[story] you can only live twice
author: diamond dazzler (diamond_dazzler)
01. I'M IN HEAVEN
Morning invades through the partially open window slats, dying the greyed-out brown of the room a burning orange. The room is spare, a single brown leather couch that might have been art deco-influenced, but is now a worn relic in an apartment of antiquities. The chairs are plastic, twentieth century bubblegum school days variety, nostalgic of another era's vision of the future. There is a pile of hardware and wires piled on and under a mysteriously stained white table placed dead center in the room.
Light flashes across the room, bright white rays sliding through the slats as a patrol craft glides noisily past on its way up to the 89th story. A storm warning is issued, the text popping onto an antiquated binary text scroller that dangles from the ceiling across two of the windows. The text flashes in rainbow colors as it announces that everyone should stay indoors. It is followed by an advertisement for retina design and color replacements, brought to you by Toyo Medical Group, the trustworthy purveyors of gentle aesthetic enhancement all over the globe. The automated home systems kick into gear and the window slats close, the overhead lights turn on and a pot of coffee begins to percolate.
Half-buried amongst the aging machines, exposed wires, and coffee-machine-attachment is a man we shall refer to as HUSBAND.
HUSBAND is stubbly, pale from lack of real (or simulated) sunlight, and mousy-haired. He gives off the same air of antiquated, dusty brown as his living space. He has an electric blue stripe across the chest of his shirt. It is an unusual splash of color, fighting for its life across the coffee stained and grimy chest of a man who doesn't seem to care much about such small things as color and life.
HUSBAND falls out of his nest of wires and metal, climbs to his feet and wobbles his way into the bedroom where, in her own nest of wires lies a thin, anemic, pixie-like woman we shall refer to as WIFE.
WIFE has blue hair that matches the dingy blue circles underneath her closed eyes. Her eyelashes flutter as she dreams. HUSBAND checks the wires attached to her cerebral cortex, the heart monitors, the IV, the respirator.
Satisfied that all is well, HUSBAND returns to his machine, and coffee pot, and news feed. He chats on the net. Checks Infoweb. Orders takeout meals to be delivered to him for the next week. He finishes his coffee, hooks on his VR sight and creates a virtual bouquet of glitter-pink roses. He bakes a cake and spends the evening gently holding WIFE's hand.
It is their third anniversary together, and their first anniversary since he won his bet and she got herself lost somewhere across the datastream. He wishes she were able hear him when he whispers to her, "I told you so."
02. Some Sort of Flower
The way he met her was this:
He was on the right side of a security wall, putting up defenses as fast as the mysterious person designated as 'enemy combatant: BabyStar' could tear them down. Out of the blue, a message was sent to him.
{{You're a hardwire man, aren't you?
She said, purring across the ether. Peeved, he replied.
}}And you're a wetware zombie. Still got brains after frying on nano?
After this bit of obligatory repartee, they engaged long enough for him to hit three letters on his keyboard; then BabyStar broke past. She left behind a silly little animation of singing flowers proclaiming, "BABY, YOUR STARS SHINE BRIGHT!" that hijacked the computer's desktop. Little tutu-wearing platypii chewed on the desktop icons. He got rid of them, flipped the bird at his monitor screen, and offhandedly set a trace BabyStar's tail.
"Amateur," he snorted and went back to lunch.
Three hours later, after hop-scotching around the globe several times, the trace revealed BabyStar to be an 80 year old pre-implant grandmother and member of an Anti-Wire luddite community in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowheresville. Three minutes and three seconds after discovering this, he found himself tracking down one of the most irritatingly persistent poli-propoganda viruses he had had the displeasure of clearing from a network.
His bosses were not pleased.
They met again with the same sneaky attacks, same username, different server. He traced BabyStar to a robot-manned mushroom farm on the moon. By the forth or fifth time they clashed, he began to think things.
BabyStar gave him a server name. "Meet me here." She said.
It was a game server, just another generic sim out of the billion Korean VR fantasy clones in existence. Her avatar was a gangly girl, completely flat chested and covered in glitter. He was a stock paladin-type with albino-blond hair. Teeth, eyes, hair sparkling at him, she smiled and handed him a glass of something with an umbrella sticking out of it. He stared at it.
"What is this? A date?"
Her smile widened.
They killed together, playing with blood and dismemberment and the mass destruction of entire towns until his body demanded that he either feed or caffeinate it. They played, her lips pressed close his to ear, whispering sweet wild things he rarely thought of, things he only knew in the thinnest lines of theory in the middle of his sleepless nights - everyone else's days.
He was lost.
"You're kinda pretty," she said, so sweetly that he forgot he was a stock paladin with impossibly blond hair and that she was a stalker who probably did know what he really looked like.
He was lost.
03. You + I
Some people meet in laundromats.
Other people avoid daylight and natural air unless a catastrophic disaster occurs. In this particular instance, it was the Great Signal Death. At about two in the afternoon, a massive power surge blew out the triple-layer failsafes built into the linked power grids across the entire Eastern seaboard, simultaneously frying the brains of every net-user on a plug-link and sending a compressed beam of something through an historical relic of a radio tower; a something that took out one of the biggest commercial satellites in orbit. Some speculated it was a secret military test gone wrong. Others said it was a case of corporate espionage.
At the time, no one really cared about any of that. The Wired was down and there were people who needed to get back on. Immediately.
It was raining.
He didn't know about useful rain-keeping-off things like umbrellas or raincoats when he and his neighbors panicked and ventured out into the first dose of real atmosphere they've had in years, searching for the nearest independent satellite-linked café with its own generator. When he finally found one, he squished wetly as he sat. He was sitting across from a girl with a mussed head of hair in an amazing shade of bright blue. As he slipped the VR set over one eye, he wondered whether she dyed it, or had her roots genetically altered.
He logged back in. BabyStar apologized for replying slowly. It was the first time in years that she'd had to type and she found that she'd completely forgotten how. Watching the girl in front of him hunt and peck with her fingertips - she chewed her nails, he noticed - he told BabyStar that he didn't mind.
They were riding a ship across a supernova like some people took speedboats across shark-infested waters. They went fast, looping and twisting first one way and then another. Left, right, left again only to drop into a tight corkscrew, she gunned the ship straight into an asteroid belt, swerving and laughing wildly in equal measure. He preferred long scenic drives that lead to an actual direction, but BabyStar liked short, dizzy drops that made his stomach churn and his sense of direction disappear as she changed speed, going full throttle one moment, and dropping dead in space a second later.
