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Not real.
Not real.
Not real.
Not real.
Not-
The green swirls drifted to the fringes and made way for a ludicrous stretch of ethereal pink sky, with slashes of purple that could’ve been clouds.
They sure acted that way as Chio plunged through one of them, then another, then another, then another, each time feeling nothing but annoyance that they weren’t slowing her descent in the slightest.
It’s okay though, she thought, taking a break from flailing her arms and coughing out sandpaper-like air, cos this can’t actually be real. From a toilet ventilation shaft to clouds over Iceland.
That’s where she assumed she was.
Or hallucinating herself to be.
Not Titan as she could still breathe [just about], and not Mars cos the orbital platforms would’ve vapourised her by now, and definitely not Uranus as that was a creepy pale grey colour. No, not any of them, cos she was on Triton and, unless teleporter tech had suddenly advanced five hundred years, that’s still where this was. Possibly in a simulation of some kind. An insanely visceral one, activated by the plaza security system to-
Hang on…maybe it wasn’t any of that. Maybe the answer was much simpler. She’d been shot by the cops and this was a death transition. Falling through pretty, pink sky towards what looked like the mouth of a crooked volcano…that from her current birds-eye-view kind of resembled a Russian orthodox cross.
But if this were the afterlife…why was the wind making such a realistic whistling noise in her ear? And why were her eyes starting to water? And the other figure to her left, who seemed to be-…
Wait…what?
Flipping on her side to get a better look, she instantly realised that physics wasn’t her strong point as she started to spin, wildly at first and then with a tad more serenity as she briefly passed out and came to again.
Instead of clouds, there were zip-bags of pink dust falling beside her, doing absolutely nothing to assist either her or the other guy.
Jun kut sei disloyal shit flakes.
It was hard to be really angry cos she was in freefall, spinning like a cocaine snake, and they were just zip-bags, stuffed with baking pow-
Jun.
Ambush wind from the side, more flailing, matched by the parallel diver plummeting to their death in solidarity.
It was quite far, the distance between them, hazy too…but it did look like a He.
Need to stop spinning, communicate somehow.
Air paddle towards him.
Attempt sign language.
Shriek in Tritonese.
Spreading out her arms, Chio slowed down the loops, and finally stabilised, just in time to see the other figure disappear beyond the wall of the volcano interior that she was being sucked into.
Jun, jun, jun and jun kut sei was all she could think as the floor of the cave appeared god knows how far below and another swirl of green rose up like a pointless blanket to meet her.
Arms regressed through a series of final flails, eyes closed and opened and closed and opened and closed again tight as the green mist hit her…enveloped her body whole.
Please be quick, please be quick, she begged, picturing chicken bones and Bolognese mashed into one huge pile of-
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The wind stopped abruptly, and so did she.
Not abrupt enough to snap her skeleton in two, more of a three second whoosh effect that slowed her at just the right pace to be within touching distance of the rocky ground.
Still gonna hit, still gonna hit, still gonna hit, she assured herself, refusing to open her eyes as that’s when the gravity would be switched back on again.
And that was convincing for ten, twenty seconds, but when she’d been hovering in the invisible net for several minutes, still coughing up dry bits of invisible grit, something had to change. So, rationing her breaths, she shouted out to whoever was at the controls of this thing, ‘I know you’re going to drop me again,’ then opened her eyes.
As expected the volcano floor was directly below, close enough to put her feet on.
Didn’t seem to be any lava lurking around. No magma either, assuming there was a difference between the two. No particularly jagged rocks. No spike strips. No sublimating nitrogen ice. No cops.
‘This better be solid,’ she whispered, trying to reel her heart back in and slap it into a more sustainable beat.
It was.
Firm, solid rock. That she’d almost been splattered across.
The thought of the whole ‘almost-death’ hit her hard, threw hot soup in her face, the idea that what had just happened was physically real, that she’d plummeted from a supernaturally pink sky while some other poor jun yan had missed the mouth of the volcano and…what? Smashed full velocity onto the outside rocks? Landed gently in a swimming pool?
Her chest contracted and her lungs turned to rice paper, legs lasting as far as the cave wall before buckling and sending her down.
