“The actions of one affect those of the many. If each person were a thread and the amalgamation a tapestry, ‘ripple effects’ occur at nearly every moment.”
– Render
Staring at the truest possession. On my desk. Closed beckoning, a stolen tome, not musty, clean and brand, new not given teachers droning gibberish “Let’s look again at everyone’s favorite character, the crowd groans never opening their mouths charlie. A plain red book, the spine broken. Cover reads: THE PITCHER IN THE FERRY a lonely, lonely kid you are. Shuffling pages. Protesting chalk as Mr. Compson inscribes his soul on the board. A kid doesn’t own parents ran away home, no he ran to live in a garbage heap after burying the sister alive in the back with her favorite toy horseman. That’s not right. It’s a baseball player in the 21st century who wanted to be a sailor now that’s just a dream. If he really wanted a dream he’d start with the baseball bat.
Don’t swing at sliders, swing at sailfish, coming and going swiftly through the waters. Not at the soft air pliant unresistant not parrying to the sword. Do I do the readings do I ever never did delinquent wannabe dark runaway vigilante caped broccoli or something. Don’t envy him. But at least it’s “literature.” The one class I pay attention in. I reach down for my scabbard.
Don’t have Utmost there. Didn’t do the practice integrals. Did secure Utmost in the safe place back heap imogen. Run away, run away where are you going, you’re still in class and not caring for students’ rights. Students raising their hands. Utmost safe besides some steel curving pipes up above in the abandoned attic. An adult is standing behind us. Asking a question about Jaden Cornfield who doesn’t like watching those kids next door recreate baseball, imitation sword and shield, Utmost by my side and yearning. As Mr. Compson asks me something can I recreate what he just said, I’d put on my earbuds for syncopation serenades song beat sun. Sun is fire. Sun is a follower of the fire.
Clock above the door, seven minutes to go, and off we run. Forty-three minutes till lunch midpoint day run run run upstairs for Utmost. Reach down beneath the fallen shafts and hold it in my hands. Practice the Cycles and swing. No one can watch from the dugout. There is no narrative in team, it’s missing the initials. And I don’t think about the second one.
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The sky had clouds today. A nice change from having empty blue skies for months. Skylark wondered if the weather towers worked on a set pattern or if they were random like everything else.
“Skylark, some help over here,” Falara said, somehow managing to not bump into the person in front of them as she was sliding away her V-books. They vanished one by one into the V-locker but sometimes one poked back out, so it looked like shortened cylinders hovering shakily.
Skylark laughed and came over. “Just keep using your Thoughts, one by one,” she said, pointing back and forth between her forehead and the tips of each V-book. William Restor had gotten V-lockers just before this school year and it was two months in, but Falara still hadn’t figured out to use them. She was a wizard with the Worldnet, but somehow always managed to find physical technology difficult. The other people in line behind them were clearly trying not to laugh.
There were still a lot of them… Skylark only went to these with Falara but they were always busy when she came. Tickets hard to get via Worldnet but Falara knew how to do that. Skylark smiled to herself as she watched her friend finally step off the self-scanner, her V-locker closed. Receptor, Thought-feed, communicate with the self-scanner. But using the Worldnet was far more––structured. You couldn’t really see it.
“Sorry haha, Skylark,” Falara said, and Skylark smiled and nodded, and stepped up onto the self-scanner herself. She heard some people sigh in relief from behind her.
Incoming Thought-message, identity Self-Scanner v. 3, M4A-7. Receptor wearer: Skylark li Agle, 2nd year William R H, resident #4012 district Q Might. A few seconds, and then: Ticket purchased jointly with Falara Miyander, access permitted. The self-scanner lit up a soft green, meaning that she could step off, identified. She stepped off and joined Falara, waiting next to the actual entrance to the Exhibit.
“It’s really not that hard, you just, step on, and the scanner TMs your receptor,” Skylark said, but Falara shrugged as they passed through the invisible field-boundary, entering the huge domed space inside. “I don’t get how you can use the Net like V-world but still have trouble with self-scanners.”
“Hmm… Look, Skylark, it’s the Rins!” Her friend said, pointing away at a cluster of techists, a family, grouped around what looked like three model robots suspended in an almost transparent liquid in a container, held a half-meter above the ground by an almost invisible string. Skylark looked up and could barely make out its connection to the ceiling of the dome high above.
