This is a short story written by Anika Lippke ’24 as a preface to a technological dystopia.
1:
the moon is not merciful, and static weeps silently.
It wasn’t intentional. They had all agreed to stay manual this round, to further substantiate their tactical assimilation of the VAMPIRES’ capability past their rudimentary understanding of the vampires’ instinctive belligerence, past their daily little whispered adrenaline dose, packaged adequately within a muttered mantra, they’ll paint us red.
She’d be punished enough to satiate Loren’s viscous lust for her teeth on the ground if Nio hadn’t enough of a spinal cord to gradually settle the violent tremoring in his skinny back enough to graciously peer past the digital fractions of his skull rocking despondent upon the pearlescent glass floors and give Nathalie no more incriminating evidence to sweep up through her fingers but a meager little smile.
“Did you scream?” She asks, languid, her glances dotting away gradually from Nio’s collapsed figure upon the electric floor.
The fragments of the skull are already melting back into their environment, the lighting swallowing the shards where it hits as blank as a supernova, and Nio has gathered the remains of his scatterbrain within his hands and cups desperately at the dripping remains as if he could somehow miraculously plug the fluid static back into his unobstructed brain in order to gather his shredded orientation.
But he pauses at her words. The rest of the holographic gunk slips through his fingers as if it had never collected there in the first place and he feeds her with an expression she’s gotten sasquatch handfuls of from only Loren in the past, and it’s oddly astonishing to swallow the arrangement of his features off of another’s face. Disapproval.
“You’re the one that screamed,” he clips back shortly, disbelief and scorn knotting his features into something pitiably ugly.
Without another word Nathalie is left standing alone beneath the fading glitter hedge, clutching at her translucent glow gun like a teddy bear, and Nio has not only scattered to his feet, but hightailed away, (“she’s a poppet after all…”) leaving a static trail behind where mechanic blood drips from the receding “wound” at the back of his head where Nathalie had jutted him quite aggressively with three glow bullets (painful; foul play) within the span of about twenty milliseconds (impossible without cheats) without even giving him the grace of turning her head in his direction as she rattled off the bullets; as automatic as her reflex to levitate the gun with her uncanny reliance on grid magnetism, her fingers ticked off three rounds and sent the poor boy scrambling across the glowy plex floors with the vertigo of a zombie with sweat-marinated heat stroke.
A deplorable second-place loss to the girl who apparently screamed without her own awareness upon his approach.
Her bearings are titanium plates today.
They’ll paint us red.
An obstinate cynic of most warm colors, this has had Nathalie’s memory foam riveted and subplanar and omnipresent and hollowed out like a dessert carcass which spares no room for her ability to question the morality of fictionally scooping out the right senses of any classmate who dare approach her mid-collection, sub-awareness.
Sucks that he didn’t let her apologize, though. Nio’s a little twig. Not that Loren cares.
She’s in for a teeth scooping and she knows it, sparring her dearest instincts to keep the bitterness from inside of her brain suppressed into a flat expression of splendid neutrality and (Loren’s favorite) obedience as she navigates the plex floors with a sweeping steel hand against the obstacle walls set up in disseminated formations across the glow gun course to instill mystery and realism within its assorted regulars.
Her consciousness reboots as her face is spontaneously plunged in a fuchsia smog that sends her arm hairs shooting erect like titanium spikes jumping to protect her lilting body, announced by the small comm in the collar of the crystalline armband encircling her left wrist in a blinding flash of holographic light,
“Remember; it’s just a simulation. Deploying dose.”
The glow gun battleground floors pivot beneath her sliding feet with the volatility and unpredictability of a creaking boat amidst the waves of a forsaken thunderstorm at the zenith of midnight, and she has to fight against her instincts as to not topple herself straight into the gaping vortex of the static floor beneath her, which surges with the urge to slurp her up into its holographic galaxy the more she lets her gaze linger upon it.
Any second longer and she’d plunge face-first into the matrix.
Against her bare wrists, Polaris flitters playfully as it assembles into opacity along the thin traces of veins scraping her arms, white flickers trailing down its fluorescent lines, which have taken on a lifelessly pallid and flaxen tone, adhering to the convoluted muddle of her mind, her lack of any sort of presence that is not corporeal.
As if it could be reminding her gently that even her emotions can be monitored and quelled promptly through the pores in the walls, Polaris’ connection to her nerves, connection to the entire ACRUX building.
The resent in her gaze anchors her eyes down onto Polaris until the ponies in the carousels of her vision stop bobbling sideways and she has reflexively let go of her grip on the wall behind her. She continues to press its isolating white expanse beneath her hand, though, as she slowly gathers the orientation to exit the venue, practicing her parting goodbyes through muttered one-liners so thickly that she nearly misses the party exit notification plastered just between her eyes on her way out.
It’s one thing to be Nathalie Abernathy- another to be stupid enough to ignore a training command and brutally force a classmate to endure the most accurately volatile simulation of what it’d feel like to die three times over by thick fluorescent spikes taken straight into the skull without hesitance- far more than enough to get so shaken up by her realistic dissonance that her vitals fly off of the handle and there’s a sedative filtered straight into her nostrils targeted to slow her down and remind her that she can’t hold such intense (though unintentional) animosity during such a violent simulation.
Thoughts of how Loren would react turn her insentient and she pauses, facing the wall to the exit that she had just walked through.
“That bubblehead’s going to pop if you bonk into that wall again,” supplies a squalidly content voice from both behind her and through her subtitle display, to Nathalie’s maximum discontent, and she dissolves the party exit notification to clear her vision and get a straight-on look at Loren, trying her best to shake the subtitles from her visor without looking down.
If she has a bubblehead, he’s got an iron lump.
She begrudgingly lifts her head to eye Loren without lifting her chin higher than Loren has his set, angled enough to brush his sweeping, crimson-stained, street-brush locks out of his face, so that she can actually see more than his plastic nose for once.
He’s got that mud-slurping smirk thumb-tacked onto the corners of his lips, and if his eyes were obscured today as they naturally sat beneath his clumpy threads of hair, she would have missed the animosity in the empty set to his quirked carmine eyes.
She should be past the shiver that sweeps through her bare, sweat-streaked shoulders as she realizes that everyone but she and Loren have gradually begun to file themselves out of the glow tag lobby, all shuffling feet and soft murmurs, inevitably beat from a long night of simulation vampire-hunting and ready to take the night to reset from all of the camera coverage and flicker pollution. It fills her like autumn adrenaline regardless, swallows her words into the silent placidity of the pools within her lungs.
As expected of the Primen class’ first ranking student consistently for the past three years, fear of one’s own manager is rarely as forgotten as it is implanted within one’s essence in spontaneously resurgent increments meant to gradually extirpate the boundaries of one’s soul.
He keeps her quiet, taking his time to study her narrow, exerted figure from his casual leaning position against the colorless plex wall, roving eyes red like they’ve been bloodshot his entire life.
She has to violently force down thoughts of her criticism of his profile down into the most primate of her brain’s subconscious. Not everyone has the same customization benefits as Nathalie Abernathy.
Thank bio, the grip on those sedatives has her mind’s volume hushed to an avoidable whisper.
Loren closes his eyes like he can hear her thoughts and swerves to face her head-on with those crookedly unsettling eyes clasped upon her own.
“Are you awake?” he snaps shortly.
“There’s been an outbreak and a gang of vampires has Cerisa Hewett held captive.”