Year: 2024
At twenty-one, Bryce Desmond saw her dangling from the concert hall’s balcony.
Lava Locks, he had coined the girl, from that mane of fiery red that reached all the way down to her ass. It swayed along with her as she looked down to the hired security, shouting for her to get down. As if she would, for they’d kick her out as soon as her feet touched the cement.
Lava Locks did not heed the warning; instead, she kicked herself off the ledge and into the crowd, where a press of eager hands caught her. They deposited her among their ranks, becoming her shield and camouflage.
The maneuver fooled security, but it didn’t fool Bryce, who hadn’t taken his eyes off her.
“She’s crazy! Did you see that?” a different girl yelled, one who was not Lava Locks. Bryce had found her at the bar an hour earlier and, since then, proceeded to spout her life’s details. Bryce could only recall snippets by then. Five minutes ago, Bryce had made it his goal to leave with her. Now, he settled on an outcome that would place him wholly alone or in the presence of that fiery wraith… and nowhere in between.
He pushed through the crowd, tracing the routes and the likely paths, recalling the moment when she had removed her hoodie, tied her hair back, and placed a toque on her head.
He found her leaning on the back of a pillar in the center of the room, fending off some curious 5’6 guy with the jawline of a GigaChad. Bryce could not blame this pursuer, drawn to this beacon like a confused insect. Bryce Desmond was just as confused.
When Lava Locks managed to fend off the short assailant, Bryce approached her, facing away to avoid appearing confrontational.
“Hey,” Bryce said. Then, louder. “Hey! I like what you did! That was so… cool!”
Cool? He wasn’t a poet, and English was only an elective in his first year at Caltech. It was all he could do to stop cringing from the words.
Lava Locks had turned Bryce’s way and sneered. When her scan reached his face, something changed. It was like she were a music box unlocking its final phase, its sprawling reveal. “You’re the one that’s cool.”
It sounded like mocking back then. She said something else, but a dubstep drop like the yawning of a hellish monster drowned out her words. It could have been a warning, but she did not pull away. So, Bryce took it as a rallying cry, as if that same monster were on his side.
He was an awkward mess on the rave’s floor, but so was she. Her glow-up Adidas blinked like Christmas bulbs, each of her stomps off time to the synth drops but still a wonder to behold.
When he came in close, something cold pressed into his grip. He looked at it. “What’s this?”
Lava Locks seemed to be done with reading lips. She whispered in Bryce’s ear. “Dreams and nightmares can be wrapped into one if only you can handle it.” She went on. “They say you should take someone with you into the black.”
Into the black. The expression seemed innocent before. Bryce would come to know it meant the emergence of something larger.
Fresh into his cybersecurity undergrad, Bryce had learned the most valuable lesson any human male can ever know: never turn down an offer from a girl you fancy, no matter what it is.
They woke up the following day together in the back of a dormant Prius that Bryce had hijacked using a zero-day exploit he had learned on his third day of Applied Fundamentals of Cybersecurity. Sweat matted the upholstery. The rear window faced a beach. Gulls cried outside as the sun beat down on joggers. Auto-tint was set to maximum, courtesy of Bryce’s attempts to hack the kernel in the car’s microprocessor. He hadn’t bothered testing it until that morning and considered his luck unsustainable but well-placed.
Between inhaling Black Fire, the sessions of hesitant embrace, and the fumbling of limbs, Bryce had listened with his full attention and had forgotten he ever spoke to another soul that night. His mind snapped when Lava Locks told her his name, every line in Bryce’s psyche seeming to converge, every trail of existence leading here.
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Hannah.
It was a name so innocent and far from the appearance of one Lava Locked that Bryce had to ask her to repeat it. It would be the only time he ever asked.
“There’s potential here,” she said, heaving a deep breath.
Bryce hadn’t asked her to elaborate, only dwelling on the vivid hallucinations that seemed so real. He shielded his face, screamed, and ran, but still woke up five minutes later each time in the car’s back seat.
“I want to do that again,” Hannah said, still coming down from it. “Every night. Forever.”