The Rins were probably famous. Skylark clapped her hands to show some appreciation, and watched Falara practically run over and immediately start talking to them. An absolute child when it came to techists. While the techist family explained their work to Falara, nodding her head with every sentence, Skylark let her eyes wander the Exhibit.
Its open air space was floored with bioterra grass, and translucent magnetairs swung around slowly as they moved visitors between floafa groups, each one next to a different techist. There were just so many people. Skylark hadn’t seen this many in a while; it was almost stifling. Maybe I shouldn’t have come after all. She took a look back at the robots, and not surprisingly Falara was already at the next one, a collection of small triangles, no, Vs that were held together in a confusing arrangement a little above the grass, where a boy with messy brown hair was sitting. Skylark came a bit closer and saw that none of the Vs were touching the grass, but with the clear lines––also strings––connecting them, somehow it all stayed up.
The boy was holding physical cards. He was visibly nervous, the cards twitching and trying not to look at his one onlooker. There was no techist in sight––but then Skylark realized that he was the techist, the Alter Crest badge on his shirt and déjà vu broke into Skylark’s thoughts, and she remembered––this was the same kid she’d found in the free grass reserve, putting alter darts together, and she might have succeeded in making one of them move––but it had been ten meters away, really far, she’d never moved anything from that distance before. The boy had seen her so she had to go. And here he was again, only three meters away, and she almost jumped as she realized. She couldn’t take that chance. She almost TM’d Falara but Falara seemed too busy asking questions to the young techist, the Exhibit was a big place. Skylark quietly stepped away.
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“… this makes the alter darts essential. They’re arranged randomly, but that’s intended. Order might be more preferred than chaos, but the One Body represents it in its more controlled form––structurally lacking order but held together by the unseen atoms that transcend––I mean, unseen forces. F still equals ma.”
Tristan took a deep breath. He hoped that they weren’t paying too much attention, besides Father, who was coming. He continued:
“Their being alter darts. Perfect adaptations of flight’s simplest form, modeled after paper airplanes when society last used paper, before the forests became bioterra. Accentuated the work’s stillness, pieces to separate and take flight, I mean fly, not held to the overall structure.”
Done. Someone was excited about his work, so he had to say something.
Pops’ work. Pops created, designed, and ordered it. Chaos is order.
Pops’ work, he couldn’t forget. This month’s Exhibit had superior pieces; the glittering particle arrangement at the diametric end of the air space, the Rins…
“That makes so much sense!” the girl now standing above the One Fleet said, clapping her hands together, the movement causing her bright red bangs to shake. “You’re so young for a techist––what’s your name again?” she asked him.
Tristan smiled despite himself. “You can access everything about me through my Alter Crest, here, just enter Tristan Mott via the Exhibit’s registered system.” He pointed to the badge on his shirt. “My dad’s Meliodas Mott––he designed the Exhibit today.” He pointed up in that direction. “See,” he said.
The girl looked, and gasped. “Oh my gosh, he’s dazzling!”
“Thank you, okay,” he said. This girl was unusual, Father was famous but not for his hair––he looked, and felt his jaw drop.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The much younger man walking down the nearest magnetair next to his father was bold and beautiful as lightning. The weather towers almost never selected it for the calendar, but he had long golden hair, much longer than his own and made Father’s bob look redundant, really bright, shining eyes that focused on his father’s, that face, Tristan touched his own and regretted not updating his body-maintenance prescriptions in the past three months. Broad, wide shoulders. Tristan found himself scanning the young man’s entire figure as he might––or rather, as the self-scanner had scanned his identity two hours ago upon entering the Exhibit.
Tristan saw that the people around the magnetair were also stopping to gaze; the people near were now coming towards his exhibit; the onlookers were being pulled like self-drawing magnetic field currents…
He dropped his card and pulled his hair back as far as it could.
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“My son, Tristan,” Meliodas Mott said, gesturing towards the array of these alter darts and the awestruck child next to it. “The One Fleet.”
Jaceus smiled and nodded politely. Here was the student who’d been absent from William Restor for his techistry, his father’s pride. The rather brutish man, Jaceus did not like the ruddy brown point of hair on top of his otherwise bald forehead; was pointing directly at the alter darts and saying something very precisely to the gradually growing crowd. All of them were looking not at the speaker, nor at the techist or the piece itself but at Jaceus.