"We're listening to the same song, aren't we?" she murmured, fingers tapping against the steering column. Except her voice was coming from in front of him as well.
He automatically looked up, startled, staring at her in VR, and his free eye finding the girl in the neighboring terminal. Both girls in both worlds raised a hand. They smiled at him. He hadn't even noticed the music, which was blaring loudly from the speaker hanging so low that he could have hit his head on the bottom of it if he stood up wrong.
He stood up and hit his head. Then stared helplessly. BabyStar giggled at him, no more than two feet away in his real life.
He was shocked to realize -- this tiny slip of a girl who stalked him -- he was completely in love with her.
04. Always and Always
In retrospect, he should have known she was a user. He had assumed as much that very first time they met. But somehow, between the stalking and sweet smiles and dark wicked words, he'd forgotten. It wasn't so much that she was a wetware user -- when the technology first came out, he'd been endlessly fascinated with the very concept of a computer that could be poured out into any frame that could be found for it.
Wetware poured into the eye socket might temporarily turn the brain into one of the fastest damn processors in the entire world… Without any of the human-through-interface lag, speeding through the Wired as quick as human thought might be an incredible rush, but the inevitable end results were no prettier than the remains of plugged users who gave up on real life. Everyone knew the dangers. But it was so, so very tempting.
He'd forgotten about that.
HUSBAND was once a gawky, precocious youth known by the handle (•_•), read as 'Face'. Perhaps there was a time he answered to an innocuous name like 'Frank' or 'John', but that old identity had disappeared so long ago that he often thought he must have leapt from the womb fully formed as mumbly and shaggy-haired (•_•).
He dressed plainly, ate plainly and was active just enough to be relatively healthy. He was soft-spoken to the point that some people thought he was speech-impaired, but it wasn't something he felt a desire to correct. (•_•) rode the ether between Earth and the moon colonies, what use did he have for speech? He hijacked satellites, pirated broadcast signals and sprayed his virtual graffiti across corporate servers all over the world. (•_•) handled the Wired like a man handling a fine, fast car. Bright red speedster. Sun, wind and a beautiful girl in the next seat with her hands and mouth in inappropriate places. That was who he was.
Now he silently performs his daily routines with the steadiness of a preprogrammed cleaner bot. He used to joke that, for a human carrying only the most minimal enhancements, he was more robotic than most cyborgs. All vestiges of his former life have been reduced to diligence and reliability. Dedication. Responsibility. Layered on top of a lanky frame of stress and apathy, HUSBAND is his new skin now.
He has the beautiful girl, but she's broken. He has difficulty remembering what speed feels like. He spends his days listlessly creating virtual topiary for those who can afford the real thing, but don't want the hassle of keeping something alive.
It pays well.
He wonders if this is why she married him-- because, like a robot sentinel or bot-pet caring for its dead owner's house, he would be a reliable contingency plan. He would take care of her body in case…
Which is what he does. During the day, he exercises her, cleans her, feeds her. At night, he is wired, building small signposts everywhere pointing back to him. "Here, come this way."
"Come home."
"I miss you."
It becomes a phenomena. Other schmucks, left behind by spouses, or lovers, or family who didn't love them enough to ignore the siren call of the broadcast waves and infostreams; they place their own signposts. HUSBAND wonders if WIFE will see and know his from the all the others, or whether she will be confused. Or if she will just laugh. He wonders if she, like he did, missed her other self, missed the fire and speed and excitement. He wonders if she missed it all too much to come back.
05. Stand By
The way he meets her is this:
She opens her eyes.
"You told me what?" she asks, voice failing, slipping in and out like the haunting broadcast ghosts that machines sometimes pick up on stormy nights.
Heart pounding through his chest, his ribcage-- and he can almost swear that the visual feed from his eyes to brain has somehow short-circuited. He runs shaking hands over her face, her arms. "I told you so," he whispers. Saying the words again and again.
She seems almost puzzled at first, lifting her head just enough to look down at her body. She is silent. She smiles.
She smiles all wrong.
06. MAGIC PLACE
WIFE is different. HUSBAND isn't sure how. Some parts more and less brittle in different ways. Strong, and weak. Her ways are angled in all the places she had once been soft and gentle. She doesn't know how to walk at first.
She seems fascinated with the apartment, her hair, the collection of gleaming white coffee mugs in the kitchen. She drifts from the one room to the next -- there are only four, and two of them can barely be counted as actual rooms -- back and forth, running spidery fingertips along surfaces. She rarely speaks except in a hoarse, husky murmur, her voice swinging up, then down in octave, as if testing its range.
"Come here." She says one day, from where she lays sprawled across the bathroom floor, wracked with cramps, her face white and her movements lethargic.
He comes to her, kneeling. All she wears is his old shirt, the one with the blue stripe and short sleeves; it still looks large on her small frame. Her bare arms and legs are splayed against cool tiles. He slips his hand under the hem of the shirt, pressing gently against the soft, sweat dampened curve of her abdomen. She arches.
"Does it hurt?" he asks, pressing harder. Her eyes darken.
"Lower," she says. He moves his hand lower. His fingers come away with moisture and blood.
"Come here," she says again, grasping his wrist, claiming his hand and his fingers again. "Here. Come here." He lies over her, injuring his elbows and knees on his way down. She pulls at him, her hands guiding his under the slightly rough folds of his own borrowed shirt.
They don't kiss. They bite and claw at each other. They roll across the floor until they slam into an obstacle that can't be shoved or kicked away. He hisses wordless things into her hair, angry, resentful. He slams her hard against the tiles, his fingers leaving dark purpling bruises where he grasps her arms. She shoves him, knees and kicks him onto his back and tears his shirt open, snarling in foreign words he thinks he should probably recognize even if his mind is too far gone to understand any of it.
She's hot and she's brutal. He doesn't realize there are tears on his face until her hands come up to rub at the moisture under his eyes.
Afterwards, they sit, and she smokes a cigarette of a brand he didn't know still existed. She silently offers him one. Three years of marriage and he hadn't even known she smoked. Or menstruated. Resentful again, he leans in, kissing her, finally, for the first time in a little over a year. He kisses her like he hadn't been able to. He kisses her because her still body had been far too close to corpse-like for his tastes; now she is alive.
She's very alive now, and she's kissing him back with her teeth, her nails digging into his wrist and cigarette ash burning holes into both their shirts.
