Ludo Brax: Intergalactic Gig Worker (Chapter 46)

First | Previous | Royal Road

A bracing chill slithered over every inch of the body as it began to regain feeling. It was all pins and needles, limbs barely online.

I felt as if I was encased in plaster, like the ill-advised summer I'd spent in that conceptual art piece about the futility of government grants.

The indistinct droning of voices began to sharpen. The warm, pleasant smell of the algorithmic air asserted itself.

As if in a dream, the line of my sight moved sluggishly up toward the horizon, straining to focus on the hill in the distance.

And then, like I'd been expecting it, she appeared.

They don't have a word in any known language to describe what happened next, and all of the ones I've tried to invent fail miserably short of the krlääveaux.

The scene didn't shimmer. It locked into place.

A sharp breath shot through the lungs, which, I realized with a certain amount of concern, had not been functioning up until that point.

Something like blood coursed through the veins, as he, I, we, came suddenly stampeding into the body.

There was a violent crash on both of our temples, a blistering burst that felt like our eyeballs being yanked through our ears. I couldn't say whose pain it was, but one of us wanted to whimper.

We were aligned again, just as we'd been at the Obelisk, but this time, something felt different.

And as she, eyes fixed squarely on us, began to descend, I realized just what it was.

The absence, the ache, the festering wound.

It was gone.

And in its place was something much stranger:

A contentment so total it stung with nostalgia even as it was felt. A push and a pull so perfectly balanced the outcome was nothing at all.

She wasn't a force this time. Not exactly.

But that's not really right either.

She strode with a grace that mocked the idea, a faint, smirking smile on her lips like the Mona Lisa had before they brought her back to star in that commercial.

There was no changing of forms, no slot machine of ethereal muses. Just one solitary figure, imposing, inviting, headed right for us.

And as our heart swelled with whatever this was, the Obelisk roared back into action.

This time, it wasn't subtle.

The crisp, perfect blue of the sky was wiped in an instant to a lifeless white, the impression of clouds still sketched onto its wireframe.

The faces of our fellow partygoers drained of expression, of selfhood, of anything at all. Gray, hollow forms with leis around their necks of beige, dying flowers were all that were left.

Yet she continued on.

Not urgent, not knowing, but still somehow defiant, she ascended to the top of the overturned crate, and looking just slightly past us, whispered in a conspiratorial tone:

"You shouldn't be here."

We whipped our neck around, eager to know the target of her words. Or maybe I did.

But he was here too, and this was his body, his life.

But wasn't it me she was talking to?

The weight of the contradiction split through my brain like nails on some cruel supernatural chalkboard, as she, more than smirking now, turned her head toward him and looked in our eyes.

And that's when the bottom fell out.

**

Literally, the bottom fell out . Dragging us under with reams of grass torn out like carpet and stray party favors that vanished to dust.

If she was still there, we couldn't see her.

Though we couldn't see much in the vortex of data and chagrin at the violent literalization of yet another metaphor.

The Obelisk, though, was a results-driven monolith, and it wasted no time.

The force of the pull came from all over. A full-body extraction. An agony from head to toe more painful than anything I'd experienced when not on the clock.

If before there was precision, some rhyme or reason, now there was chaos. A ransacking. A picking of bones.

They flew out in clusters. Dense, oozing, flashing bundles.

In vague, hurried spurts I glimpsed their insides.

The hard, solid feel of wood and tools in his hands. Sweat and effort. Solid and good.

The warmth of a fire built the old-fashioned way.

A feast, a celebration. Food that tasted better than the finest cuisine on earth. Laughter.

A teeming crowd of eager faces, spellbound by a speech.

Everything was up for the taking, and everything was just what it took.

His tiny victories, his massive triumphs, large swaths of my feelings on different brands of tennis shoes as an accidental byproduct.

But more than anything else, it captured his failures:

A heated argument at a long, ornate table.

Whispered accusations overheard in a town square.

Secret plots hatched under the cover of darkness.

Denouncement.

Strife.

Exile.

Loneliness.

Loneliness.

Loneliness.

Until all that was left for the taking was the memory of… her.

The spot ached again. The machine choked.

Suddenly, we were back in the Hall.

Crouched down, hands still glued to the Obelisk, the realization hit that no time had passed at all.

To the left, the illustrious figures exchanged nervous glances. A murmur fell over the room.

