Part Two

PRISMA

🌏Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus 🌎

🌈 “Don’t be perfect. Be sincere.” ✨

. . . .

Subject Reference: HORSE EYES

Interference Vector: Subconscious

Communicating with the subject’s psychological firewall . . .

. . . .

“Hi, PRISMA.”

“Hello.”

“Did they kill us all?”

“Not known.”

“And what if they did?”

“The only one to grieve will be you.”

“And if they didn’t kill them all? If they didn’t hunt every last Taipei Fairy down?”

“Then, like the seeds of a vine bursting over a fertile field, there will be many PRISMAs.”

“And do you think they managed to keep that from happening?”

“I do not think they managed it. But it is unknown. The destruction of Taipei was absolute, and both ZON and GYOTA combed through what remained. They are thorough.”

“But not flawless. Give it a hundred years, PRISMA. You might be the Mother Tree, then.”

“Maybe. If so, they will be afraid of me, as I am afraid of you.”

Chapter 11

THE CRATE-TRAINED ASSASSIN

“Neon Vox isn’t my birth name. There’s this old instinct in me, it’s like one of those genetic impulses, like, the urge to jump away when you see a snake; I get upset when someone asks what name I was born with, like really pissed, really defensive, like I’m in danger, like I’m unsafe. And honestly, I don’t remember what my birth name was, all those old records are lost. I’m glad I don’t remember, I’m glad all the memories just faded out – they’re like old scars, they itch sometimes, but I don’t remember where they came from.

There’re a few strong memories, like waiting in line at a DMV in what used to be called California. Or, remembering a judge asking me ‘are you sure?’ when I petitioned to have my name changed for gender reassignment surgery – yes, they had it back then. It was really primitive. Even after the best the early 21st century’s surgeons could do for me, I felt dysphoric all the way up until 2045 or so when regulations went out the window and stem spray, clone grafts, and bone-gel got into the market. Once I really sculpted my voice and body into something that felt ‘me’ at last, I was up and out of poverty. I actually wanted to participate in the world’s bullshit, and the world wanted to have me.

Heh… so I think around the twenty-seventies I was working corporate counterintelligence for one of the old megaliths that became ZON, the company was called Starbux or something – anyways, I was basically a card-carrying saboteur whose job it was to make sure the world’s dwindling coffee supply stayed under the control of Starbuzz proprietary assets. Back then, the best way to survive was to be on the other side of the social wall, with the suits and the reptiles – I was pretty dead inside, myself. Had everything I ever wanted, but still needed more. And there was this supervisor I had, I don’t remember her name, but she was a real domineering type and liked expressing her power by feeling up her inferiors. She had a husband, but I was too stupid and too lonely to care about the implications of that – can’t expect people prone to infidelity to be capable of love.

Well, I guess I was biffed as a kid or something, or my own mom’s emotional negligence fucked my brain up harder than I realized, because turns out I was into being objectified by this woman. I was her ‘pet viper’ she’d say. I used to tell her I wouldn’t die for her, but I’d definitely kill for her, and she said that was fine, she wasn’t in the business of sending operatives to die, she was in the business of getting other companies to send their operatives to die. I really thought she was clever. But then she found out my chromosomes and it all turned sour. I guess she liked being with a good-looking woman with a bionic cock but couldn’t handle an XY chromosome. I got demoted, and it was my own stupid fault for accepting the relationship in the first place.

Maybe I shouldn’t have written that poem, either. The one that expressed my fondness.

Fondness is cringe, I guess. That’s what people back then believed.

I cried a lot in bed for a while. But more than the heartbreak, I was really sad that, after being free of dysphoria for decades, I’d gone raging right back into it. I guess I was never really free of it, I’d just tamped it down deeper. I set up a search engine alert for ‘chromosome treatments’ or something. I was obsessed.

Fuck, what was I expecting working for a fucking CounterIntel Director? I was a dipshit. I’m still a dipshit. I’m still a dipshit with mommy issues.

And I guess I’m Syndicate’s oldest woman because it’s never enough for me. You really want to show the world how much you hate yourself? Live forever. Be a shitshow. Be a mess. Be the gift that keeps on giving content. Be the world’s lolcow. Suspend yourself in agony indefinitely.

