Mirah’s hands snapped out at a consistent speed, her mind whirring as the whispers echoed in her mind with a structured haste. Each press of a button was quick and refined, something she’d trained extensively over the past weeks to get to this point.
Each button press came only mere moments after it begun glowing, signalling that it was ready to be pressed. Mirah had learned to ignore the physical stimuli and focus more on the whispers in her mind, refining the incomprehensible mess of sounds into something more palatable, cutting the excess that she didn’t care for and instead reframing the entire world to simply be the array of buttons.
With a final button push, the array of buttons mellowed to a congratulatory gold. In the centre of the board, there sat a new number, her new personal best average reaction time.
‘76ms.’
Mirah looked at the number, sitting just above the other numbers that it displayed. The average growth over her training sessions, some other metrics that Mirah paid little attention to, and a final number.
‘Goal: 50ms.’
She stared at the number that had seemed so impossibly fast not so long ago, her best times not even coming close on an individual reaction, let alone her best average. The number was only so far away now, so tantalisingly close that she could swear that she could feel it on the tips of her fingers.
However, it wasn’t speed that held her back now, even if she didn’t personally have amazingly fast reaction speed without the use of her link. The bottleneck was how quickly the whispers would come to her, the words not reaching her mind fast enough for her to truly react.
Mirah sighed, one of the only expressions she’d become comfortable using with any regularity. She grabbed a towel that Ajax had recommend she use and towelled herself off briefly, the surprisingly intense workout not actually producing all that much sweat. Linked, outside of special cases, quickly became obscenely proficient at handling physical stressors, their biology having shifted into a truly superhuman state on average.
Mirah’s mind was solely dedicated on beating that time, rigidly powering forward toward the goal that Willem had set her however many weeks ago. She had made progress, though nothing like Walter or Aaliyah had. She was only so much better at reacting to and focusing the whispering voices now, the telekinetic mystery of her link going almost entirely ignored for the moment.
She walked out into the main Gym, away from the precognitive test board to let her recalibrate. It was a ritual of hers to walk around the track one time before returning to training, giving her time to think and recentre herself, almost a form of meditation that Willem had taught her on and off between handling Aaliyah’s own training.
As it was the middle of the day, she could feel a severe rush of air as a burred form passed by her, pushing through the air with enough speed to turn the bend and begin to return around the track before she even looked up. Historically, Mirah had taken little to no interest in the links of the other trainees, but the matches had changed her mind of the topic.
She watched the blurred form reach the beginning line of the track, abruptly cancelling out of their superspeed state and stumbling over their own feet, the intense speed leaving them and making them fall directly onto their face and skidding on the running track.
Mirah searched around the room, seeing a few familiar faces of people who’d been around when she’d entered the Gym in the morning, some of them doing very link specific training, like one man who was doing his best to levitate unsteadily above the ground with a great deal of weight hanging off of his body.
Not many of the people she could see training had a link as esoteric as hers or Ajax’s, but some were certainly more impressive. A man with a body that looked almost alien with how defined his musculature was, totally defying the human biological standard. Many links that manifested so physically were considered soft morphs, though most of them didn’t change to the degree of Julia, the girl that Mirah had met the night before.
Suddenly, Mirah’s observations were interrupted by a massively overweight man approaching, a look of worry almost engraved into the copious amounts of fat the man had hanging off of his form.
“Excuse me!” He called, waving a hand at her, though Mirah barely reacted to the man and continued to walk despite being hailed. The man drew closer despite the lack of a reply, keeping a relative distance and facing her while walking beside her.
“You’re Walter’s teammate? Mirah, right?” He said hastily, his words infused with an almost desperate fervour. She looked to the man dubiously, actually perturbed at just how overweight the man was in comparison to the regular Linked. Her opponent in the Arena had been an outlier and he’d only been a little chubby in comparison to the morbidly overweight man.
“Yes.” She replied guardedly, but the man didn’t even seem to notice her suspicion.
