Epigraph

content/read/025.md

@@ -1,73 +1,51 @@
-# Dr. Carter Ramirez --- 2112
+# RJ Brewster --- 2112
 
-Carter dreamed of shadows.
+AwDae was unsurprised to find home unlocked.
 
-And through it all, there was the river: the muddy, sometimes stinking river. The Thames which only seemed to engender affection that one might call 'grudging'. When she had first moved to London, it had been her guide. The Thames was always vaguely downhill, the slope her Y-axis. And on the X-axis, the bridges. Tower, London, Southwark, Millenium II, Blackfriars Rail, Blackfriars Memorial. Tick marks along a waterline.
+Although the front door had always been locked when growing up, the fact that this whole sim seemed oriented around riddles meant of course ey'd be able to gain entry places ey knew. Clues, right?
 
-And in her dream, she walked aimlessly along the south bank. The constant renovation of the area had led not to one great revival, but countless smaller ones. Buildings were torn down and raised back up, plots of land chopped into ever smaller portions. Those same buildings growing higher, never quite managing to match.
+Ey checked the other doors in the complex to test the hypothesis. All locked.
 
-Strode past towers, squat pubs. Some old, some new. Mostly new.
+There was no bracing for the surge of emotion and memory as AwDae stepped into the entryway of eir old home. Cool tile. Tattered rug. Coat hooks where they were supposed to be.
 
-Strode past people and crowds, buskers and food carts.
+No coats. The sense of desertion was overwhelming. And yet.
 
-Strode beneath bridges, along railings, past tour boats gliding silently along the surface of the water.
+And yet, ey felt as though eir mom could be just around the corner in the kitchen, prowling through the fridge, her boyfriend laid out flat on the couch, snoozing in front of the TV running old science fiction shows. And yet ey knew --- knew on some fundamental level --- that the house was empty.
 
-And she passed shadows.
+Perhaps it was that it was all too silent. Silent as school had been.
 
-And the shadows were like the people of the crowds. A little taller perhaps, but still just like the people. It was as though someone had cut a person-shaped hole out of space, blurred the edges, vignetted, pinched the light.
+AwDae shrugged out of the rucksack and set it down in the entryway. It was precisely the space where rucksacks went. It was precisely the space where ey had set eirs countless times growing up. Ey did as ey had always done and Despite bracing emself for it, there was still padded into the common area, toenails clicking against the tile of the entryway, and then the hardwood floor. Floors which had never seen fox paws.
 
-And it wasn't through prolonged observation, she was just suddenly aware of the fact that the shadows were all behaving in the same way. Always following one of the people. Same pace. Same gait. Somehow more sinister for that exactitude. Always following just one person, never changing, never looking around at anyone else.
+The sensation, that uncanny mix of *home* and *wrong*, quickly grew to overwhelming. The fox sat down on the rug in front of the coffee table. Eir spot. Eir spot, where ey had sat to eat dinner countless times. Eir spot, where ey watched TV, those old sci-fi movies, with eir mom's boyfriend.
 
-And no one else seemed to see or notice these shadows except her.
+It was one thing for the house to be so painfully empty and another entirely to be here as AwDae and not RJ. Perhaps ey could have held each of those concepts in eir mind independently, were ey to only experience one at a time. The two combined were too much. Ey felt eir breath as short, shallow gasps. Ey felt eir vision constricting. Ey felt eir heart race no matter how still ey sat. Ey felt all these things happening to em with an increasing sense of detachment. Ey found it hard to concentrate on what ey was even supposed to be.
 
-And she started tailing one of the shadows. Quietly. Unobtrusively. Followed it following a young black woman pushing a pram. Another young child walking at her side. His hand curled loosely in the fabric of her pants. Constantly in touch.
+*Is my pulse elevated offline, wherever that is?*
 
-And Carter struggled to keep up. The harder she tried to keep pace, the slower she seemed to go.
+Ey let out a strangled laugh. Perhaps there existed in that space some doctor's befuddled stare at the sudden signs of anxiety showing in their patient.
 
-And she tried to call out.
+The laugh turned to sob, stopped quickly.
 
-And her voice came out only as a whisper.
+AwDae leaned forward, stretching eir legs out behind em. Ey laid flat on eir floor, on eir oh-so-familiar rug, bafflingly present in eir bafflingly present home. Laid flat, then rolled over onto eir side. Eir tail lay limp against the short pile of the rug behind em.
 
-And the shadow reached out it's hand.
+*How had this happened? What did I do? Why here? Why me? What did I do to deserve this?*
 
-And the shadow's fingers slid through the woman's hair reaching for the base of her scalp.
+Eir mind was awhirl with words. With questions, and only questions. Ey didn't have answers. No answers inside, none before em, none in the house. Answers were a thing that did not-- could not exist here. Answers a thing that happened to other people.
 