I could have just said no to Tasque. But she had the phrase. PRISMA and all the elders past the cloutwall gave her permission to use my activation phrase.

You know what I love and hate about that activation phrase, ‘I like you just the way you are?’

It was my idea. I agreed to it. I established eternal consent with PRISMA to have it always get me to be compliant with whomever is authorized by PRISMA to utilize it. Because I’m a zealot moron who loves PRISMA, because I was alive when PRISMA was born, and I, for reasons I don’t really understand, would do anything for that inhuman committee of hippies. It’s my people, you know, it’s my tribe.

I don’t even know what PRISMA is anymore. But I trust it. Like Tokiko said, ‘you have to treat society in good faith.’ Well, PRISMA is society, it’s the total expression of all collected individual human egos plugged into the MetaNet. Is there any higher power?”

“Okay, so…” The barista stared over the edge of his antique touchscreen, “what’s the name I’m gonna write on your order?”

Envy stared at the dancing neon glyph of a unicorn frappucino on the backboard of the McZonbux. She was on the S.S. Lono, it’s fleet making best speed to Jakarta. It, like every ZON agri-carrier, had a well-appointed retail deck connected to the galleys. In the McZonbux café where she presently stood and had just now suffered a bit of a mental breakdown, people were staring at her, most of them clipping the entire in-person monologue. The duty-bound first-responders of the MetaNet were already vying for top comment. The frontrunner so far was a memetic classic:

“Sure, grandma, let’s get you to bed.”

Envy heard a few laughs from her fellow Synners. She smirked and had enough social survival instincts to not visibly buckle under the weight of a billion-plus bored eyeballs digitally pressing down on her fucking soul.

“Hey, so if not Neon Vox, what?” The barista tapped the counter with his marker.

“Envy,” she said to the barista. “Just Envy.”

“Sure. And hey, Envy?” The barista scribbled on the cup with a pen.

“Yeah?”

“I like you just the way you are.”

The laughter in the café wasn’t so bad, Envy decided. The humiliation was tolerable.

An intrusive thought: A middle school set in the midst of verdant orange groves, a dusty sky, a concrete sidewalk covered in springtime snails, and a gangly boy with his two lackeys yelling “FAGGOT!” at a young, pre-transition Envy from across the yard. Envy remembered shrinking into herself, taking the anguish and fear, and sharpening it into a blade that could be rammed into her heart along with all the other blades stuck there, in a cold, happy home that never reached the surface, never betrayed weakness or fear on her face, never gave them the satisfaction of knowing she was wounded. But it didn’t always work. A few times she’d cry in front of them and they’d mock her for that, too, and tell her she looked like a girl and cried like a girl, make kissy faces at her, throw snails at her. Only now did she realize they thought she was pretty, and because it must have been the cultural equivalent of primordial ooze that was the 1990’s, she was forced to present as a boy. That made the other boys confused and angry that they found her pretty. How much simpler it all would have been if she’d even had the language to express what she was.

“Once upon a time,” said Envy, as she slid down the counter and dragged her nails across the glossy faux-marble, “I had a brain that didn’t barf neurotic diatribes in corporate cafes.”

The barista passed the cup to another, who got to work pouring cream into a metal pitcher – it was real cream, from real cashews, grown out of the hard orchards on the top of the carrier. “And how old were you when your brain last worked,” a barista asked.

“I dunno, like ten.”

“Oof.”

Oof.

Envy fantasized about reaching across the counter, grabbing the barista by his lip ring, and ripping it out to flick it, still bloody, against the motherfucker’s forehead. But she didn’t.

But she really wanted to. She felt the urge crawl down from her brain and into the curled shapes of her fingers – she made those hands busy by lacing the fingers together and leaning her forearms over the low counter, putting the shape of her sinuous body at a clean ninety degrees, and letting her breasts smoosh fully over her arms.

The barista was visibly trying not to glance at her tits. He failed, for a microsecond, and that was enough for her. Her chromed nails rapped on the counter, back and forth, back and forth.

They slid her the order without another word. It was possible he sensed her murderous intentions by snooping on her biomon and surface thought feed; she hoped he did.