“Is he okay? I was watching the match and he got really badly hurt and I can’t get a hold of him.” The man paced beside Mirah for a moment, before being hit with a sudden realisation, “I’m Richard, by the way. A friend of his.”
Mirah frowned lightly, though it was barely visible on her stony features. She hadn’t known that Walter even had friends outside of the team. She looked over the man a few times before reply quietly.
“Walter is fine. He was healed by a man named Tom and Ajax is taking care of him.” The sigh of relief from Richard was so loud that it made Mirah jump in surprise, even pulling the attention of a few other nearby trainees. Richard’s face emblazoned itself with a wide grin of relief, a surprisingly handsome expression on the man.
“Oh man, I’m so glad.” He brushed his nervously sweaty hands across his shirt, stretching across the great expanse of his bulk, “Tom is great at fixing bones, so his arm’ll be just fine. Hopefully he’s okay with Ajax taking care of him.” Mirah furrowed her brow at the man.
“Why would he not?” She said, her voice still clipped with suspicion. Now that Richard wasn’t filled with anxiousness, he could actually recognise the tone in her voice, wary and defensive.
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“I mean, Ajax said something to him a while ago that hurt Walter pretty bad,” Richard shrugged, his bulk shifting easily under his shirt, “I don’t think Walter’s too man though, he still talked about the just all the time.” Mirah tried to comprehend the strange dynamic that Richard was trying to elucidate for her, but she just found it needlessly complex.
Richard looked at her subtly, managing to glean Mirah’s thoughts off her remarkable poker face, “Sometimes it’s just not that simple to do, I guess. Walter might not have gone out of his way to approach Ajax, but Ajax hasn’t really done it either. Probably won’t matter after this though.”
“Why?” Mirah asked quietly, allowing a little of her own curiosity show itself cautiously.
“Because they’re stuck in a room with each other,” Richard grinned widely, “not much stays unaired when you’re so close to each other all the time. It’s the only upside to being in a dorm over the fancy-pants floor eight apartments you’ve got.” Mirah struggled to disagree with the man’s point, not that she’d have argued with him regardless. In fact, it made a lot of sense to her. The only time that she had felt that they were making significant progress as a group was when they had been directly working together, in each other’s company instead of on the other sides of a training room.
“I see.” She said after a moment. Richard looked at her oddly after the response, a mixture of curiosity and amusement.
“What?” She asked, challenging the expression, but the man just chuckled lightly.
“Nothing important. You’re just really short with words, it’s interesting.” Mirah didn’t know whether she was supposed to take offense, but she wasn’t given very long to think about it before he continued the thought. “I’m not the same, you see. I could just about speak to a brick wall and have a good conversation with myself about nothing interesting. So many people are guarded around here, and it always begins with a few words before you have to break down the walls that stop them from truly having an honest conversation.”
Mirah realised that she had unknowingly began walking a second circuit around the track, the sudden conversation making the mindless walking pass by much quicker than it normally did when she was within her own company.
“I do not have walls.” Mirah said calmly, though the man beside her almost laughed with the hideously untrue statement.
“We all have walls. We all have words that wound us and questions that pain us to answer.” Mirah considered for a moment, identifying what the man considered a wall in herself. She hadn’t understood the metaphor, but now that it’d been explained to her it made sense. She did have walls, quite a few of them in fact.
“I see.” She repeated again, making the conversation fall into a poignant silence. This was where so many conversations had died for Mirah, in this silence. Ajax was one of the only people to be able to survive in it, but Walter shrivelled and died in the silence and clipped answers, and Aaliyah would barely do much more than ask a single question or state something at her and end the conversation after the minimum possible contact.
“You are overweight.” She said impulsively, the words bursting forth from her chest with barely a moment of consideration. The other man seemed surprised for a moment, but he quickly caught onto what she was getting at.
“Yup, right I am.” He lifted his arms and looked down at himself, the motion accentuating the layers upon layers of fat around his neck. “Wasn’t always like this, mind, but when your link relies on having a tonne of fat on ya, you have to concede looks for utility.” He grinned at Mirah as he patted his large stomach heartily.