Bryce knew she was talking about one thing but hoped she meant the other.
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Year: 2028
Four years later, after specializing in Field Cybersecurity—a fancy name for a niche and emerging subset of IT with problems requiring physical human intervention—Bryce graduated from Caltech with honors and enough money from his co-op terms to afford a down payment on a one-bedroom condo. Coupled with a signing bonus to join a new trendy startup called Metamatics, where he would fix streaming antennae across the USA and Canada, Bryce left California for Chicago. With Hannah in hand, inseparable from the rave, the first thing Bryce did after entering their new home was kneel and propose.
The ceremony was small, and only the wedding parties were attending. Bryce had intended to tell his parents a year later, a decision he would come to regret when both his mother and father were killed during the country’s first and only bullet train derailment.
Hannah had cradled him like a bumbling child on the nights when he dreamt of returning home to tell his parents the good news. She prepared his lunches for work and massaged his back every night. Through a responsibility more to her and not his job, Bryce had pulled himself out of the rut just in time for the most significant talk they’d ever have.
“I just don’t think I have time for that,” said Hannah, stooping over their garden balcony. “I have nieces and nephews. They’re like my kids anyway. Besides, I’m 29.” The words could have come from someone twenty years older. “Can you get me it?”
"It." No need to describe this device Hannah had taken to with the same devotion as a musical instrument. The vape had been sitting on the balcony’s table, out of reach of her. Bryce passed it over. He had taken maybe five hits in the five years since they had met at the rave, while Hannah had summoned the black at least once a week. In their first years as husband and wife, it was a novel pastime for her, a mild indulgence that wouldn’t put them in immediate danger, as the stitchings—the names for the hallucinations for Black Fire—were easy to come by. As time went on, however, he began to question why he would return home and find his wife on the same couch she had been sitting on when he left.
Bryce went along with her plans, their life now more valuable to him than anything.
Things changed when Hannah, seemingly emboldened by the decision to be motherless for the rest of her life, joined as a social media manager for one of her friend’s startups an hour away. Where Bryce had spent long nights at Metamatics’s office and in the field, Hannah must have felt it was her turn, her revenge. She would spend nights in the office, sleeping at hotels nearby, still calling Bryce but explaining that work was busy and there was nothing else to worry about.
It could have been an affair. It would have been better if Hannah had found someone else and was sidelining him. At least that way, he would have justified what came next.
This logic drove him out the door at 3 AM one night. He walked and did not take an auto-car. He did not tell anyone where he was going. He did not leave a note.
She had been a coworker, throwing him advances and casting her line just enough for Bryce to follow the lure. It worked, and when he showed up on her doorstep, she had let him in.
It had been a sleazy affair. Clumsy and messy. Awkward and unjust. Bryce didn’t finish, which meant she probably didn’t either. The interaction served as nothing more than a step up from an orgasm, and a small one at that. He wondered if this was all his life amounted to now. He wondered if he could take it all back.
The blue light on the TV in front of her bed did not belong to the TV but a camera disguised as a phone charger. Bryce didn’t mind it when he stared not at her but at it. When he saw the footage online, himself a worn, rough, and sweaty primate of a mess, he thought it suited him.
“They offered it to me on a blockchain,” said Hannah, referring to a message she received minutes after Bryce left the woman’s house. Hannah’s laptop sat on the coffee table between them. “It’s the only copy.”
Bryce was far past denying the act now. It was not difficult for Hannah to track his movements from their shared location app, and turning it off that night would have been more suspicious. She coincided this data with metadata included with the footage. How else could he explain a 3 AM jaunt to a suburban neighborhood? A late-night jog? Bryce got in enough steps from his fieldwork.
“Why?” Hannah had asked.
There should have been an answer in that silence and a chance to save what they had built. Instead, there was nothing.
He could have said Hannah deserved it. He could have said she had ignored him and that their distance was measurable in hours and days. He could have retaliated. If he had been a lesser man, he could have hit her.
Instead, he left.