He briefly considered it.
“Your son’s extraordinarily talented, Meliodas,” Jaceus said. “I could not have performed it better myself.”
“Ha ha ha!” Meliodas answered, waving his hand over the One Fleet as it was called. “Talent means nothing without the proper command.” Jaceus noticed the father glancing at the son, who mirrored the smile. He noticed immediately that it wasn’t genuine.
“My son gave a good explanation?” Meliodas inquired of the one onlooker who was staring at the piece, although Jaceus could have sworn that she was looking at him very piercingly just before. She had her hands over her knees, and was holding a hand just by one of the darts, nearly touching it; almost as if she was feeling for something.
“Yes! Tristan explained it very well,” she answered, not looking up; and Meliodas, nodding affirmatively, dipped his head to the audience, cocked his head to the side––likely receiving a message via receptor––and nodded again.
“Thank you all, for seeing our work. I must go,” he said, and with a few paces left them, leaving some twenty people’s focus on Jaceus unabridged. The techist Tristan was still pulling his hair back over and over again, staring at him with obvious adoration.
Jaceus sighed and thought for a way to leave.
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Skylark normally didn’t like the randomness in things but because of it, she could get away on these magnetairs. There were a lot of people walking up and down them, like ants in an insect tank from a fauna reserve, and Falara wouldn’t be taking her eyes off of anything techist for a while.
Skylark certainly recognized something special about techists––the highest engineering made into pieces of art for modern day society to look at. Of course, being in Might they couldn’t have the latest technology or even the best. But it was still cool and exciting and wonderful for many, just not her, not that she couldn’t understand a lot of it, which was partly true, but also she could do some of these amazing things with tech just by looking and raising her hand.
She didn’t envy them, wearing their badges.
Skylark’s magnetair dipped down, close to what looked like a floating cylinder covered with changing illustrations; there were some words on them but they didn’t seem to be in Neo English. As she stepped off, her shoes making the soft tick as they de-magnetized, she then felt a twang run through her feet—but it didn’t stop there, and lanced upward, shooting through her stomach and arms. Her throat felt like she had just swallowed something sweet. Then an urge, a desire, broke into her thoughts and she looked behind her, down through the moving stairs and back to where the young techist had been; she just knew to look there, and the boy was not alone—he was completely surrounded by people, waving his hands animatedly—
Her heart came to a stop.
She felt herself rising off the floafa platform, imperceptibly—flowing, golden hair past the shoulders—eyes so bright they shone from that distance—shirt stretched so tightly over skin—he was smiling at the techist, and Skylark saw lightning beat.
A perfect human. Not even perfect like BMPs made you perfect or at least the way you wanted to. More perfect. Sometimes V-movies had AI like the citizens before AIV.
He was like that. There was this kind of glow about him but he wasn’t actually glowing. She was slowly walking back down the magnetair as it slowly descended that way.
Even his hair looked like it was shining, but that was probably due to the light. It was really well lit here, inside the Exhibit. Falara was standing there, too. Skylark was almost there. Almost at the end of this magnetair which would take her to—just two more, before landing.
The golden guy was now laughing, saying something to the people there, and the twang grew stronger. But Skylark ignored this new feeling she had, and was about to step off the magnetair, when she saw the techist looking in her direction.
She thought she was now close enough to see. The techist was looking straight at her—not at the one with the golden hair and his face changed, it showed recognition, and Skylark remembered, a day when she had been staring with awe at her brother, who was causing the lilies of the field to shake from their roots, and leave the soil, and she had been distracted, and Alauda had been recognized, and—
Skylark had to leave. She couldn’t let it happen again.
But her eyes turned back to the ones of green, and she couldn’t look away.
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The girl almost at the edge of the wandering magnetair looked familiar. But he couldn’t place who she was, exactly; and the more he tried to catch the attention of the young god who was just a meter or two away, his hair was perfect, it was perfect gold, or rather perfectly golden—there was no gold in the world—and he was drawing all the attention. The attention that had been wandering, uncaught, but now tethered firmly to—“Jaceus,” he was saying, telling his name to those asking, and Tristan couldn’t catch the last name. It was just Jaceus. It was certainly not a name inherited from Government families but it certainly didn’t sound like a typical Sector name.