She pulls away to inhale another lungful of smoke, then leans back in to press soft lips and a thin, black vapor of cancer against his mouth. She does it again.
All it takes is this; this moment on the floor, damp with sweat and traced in blood as he breathes in heavy, sweet smoke from a mouth dark with whispered words in languages he doesn't know. He realizes that WIFE is no longer his WIFE. In fact, WIFE is no longer herself at all.
07. "I"
His wife is a man.
There is no real reason for him to think this; her body has only been hijacked, after all. But it's the way she walks with a slow, confident saunter now that she is eating properly again. He finds himself spending hours fixated on the way her shoulders shift, as if she is used to them being far broader than the delicate, thin things she has now. He is amused at how utterly perplexed she becomes whenever she reaches for an object on a high shelf and realizes how far from her fingers it is. She needs to be taught what to do when she menstruates.
It isn't obvious at first (they both attribute her confusion and lack of memory to the nano-burn, a temporary side effect.) He brings her the many wigs and collections of glittery makeup and gauzy things he'd placed in storage. She begins to giggle more often. When he asks her whether her throat is sore, she tries to pitch her voice higher. She forgets often, however; half the time her voice slides down into an odd, husky rasp. And it is only after he accidentally surprises a real laugh out of her -- a deep, loud sound that erupts unrestrained from down in her belly -- that he thinks maybe there is some other way she prefers to laugh. She reaches for the wrong toothbrush one morning while he is frowning thoughtfully at her in the bathroom. Watching her hand dart from the baby blue brush to the glitter-pink one, he realizes she is watching him as carefully as he is watching her.
He begins to give her deliberately obscure cues, just to see what will happen.
He discovers that he might actually be a pretty good liar.
This new person, he slowly and carefully learns, likes her coffee with enough cream to fill a cow, but very little sugar. She prefers clunky but plain, un-ornamented jewelry. She thinks the bizarre, razor-fanged, man-eating cacti mascot for Mui-Mui Burgers is the cutest thing ever. Her natural posture usually involves having her limbs splayed everywhere, taking up as much space as possible. She moves as if she expects everyone to give way and is surprised when people don't.
"Shove over," she says, sliding past him the morning after he drags her outside to the Dominican Day block party his sector seems to erupt into weekly.
"I didn't know girls could pee standing up," he replies. She belatedly plops herself down onto the toilet seat, elbows on her knees. Tragically hung over, she squints at him. He smiles and goes back to brushing his teeth.
As innocuous as this scene in the bathroom is, it has an incredible effect on her.
He wonders about this, as she gives up giggling and wiggling around in the tiny little skirts BabyStar liked to wear. Perhaps he has a trustworthy appearance, he thinks, as he watches her dig through his drawers and sniff his undershirts. Or gullible. Maybe she thinks he's abusable. She wanders off clad only in a pair of his boxers.
Perhaps she actually wants him to learn about the person hiding behind his wife's face.
He doesn't know why she would. He doesn't care, either. He just knows that he is becoming used to looking up from his half-formed icicle topiaries and gilt-rose gardens to see her standing hipshot and cocky in the doorway, her hands in her pockets, her expression coolly neutral as she stares unabashedly at him from behind a thin, pungent curtain of shifting cigarette smoke. The food in his pantries goes from the collection of sweets BabyStar favored to a wide range of spices that has him resigned to visiting the doctor for stomach inflammation rather than aching teeth. She takes to dragging him to better parties than the sort he would typically have access to.
She never once touches his computers.
"You fuck me through the floor when I can barely walk, but now you don't touch me. It's like we never talk anymore. Are you pregnant?" she says jokingly, late one evening. He rolls over to look at her over the invisible divide slicing down the center of the chaste bed they share. The neon lights filter in from outside the uncovered windows, flashing different colors over the walls and their bodies like the lighting in a bad arthouse 'erotic' flick. A smirk twitches at her lips. Her expression is nothing BabyStar would have worn.
It's amazing, he thinks, how a simple twitch of the brow or quirk of the lip can transform a face into someone else's. He reaches out and runs his thumb over an eyebrow that hasn't been plucked in weeks. He quickly pulls his hand away before she can bite him.
"We never really talked before," he murmurs, truthfully. "I don’t talk much." He blinks sleepily at her, noting that her roots are beginning to grow in black. "But you know that," he adds.
A little uneasily, she mutters, "Yeah." BabyStar would have rolled over at this point, perhaps looked coyly over her shoulder at him and changed the topic. This person stares him in the eye, a small crease forming between her brows, which he smoothes with his thumb.
He shifts in closer until he can sling an arm and leg over her body, using his weight to squash her into the bed. She grunts. "This isn't sex."
He mutters into the hair obscuring her ear, "I have a headache, dear. Maybe later." She mutters under her breath and wiggles fruitlessly. She goes to sleep eventually, when she realizes he has no intention of moving and she isn't strong enough to shift him off her.
He wonders why she is staying here with him, even as he notices, with shock, that a sort of sensory color is slowly returning into his life. He hadn't been aware it was missing.
Where BabyStar had been a retinal explosion, this new woman is a creeping agitation that crawls across his skin like a rainbow of ants saturating his mindscape. Blacks have never been quite as black. Oranges never burned as darkly, and white never had so many off-color variations. He feels as if his nerve endings are coming to life for the very first time. The significance of this is not lost on him.
Where BabyStar was a silken, bewildering creature hovering somewhere above him, just out of reach of his grasping fingers, this woman is right next to him: at the bars he goes to, belching when he does, laughing loudly and stupidly when he does, singing bawdy songs off-tune and loudly in foreign languages while he accompanies in the only words he knows. She leaves her dirty, balled-up socks on the couch beside his.
It isn't that his wife is a man. His wife is someone like him.
08. Baby London Star (or) My Super Secret Agent Man
She continues to silently watch him long after he stops his own staring and instead focuses on trying to get his fingers underneath the worn cotton of her sleeveless, white undershirts as often as possible. She still rarely says anything. Instead, she speaks in smoke signals.
Smoke rings mean contentment.
'I saw three flocks of birds flying past our window, and I just watched them pass. They were fat and soft like chickens. Can we shoot them next time and eat them?' Nonsense thoughts and dark, mysterious smiles sleepily follow the last ring that expands and dissipates into the air. He likes to kiss her during these times, quickly catching her mouth with his before she breathes out a new batch of wobbly circles.
