Breathe.
Wait, was that a thought–or was it a sound? It wasn’t her voice, though it did seem to come from inside of her. It wasn’t her internal monologue–which coursed through her mind just a little more confident, self-assured and, for some heretofore unexplained reason, British–that told her now to, at very least, keep up the basic capacity of life.
Walk.
Breathe.
“I can do that,” she said, with an inexplicable sense of quasi-pride. Is this what madness felt like? She had heard of the insanity of solitude, but she had suspected it took more than a few minutes. And everyone in the district was a little insane; it was to be expected, mere glitches in the fabric, inconsistencies between space and time. Chanter began to walk down the road towards the snowy hillside, one step at a time; towards the dense forest of trees which outlined the township, all flowers, repetition and random.
Walk.
Breathe.
She focused on each step, one ahead of the other, and stared upward into the pale blue sky. There were glitches in the clouds. They were torn in jagged lines; half-flowing, half-still. She had seen them like this before, in brief moments of time; she had spent small portions of her childhood, lying wherever she might, and looking for the captured, locked pieces of sky.
Occasionally a bird would get stuck in one and hover there… sometimes for days, once for more than a month… before just abruptly disappearing or racing to catch up with brethren that had long been deleted.
Walk.
Breathe.
But once she got to the forest’s edge, what would she do? From there, there was no way to get out, there was only a constant series of just-almost-similar chunks of exterior space, with small, glowing things to collect and to prize. You could go north, east and west forever but south only exactly three times. She didn’t like the forest; it gave her motion-sickness, and the constant,, repetitive cherry blossom trees only increased the feeling.
Walk.
Breathe.
At the edge of the forest it occurred to her that no directions had been given, and she wasn’t certain why she had chosen the direction she did–but for the fact that she had come from the other direction already. Everything ended either in the forests or the cliffs, however, and she had never purchased a rope, and she absolutely hated the idea of mining.
Something was wrong; there was a stillness. In fact, all there was, was stillness. The forest had frozen; blossoms half-fallen, leaves swaying in a nonexistent breeze. As she stepped into the forest she expected the harsh, crunching sound of leaves underneath her–which seemed to occur even when the leaves were, apparently, moist and wet, or even not there at all–but there was nothing.
Walk.
Breathe.
Experimenting, she raised a foot and lowered it again. Nothing. She walked through the silent, still woods and jumped, just slightly, as she noticed her arm passing through a blossom entirely. She didn’t feel anything–not a thing–but she hadn’t seen a clipping error since she was a child. The sunlight which fell to the forest floor was dappled but did not alter, in any way, as she walked over it; a frozen pattern across the landscape.
Walk.
Breathe.
She wondered if somehow she was simply receiving prompts from some sort of scheduling system, some kind of over-soul which guided the inhabitants, whispering to them their needs. But, of course, she didn’t need to walk, and she never actually needed to breathe, though the system had always seemed averse to letting her sit underneath a pond and stay there. But she’d always wondered where the frogs went, once they jumped in–and the answer had been, nowhere, they disappeared the second they touched the water from above.
Walk.
Breathe.
At least, however, she wasn’t getting tired–she didn’t feel fatigued, not at all. And they did feel fatigued, when they exerted themselves–it was necessary to exercise, to flood the system with–
Run.
Wait–was that just–
Run.
Unplugged: a Cyberpunk Serial 