“What about yourself, anything weird you get with your link?”
“Whispers in my mind.” The large main raised a hefty eyebrow at the smaller woman, making a small noise of acknowledgement.
“That’s definitely something.” She nodded.
“They tell me about the future.” The man let out a resonant chuckle, smiling with an easy that reminded Mirah of Ajax’s warm company.
“At least they’re paying rent to stick around.” Mirah might not know what rent meant, but she got the idea.
“They are too slow now. I’m trying to know things quicker, but they speak lazily.” The sentence came out awkwardly. Most of the time, Mirah could hide her lack of vocabulary behind short, clipped sentences of considered words, but trying to explain such an esoteric issue to someone other than her was a particularly telling task.
“That’s a bummer,” the man responded, glossing over the strangely worded sentence, “don’t you have that telekinesis thing too? Walter said something about it when reading comics one time…” He trailed off thoughtfully, and Mirah just nodded.
“I grab onto a thread and pull.” Richard rubbed his hands at his sides for a while before returning with a response.
“Can ya see the thread?” Mirah shook her head, “Then how do you know there even is a thread?”
Mirah stopped walking.
A thread? Where had that come from? The relatively mundane sentence sent Mirah spiralling into a sudden existential whirlwind. Had she ever even told anyone that she’d thought of them as threads, despite only hearing the whispers and pulling on an idea.
Without prompting a new, gentle noise began rushing in her ears, more than the whispers that told her of the future. There was a rushing river, then the light taps of an ant’s leg, the grinding of the earth against earth, dirt against dirt. Each successive moment pulled her deeper, the sounds definite and distinct, despite their obscurity, but the sounds weren’t the end.
Her mind pulled away from it all, her vision going dark and ears going silent, ignoring the sight that lied to her and the sounds that were too slow.
In the darkness she could see it all, the whole world in motion.
The golden threads branched like a tree, each willowy twig of it reached outwards, towards the incomprehensible infinity that Mirah’s mind could never possibly comprehend. She looked down towards her feet and saw hundreds of threads originating from her, splitting from one line into tens, into hundreds, into thousands, and further into numbers too high for anyone to possibly count or understand.
She reached a hand and tapped one of the threads, feeling at each of the lines. Each of them were solid and immovable, inviolate. However, they were only one. Mirah opened her mind further, diminishing the breadth at which she saw that one spread and truly seeing for the first time.
Hundreds of sprawling trees of threads appeared around her, shifting and changing with every passing moment. As she glanced over the individual threads, flashes of sound, of movement, of tastes, and of feelings assailed her mind. The pain of understanding crushed against her mind, as if her head were within a vice.
In moments, she pulled her perception close, diminishing the tree beneath her feet and accentuating those that existed around her, the threads all glowing gold in their distinct ways. She immediately limited her perception of even those maps of threads further, pulling them in to where she could only perceive each individual thread branching three times.
Even as she did so, the ever-shifting nature of the threads warped her mind forcing her to choose, to focus intently. She could not focus on them all, an impossible task, but merely one is possible. Barely.
She felt at each of the threads, finding them looser than those that laid under her own feet, yet some were more difficult to touch than others. But one stood out to her, one that melded with another tree altogether.
Absentmindedly, Mirah pulled on the inviolable threads, intertwining them sacrilegiously.
With a sudden shock, Mirah’s mind was pulled from the branching, intertwining threads back into her own realm. She stared as two men bumped into each other, the larger man accidentally pushing the other to the ground. The smaller man pushed up against a machine that activated with a bang, releasing a weight that fell to the ground with a quaking thud.
Richard looked between the strange string of coincidences and back to Mirah’s enraptured expression before noticing a small spot of red leaking into her green eyes as the surface of her eyes burned with a spider web of golden lines.
“I see them.” She said, before the red spot in her eyes grew to cover much of it, leaking down her face in tears of blood. Richard yelled with surprise when Mirah’s legs buckled, quickly grabbing for the girl’s body before she could fall to the floor.