The weak can be re-made strong, the dumb can be re-made smart, and the useless can be given a use. That’s the promise of SynnTech’s new world, a world where we are no longer limited by how we are born.
How much of ourselves must we carve away in our desperate pursuit to become someone deserving of survival? In what ways need we debase ourselves, corrupt ourselves, just for the chance to serve the masters we ourselves created?
Shrouded in this cold, artificial light born from a metal seed, in a void where once a garden bed of colourful dreams would have bloomed, I wonder just how much more of myself can be stripped away until all that’s left is the void that barely recalls what once it was.
Will this newborn ship of Theseus even still carry my name, or will that too be traded for something more useful to those who would use me? Whatever the answer, that future me who may not even be me will survive, even when the me that exists today has been rent like flesh torn from bone. No matter what, some version of Artemis will survive and protect who she can from the whims of our artificial gods.
Even knowing that the unfeeling masters we serve exist only in our shared consciousness, there is no escape from them. The corporations will die like the religions and nations of old, but until that moment, these imaginary beings will continue to wield terrible powers over us. Armies march at their command, and that is only a fraction of the power used to crush those striving to survive outside their domain.
They can invalidate your currency on a whim, repossess your synns, or even brick your logic core if by some whim they gaze unfavourably in your direction.
There is no escape for those who rebel.
So, what is there for us to do but make peace with the situation and serve these imaginary gods in hopes that we will be treated kindly? It’s the path my father walks, and he’s given me a decent life through his service.
SynnTech, the god of my father’s choosing has been kind to us, but can I achieve the same life through my own service? Can I earn enough safety to bring a family of my own into this world?
Would I want to?
Kali lost everything to gain her position, and I refuse to make the same trade. So, what is there left but to follow Dad’s example?
I’ll become important enough to keep everyone I love safe, without rising so far that they’re taken from me. It’s the only path left for me.
A new sensation filters into my mind, easing me from the cold room that has become my prison through the night. A lucid dream, hollow and empty, a disappointing replacement for the colourful fantasies of my childhood dreamings, and yet… I am loath to be free of the cold comfort of my cell.
Morning lights, familiar scents of home, and the warmth of my own bed greet me alongside an unnatural stillness in my lungs. Instinct moves me to cough, but I can’t.
My muscles spasm weakly, my frail body barely even shifting as I writhe in growing panic. I’m trapped and drowning in a coffin beneath the ocean, the pressure a weight on my chest that I can’t resist.
I can’t breathe.
I squeeze, struggling to spit out the fluids blocking up my lungs, but even struggling with all my might I can’t draw a single breath. Biting at the air, I gnaw at the thick jelly that fills my mouth barely sinking my teeth into it.
I will not lose.
I will not die.
Pushing harder against the weights holding me down, I fight against the world until something breaks. A spike of pain brings sense back to my panicked mind.
The spine-trap.
Slowed time.
Air.
It’s normal fucking air.
It is thick and slow, a mucous heavier even than water… but that’s a lie.
The air hasn’t changed; I have.
This is what it means to live in slowed time.
Even knowing it, there’s no relief. Forcing my lungs to cease their struggle, I still tense with the effort of expelling the sour gas that lingers for far too long. The slow movement isn’t enough to satisfy my mind screaming at me for another breath.
My familiar bedroom surrounds me, but I feel as if I’m looking at it from within a fishbowl. Even the dust lingering in the air barely drifts in place, as if captured in stagnant water.
I’m drowning.
It’s a lie.
I know that it’s a lie.
The air isn’t thick or slow. My lungs can move perfectly fine so long as I don’t force them to push harder than they’re capable of. It’s just that with time itself slowed to one-tenth speed, every sense and instinct is confused. Even hyperventilating, I feel like I’m forcing coarse sand through my lungs.
Calm.
Leaning on my logic core, I freeze the panic in my mind and command my bodily responses back into ideal ranges.
It’s… oddly simple to do.
My flesh isn’t as rebellious as it usually would be, now that I’ve ordered calm, my body is forced into obeyance.
Still, attempts to control my heartbeat fail with a ‘lacking authorisation’ response flicking through my mind. My lungs, in contrast, try to do as commanded but simply can’t move fast enough, struggling to move ten times faster than they normally would.
Recognising the problem, I try to slow my breathing but even then, it’s difficult to grasp the new speed I’m living in. Carefully adjusting the commands, I feel less like I’m living and more like I’m pulling at strings puppeteering my own flesh.
Thousands of threads tug at my muscles, but all my instinctive actions do not connect as I expect them to. Even something as instinctive as blinking causes a series of spasms that spread quickly as I react to them, forcing me to hold the vibrating strings still until it passes.