Tristan stopped staring, and looked back to the girl—he knew he recognized her, but he just couldn’t place where—their eyes meeting, hers a bright, startlingly bright blue, she abruptly turned around and nearly flew back up the magnetair, which had just touched down on the Exhibit grass.
Why would she run—Jaceus had been drawing her attention, of that Tristan was certain—and, as he looked past those golden strands, nearly blocking out the light, he saw in his mind, a clear memory, formless but also true, crystallized, as if it were reshaped from forgetfulness—
The alter dart twitched, as if touched from afar, but there was no wind, and as Tristan looked and out beyond the grass he saw a girl, her eyes bright from that distance, withdrawing her hand, and turning and running away just as she came. Tristan shook his head and returned to the piece, moving the final alter dart into place.
—The One Body was floating.
It was floating of its own accord. No wind- or airstrings from above; Vel’atta’s Resistance didn’t apply in Exhibits; the absence of magnet waves or the other pseudo-float technologies available here in Might, not as advanced as those in Plent or High of course but the One Body should not be floating, nobody else was doing anything to it, now those around Jaceus were looking at it in amazement, surely this was part of the Exhibit, it had all been planned, it was just one of many similarly floating pieces, the girl was now nowhere to be seen, and Tristan noticed Jaceus, eyes fixed upon the work, mouth open as if he had been interrupted mid-sentence.
And almost immediately the One Body settled back down, floating in a perfectly vertical vector back down to its artificial podium. Walking a few steps forward Tristan saw that none of the darts had been dislodged and that the arrangements were as immobile and still as they had been before.
Tristan stood for a moment, still, thinking quickly. He scanned the surrounding area for any Exhibitists who might have noticed. It was against regulation to depart from registered piece performance. Pops knew that.
But Pops was not in the surrounding vicinity anymore. Tristan couldn’t see him. The receptors on those remaining in the audience were blinking rapidly though and that indicated their uploading the spectacle to their parts of the Exhibit-feed. Pops would check the Exhibit feed but it wouldn’t be until later.
Well, something had happened. Like before, there had been the strange girl with blue eyes, but also like before, nothing really had happened with the work, technology would be true.
And eventually, Father would see what had happened, written and understood in his daily issue of Energetic. Tristan stood there. Role forgotten. Father wouldn’t question it––more attention for the Motts––perusing his V-book over freshly ordered, no, made coffee––congratulating his son on the presentation of the One Body––dismissing the unregistered, unexplained levitation as a sign of Tristan’s talent. Tristan smiled and beamed as he faced the crowd.
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Their attention distracted, he could finally leave, and return to the school. His objective was complete, having acquainted himself with the techist named Tristan, and unfortunately his father with him, but he would not meddle with their dynamic. He could tell that the boy saw his father in a convoluted mix of idolization, obedience, and fear, and that such freedoms available to children of the––
Jaceus cleared his head. This was not the time to think of home.
He turned and began to walk somewhere else; but then, he felt a flare in his blood. Blue and stellar. Glancing through his fingers and causing sparkling sights behind his eyes, unclear gleanings of the shapes of magic as they gained clarity. He felt his eyes pulled to one of the floating stairs and there upon it was walking quickly away a girl with cerulean hair but he knew, he hadn’t dared to suspect, but the techist’s piece moving of its own accord had been touched by magic, light, but magic all the same. Jaceus Myodor looked after the Scion, for Scion she must be, and the memories came unhinged, and as he took some steps forward he saw in his mind open a door of lightwood, the door to the Tribunal, and a wash of light billowing out from its interior, the place where he was to receive his magpotis and Triomphe clapping his shoulder as he entered.
He entered through that door, and the colors of the sun faced him…
Jaceus clapped his hands to his cheeks, brought up the first entry he could find in his Thought-feed, and focused back on the Scion. She was now at another floating stair, or magnetair as they were called here, and she was trying to get to the exit… Of course, she wasn’t the same. But he knew without shaking that she had been the one to cause Tristan’s alter darts to rise and fall. She could be Scion Magy’cal. The gold and viridian of his awakened memories faded. Scions were just so few. For her to be that distant and for him to notice––Jaceus quickened his step and nearly walked.
Taking a deep breath, he walked quickly after the Scion. He had to speak with her and tell her about her world. Just as he had the others he had found here.