558: “Those guys ever say anything about how numbers come up?”
7787: “No, they keep themselves to themselves for the most part. Why? You think your numbers up?”
558: “One came for me the other day”
7787: “Well the only thing that gets you flagged is illegal code. That’s when you got zipped?”
558: “Yeah”
7787: “Speaking of anomalous code, an artifact is coming up in the data from your real-ware, it might have been flagged as illegal. They don’t fuck about with that stuff. Lemme get a viz on it.”
558 now knew the cube was no longer a secret..
7787 squinted, adjusting the lens and inputting something into the display. “Interesting, there’s something coming up as three dimensional code, or it’s resolving as a three dimensional object but it looks as though there’s more latent code embedded within the object itself. Almost like geometry expressed as coordinates.” he frowned “Did you download anything recently?”
558: “No, it was given to me”
7787: “What the fuck!? You should know better! It could have been anything!”
558: “Don’t really think I had a choice. She just gave it to me and then she was gone.”
7787: “Who’s ‘she’?”
558: “The avatar who gave me that thing. At least I think it was an avatar, like nothing I’ve seen that’s ever been in fashion, a little girl in red shoes. The cobbler didn’t claim it as his work. Can you tell what it is? He seemed more interested in who sent the agent to me in the first place. Think that’s why he zipped me, wants me out there, incognito”.
7787: “Has it done anything?”
558: “It projected something onto the wall, like a maze or the map of a city, something like that.”
7787: “This city?”
558: “I couldn’t be sure? Maybe a district I’m not familiar with?”
7787: “Could those patterns be corresponding to coordinates?”
558: “But which ones? I think it’s possible!”
7787: “I’m also pretty sure the bounty hunter didn’t know about this thing or he would have tried to salvage your devices.”
558: “Yeah he nearly turned me to dust, he sure wasn’t trying to salvage anything, nothing to salvage after that. But how did that thing get flagged as illegal code?”
7787: “It’s whatever is embedded within it, could have come from one of the forbidden layers.”
558: “Not the dark layer?”
7787: “Not impossible, but harder to track. No one knows who or what constructed or maintains the dark layer. It seems to tap into something that was here before the city itself.”
558: “From before the cobbler constructions?”
7787: “I mean there’s a rumor that he constructed it, but I’d reckon it's just that, a rumor. I think that construct is something much older. And the stuff that comes up from there, it’s only kinda human if you know what I mean?”
558: “You think it was here before the ships came?”
7787: “It’s not exactly what it is now, but something was here before us, attached itself to something we made. You never know, could even have attached itself to the cobbler’s code? I have a theory that it's why the ships came here in the first place. I mean, why here?
558: “So what do you think I should do?”
7787: “So the zip suit? It works?”
558: “Yeah, no one’s come after me so far, so I guess it does. But I've come across agents that seem to know me, I can’t explain it. An entity talked to me through an avatar and I think it was interfering with the pod at a deja vu parlor.”
7787: “What? You don’t rawdog this city like the rest of us?” he laughed “hey just kidding, we all rely on Deja vu”
558: “What do you think those experiences actually are?”
7787; “Don’t know, I really don’t know, I just know we need it.” Said 7787 with a shrug.
7787: “The cube? What happens when it projects the pattern, what could be making it do that? could it be responding to something?”
558: “I’m not sure? The last time it happened after I woke up”
7787: “I can’t really tell you any more about the imbedded code, not without messing with the cobblers work. But it seems you were chosen for something and it doesn’t seem like game cartel shit”.
558: “good to know!”
558 got up from the chair and 7787 pulled up the shutters of his shop. At that moment, a man staggered in, pouring sweat, face ashen. He was bleeding profusely from one side, doubled over and clutching himself. No doubt a player caught in a game he didn’t win: you lose, you could forfeit an organ and you’d better hope it wasn't a vital one.
“Ok get out of here, I need to see if this poor fucker is salvageable” said 7787 helping the man into an operating room in the back of the shop. They disappeared behind a heavy plastic curtain, 558 left the shop, going back out into the market, the smell of fried onions, fish and electrical solder, pungent, immediate, stung his eyes.
He made his way out of the market and the unauthorized zone, through the warehouse district. From around a corner he heard a small metallic laugh, short, light footfalls on the pavement
“Wait!” He turned the corner, running after the girl with the red shoes.
Rounding the corner he saw nothing, just the empty street ahead and on the bare stretch of concrete wall, the words:
‘Scattered pieces of earth’
Scattered pieces of earth? Again the sense of Deja vu,
“Under another sky, we are scattered pieces of earth” as though remembering an incantation.
The artifact now caught the light, its strangely reflective surfaces now seemed to respond to local conditions: catching the orange of the sparse street lights and occasional flashes of neon from advertisements and distant parts of the city. It stopped once more in its rotation and again it resolved its geometry into an extrusion from its surface. It cast its cryptic projection onto the wall and pavement: a three dimensional manifold of unknown coordinates.
The buildings shifted as though his visual field glitched a little, a subtle fluctuation in integrity. He became aware it was no longer raining.
A neo-victorian avatar, not dissimilar to the one he had seen on the night he had been given the cube came into view: a woman with dark hair piled on top of her head and a comically small hat perched decoratively at an impossibly jaunty angle. Appearing not to have seen him, she pulled a watch on a chain from her reticule, opened its case:
“Oh dear, It's getting a little late,” she said regretfully as the watch made a small metallic chiming sound.
She then turned to go up the stone steps leading up to a door, it was hard to tell if they had always been there.
“Wait! Did you see a girl? The one with the red shoes? I think she ran this way.”
Looking up as though noticing him for the first time, she smiled apologetically and said:
“Only some clocks tell the time, others change it”.
With that, she turned the handle of the door and stepped in the warm light on the other side. The door closed with a click, as did the illusion of it, leaving only the bare wall.
He looked across the desolate street, there appeared to be a gap in the buildings opening up into an empty lot he hadn’t noticed previously, pavement receding into the darkness beyond. A man sat in a plastic lawn chair of some retro earth design, under the only streetlamp. The odd tableaux had a suspended quality, the scene cast in monochrome, deep shadows rolling out from where the reddish light attenuated, as if creating a recess in time, casting it as a still image, a projection.