a reflection on the surface: a grin, white even teeth revealed by a mouth was somehow obscene. Then it was gone. There was something so familiar about it, the same sense of dread thickening in my veins, the sense that I was not outrunning it: the night and all the things that make me forget. And I hear the voice again. Then light cracks the gray dawn and I keep walking.

I passed the traders with their avatars making their way to the London Arc. The night’s rain evaporates from the pavement along with the hidden, nameless terrors. I want to plug in and be her for a while, to hang all my thoughts on that hook and leave my questions behind, become someone that at least for a while is an answer. These shattered realms, a lifeline to something that is true, maybe the only true thing.

***

558:

Enemy of my enemy delivered its usual rotation of well studied earth cliches. 558 sat at a table overlooking the street below, his companion who had sidled up already slurring her words, bumping into the table, was now rolling her eyes and complaining she ‘didn’t have enough xanax to deal with this bullshit right now’. This is what you came for, this was the experience. She continued to sip on her white wine talking about her ex husband and how she can’t find a good groomer for her dog these days. He continued to look down at the street. It had started to rain again, casting a soft volume of neon over the skyline. He turned back to look at her; this was starting to wear thin, the only reason he came was to test the zip suit against avatars like her. So far, none had seen through it to alert a bounty hunter that his number was still active, nor had anyone followed him or even looked at him a little too long.

Nina, or that's how she had introduced herself, continued to give her vapid, incoherent vinyets of her life with things like: “ so yesterday my anxiety ‘app’ asked how I was doing and then I said, I’m dunk!” laughing shrilly, spilling her drink down the front of her dress. He just continued to stare out of the window, unable to gather his thoughts, trying not to pay attention to his conversational companion.

After a while, he realized she had stopped talking, he could feel her looking at him. When he lifted his gaze, he saw she had now turned towards him with a quizzical tilt of her head, an oddly soft expression crossing her features - an affect suddenly incongruent with her preprogrammed persona.

“Under another sky, we are scattered pieces of earth” she said sadly, her eyes taking on a vague unfocused quality.

“What? Where did you hear that?” something was unwinding and It was prickling through his nerves, he was paying attention now.

“You know” she continued without indicating she’d answer the question, yet eyes suddenly intent on his, “I would be very careful if I were you, but it's probably too late now, this city has ways of trapping you…on this unknown shore,” She trailed off wistfully.

Then the moment was gone and she looked scathingly bored again. He felt like reaching across the table and shaking her, but he couldn’t even do that.

“Tell me where you heard that!” he shouted, knowing it was futile.

“Weren’t you listening” she said taking another sip of her wine “I’m bored of this conversation anyway” she said with a lopsided look of disgust, focusing her gaze somewhere above his head. Whatever or whomever had just spoken through her, it hadn’t been the avatar calling itself Nina.

Hastily, he stood from the table almost knocking over his drink. “Oh, so you’re just gonna go like that? Fine! You were unbearable anyway,” the avatar muttered.

He made his way outside, then stood leaning against the wall breathing heavy gulps of the ozone laced air. He felt as though something were closing in: this suit was either some sort of filter or a beacon and there was no way to take it off. On the other hand, if the cobbler hadn’t zipped him, he’d be vapor by now. But this thing wasn’t what he thought it was and neither was the mission he thought he was on, if that’s what it was? He was more like bait now: waiting for unknown entities and constructs to come up from the depths of the digital layers. Something had spoken through the avatar at Enemy of my Enemy, something that had known him.

Two citizens walked by, nearly bumping into him, deep in conversation, their avatars trailing behind engaged in a conversation of their own, their representational formations expressed as 1980’s earth bankers, their protocols set to expressing data as language:

“I don’t know if it’s this new upgrade” said one to the other “but don’t you feel something? My efficiencies are way down and some of my representational functions… like, I dunno? losing integrity”

“A virus?” said the second.

They touched fingers, exchanging their real data.

“It’s a language thing” said the second again.

“I feel it in the algorithm, something...something is changing”

They hadn’t noticed him and didn’t acknowledge him as they went by.

Neon blooms rippled their kaleidoscopic cityscapes across the patch of concrete wall he was standing next to. His heart was still racing and the cooling air wicked the sweat from the back of his neck. He reached out and pressed a palm against the shifting surface, its language of interpolated scenes. A new tableau rippled out, star-shaped from his hand: glowing letters scawling words across a wall, one he’d seen only two nights ago. Neon bloom hadn’t reached and colonized that part of the city yet: it was taking the image from his memory, somehow interfacing with his real-ware tech through skin contact.

‘Under another sky’…