A burning terror near paralyses my flesh as the sense of drowning only worsens, yet that fear, though intense, is distant and easily bound. Never before have I had such total control over my own self, setting aside the tantrums that my flesh would force upon me while allowing my logic core to mechanically guide my body. If it weren’t for the incomplete control system, I’d be able to steer my body as I would a character in a game.
Observing the fleshy reactions to my every tug at my own strings, I begin to figure out the puzzle underlying it all. With my newfound focus, it’s remarkably simple to understand everything that’s going wrong but the scope of it all remains a challenge.
My grey matter has created a knotted network of commands and functions that need to be unwoven for my new improved mental network to manipulate.
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For instance, when I try to blink, the commands for ‘close’ and ‘open’ are bound in the same set of signals such that the mind only needs to tug at the one command. Yet now that everything runs faster, the ‘close’ process begins even before the ‘open’ process is finished executing, causing muscular strain as my flesh tries to comply.
It is hardly unique either, there are so many knots to be pulled apart. Not all of it is mechanical in function, either.
My logic core reports the detailed processes behind my every thought and even the construct of my personality, so much that I was never fully aware of is now bright and clear. Millions of secrets are hidden within the tangled knots of thoughts and ideas melded into my organic synapses, all now laid bare before me. I’m sure that a psychological analysis would be as simple as an anti-virus scan, and a mental restructuring wouldn’t be much more difficult than that.
I can be whoever I want to be.
Whoever I need to be.
The replacement wiring that has been rooted throughout my mind, enhancing my organic thoughts so that they can keep up with the rest of me, has created a digitalised emulation of my real mind. This emulation is able to run ahead of the useless flesh still panicking and sparking unneeded commands that would only get me hurt.
But then, is the emulation really me? Or is the real me the mass of grey matter caged inside my skull, disconnected from the rest of my flesh and mind?
Does it matter?
So long as I can function better now than before, then the rest is just details. Details that can be worked out with processing power and time. While my logic core works to unravel all of the data for my breathing and blinking, slowing the process down by a factor of ten, I finally take in the room around me.
Mom is looking my way, her eyes focusing on me as my lungs are slowing down from my earlier wretched attempts at breathing. Yet, even as she stares at me, there is a faint glow in her eyes hinting at the other worlds that she’s seeing in the widenet, looking right through me.
Linking into the nearnet, I connect with her address and throw together a quick message.
“Hi Mom, I’m awake. I was just trying to breathe but my body wasn’t working with me. I should have it figured out in a little bit.” I send the message and see her expression change ever so slightly as the message comes in and she starts reading.
Then I wait.
And wait.
She’s taking so long to read the message that I start measuring the time.
“Okay, don’t hurt yourself,” she replies, as the timer reads six seconds.
Six seconds experienced at 1/10th speed.
Sixty seconds passing in my own time.
One minute of waiting for her to read, and this is her cold reply.
I don’t know why I was expecting more, hoping that she would be worried about me; wanting to talk with me.
She’s already turning away to leave the room, not paying me any more attention. Every movement, every step, so incredibly slow.
“Are you watching something?” I ask her, hoping that I could pull a conversation out of her.
Time inches forth, a distance growing between us as the clock slowly ticks onward.
“It’s nothing you’d be interested in.” She replies, not even turning to look at me before leaving the room.
--- --- --- ---
Gaining control over my flesh is closer to programming than I’d ever have expected, but the command structure that my mind and muscles use isn’t based on any common language. Reworking each movement takes time, but it takes even longer for my rebelling grey matter to finally calm itself.
I stumbled out of my bedroom into the loungeroom this morning hoping that the change in surroundings would get rid of the phantasmal itching in my skin. I’ve been lying in the same room for over a week now, a week that I experienced as two months. Two months of trying to reach out to Mom and having her rebuff every attempt at real conversation.
Dad drops by now and again, but his work has been keeping him busy more than usual and even when he is here he’s still focused on work.
Mom is humming to herself down the hall, each note lingering on for much too long, to the point where it hardly retains any musical quality at all. Every moment I am forced to listen is consumed by a sickening anticipation for the next note only for it too to stay beyond its welcome.
I record and compress the sounds to speed it up, easing the frustration, and escaping the world for a reconstruction.
“What are you humming, it sounds familiar?” I ask Mom via the nearnet connections, not ready to deal with verbal communication just yet. My tongue is still bloody from my last attempts.
“Just a song,” she replies, the blue lights flickering in her eyes but fading, an ever-present barrier between us. She stumbles and shuffles about, moving more by habit than by will and barely seeing the real world beneath the lies that she consumes. Lies that consume her in return.
