muto mentem
Active member
“It’s important that you understand this. We all need to know where we’re going, and how important it is to be ready when we get there.”
Sabina blinked. The face of the overseer vanished. The medical equipment all around her was gone. The cramped backstreet clinic fell away in a shower of sparks. All the careful pretences and abstractions she’d employed to protect herself as a netrunner were stripped away, leaving her exposed to an endless flood of empty information.
It took a moment to cut it down into something manageable. The current rushing by her was water, obviously–a canal. The information itself–traffic, right?–was a parade; the floats (haha) were stacked up to the sky with bits of tatty bullshit–statues and balloons and towers made of superheroes and supermodels and toys and dragons and videogames and porn stars and forever and forever and forever. And all along the canal’s edge, there were thousands upon thousands of skyscrapers, and from each skyscraper’s windows, she could see thousands upon thousands of little hands reaching out on arms that were far too long, breaking pieces off the float-boats, clutching their prizes tightly, reeling in, disappearing back into the brightly-lit darkness. And over all that, the noise–a thousand trumpets, a thousand voices, a thousand screaming kettles, a thousand clicks and alarms and bells and whistles, all at once, all yammering and complaining and playing and singing, all coming together into one tremendous chorus.
And under it–God–she hadn’t realised just how fast they’d been going. The canal was more like a waterfall than a waterway, when you really looked at it--a vertical descent, almost; it'd have to be, at this speed. Or was it the buildings that were sprinting by, churning up the water with their odd stilt legs, while the floats remained motionless amidst the spray?
And, something else–she wasn’t on a float; she was a float. Or, no, that wasn’t right, either. She was lying in the canal, staring up at the sky, and at the same time, she was staring at the world all around her through the eyes of dozens or hundreds of tiny Sabinas, crawling all over her. Some of them were holding onto the fabric of her hospital gown for dear life; others were tumbling into the water, leaving nothing behind but a bit of panic--no splash, no scream. She couldn’t move, for fear that she’d send them all overboard, and oh, god, oh, saints, I’m not ready for this, how could anybody be ready for this, and now that she’d thought of herself and all the little scraps of her she was wearing like dead skin, the other floats were transforming, too, into all the things they really were–bodies, monsters, heroes, gods–and they were all falling, too, into the water–or, no, into the sea–and the canal-ocean-road-waterfall was turning red all around her as, she couldn’t help it, she flailed, and she could feel parts of her dying–ideas, dreams, hopes, desires, fears, lost in the water all around her, becoming the water, joining the flood–
Sabina blinked. The face of the overseer vanished. The medical equipment all around her was gone. The cramped backstreet clinic fell away in a shower of sparks. All the careful pretences and abstractions she’d employed to protect herself as a netrunner were stripped away, leaving her exposed to an endless flood of empty information.
It took a moment to cut it down into something manageable. The current rushing by her was water, obviously–a canal. The information itself–traffic, right?–was a parade; the floats (haha) were stacked up to the sky with bits of tatty bullshit–statues and balloons and towers made of superheroes and supermodels and toys and dragons and videogames and porn stars and forever and forever and forever. And all along the canal’s edge, there were thousands upon thousands of skyscrapers, and from each skyscraper’s windows, she could see thousands upon thousands of little hands reaching out on arms that were far too long, breaking pieces off the float-boats, clutching their prizes tightly, reeling in, disappearing back into the brightly-lit darkness. And over all that, the noise–a thousand trumpets, a thousand voices, a thousand screaming kettles, a thousand clicks and alarms and bells and whistles, all at once, all yammering and complaining and playing and singing, all coming together into one tremendous chorus.
And under it–God–she hadn’t realised just how fast they’d been going. The canal was more like a waterfall than a waterway, when you really looked at it--a vertical descent, almost; it'd have to be, at this speed. Or was it the buildings that were sprinting by, churning up the water with their odd stilt legs, while the floats remained motionless amidst the spray?
And, something else–she wasn’t on a float; she was a float. Or, no, that wasn’t right, either. She was lying in the canal, staring up at the sky, and at the same time, she was staring at the world all around her through the eyes of dozens or hundreds of tiny Sabinas, crawling all over her. Some of them were holding onto the fabric of her hospital gown for dear life; others were tumbling into the water, leaving nothing behind but a bit of panic--no splash, no scream. She couldn’t move, for fear that she’d send them all overboard, and oh, god, oh, saints, I’m not ready for this, how could anybody be ready for this, and now that she’d thought of herself and all the little scraps of her she was wearing like dead skin, the other floats were transforming, too, into all the things they really were–bodies, monsters, heroes, gods–and they were all falling, too, into the water–or, no, into the sea–and the canal-ocean-road-waterfall was turning red all around her as, she couldn’t help it, she flailed, and she could feel parts of her dying–ideas, dreams, hopes, desires, fears, lost in the water all around her, becoming the water, joining the flood–