Post by Annasiel on Feb 15, 2022 1:34:08 GMT
HYPERREALITY
WHEN DID YOU FIRST DIE? DO YOU REMEMBER?
WHEN DID YOU FIRST DIE? DO YOU REMEMBER?
Tough love for those in the city of a million lights. It's a beast of its own design. Glittering, reflecting on the Basin Lake like eyes, a titan in chthonic repose, a beacon in the endless night. Pods skim across the superhighways with howls in echoing wake, air pushed aside with roars that shake the very walls of the buildings they narrowly skim. Below the maze of elevated streets, a deep smog settles, and in it, the light and sound take on a life of their own, distorting, distressing, till the glow are the dizzy trails of wisps, the howls, the hungry cries of predators in wait. This is not a place of honor. This is not a place where people live. Here, the best they can do, the best you can do, is survive.
Then there are the proprietors of it all. Hiding away in their penthouse temples, phasing on memory leaks until their souls are fried. They get by better than most, with their fancy jobs, their cushy rooms, their fast cars and faceless servants waiting on their hand and foot - they're just surviving, too. Got better ways to cope, but coping's coping all the same. They know better than most there's nothing to be happy about, but truth trickles down. They've got their fingers on the laylines - the pulse is dead. Truth is, there's no sunrise. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. You're in post-digital nirvana, scrum. Tunnel's through. Done. You got spat out here, so you better make the most of it.
If you don't, you'll fade away. Maybe for the better. There's no hope here.
The diner stinks of burnt coffee and cleaner. Dim light pours in through the visored windows, reflected on the coiling vapors of the Gap outside, barely enough to match the singular neon strip humming above the counter. A tired-looking waitress in a miniskirt and tights chews bubblegum with solemn conviction behind the register. Greasy stalls are filled haphazardly with patrons, some poking at grey food, some reading their daily tabs, some staring out the windows at something that isn't there. It'd be a lie to say the air was thick with tension. Tension takes anticipation, anticipation, knowledge, and the only knowledge the patrons had was that it was another blessed day in Afterlife. The tension was all in retrospect.
A pod roared past the shop, rattling the window enough to flicker the faint 'Ricky's' projected at the glass outside. This time, though, the howl was cut by a whine, the window shattered, and a small, blue cube ricocheted across the diner floor. One second. Two. Enough for some to turn their heads, others to look up, and the bored waitress' drooping lids to fly open in surprise. Then - not with a sound, but with a lack of it, a silent POMF that stole what little life the air had left, the flying cube erupted. Light flared where there was none before. Noise rose where silence had held the stage. The window, already sporting a gaping hole, erupted outward, shards flying out into the Gap, rain as deadly in its fall as the type from clouds. Bodies were flung about in the ensuing chaos, dolls in the hands of an angry god. Some, mercifully, died again in that microsecond. Where did they go? Does it matter?
You were one of the ones that didn't.
