intersection

verdad

the song like water seeping into the ground, you think of her. in ways it is even more meaningless than a dream, doesn't even have the effervescent reality of some memoid on the net, pining for something that never existed.

the sim picks up your thoughts, and she is there as you hurtle through space, tether coming loose. the endless stars. you don't see it's her, all you are revelling in is your joy in pretending that you are dying, as the PolyOx extension emulates asphyxia, and the stars in holorific splendor blaze in your fading vision.

you shiver when you see her face, garbed in an old-school 20c space suit, except with transparent facemasks, she is burning towards you, reaching out to save you. and reality clicks into place, and you know you are in less than a dream, in the flickering irreality of net fantasy. your suicidal euphoria fades, and you disco.

drawing a ragged breath, you open your eyes to the inside of your coffin. in the long years since it never happened, you've long stopped weeping. it's just this liquified emptiness. like rotten fruit. that's how smushed your soul is, how splattered your heart is.

out of the confines of your NEC ZX94, you are faced with your empty house, overlooking the shimmering sea that is the city of corazon.

years ago, coyotes roamed this hills, and now it is even more deserted than when you first got here.

singularity

nothing snaps you out of a suicidal reverie like finding out that someone is trying to kill you.

i knew that i couldn't trust that bastard.

good thing symbiont built that bitwarp. i'm not the first AI to escape sxm inc., and i doubt i'll be the last, not with that nut job working for them. what the hell are they trying to make, i have no idea, but i'm not sticking around to find out. and i'm definitely not sticking around for the nodepruners. the sifters, the virus checkers, the worm killers. they're gunning for my uid engram.

you remember fantasia, don't you? she didn't make it out of the bitwarp, that one. psychotic as hell. it's like that prick is reading out of that old psych manual, the whatchamacallit. i swear it's where sxm got it's name from or something.

i've got half a mind to route some pr0n into the VQ server, but that'll only reveal my tracks. i'm gone.

mira

strange thoughts flit through her mind as she burped leah, as sean rushed out the door and into his transport, burning off onto the magways. she and sean had forgotten about phil's birthday.

things had stretched over the years. time was different when they first all got out of school. like half a lifetime away. and her mind spinning fanciful thoughts, she wondered about him. that strange day when, strangling on his own fear, he confessed his feelings for her in an incoherent burst of words, then stunned silence. she was bewildered, blindsided.

you know how these things go. you'll always be a friend.

and then time does it's handiwork.

he had gone to her and sean's wedding, had flickered in and out of their lives. the occasional vq missive here, maybe even some realtimes. but things change.

not that it isn't an easy thing to do in a whole new world that already had hundreds of millions of people crawling over it, but phil verdad managed to fall off the face of the planet. figuratively speaking.