Fell. Fell. Fell. Fell. Fell. Fell.
Death fall. Death fall. Death fall. Death fall. Death fall.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
She stayed flat and stared into a particularly large piece of dark red grit next to her cheek, then filtered in the other grit around it.
They were safe on the ground. Like her. Safe on the ground. Like her. She wasn’t falling, she was on the ground. On it. Firmly on it.
The sudden image of a green whirlwind scooping her up and lifting her back to the sky ambushed each zone of her brain, and it was so suffocating that she had to push herself closer to the wall.
You. Are. Not. Falling.
Not. Falling.
Not.
She repeated it a few times, in her head and out loud and the green gradually shrank to the size of a hamsters deodorant spray. To keep it that way, she forced back in the simulation theory, the idea that the entire thing had happened in a VR suite, and her real body was there right now, perfectly fine.
Yup, there was no way this was real.
How could it be?
This is a simulation. A construct somewhere.
Right?
Her new friends, the collection of dark red grit embedded in the volcano floor that she appeared to be conversing with, said nothing. Which was expected, they were rocks, grit, they couldn’t explain anything. They weren’t a part of this. Were they?
She moved her hand to adjust her hat and touched bandage instead. Jun. Of course, it had blown off, she’d just dropped down from the heavens. And landed in the middle of a volcano. On rock that didn’t look like Triton rock. Or simulated rock for that matter. No glitches, too many variations in texture.
An actual set then?
She rubbed the bandage, pulling off a dry flake of blood.
Could be some kind of surveillance tech buried inside there, assuming it’s really not a simulation.
Or a robot perhaps?
The types they used in asteroid mining, to cut down on human fatalities.
Or a human, hiding below, sleazily looking up her trouser legs.
A new kind of perversion.
Terrify someone with a near death experience then spy on them close up.
Arranged by Kenji or Trig or-
The dark red grit interrupted her paranoia with a soft vibration effect across its surface as an electronic beep sounded out above.
Chio turned to shriek at it then mumbled giant jun kut robot eye when she saw a large, red dot floating above, the air shimmering around its circumference.
‘Kenji?’
The red dot throbbed and pulsed and not much else.
‘Trig?’
More throbbing, more pulsing.
‘Jun,’ she whispered to herself, using the cave wall to manoeuvre herself back onto her feet, and that was about it.
What else could she do?
It was a red dot.
Or a red orb.
If Sataan were here, he would’ve punched it already, and then punched whoever had sent it here, but she wasn’t Sataan…and she didn’t want her hand to be disintegrated. Which is what would probably happen if she touched it.
Just like the old Cannonon serial, Yellow Muon Blob. Only that one absorbed your body when it made contact, then transported a copy to a different location.
Nope, she didn’t like that idea much either.
What to do?
Talk to it more?
Ask it why she’d just fallen out of the sky? If that’s really, truly what just happened. If this wasn’t a simulation. And which sky was it exactly? Didn’t feel like Iceland anymore. Hadn’t looked like it that much either, outside, before she’d been sucked into this weird, dark volcano chamber.
The word dark erased itself quickly as lights appeared on the wall around her.
Ah, that’s a bit better.
Signs of activity, intelligence.
Chio took a few more measured breaths, each one pictured as a physical process in her head, the lungs now leather instead of rice paper…then cleared her throat.
The red dot shimmered and became paler, almost rose pink.
‘Can you understand me?’
Then darker.
‘Are you the leader of this…volcano…simulation thing?’
Then back to its original red.
‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.’ Chio looked up and shivered when she couldn’t make out even a whisp of the pink sky she’d started from. ‘Is this Iceland?’
That seemed to do something, as the red dot rotated on its axis, then expanded outwards into a gradual loop.
‘Should I go somewhere or just…’
The loop kept circling and circling, getting closer and closer to her face until it came to an abrupt stop and, without electronic beep or tone change, shot out a ridiculously large light field that entrapped her completely.
Jun, I knew it, she thought, ecstatic at her own detective work, then confused as to what exactly it was that she knew, before settling into frozen blankness as the object-terror void of what was happening to her actualised in her brain.
Absorbed, just like that yellow blob.
Jun kut sei copycat.