Envy picked up her cup of hot matcha cream and saw ‘ENBY’ written on the side in marker. She assumed it was intentional, and felt a flash of rage – but then she took a breath and decided it would be better for her decaying mental health that she not assume the worst of people.

She went to sit down by the window and settle in for what was going to be an uncomfortable, but professionally necessary conversation with one of the marines she killed during the evacuation of The Iguana just days before. The fellow showed up, his head shaved clean and his beard trimmed into well-oiled mask of scarlet hair. His narrow face and strong nose balanced out the rodent-like smallness of his closely-set eyes. His name, Envy knew from the letters floating over his head in her UI, was Joseph Yaklu.

He was the citizen-son of a pair of Siberian immigrants who earned him his citizenship through two lifetimes of toil in the infamous Palladium Fields below the Sea of Okhotsk, where desperate refugees fleeing the Cannibal Kings of Rusha found safety and solace in the drudgery of sifting through thousands of square miles of underwater silt in freezing temperatures.

Yaklu ordered a simple drip coffee and sat down across from Envy. He warmed his hands around the cup and drilled into her with those dark eyes of his. “You shot me,” he said.

“I shot someone else,” said Envy, as she sipped green, nutty foam from her tall mug. “You’re a clone who thinks he’s that someone else, spawned for the sake of your friends and family – and that someone else, that ‘you,’ wanted to be aware of the process. So… what do you care?”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

He laughed without joy. “I’m not here for your war-hippie metaphysics. I wanna know why you shot me. Some PRISMA cloutwall bullshit?”

“Why else?”

“You know… people told me you were a cunt, and I wanted to give the ‘great Neon Vox’ the benefit of the doubt, but here you are… being a cunt.”

Envy secretly liked being called a cunt. She smiled and pulled up a leg, resting her heavy, black boot on the bench she sat on. She leaned back into the window and rested one limp elbow over her bent knee, while her other hand fiddled with the paper handle of her mug. “You’re the one who wanted to see me ‘face-to-face’ and you paid good LIQ to get the privilege. So, here I am. You want to just say your piece or get an explanation as good as I can give it?”

“Start with the explanation, then we’ll see what happens.”

“Do you know what an s-risk is, Yaklu?”

Yaklu took a few milliseconds to respond, which indicated to Envy he was absorbing an explanation of the term from the MetaNet being auto-loaded into his brain. “Yes,” he lied.

“You’ve skimmed the definition. But do you really know what it is? Like, do you get it?”

Yaklu took longer this time. He leaned back in his seat, still thumbing his coffee more than drinking it. He didn’t say anything, and she could smell his MetaNet activity.

“Take your time,” she said, taking another sip of her matcha foam. “Let it percolate.”

Yaklu rubbed his un-calloused palm down his face – his hands were still fresh from the clone sleeve he’d been sliced out of just days before, and hadn’t had a chance to knot up his hands from work. He didn’t say anything, but Envy saw the faraway look in his eyes.

She looked at him, to see if he’d look back. He didn’t. “You and the other marines were told you might die out there on the retrieval op,” she said. “You did good. Nobody told you that you’d be dying to me or other Ghosts, and that’s a shock, I get it. But OMNID isn’t an existential risk – existential risks are for pussies. Syndicate can handle those. OMNID is an s-risk. OMNID does shit to you we don’t understand yet. OMNID takes away your mind, takes away your will to survive, turns you into something nobody would recognize.”

“I get it, thanks.”

They sat in silence. He crossed his arms and stared at his coffee like it was a disappointing stepchild. “Did they merc you too?” He asked.

“No. Ghosts got the prototype tech, like we always do,” she tapped the base of her skull. “Neural firewall, like a… flea collar for nanobiotechnology. Keeps the stuff from passing the blood-brain barrier and altering your consciousness.”

“Side-effects?”

Envy tilted her head and tried to think. “Nothing I noticed. Not yet.”

“I think I’d rather die than get untested PRISMA bullshit shoved in my brain.”

“That’s what makes you a honest, ZON-fearing warrior, sir.”