Reedy, thin streams of grey sliding through the air like blades of wiggling grass means she is thinking. She is not the sort of person that likes to think, he learns. She enjoys being distracted often.
'There are things you really don't want to, or need to know about.' Dark impenetrable clouds mean nervousness. She comes home with a new weapon during these times -- a small handgun, knives, an electric nightstick. How or where she is getting them, or even whose money she is using, he doesn't know. He doesn't ask.
When she is angry (or serious), there is an absence of smoke and a blank sort of implacable silence that is so intimidating his mind immediately conjures images of execution officers and slow, painful death. He avoids her during these times, though he doesn't really need to. She tends to disappear on her own, for days at a time before she comes back, smelling of soap and bearing gifts of exotic food neither of them know how to eat. He finds himself scanning the newsfeeds in her absence, watching security videos of gang fights, and drug busts, and violent clashes between unknown armed persons.
He likes to create little fantasies about her while he is working and she is somewhere nearby, bending and twisting about on the floor as she exercises. She seems determined to bulk up as much muscle as she can, as fast as she can. It will take her awhile; dainty BabyStar never exercised a day in her life.
'Who is she?' He wonders. In some ways, this chain-smoking keeper of weapons and organizer of kitchen supplies is still as much of a mystery to him as she was the day she first woke up. He imagines an ex-Yakuza, a handsome face on a long, lean body. Fancy shoes and an expensive, tailored suit. Yakuza becomes tired of the hard life and attempts to escape from the kumi, only to become trapped somewhere without out an easy escape. Yakuza's real body is in the harbor, in pieces, in a box chained to a heavy rock.
Other days, he thinks of an equally tailored corporate spy with fancy wristwatches, beautiful hair, and a belt full of interesting gadgets. On discovering nefarious dealings while on a mission, and escaping with the secrets hidden, the spy runs out of luck. Spy is soon dealing with an unexpected out of body experience courtesy of rival operatives from another corporate identity.
Maybe she is a trained, secret soldier for the government? Or a government experiment?
She would make an interesting government experiment.
.
Her hair is growing long -- half of it pure, glossy black and the other half a fading, graying blue -- so he pulls up a selection of possible style choices. They're all decidedly masculine. When he calls her to him, she comes and sees what he's done. She looks at him with that way she has, as if there are questions but she's already figuring out the answers. Whatever it is she decides, it isn't long before she nods once, pointing at the image she likes, the tip of her finger poking through the jelly screen. It's a plain cut, the sort salarymen wear. "That one," she says, mildly.
A few days later, her hair is black, short, and she's wearing it slicked back the way mobsters tend to. She's sauntering around with his suspenders and her new, black trousers that hang low around her hips. There is a cocky, shit eating grin smeared across her face.
She chews on cigar butts when she wants him to touch her.
She's only just beginning to work that damn cigar between her teeth but he's already reached his limit. He has her on the floor before she manages to do more than spit and laugh. She looks good, he decides, with her mussed hair fanning across her forehead and into her eyes.
.
He tries to tempt her to his computers next, which she continues to avoid. She only shrugs when he coaxes her into sitting beside him while he works. Her eyes are dark. "I'm better with other things."
"Here, give me a handle," he says, ignoring her. Her eyes seem to darken further, becoming all pupil, as she stares silently at him. He stares back.
The corner of her mouth eventually tilts up and she says, "Agent." His staring becomes embarrassment. She begins to laugh. At him, he realizes, though not unkindly. Still, with her answer, he feels a tension within him begin to relax.
"Who're you?" she asks when she is finished. He blinks, finding her phrasing a little odd. Not 'What is yours?' but actually, 'Who are you?'. He suddenly doubts that she's as removed from the Wired world as she makes herself out to be.
"(•_•)" he says.
"Faaaaaaace," Agent drawls, blowing smoke in his face. She sticks her elbow through a floating projection of a giant strawberry as she turns around and leans back against the table. "Face," she repeats, eyeing him speculatively. "Not a bad name. It fits you."
Then she is bored and wandering away. In the kitchen, she sniffs everything and rearranges the cupboards for the 394th time. She leaves her socks and underwear everywhere, and she can't do laundry, yet the food needs to be alphabetically arranged and color-coded. He climbs to his feet and follows after Agent, leaning against the doorway, just watching. Her skin is turning a warm, honeyed gold from all the sun she gets running around outside. She glows, he thinks, tasting her new name in his mind. Glows so much that he...
He could maybe…
Almost...
09. There will be Love there
He realizes he loves Agent.
He realizes he loves her the same day one of his long-forgotten signposts to a dead girl registers a blip.
Another beacon is set off. Then another.
He looks up, looks to where Agent sits, curled on the edge of the windowsill, recently washed hair tucked behind her ears, a cigarette cradled in her thin hands. She's smiling a small, secret smile.
(•_•) looks back down at his computer. Watches as the signal progresses from one point to another. It doesn't seem to be random.
He can verify. It could be some curious kid, riding the signal for his very first time, following the trail of something he sees might be interesting. (•_•) doesn't, though.
One, by one, by one, (•_•) reaches out into the ether and takes down the scattered pieces of his old life. When he is done, he goes to Agent and pulls her to her feet. He reaches past her for the wall controls and toggles the window shut.
He buries his face in her damp, black hair. "You better be worth it," he whispers. He smells apples.
10. Rock n Roll
Agent suggests they go for a drive in her new double-seated WaspMX air bike with its black enamel shell and barely-air-legal double propulsion system. On the roof, they climb onto the high, arching scoop-back and straddle the firm, fresh smelling leather. Agent takes off a moment later.
They are going nearly 100mph, upside down and practically glued to the underbelly of an early morning commuter sky tram. They dive down low, almost clipping a hovercraft's radio antennae. Agent's pace is steady as she sends the WaspMX in great arching loops over and under the tram lines woven through the city's 30 layers of traffic. (•_•) buries his nose at the nape of her neck, her short cropped hair tickling his face. He can smell her shampoo and the beginnings of a good sweat through the leather of her bodysuit.
"This baby's made for speed!" Agent shouts over her shoulder. "For hard riding! Wanna go?"
His arms tighten around Agent's middle, which she takes as assent. She guns it, taking them in tightly controlled turns through tunnels and passageways and places in the city he didn't know existed. They play a game of chicken with a broadcast balloon, buffeting it with pressurized air and shifting it off its course further and further with each pass.
