#13 – Transmission #5

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.

#13 – Transmission #4

Chanter was pushed aside by urgent feet; the temple was emptying behind her, its inhabitants moving forward to the crowd within the street. The little child lingered behind and Chanter stood there, empty, hollow and invisible as she always was to them.

A hole in the crowd opened as a few people pushed their way forward. But the voices were just a wall of noise to her; she couldn’t make out anything but the feeling of fear; the songs of horror. She wondered if she should leave by the temple’s back door.

But as she looked back, the thin line of reality blurred at its edges. There was a flat canvas before her, and then nothing at all. There were legs beneath her, and then nothing at all. There was breath within her… and then nothing at all.

Static-filled, lock-step, crawling — walking — kneeling? Incomprehensible, impossible (am I?) broken

moments

that unraveled — choking? Dry — were those her hands? Wait — were those her feet? Did she have feet? Or was it sky? Like rough

unbroken

twine, a cord of endless light and the hesitation of moment unfurled and falling sideways, tossed to-and-fro like

ice

like burning fire ice adrift on dark waters, dark moonless waters — and breathe, breathe, breathe 

breathe

And suddenly

resolve

Chanter stood trembling at the doorway of the temple wondering, impossibly, if she had been there the entire time or if she had even ever been there at all. Or could it have been the same thing that took…

The boy?

But there was no boy. Chanter felt herself walk-falling down the too-perfect steps of the temple, looking up and down the hard-packed road; the street deserted and empty. She turned her head, a darkness eclipsing her; the temple was empty.

She was alone.

She looked down at her wrist to see nothing at all; just bare skin, impossibly bare skin. She rubbed her arm up and down in a daze, a fevered daze, feeling light and sick, immaterial and insubstantial and the panic did she exist?

Did she ever exist?

Turning around, whipping her hair, half-stumbling through the street in a panic — Chanter ran into her home, nearly slamming into the door even as it opened automatically before her. And it was her home, her small home, her cozy, quiet, invisible home — just as it had always been.

But there were no flickers. There were no lights. In the pantry, there were no glowing, half-visible objects to eat or to order. She threw open her plain wardrobe; empty, no clothing to select, nothing to buy, no hovering points or half-taken scores.

Where am I? Chanter took her breaths deep and slow. If she was a glitch, had she been returned to her world? An empty world alone and devoid of… would she be here forever? Would she be trapped here forever?

Would they notice uptop? Would they see that she was gone? Would they — could they… would they even care? Unthinkingly she looked down at her wrist again, trying to gauge the passage of time — in those weak, half-hour chunks they allotted their time into — but she was denied even that small comfort.

Breathe.

#12 – Transmission #3

Children were controlled. They had to be; the population needed to be sustained according to extremely specific, narrow protocols. So children weren’t created because of love or sex or any of those messy, natural reasons, they were created on a schedule. When a person died, genetic material was taken from two hosts and a new child was grown. And then that child, once its consciousness emerged, was delivered to the next pair of waiting, pre-licensed parents.

At least, that was how it was supposed to go. No one really knew what had happened with Chanter she had just appeared out of whole cloth to them, not requested, not scheduled and — it was very difficult for her not to assume — not wanted. Since she existed outside of the system, she had no assigned parents. And though someone uptop could have altered it, could have forced her into the queue, could have given her a lineage, a purpose, a meaning…

They just… never did. It was a failing that had occurred long before Chanter had the knowledge or voice to question it.

So that is how Chanter had lived out her life; as a ghost. She had no needs, not really. Children were, for the most part, automatically taken care of by the system; put through routines that taught them, that tested them. And the people around her did care for her, as needed, from time to time. But there was no family that she could call her own. There was nothing that she knew as hers.

And maybe, somehow, this is offered her a perspective that grew beyond the mechanical tethers of their shared experience. She felt like her consciousness was an ever-growing balloon extending out and beyond the thin veil of electrical impulse reality, encompassing a wideness of space and time.

Sometimes there’s a moment like flicking on a light in a dark room, when a consciousness turns in on itself and seemingly verifies its own existence. This was the moment that she was experiencing now: a supreme consciousness of being, a sudden realization of self.

And then the clamor bled back into the air, into her pressurized surroundings. Voices returned, all at once; so much so that she wondered if there had just been a glitch, like her. And then, she realized, there was panic; she felt it, sensed it, before she saw it. Just outside the temple door, there were people crowding around in the street. And in the very center of all of them she could see someone — lying on the ground, not moving.

She did not want to move closer. So she did not. Yet, in another timeline, in another layer of reality, she felt as though she did. She felt separate from this alternate self; as though the split from her doppleganger was so recent that she could catch up, if she moved fast enough. That she could just slide into that alternate reality and find herself moving through the crowd to reach to that fallen person; a young boy dressed in blue.