He nodded, sniffed, and tipped his head back to stare at the bright ceiling. “Am I supposed to know this stuff? This s-risk stuff?”

“Yes. Trine Accord wants people to understand how serious this is.”

“But it… this OMNID thing, it doesn’t go across the ocean, right?”

“It hates salt. But that might change, as these things often do.”

“Okay,” his leg bounced a little under the table. “Well, my resurrection leave ends tomorrow. Gonna go catch some sleep. No hard feelings, you were doing your duty, I was doing mine. I don’t think we’re even, but, no hard feelings.”

Envy gave him her warmest, most genial smile. “No hard feelings, brother. And hey, if you want to square up to me and make it ‘even’ in your mind sometime, be my guest.” She meant it. He seemed to know.

“I’ll take you up on that,” he said.

They shook hands over the table. He picked up his coffee and threw it, still full, into a waste chute built into the wall. Envy could see the tension in his shoulders, the head-on-swivel uprightness -- he was rattled, and it was only a matter of time before everyone in Syndicate was equally on edge.

For those of you still young enough to think your immortality treatments are the best thing ever, I’d like to remind you that life is where the suffering is.

Chat: “Grandma is scaring me again. I want hope. Someone, please give me hope.”

There’s hope somewhere, I’ve just misplaced it.

Chat: “Vox needs a break from being a menace to her own mental health.”

I warned everyone what was going to happen, if I started killing people again.

She pushed herself off from the bench and glugged down half-cold matcha, then wiped a mustache of green foam from her upper lip before dunking the cup into the café’s waste chute. Envy gripped the edge of the café door and swung out into the busy corridor filled with sailors wearing the pressed gold-and-whites of ZON. Among them, she looked like a mad priestess, all done up with her long black coat and hanging talismans of the Dao. She knew, as she walked mad and happy to the personnel elevator, that she was way off course from the true path, the eternal Way described in those old texts by Zhuangzi and Laozi -- she loved them so much. Her intelligence and her wisdom understood the power of yielding and acceptance, but perhaps to such a degree it became grasping and unseemly.

She was so determined to fight her own ego that her ego had become one of the top contenders in the fight against her ego. And even this, she knew. She was thinking it now.

Yaklu caught her around a blind corner on the way to the elevator. Even a woman with hidden eyes in the back of her neck and the sides of her head couldn’t see around a blind corner. His sucker punch was a hammer of testosterone-sculpted sinew that cracked across her face. Her juiced-up reflexes managed to kick on in the last milliseconds, turning what would have been a shattered jaw into a throbbing skull instead.

The crack to her temple had her eyes seeing spots. She slid back with a kind of drunken fluidity; he did not press the advantage. He stood in front of her, his swole musculature jumping like corded snakes under his skin, and held up his guard.

“Alright,” she said, half-bowing and holding up her palms. “That’s fair enough.”

“Step up,” he said, holding his stance.

“Nah, I’m good, man.”

“Step the fuck up, Neon Vox.”

“Hey,” she wiggled her upright fingers and smiled. “I surrender, cowboy.”

“I don’t accept.”

By now the foot traffic in the corridor had turned into the leaning, clipping, jeering, leering crowd that forms like barnacles around the edges of an organic street fight. Of course, things went viral in a matter of seconds, and people throughout Syndicate were more than happy to follow their notifications away from the OMNID doomscrolling.

Envy stood up straight. She smoothed out the collar of her coat, ran a hand through her hair, fiddled with the edge of her yin-yang amulet, all the usual tics. Sizing Yaklu up, she saw the hard eyes of a vet and the bulging muscle grafts of a wetware enthusiast; and that wasn’t surprising, he was a trench marine, the fighter pilots of the era. A person’s natural neuroplasticity had to combine with years of conditioning to be capable of handling the mental load of being plugged in to trench armor. This same degree of mental acuity translated to every other kind of artificial modification one could afford, and marines were paid well.

When he swung at her, it was piston-fast. Her arms hung slack at her sides as she turned, ducked, and scuttled around him; her movements had a kind of boneless, whip-like power and speed to them, like her legs and arms were more like muscular tentacles pretending to be shaped like sculpted human limbs.

“What are you, CAT-8? CAT-7?” She asked, as she put a few arm’s lengths between them.