For the first time in what feels like forever, (•_•) laughs.
The END.
01. I'M IN HEAVEN
Morning invades through the partially open window slats, dying the greyed-out brown of the room a burning orange. The room is spare, a single brown leather couch that might have been art deco-influenced, but is now a worn relic in an apartment of antiquities. The chairs are plastic, twentieth century bubblegum school days variety, nostalgic of another era's vision of the future. There is a pile of hardware and wires piled on and under a mysteriously stained white table placed dead center in the room.
Light flashes across the room, bright white rays sliding through the slats as a patrol craft glides noisily past on its way up to the 89th story. A storm warning is issued, the text popping onto an antiquated binary text scroller that dangles from the ceiling across two of the windows. The text flashes in rainbow colors as it announces that everyone should stay indoors. It is followed by an advertisement for retina design and color replacements, brought to you by Toyo Medical Group, the trustworthy purveyors of gentle aesthetic enhancement all over the globe. The automated home systems kick into gear and the window slats close, the overhead lights turn on and a pot of coffee begins to percolate.
Half-buried amongst the aging machines, exposed wires, and coffee-machine-attachment is a man we shall refer to as HUSBAND.
HUSBAND is stubbly, pale from lack of real (or simulated) sunlight, and mousy-haired. He gives off the same air of antiquated, dusty brown as his living space. He has an electric blue stripe across the chest of his shirt. It is an unusual splash of color, fighting for its life across the coffee stained and grimy chest of a man who doesn't seem to care much about such small things as color and life.
HUSBAND falls out of his nest of wires and metal, climbs to his feet and wobbles his way into the bedroom where, in her own nest of wires lies a thin, anemic, pixie-like woman we shall refer to as WIFE.
WIFE has blue hair that matches the dingy blue circles underneath her closed eyes. Her eyelashes flutter as she dreams. HUSBAND checks the wires attached to her cerebral cortex, the heart monitors, the IV, the respirator.
Satisfied that all is well, HUSBAND returns to his machine, and coffee pot, and news feed. He chats on the net. Checks Infoweb. Orders takeout meals to be delivered to him for the next week. He finishes his coffee, hooks on his VR sight and creates a virtual bouquet of glitter-pink roses. He bakes a cake and spends the evening gently holding WIFE's hand.
It is their third anniversary together, and their first anniversary since he won his bet and she got herself lost somewhere across the datastream. He wishes she were able hear him when he whispers to her, "I told you so."
02. Some Sort of Flower
The way he met her was this:
He was on the right side of a security wall, putting up defenses as fast as the mysterious person designated as 'enemy combatant: BabyStar' could tear them down. Out of the blue, a message was sent to him.
{{You're a hardwire man, aren't you?
She said, purring across the ether. Peeved, he replied.
}}And you're a wetware zombie. Still got brains after frying on nano?
After this bit of obligatory repartee, they engaged long enough for him to hit three letters on his keyboard; then BabyStar broke past. She left behind a silly little animation of singing flowers proclaiming, "BABY, YOUR STARS SHINE BRIGHT!" that hijacked the computer's desktop. Little tutu-wearing platypii chewed on the desktop icons. He got rid of them, flipped the bird at his monitor screen, and offhandedly set a trace BabyStar's tail.
"Amateur," he snorted and went back to lunch.
Three hours later, after hop-scotching around the globe several times, the trace revealed BabyStar to be an 80 year old pre-implant grandmother and member of an Anti-Wire luddite community in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowheresville. Three minutes and three seconds after discovering this, he found himself tracking down one of the most irritatingly persistent poli-propoganda viruses he had had the displeasure of clearing from a network.
His bosses were not pleased.
They met again with the same sneaky attacks, same username, different server. He traced BabyStar to a robot-manned mushroom farm on the moon. By the forth or fifth time they clashed, he began to think things.
BabyStar gave him a server name. "Meet me here." She said.
It was a game server, just another generic sim out of the billion Korean VR fantasy clones in existence. Her avatar was a gangly girl, completely flat chested and covered in glitter. He was a stock paladin-type with albino-blond hair. Teeth, eyes, hair sparkling at him, she smiled and handed him a glass of something with an umbrella sticking out of it. He stared at it.
"What is this? A date?"
Her smile widened.
They killed together, playing with blood and dismemberment and the mass destruction of entire towns until his body demanded that he either feed or caffeinate it. They played, her lips pressed close his to ear, whispering sweet wild things he rarely thought of, things he only knew in the thinnest lines of theory in the middle of his sleepless nights - everyone else's days.
He was lost.
"You're kinda pretty," she said, so sweetly that he forgot he was a stock paladin with impossibly blond hair and that she was a stalker who probably did know what he really looked like.
He was lost.
03. You + I
Some people meet in laundromats.
Other people avoid daylight and natural air unless a catastrophic disaster occurs. In this particular instance, it was the Great Signal Death. At about two in the afternoon, a massive power surge blew out the triple-layer failsafes built into the linked power grids across the entire Eastern seaboard, simultaneously frying the brains of every net-user on a plug-link and sending a compressed beam of something through an historical relic of a radio tower; a something that took out one of the biggest commercial satellites in orbit. Some speculated it was a secret military test gone wrong. Others said it was a case of corporate espionage.
At the time, no one really cared about any of that. The Wired was down and there were people who needed to get back on. Immediately.
It was raining.
He didn't know about useful rain-keeping-off things like umbrellas or raincoats when he and his neighbors panicked and ventured out into the first dose of real atmosphere they've had in years, searching for the nearest independent satellite-linked café with its own generator. When he finally found one, he squished wetly as he sat. He was sitting across from a girl with a mussed head of hair in an amazing shade of bright blue. As he slipped the VR set over one eye, he wondered whether she dyed it, or had her roots genetically altered.
He logged back in. BabyStar apologized for replying slowly. It was the first time in years that she'd had to type and she found that she'd completely forgotten how. Watching the girl in front of him hunt and peck with her fingertips - she chewed her nails, he noticed - he told BabyStar that he didn't mind.
They were riding a ship across a supernova like some people took speedboats across shark-infested waters. They went fast, looping and twisting first one way and then another. Left, right, left again only to drop into a tight corkscrew, she gunned the ship straight into an asteroid belt, swerving and laughing wildly in equal measure. He preferred long scenic drives that lead to an actual direction, but BabyStar liked short, dizzy drops that made his stomach churn and his sense of direction disappear as she changed speed, going full throttle one moment, and dropping dead in space a second later.