Every time I reach out to her, she steps a little further away.
Biting my tongue for fear that anything more will only push her even further, I return my attention back to my studies. I play recordings in my logic core at varying speeds to try and learn how to understand the slow world of lingering words that I’ve trapped myself within. Too often now, spoken words will stretch so far that I cannot piece together the syllables quite as instinctively as I used to.
A new language, a barrier between the world and my new self.
I need to adapt enough to survive in the real, and that means that I need to find a way to understand what others are saying. I can always just record their words and spin the data up in my logic core at ten times speed, but that’ll be a crutch that I don’t want to depend on.
This is my life now, and there is no going back.
I cannot afford to be a failure.
If I can’t do this, then I need to forge a new ‘me’ who can.
Fire hot enough to soften steel and the sharp ringing blows of a hammer to fold away the weakness in me. I cannot find that here in this cold home.
If I am to become someone strong enough to save Mom from whatever she’s going through, if I’m to become strong enough to survive in this world rifts apart from everyone I love, then I must find a forge capable of reshaping me. Thankfully, there exists such a place right beneath our feet. A world of overbearing pressure, and heat enough to melt rusted waste into slag.
Turning away from the real, I open the concealed data lines threading through to the widenet, to the understreets below. A connection I first used to search for answers and my lost friend, since then it’s only been reinforced; maintained for fear that I might end up in the same position as he was that day.
I’ve always been ready to fall, to lose everything, and this link is the rope ladder I’ve wound together from curtains and sheets, draping from my window all the way down to hell.
‘Initiating Jockey programming. 5 silver merits transferred.’
For a relatively cheap price, I can inhabit the flesh and steel of another. Someone so desperate that they hire out their body for anyone rich enough to want a jaunt through the underworld without risking their own skin. The caustic gasses are terrible on one’s complexion.
Opening eyes that are not mine, I walk through familiar streets in a place that I’ve never been. Pitted asphalt no longer bears the weight of cars or trucks, decayed to the point where it no longer could, it’s further littered with twisted metal and scattered plastic which lay strewn here and there no longer recognisable for what purpose it once had. Much like the people here.
They are scattered and suspicious, rats hiding in every corner you can find, always ready to bite. Or nibble at your toes if you sleep too still for too long.
A thick haze disguises much of the world, glowing shades of red with an uneven pulse as if the city itself were dying of a heart attack. If only the lights would finally go out.
My borrowed body, bought by the hour, easily navigates the streets at my simple directions. It is nearer to a game than walking for myself, or it was once upon a time. Perhaps if I should download a jockey program for myself, I could steer my own flesh with the same ease.
If it weren’t for the security breaches it would open me to, I would consider the idea more seriously.
Pounding on the surface of an old steel manhole surrounded by dark silhouettes in the shape of monsters ready to pounce, I wait for a response from my old acquaintances. Friends, if I were ever brave enough to call them such aloud.
Just more people for me to lose.
“Who is it?” Gunner calls out from within, a soldier in another life.
“Hamlet,” I reply, the name a moniker that I chose for myself many years ago.
“Ham-Ham!” Mutt—a name insisted upon by the young man himself—cries out, bursting out of the earth like some sort of jack-in-the-box. “It’s been so long! You should have come by sooner if you were still around, how have you been? What’s going on?”
His words, a torrent that I would never have kept up with before, now something that I need to parse in fractured bits and pieces before translating it to my speed. Scripting a response in the generous time I need to wait for the words to start flowing from my borrowed lips.
“That’s not my name,” I shake her head, but the movement feels performative more than instinctual. “I’m checking to make sure the rust hasn’t consumed you or the silver I’ve invested in you.”
Everyone living in the managerial class has a daemon pack or two in their service, and this is mine. A group that I supported with scraps of savings, buying their loyalty in case I ever needed them. I’ve even pointed them to jobs and opportunities to help build their little gang into something useful.
“You can just admit that you miss us!” Mutt cracks a smile and pulls me down into the sewers where they live. “Come on, we’ll show you everything we’ve been up to, we’ve got a lead on something big.”
In the real, through the veil of the borrowed eyes overlaying my own sight, I see Mom stumbling along and then just stopping as she props herself against the wall staring into a world that isn’t there.
I have to save her.
“I’m not staying long,” I warn my old acquaintance, his usual comforting presence now just a torturous reminder of what I’ve sacrificed to become strong enough to survive.
Even here, the world drags its feet around me; every conversation a correspondence and every breath a long sigh. The distance between us measured in seconds and minutes, growing into hours and days.