But she did not move and her alternate self faded away, lost forever; that reality would never exist. She did not want to move any closer; she did not want to become responsible. Her entire life she had been blamed for small things, random things, things that just could not be explained. Her existence itself was a curse and the things that she touched became a glitch. 

She did not believe this. But she did.

#11 – Transmission #2

Every passing day seemed like a blur; a smeared liquid pool of color and time. Chanter could not say what she had done yesterday; the day before, or the day before that, though she could pull up her logs and see the same meaningless patter repeating itself again and again. There was nothing but the purchase or the discovery of some new and gleaming experience, and Chanter found herself disenchanted with these parceled, partitioned moments of time.

A memorized sequence of footsteps found her in front of the district center; an ornate building in the fashion of the temple, or perhaps a tea house, or perhaps both, which seemed to grow continuously larger with time. On matte, textured walls, bulletins were displayed — little missives and transmissions coming in and out through the ether, reaching to them from the other settlements. Birth announcements, death announcements, queries and complaints. They were always different… but always the same. Behind her, she could hear the scraping sound of the brushes down the street.

In some quiet, manufactured vacuum of event and time, Chanter was alone. Somehow she had simply managed to trickle through a thousand dust-laden conversations and introductions to emerge clean and clear on the other side. A ghost in a city of the dead, she spoke to no one and no one seemed to notice her. It was easy, in this place. There was a… calm. A calm that she almost dare not disturb; a placid pool, mirrored and bright. Was she lonely? They were always alone. It was not a question with an answer.

Chanter shrugged her shoulders and pulled her jacket closer to her, conscious of the distraction within the cold. It would have been so easy — too easy — to always be comfortable. It would be madness. People could only function in a sort of quiet, pervasive discontent. If there was nothing to be unhappy about there was nothing to strive for, and if there was nothing to strive for then… then there was nothing at all.

Inside of the tea house, she felt the temperature rise — just barely warmer, a degree or two that hovered close to her skin. Faces that she knew better than her own were catching up on news, making purchases, buying food. One of the district’s younger children, Skipper, was sorting through lessons with her parents; a glowing book of moving pages.

Chanter had never known her parents.

Chanter was a glitch.

#10 – Transmission #1

YOU ARE IN QUADRAGINTA
IT IS THE 24TH OF SEPTEMBER
IT IS THE YEAR 153
IT IS 10:00 IN THE MORNING
THERE ARE 0 ALERTS
THERE ARE 0 WARNINGS
YOU ARE CURRENTLY 24 YEARS OF AGE
YOU ARE CURRENTLY HEALTHY
YOU ARE SAFE
IT IS YOUR FREEDAY

Chanter stared, stock-still, breathing shallow, at the blinking numbers scrawled across her cream-white ceiling, a glowing cord of light: 10:00. 10:00. 10:00. She could envision her body moving, like a ghost, above her, but she could not seem to summon the energy or lactic acid to complete the task. She wondered if this was what it was like to die: to simply lose the will to move forward anymore, to be unable to muster the energy. Maybe it was this inner spark of light that died and then you were just — gone, unable to tether yourself to existence any longer.

But she was just being lazy.

She dragged herself up from her thin, black floor mat, reaching out towards the eerily luminescent, unnaturally steady rice-paper walls that made up her small, empty cube. She had never bothered upgrading the size; it had never seemed important to her. She looked down at her clothes; an embroidered, red-silk robe, which floated lightly against her skin. She wondered if she should leave now. She wondered if she should just stay. She stared across the room, at a brightly illustrated painting of crashing ocean waves and imagined them crashing upon her.

What was the point, really? It would be a reduction to say that her goals didn’t matter, that her life didn’t matter, that her fabricate world didn’t matter — as with anything, it was all relative, and she could not imagine that anything could be more real or more meaningful than anything else; it was only a matter of perception, of context, of will. Yet that clock, which turned to 0, turned to 30, turned to 0, turned to 30 again, that clock was driving her to madness. Each creeping of it across the long linear strand of time was making her feel as though her skin was pulling off her flesh, as though her bones were screeching and screaming.

“I should go out today,” she said, to herself, the hollow sound of her voice falling flat and unnatural within the chilled air; of perfect temperature, of perfect humidity. That thought affirmed, she went through the motions in a way similar to falling down a mountain; a free fall effect from one task to another, to wash, to get dressed, to clean and finally to stand before her door and take one deep breath before pushing out into the bright white, blinding light.

Cherry blossom trees were now in full bloom; she knew this not from the trees themselves, but from the pale, faded flower petals which were strewn across the street. Wanderer slowly scraped by, brushing the flowers away from the path, slow, even strokes dissolving the petals against the stone-paved black roads. Miller was further down the street, repairing the lantern-lights one by one; further down the hill, Chanter could see a dozen people or maybe more, down at the market, buying and selling their wares. She buried her hands within her pockets. There was a cold chill in the district air.