"We're listening to the same song, aren't we?" she murmured, fingers tapping against the steering column. Except her voice was coming from in front of him as well.
He automatically looked up, startled, staring at her in VR, and his free eye finding the girl in the neighboring terminal. Both girls in both worlds raised a hand. They smiled at him. He hadn't even noticed the music, which was blaring loudly from the speaker hanging so low that he could have hit his head on the bottom of it if he stood up wrong.
He stood up and hit his head. Then stared helplessly. BabyStar giggled at him, no more than two feet away in his real life.
He was shocked to realize -- this tiny slip of a girl who stalked him -- he was completely in love with her.
04. Always and Always
In retrospect, he should have known she was a user. He had assumed as much that very first time they met. But somehow, between the stalking and sweet smiles and dark wicked words, he'd forgotten. It wasn't so much that she was a wetware user -- when the technology first came out, he'd been endlessly fascinated with the very concept of a computer that could be poured out into any frame that could be found for it.
Wetware poured into the eye socket might temporarily turn the brain into one of the fastest damn processors in the entire world… Without any of the human-through-interface lag, speeding through the Wired as quick as human thought might be an incredible rush, but the inevitable end results were no prettier than the remains of plugged users who gave up on real life. Everyone knew the dangers. But it was so, so very tempting.
He'd forgotten about that.
HUSBAND was once a gawky, precocious youth known by the handle (•_•), read as 'Face'. Perhaps there was a time he answered to an innocuous name like 'Frank' or 'John', but that old identity had disappeared so long ago that he often thought he must have leapt from the womb fully formed as mumbly and shaggy-haired (•_•).
He dressed plainly, ate plainly and was active just enough to be relatively healthy. He was soft-spoken to the point that some people thought he was speech-impaired, but it wasn't something he felt a desire to correct. (•_•) rode the ether between Earth and the moon colonies, what use did he have for speech? He hijacked satellites, pirated broadcast signals and sprayed his virtual graffiti across corporate servers all over the world. (•_•) handled the Wired like a man handling a fine, fast car. Bright red speedster. Sun, wind and a beautiful girl in the next seat with her hands and mouth in inappropriate places. That was who he was.
Now he silently performs his daily routines with the steadiness of a preprogrammed cleaner bot. He used to joke that, for a human carrying only the most minimal enhancements, he was more robotic than most cyborgs. All vestiges of his former life have been reduced to diligence and reliability. Dedication. Responsibility. Layered on top of a lanky frame of stress and apathy, HUSBAND is his new skin now.
He has the beautiful girl, but she's broken. He has difficulty remembering what speed feels like. He spends his days listlessly creating virtual topiary for those who can afford the real thing, but don't want the hassle of keeping something alive.
It pays well.
He wonders if this is why she married him-- because, like a robot sentinel or bot-pet caring for its dead owner's house, he would be a reliable contingency plan. He would take care of her body in case…
Which is what he does. During the day, he exercises her, cleans her, feeds her. At night, he is wired, building small signposts everywhere pointing back to him. "Here, come this way."
"Come home."
"I miss you."
It becomes a phenomena. Other schmucks, left behind by spouses, or lovers, or family who didn't love them enough to ignore the siren call of the broadcast waves and infostreams; they place their own signposts. HUSBAND wonders if WIFE will see and know his from the all the others, or whether she will be confused. Or if she will just laugh. He wonders if she, like he did, missed her other self, missed the fire and speed and excitement. He wonders if she missed it all too much to come back.
05. Stand By
The way he meets her is this:
She opens her eyes.
"You told me what?" she asks, voice failing, slipping in and out like the haunting broadcast ghosts that machines sometimes pick up on stormy nights.
Heart pounding through his chest, his ribcage-- and he can almost swear that the visual feed from his eyes to brain has somehow short-circuited. He runs shaking hands over her face, her arms. "I told you so," he whispers. Saying the words again and again.
She seems almost puzzled at first, lifting her head just enough to look down at her body. She is silent. She smiles.
She smiles all wrong.
06. MAGIC PLACE
WIFE is different. HUSBAND isn't sure how. Some parts more and less brittle in different ways. Strong, and weak. Her ways are angled in all the places she had once been soft and gentle. She doesn't know how to walk at first.
She seems fascinated with the apartment, her hair, the collection of gleaming white coffee mugs in the kitchen. She drifts from the one room to the next -- there are only four, and two of them can barely be counted as actual rooms -- back and forth, running spidery fingertips along surfaces. She rarely speaks except in a hoarse, husky murmur, her voice swinging up, then down in octave, as if testing its range.
"Come here." She says one day, from where she lays sprawled across the bathroom floor, wracked with cramps, her face white and her movements lethargic.
He comes to her, kneeling. All she wears is his old shirt, the one with the blue stripe and short sleeves; it still looks large on her small frame. Her bare arms and legs are splayed against cool tiles. He slips his hand under the hem of the shirt, pressing gently against the soft, sweat dampened curve of her abdomen. She arches.
"Does it hurt?" he asks, pressing harder. Her eyes darken.
"Lower," she says. He moves his hand lower. His fingers come away with moisture and blood.
"Come here," she says again, grasping his wrist, claiming his hand and his fingers again. "Here. Come here." He lies over her, injuring his elbows and knees on his way down. She pulls at him, her hands guiding his under the slightly rough folds of his own borrowed shirt.
They don't kiss. They bite and claw at each other. They roll across the floor until they slam into an obstacle that can't be shoved or kicked away. He hisses wordless things into her hair, angry, resentful. He slams her hard against the tiles, his fingers leaving dark purpling bruises where he grasps her arms. She shoves him, knees and kicks him onto his back and tears his shirt open, snarling in foreign words he thinks he should probably recognize even if his mind is too far gone to understand any of it.
She's hot and she's brutal. He doesn't realize there are tears on his face until her hands come up to rub at the moisture under his eyes.
Afterwards, they sit, and she smokes a cigarette of a brand he didn't know still existed. She silently offers him one. Three years of marriage and he hadn't even known she smoked. Or menstruated. Resentful again, he leans in, kissing her, finally, for the first time in a little over a year. He kisses her like he hadn't been able to. He kisses her because her still body had been far too close to corpse-like for his tastes; now she is alive.
She's very alive now, and she's kissing him back with her teeth, her nails digging into his wrist and cigarette ash burning holes into both their shirts.