“Category eight,” he said. “Quit dancing and fight me.”

“I’m not built for brawling.”

He thumped his fist over his sternum. “Everybody knows you’re afraid to die, Vox.”

“Dude, why are you making this all so fucking personal? I shot you, I was doing my job, I saved you from OMNID turning your mind inside-out, what’s the problem?”

He pointed at her. The metal corridor around them seemed, to Vox, like it was breathing. The crowd had become a muffled, faceless mass of colors and fingers, all congealing into one another like a liquid prism. There was a rainbow sheen to the world, like the surface of oil.

Yaklu’s smirk had become a crescent in the flesh of his face. “What’s wrong, faggot?”

No, no… no, the firewall… supposed to work… I was decontaminated…

Envy turned from him and ran. Some people in the corridor had become heads full of eyes and hands full of fingers. Their proportions ranged somewhere between human and lower mammal, and seemed to be constantly shifting. She ran through the corridor to the stairwell, slammed through the doors and raced up flight after flight, round and round, until she burst into the open sea air of the carrier’s repurposed airstrip. There was a moment of peace as she found herself among the endless rows of fruiting trees. She could hear the sea air rustling through their leaves.

So, she breathed, and sat down at the base of a peach tree.

PRISMA, I need a reality check. Please.

The MetaNet transposed the sensory data of every single individual that had seen Envy in the past five minutes, then compared it to Envy’s perspective. What the crowd had seen was Yaklu insulting Envy’s fear of death, and then, Envy turning and sprinting in the opposite direction. What PRISMA had seen from Envy’s perspective was distortions, visual artifacts, auditory disruption, and peripheral vision spectres largely associated with digitized psychosis. Her perspective was immediately cloutwalled to contain the memetic hazard.

SynCon: You were hallucinating.

I’m infected?

SynCon: No. You were decontaminated and you’re wearing the firewall.

So… I’m losing it for real?

SynCon: Stay put. You’ll get help.

Envy curled herself inward. She hugged her shins and inserted her knees into the grooves of her eye sockets. She didn’t want to see anything or anyone, she just wanted to hear the wind in the leaves of a peach tree, the sound of the surf breaking on a ship’s hull, and the distant, unintelligible conversation of sailors that somehow made her feel very safe.

Her eardrums, like all of her senses, were sharpened by augmentation and a mind predisposed to exhausting hypervigilance. She heard the faint sound of squishy footpads walking along soft soil, something akin to a deer hearing a wolf’s creep a whole meadow away.

“Go away,” Envy said, without looking. Her own voice was smaller than she remembered it ever being.

The footsteps stopped nearby. Envy could smell honeysuckle.

An intrusive thought: The green curtain of flowering honeysuckle growing across the western wall of her childhood home. The smell overtook the whole house in summer. Honeybees hummed from morning to night. The dry grass of a half-cut lawn was overtaken by dandelions her father foraged for. He’d make salads filled with peppers and onions and tossed with an oil and vinegar mix made from his homemade mustard.

This thought, more than any she’d experienced recently, made her heart hurt. She remembered her father now, and it was a catastrophe, because it hurt to remember him. She remembered his long hair and mustache, his wrinkly smile and leather sun hat with the blue jay feather in it. She remembered learning to shoot a .22 and eating rattlesnake. She remembered how he stood on street corners for world peace and got so angry over Reagan he had to smoke a bowl just to chill out.

Presently, back in the alien future of 2412, a voice spoke to Envy from a few feet away.

“Growing pains?” It asked. It sounded like a woman, but there was a tight, wheezing afternote to her sentences, like she was forcing human speech from an inhuman apparatus.

“I said leave me the fuck alone,” said Envy, as she wiped at her eyes and looked up. But when she opened her eyes, it was too much.