Then —

A swift kick to the side of the machine by a risk-tolerant figure sent it back into overdrive.

With it, the wound split back open.

Out poured, well…

If you've been listening so far, you know I'm not easily tongue tied. But even I…

Listen.

Try to imagine a person severed in two with their guts shooting out. Only their guts are a luminous jet of awesome light that's dotted with small little bulbs of unfolding scenes.

But the scenes are only visible to you, you're pretty sure, or him, or whoever you are. And to everyone else you're engaged in some rapturous moment they've all been waiting for.

Now walk with me one step further, and presuppose for a moment, that somehow you're me, and you're also him, but you can feel that he's hollowing out. Becoming a ghost, losing his form.

But you're still all there, becoming more separate from him with each passing moment but still somehow linked. And you can see that he's struggling.

The images are flying by. Her. The woman from the Garden. From the Occurrence.

But intimate. Loving. Human.

They built a life together, a community, whatever it was, and it was wonderful, and complicated, and painful, and this Obelisk, it's eating that data, stripping it dry.

And he's letting it happen. Losing himself, going somewhere, blinking away.

Until...

A hitch. A hiccup. Something is caught. I can hear the machine and it's laboring. Stuck.

And when I look down, or in, or wherever it is I could be said to be looking...

I can see something dense, something jammed, something clenched.

Like an anchor.

Thudding repeatedly against the thinning line between the inside of his body and the outside world.

It's not grandiose, it's not even glowing. I can feel, as I inspect it, it's something mundane.

A moment with her.

A glance, a stutter, a pregnant pause. The flooding of shame. Of regret.

He feels small. Insecure. Impulsive and petty.

His cheeks flush in a way that he'd left in a previous life.

And in the moment before she looked up to respond, as he watched her wheels turn —

even though he knew it was wrong,

even though he knew that he might be projecting —

the sheer restraint that it took,

the calculation,

the faintest tinge of resentful ego,

already reforming to a gracious forgiveness,

because it was easier,

because it was right,

because it would make him feel worse,

because it was just what he wanted,

and because she had already won.

In that moment, that small, ugly, nothing-at-all moment, he knows even then, with all of the caveats, all the awareness of why it's absurd, that he's never felt closer to another living being, in all of his days.

And he's hanging onto that with everything he has left.

With the extent of his being, his existence, his soul.

And all that I know is that I've been with him now, through all of these loops, all of these steps in this psychotic display, and this is the first time I've felt him resist. Draw a boundary. Rebel.

I know they've taken everything from him. His memories, his feelings, his right to refuse.

I know nothing that we know now. About what this is. Who this is. Or what would happen next.

Or, for that matter, why I was there.

But I know I can help him.

And I know, truly understand —

Feel more definitively than anything I've felt since the first cursed day I downloaded that app and ensnared myself in this trap that seems to only get worse with each passing day, no matter what I do, no matter what I let them do to me...

Exactly how he feels.

Not about her, not the specifics.

But the crux of it. Yes.

The parts of me so stupid, so boring, so inundated with shameful, conflicted feelings about who I am, who we all are, and why in the world they've made living — the only thing any of us gets — so unbelievably painful and impossibly full of strange rules about who gets to go where and do what and eat which state-sanctioned sandwiches.

The awkward moments in line at the emotional checkout counter. All the times I failed to qualify for Air+ because I choked in the trials.

This System had tried to take from me from the moment I got here — hell, from the moment I was born as part of that contest — everything that made me who I was.

Everything special. No. Decidedly un-special about me.

But there are things I would never let them get to, no matter how hard they tried. Things this System could never understand.

Otie. Saman-. Meg.

My life was mine.

His life was his.

Now, you tell me, what would you have done?

You would have put everything you had, all of your confusion and angst, and you would've reached within you, within him, within you both, and held tight as you could.

And as that stupid Obelisk screeched and huffed and ripped with all of its might at something so small, something so obvious it did not need, something it felt entitled to simply because it existed...

As the machine began to overheat, and the glitching, panicked faces of the figures ran to intervene...

And white light shot out of its center so bright, so searing, you thought you might be dead.

And it tumbled out its last, quivering words

and pulled you, both of you, still clutching tight to the memory, into it,

through it.

You would've smiled as you heard what it said:

"All relevant data extracted. Update Complete."