She pulls away to inhale another lungful of smoke, then leans back in to press soft lips and a thin, black vapor of cancer against his mouth. She does it again.
All it takes is this; this moment on the floor, damp with sweat and traced in blood as he breathes in heavy, sweet smoke from a mouth dark with whispered words in languages he doesn't know. He realizes that WIFE is no longer his WIFE. In fact, WIFE is no longer herself at all.
07. "I"
His wife is a man.
There is no real reason for him to think this; her body has only been hijacked, after all. But it's the way she walks with a slow, confident saunter now that she is eating properly again. He finds himself spending hours fixated on the way her shoulders shift, as if she is used to them being far broader than the delicate, thin things she has now. He is amused at how utterly perplexed she becomes whenever she reaches for an object on a high shelf and realizes how far from her fingers it is. She needs to be taught what to do when she menstruates.
It isn't obvious at first (they both attribute her confusion and lack of memory to the nano-burn, a temporary side effect.) He brings her the many wigs and collections of glittery makeup and gauzy things he'd placed in storage. She begins to giggle more often. When he asks her whether her throat is sore, she tries to pitch her voice higher. She forgets often, however; half the time her voice slides down into an odd, husky rasp. And it is only after he accidentally surprises a real laugh out of her -- a deep, loud sound that erupts unrestrained from down in her belly -- that he thinks maybe there is some other way she prefers to laugh. She reaches for the wrong toothbrush one morning while he is frowning thoughtfully at her in the bathroom. Watching her hand dart from the baby blue brush to the glitter-pink one, he realizes she is watching him as carefully as he is watching her.
He begins to give her deliberately obscure cues, just to see what will happen.
He discovers that he might actually be a pretty good liar.
This new person, he slowly and carefully learns, likes her coffee with enough cream to fill a cow, but very little sugar. She prefers clunky but plain, un-ornamented jewelry. She thinks the bizarre, razor-fanged, man-eating cacti mascot for Mui-Mui Burgers is the cutest thing ever. Her natural posture usually involves having her limbs splayed everywhere, taking up as much space as possible. She moves as if she expects everyone to give way and is surprised when people don't.
"Shove over," she says, sliding past him the morning after he drags her outside to the Dominican Day block party his sector seems to erupt into weekly.
"I didn't know girls could pee standing up," he replies. She belatedly plops herself down onto the toilet seat, elbows on her knees. Tragically hung over, she squints at him. He smiles and goes back to brushing his teeth.
As innocuous as this scene in the bathroom is, it has an incredible effect on her.
He wonders about this, as she gives up giggling and wiggling around in the tiny little skirts BabyStar liked to wear. Perhaps he has a trustworthy appearance, he thinks, as he watches her dig through his drawers and sniff his undershirts. Or gullible. Maybe she thinks he's abusable. She wanders off clad only in a pair of his boxers.
Perhaps she actually wants him to learn about the person hiding behind his wife's face.
He doesn't know why she would. He doesn't care, either. He just knows that he is becoming used to looking up from his half-formed icicle topiaries and gilt-rose gardens to see her standing hipshot and cocky in the doorway, her hands in her pockets, her expression coolly neutral as she stares unabashedly at him from behind a thin, pungent curtain of shifting cigarette smoke. The food in his pantries goes from the collection of sweets BabyStar favored to a wide range of spices that has him resigned to visiting the doctor for stomach inflammation rather than aching teeth. She takes to dragging him to better parties than the sort he would typically have access to.
She never once touches his computers.
"You fuck me through the floor when I can barely walk, but now you don't touch me. It's like we never talk anymore. Are you pregnant?" she says jokingly, late one evening. He rolls over to look at her over the invisible divide slicing down the center of the chaste bed they share. The neon lights filter in from outside the uncovered windows, flashing different colors over the walls and their bodies like the lighting in a bad arthouse 'erotic' flick. A smirk twitches at her lips. Her expression is nothing BabyStar would have worn.
It's amazing, he thinks, how a simple twitch of the brow or quirk of the lip can transform a face into someone else's. He reaches out and runs his thumb over an eyebrow that hasn't been plucked in weeks. He quickly pulls his hand away before she can bite him.
"We never really talked before," he murmurs, truthfully. "I don’t talk much." He blinks sleepily at her, noting that her roots are beginning to grow in black. "But you know that," he adds.
A little uneasily, she mutters, "Yeah." BabyStar would have rolled over at this point, perhaps looked coyly over her shoulder at him and changed the topic. This person stares him in the eye, a small crease forming between her brows, which he smoothes with his thumb.
He shifts in closer until he can sling an arm and leg over her body, using his weight to squash her into the bed. She grunts. "This isn't sex."
He mutters into the hair obscuring her ear, "I have a headache, dear. Maybe later." She mutters under her breath and wiggles fruitlessly. She goes to sleep eventually, when she realizes he has no intention of moving and she isn't strong enough to shift him off her.
He wonders why she is staying here with him, even as he notices, with shock, that a sort of sensory color is slowly returning into his life. He hadn't been aware it was missing.
Where BabyStar had been a retinal explosion, this new woman is a creeping agitation that crawls across his skin like a rainbow of ants saturating his mindscape. Blacks have never been quite as black. Oranges never burned as darkly, and white never had so many off-color variations. He feels as if his nerve endings are coming to life for the very first time. The significance of this is not lost on him.
Where BabyStar was a silken, bewildering creature hovering somewhere above him, just out of reach of his grasping fingers, this woman is right next to him: at the bars he goes to, belching when he does, laughing loudly and stupidly when he does, singing bawdy songs off-tune and loudly in foreign languages while he accompanies in the only words he knows. She leaves her dirty, balled-up socks on the couch beside his.
It isn't that his wife is a man. His wife is someone like him.
08. Baby London Star (or) My Super Secret Agent Man
She continues to silently watch him long after he stops his own staring and instead focuses on trying to get his fingers underneath the worn cotton of her sleeveless, white undershirts as often as possible. She still rarely says anything. Instead, she speaks in smoke signals.
Smoke rings mean contentment.
'I saw three flocks of birds flying past our window, and I just watched them pass. They were fat and soft like chickens. Can we shoot them next time and eat them?' Nonsense thoughts and dark, mysterious smiles sleepily follow the last ring that expands and dissipates into the air. He likes to kiss her during these times, quickly catching her mouth with his before she breathes out a new batch of wobbly circles.