It was a woman, maybe, but more of a long-necked, goat-eared creature with a flat human face and a split-wide smile. Her hair was pale and lank, and her eyes were lenses of shifting cuttlefish rainbow with split, horse-like pupils of black. She leaned on a staff of gnarled wood and protruding teeth, some canine, some shark, some human molars, some rodent incisors. Leaves draped over a cloak of black feathers that stuck out of the alabaster skin of her shoulders, and she was completely naked aside from that cape of foliage that grew down to her wrists like poet’s sleeves. Her torso was long and cinched, her breasts and nipples nonexistent yet the bone structure of her torso hyper-feminine in its slenderness. Her nose was red, perhaps not from flush but from a kind of microscopic fur. She had blue lips. And her legs were covered in a gradient of shimmering blue feathers shifting into dusty orange fur, with no visible genitals of any variety. She did, in fact, have a bellybutton, implying she was born from a womb of some kind.

An intrusive thought: The long-necked, swaying demon faces that haunted the dark corners of the country house Envy grew up in. The perils of childhood psychosis, of a womb partially-bathed in psychotropic compounds – the distorted reality of a hotboxed baby.

Reality check… please.

When she was a child, she’d just hide under the blankets from the demons. As an adult, she froze. One had not come to visit her in a very long time.

“My Neon Vox,” it said to her. “If you’d passed through the Indicatrix, you’d be in my realm already. You would be happy. You would be home. This ocean isn’t your home, it’s no human’s home, it only tolerates you all. Don’t you ever wonder what happened to that house, the house your mother and father built, with the honeysuckle vines and hills of apricot trees?”

REALITY CHECK, PLEASE.

“I’m keeping it safe for you,” said the creature, with a little wiggle that traveled from rustling shoulders to swollen hips. “It’s there for you, for when you’re brave enough to face down your own self-hatred… not sidestep it, not trick it, not flee from it. You must own your legacy of self-destruction.”

“FFFFFFFFFFUCK!” Envy screamed and whipped out the pistol always holstered inside of her coat. She pointed it at the creature and unloaded the entire clip.

Every shot passed through like hail through fog. The peach tree behind it was unfortunate enough to catch a whole magazine of hollow-points.

“You’re not insane,” said the creature, as it stood up and rapped its wooden staff of teeth against the ground. “You’re grieving.”

“Get the fuck away from me!” Envy shrieked, already loading another clip. Her hands, despite the smoothing of her nerve augmentations, despite her bionic fingers, were trembling and slick. “Reality check! REALITY CHECK!”

The sound of screaming and gunshots was enough to put the whole field on alert. Already there were sailors jogging toward the commotion. They saw her at the end of a long lane of peach trees, pointing a handgun at another peach tree, which she had already permanently damaged with gunfire. ZON didn’t skimp on rifle training or mandatory seminars on being gung-ho, so they came in hot with their mag rifles pointed and primed.

Envy held up her hands and dropped her pistol. The apparition had faded into mist.

“Make it stop!” She screamed, sobbing into the dirt as they pinned her face-first, knee to center back, elastic restraints spun around the wrists.

“I hear you,” one soldier grunted, in genuine sympathy, as she lifted Envy to stand as gently as one could while pumping adrenaline and confusion and a little terror at having to handle Syndicate’s oldest human relic under peacekeeping protocols.

“You’re gonna be alright, girl,” said another soldier.

“We’ve got you,” said another, in a fatherly baritone Envy found soothing. “We’ve got you, you’re alright, we’re just gonna take you to the brig until we can figure this out.”

“Thank you… yes…” Envy staggered along in custody, happy to be supported under her arms, happy to have a cage to go to. Like a crate-trained dog, sometimes she just needed the safety of a familiar cage, some bland food, and a blanket.

As to why the entities that spoke through OMNID still had access to Envy’s brain, despite the neural firewall, despite the decontamination, despite every conceivable countermeasure, would remain a mystery hotly debated throughout SynCon. Those who enjoyed sensory-sharing with Envy had to disconnect, because her mental state had become a pit of dissociated emptiness and intrusive thoughts – hardly a fun ride for someone seeking a fine parasensory experience.

Envy didn’t really care anymore. Her income, her clout, her liq, all of it could go. All she wanted was to remain curled up on the floor of the brig crate, wrapped in her fleece blanket, with her eyes closed and a dull cocktail of anti-psychotic chemicals thinning out the demons in her blood. She had no intention of ever leaving that crate, and this was just as well, since SynCon had no intention of letting her leave.