-And Carter screamed, inaudible.
+Ey did not have the mental bandwidth required to do anything other than watch questions swirl. Ey was at a loss for images in this end of days. Ey was an observer. Nothing more than a set of eyes with no will, no drive. No urge to move those eyes as ey watched all of the emotion that had been held at bay, held back with the sense of *doing something* over the last day and change. All that emotion surge.
 
------
+Eir actions had been all wrong. Ey had accepted getting lost with resignation. Ey had leapt at the chance to solve the 'puzzle' of the microphone with something akin to excitement. Ey had found a new set of clothes with a casualness befitting a trip to the thrift store. All this when ey should have been experiencing terror. Doing all these things when ey should have been breaking down into sobs at the fact that ey had been struck with some sort of incurable...what? Incurable disease? Ey was lost.
 
-The dream dogged Carter through her morning routine and into her commute. She kept thinking, if she'd just been able to keep quiet, maybe she could have seen what would've happened when that young mother was touched by the shadow. Some sort of metaphor for getting lost? Or was her sleeping mind just carrying too much work-burden into the night?
+AwDae noted with increasing dissociation that eir breath was coming in great, choking sobs. Eir perspective, that core of emself that spent life reviewing actions and reactions, watched with cool distance as eir body shook with gasps and tears streaked down over eir cheeks and muzzle, leaving tracks in the short fur. Whatever part of emself was in charge of releasing those pent up emotions had been divorced from the part of emself responsible for actually feeling them. *See? **This** is happening now.*
 
-She was only able to dispel the lingering sense of too much meaning when she got into work and checked her email for news. No additional cases added to the research load. She realized she half expected a new one. Young, female, black, mother.
+*It's the emptiness,* that part of em thought. *This place was home, and the knowledge of being permanently removed from such a thing, from anything home-shaped or any sense of belonging, has led to this. There's no one here, and no one at school.*
 
-Just a dream, then.
+"No ranks of angels will answer to dreamers."
 
-After checking her mail on the rig's screen, Carter stood and stretched, making her way blearily to the coffee corner. She was one of the first in that morning. Just Avery and a few other early risers. Thankfully, Avery was the type to leave the coffee pot full rather than empty.
+Words unbidden were calming. The heaving gasps for air began to slow, and ey wiped eir tears away in a smooth, slicking motion that flattened eir tall ears against eir head.
 
-She doctored her coffee to her specifications and ambled back to her desk, setting the mug down on the smooth surface. She spent a few minutes scrolling aimlessly through her mail list. She didn't dive in just yet, despite the workload that she knew waited. The fog of the dream had been burned away, but there were still too many thoughts that needed organizing. Couldn't yet go through the process of setting up her workspace and ordering stacks of cards.
+Struggling to bring those two parts of emself into alignment once more, AwDae levered emself up heavily. Ey leaned on one paw while the other straightened the fur of eir face, brushing the last aftershocks of that non-sadness away in a careful, calculated gesture. Intentional. A setting-aside of emotion.
 
-*No,* she corrected herself. She was *wary* of diving in.
+Perhaps eir initial reaction had been wrong on the emotional side, but correct on the intellectual. Ey would have to at least figure out why. There would be no sharing it, no telling others, no end game other than the knowledge of a task complete.
 
-She had things she needed to do in the sim. She had things that the sim would help her do quickly. She wanted to start a stack for this Sasha that Johansson had brought up. Wanted to find a way to start making and notating all of those connections.
-
-Working in sim was part of her job, as it was for so many others. She had gone into this research project knowing that it was only in sims that people got lost. It had never bothered her before.
-
-And yet here she was, waffling about whether or not she felt safe delving in to do her work.
-
-She sighed, sipped her coffee, shook her head. Then set her hands in the cradles and rested her head against the headrest. Nothing for it.
-
-Within her spare, black space, Carter prowled through the stacks she had started on this little side project. Invisible to others, she created a private stack within the string-delineated area, next to the pendant "Possible acquaintances" card. Private cards showed up with a subtle blue tinge to her, and would only appear on her view of the workspace.
-
-On the first card in the stack, she transferred over the notes she had taken with Johansson. Then she started another card labeled "Sasha?" and added it to the stack.
-
-The whole stack was looped up to RJ's card with a piece of cotton string. Others would be able to see that she had created the stack with the string trailing off to a faint outline of a deck, or a grayed out pack of cards, or however their view of the sim chose to represent the data.
-
-Strictly speaking, she shouldn't be doing this. Such cards were intended to be for short notes to oneself about what one was working on, not for actual investigative work. This was something new. She wasn't supposed to have this information.
-
-Carter stepped back to look at the whole cordoned off section of data. She frowned. Never mind the information, was she even supposed to be doing investigative work? She was supposed to be utilizing the data that the hospitals and the university provided her with, not running out into the field and talking with acquaintances of the lost over pints after a show.
-
-Sanders would have a fit if he knew what she was up to.
-
-Even so, she wasn't quite sure it was only that which drove her to make the stack private. Some hunch. Some shadow lurking behind her.
-
-She needed to be more subtle about this than she had been.
+It was just the only thing left here in this null space that had any meaning.