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Night falls around you. The city redshifts into coral-snake shades as monuments and modernist architecture of government buildings fracture the horizon. Low-orbit satellites command it so, and Washington, DC Nocturnal awakens. Across the capital, lights and data connections ripple with staccato rhythms, a hangover from last night’s unseasonal double blackouts.
You are:
A disillusioned mathematical physicist with a wet open mind.
Desperate for knowledge.
A neo-masochist.
A willing sacrifice.
Later, when the cameras were off and he was alone with his wife, hands still shaking from the cocktail of adrenaline, fear, shame, guilt, and vodka he’d been partaking of all day, he started to tell her the truth. Even then, he only spoke it in the dark, so overwhelming were his emotions that he could not bear to be seen.
“The truth,” she said, prompting him, trying to draw him from the enveloping gloom of their bedroom.
Something has happened. It is amazing. It is unheard-of and inconceivable. It is many, many, many things, gathering a plethora of adjectives that indicate its ability to cause astonishment and confusion among those who behold it. It is a mountain-sized edifice of awe. Whether it is horrific, tragic, or a leap forward has yet to be decided.
Nevertheless, it has happened.
I’m only doing maskwork until I find better, but there aren’t many physical jobs to go around in Schrödinger City. Most get done by gleaming machines, by hop-along bots and drone swarms. Luckily, maskwork needs a human touch—and supposedly, village folk are better at it than the folk who grew up here. Could be. I always liked masks.
Asha is eight pages into the book before the words disappear. There are still hundreds of pages before the end of the book, so they must have had a record of the length of the volume, but lost the text. It’s a common experience in this library, to encounter fragments of things, to have to make educated assumptions about what once was.
They didn’t want either of us to live this long. Sucks for them—we’re good at living in spite. We’re good at surviving, at fighting, at never stopping. Today is the last day we exist in spite of Command, but it’s also just another day that ends in y. Most pilots are paired with a seasoned mentor. Not us. No, powerful men at Command threw us in the pit of a Moth to fight their pointless space war.
In The Before Days, Tim was a fellow procurer of dreams. He made a good living frequenting rooftop parties amid aging tech bros in fur-clad vests where mangosteen juices were mixed and silent discos reverberated within guests’ inner ears. As the dustbowl spread across the continent, even Reza himself was rumored to have purchased one of Tim’s dreamscapes—a particularly beautiful worldbuild of plummeting waterfalls and Tahitian escorts that kept Reza ensconced behind his retinas for days—after which Tim was invited to more exclusive barricaded enclaves of the super-rich, all who wanted private downloads to their next digital escape.
I wasn’t even two blocks into the Tumbledown when the walker’s nav crystal started fuzzing out. She veered left like a scavver drunk on coolant, and I knew I was in trouble. I tried sweet-talking her back on route, but she wasn’t listening. I was used to that. Nobody listens to a twelve-year-old—especially not a scrap pile with legs.
This is our struggle. We scuttle on the sand before the softly breathing salt-burdened sea with the lichen on the rocks a bright poison green and great white butterflies screaming under a red sky while we dream of justice and watch the ghost of a long-extinct rat ancestor, an ancestrat if you please, you know the ones we mean, the toothy ones who built dams to block the rivers, the handsy ones who built towers to block the skies, and choked on their own leavings.
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