Reedy, thin streams of grey sliding through the air like blades of wiggling grass means she is thinking. She is not the sort of person that likes to think, he learns. She enjoys being distracted often.
'There are things you really don't want to, or need to know about.' Dark impenetrable clouds mean nervousness. She comes home with a new weapon during these times -- a small handgun, knives, an electric nightstick. How or where she is getting them, or even whose money she is using, he doesn't know. He doesn't ask.
When she is angry (or serious), there is an absence of smoke and a blank sort of implacable silence that is so intimidating his mind immediately conjures images of execution officers and slow, painful death. He avoids her during these times, though he doesn't really need to. She tends to disappear on her own, for days at a time before she comes back, smelling of soap and bearing gifts of exotic food neither of them know how to eat. He finds himself scanning the newsfeeds in her absence, watching security videos of gang fights, and drug busts, and violent clashes between unknown armed persons.
He likes to create little fantasies about her while he is working and she is somewhere nearby, bending and twisting about on the floor as she exercises. She seems determined to bulk up as much muscle as she can, as fast as she can. It will take her awhile; dainty BabyStar never exercised a day in her life.
'Who is she?' He wonders. In some ways, this chain-smoking keeper of weapons and organizer of kitchen supplies is still as much of a mystery to him as she was the day she first woke up. He imagines an ex-Yakuza, a handsome face on a long, lean body. Fancy shoes and an expensive, tailored suit. Yakuza becomes tired of the hard life and attempts to escape from the kumi, only to become trapped somewhere without out an easy escape. Yakuza's real body is in the harbor, in pieces, in a box chained to a heavy rock.
Other days, he thinks of an equally tailored corporate spy with fancy wristwatches, beautiful hair, and a belt full of interesting gadgets. On discovering nefarious dealings while on a mission, and escaping with the secrets hidden, the spy runs out of luck. Spy is soon dealing with an unexpected out of body experience courtesy of rival operatives from another corporate identity.
Maybe she is a trained, secret soldier for the government? Or a government experiment?
She would make an interesting government experiment.
.
Her hair is growing long -- half of it pure, glossy black and the other half a fading, graying blue -- so he pulls up a selection of possible style choices. They're all decidedly masculine. When he calls her to him, she comes and sees what he's done. She looks at him with that way she has, as if there are questions but she's already figuring out the answers. Whatever it is she decides, it isn't long before she nods once, pointing at the image she likes, the tip of her finger poking through the jelly screen. It's a plain cut, the sort salarymen wear. "That one," she says, mildly.
A few days later, her hair is black, short, and she's wearing it slicked back the way mobsters tend to. She's sauntering around with his suspenders and her new, black trousers that hang low around her hips. There is a cocky, shit eating grin smeared across her face.
She chews on cigar butts when she wants him to touch her.
She's only just beginning to work that damn cigar between her teeth but he's already reached his limit. He has her on the floor before she manages to do more than spit and laugh. She looks good, he decides, with her mussed hair fanning across her forehead and into her eyes.
.
He tries to tempt her to his computers next, which she continues to avoid. She only shrugs when he coaxes her into sitting beside him while he works. Her eyes are dark. "I'm better with other things."
"Here, give me a handle," he says, ignoring her. Her eyes seem to darken further, becoming all pupil, as she stares silently at him. He stares back.
The corner of her mouth eventually tilts up and she says, "Agent." His staring becomes embarrassment. She begins to laugh. At him, he realizes, though not unkindly. Still, with her answer, he feels a tension within him begin to relax.
"Who're you?" she asks when she is finished. He blinks, finding her phrasing a little odd. Not 'What is yours?' but actually, 'Who are you?'. He suddenly doubts that she's as removed from the Wired world as she makes herself out to be.
"(•_•)" he says.
"Faaaaaaace," Agent drawls, blowing smoke in his face. She sticks her elbow through a floating projection of a giant strawberry as she turns around and leans back against the table. "Face," she repeats, eyeing him speculatively. "Not a bad name. It fits you."
Then she is bored and wandering away. In the kitchen, she sniffs everything and rearranges the cupboards for the 394th time. She leaves her socks and underwear everywhere, and she can't do laundry, yet the food needs to be alphabetically arranged and color-coded. He climbs to his feet and follows after Agent, leaning against the doorway, just watching. Her skin is turning a warm, honeyed gold from all the sun she gets running around outside. She glows, he thinks, tasting her new name in his mind. Glows so much that he...
He could maybe…
Almost...
09. There will be Love there
He realizes he loves Agent.
He realizes he loves her the same day one of his long-forgotten signposts to a dead girl registers a blip.
Another beacon is set off. Then another.
He looks up, looks to where Agent sits, curled on the edge of the windowsill, recently washed hair tucked behind her ears, a cigarette cradled in her thin hands. She's smiling a small, secret smile.
(•_•) looks back down at his computer. Watches as the signal progresses from one point to another. It doesn't seem to be random.
He can verify. It could be some curious kid, riding the signal for his very first time, following the trail of something he sees might be interesting. (•_•) doesn't, though.
One, by one, by one, (•_•) reaches out into the ether and takes down the scattered pieces of his old life. When he is done, he goes to Agent and pulls her to her feet. He reaches past her for the wall controls and toggles the window shut.
He buries his face in her damp, black hair. "You better be worth it," he whispers. He smells apples.
10. Rock n Roll
Agent suggests they go for a drive in her new double-seated WaspMX air bike with its black enamel shell and barely-air-legal double propulsion system. On the roof, they climb onto the high, arching scoop-back and straddle the firm, fresh smelling leather. Agent takes off a moment later.
They are going nearly 100mph, upside down and practically glued to the underbelly of an early morning commuter sky tram. They dive down low, almost clipping a hovercraft's radio antennae. Agent's pace is steady as she sends the WaspMX in great arching loops over and under the tram lines woven through the city's 30 layers of traffic. (•_•) buries his nose at the nape of her neck, her short cropped hair tickling his face. He can smell her shampoo and the beginnings of a good sweat through the leather of her bodysuit.
"This baby's made for speed!" Agent shouts over her shoulder. "For hard riding! Wanna go?"
His arms tighten around Agent's middle, which she takes as assent. She guns it, taking them in tightly controlled turns through tunnels and passageways and places in the city he didn't know existed. They play a game of chicken with a broadcast balloon, buffeting it with pressurized air and shifting it off its course further and further with each pass.
For the first time in what feels like forever, (•_•) laughs.
The END.