Renegade Kingdom Ch 3- The Trip

CHAPTER 3- The Trip
(VELVETTE)

January 1, 2089

I plunge back into the freezing waters of consciousness just as a strip of rough fabric is removed from over my eyes, scratching against my skin as it’s pulled away by nimble hands. My body has been propped up sloppily in the corner of a leather sofa, my right hip digging into a very solid armrest and my head resting limply on a cushion. A number of voices clatter cacophonously around me, and as my head slowly clears, they soften into something audible.
“Oh my God, is that really her?” exclaims a high voice.
“Yeah,” Maeve huffs. I can recognize her by the roughness of her tone. “She didn’t come willingly,” she adds moodily.
“Well, look at it from her perspective.” This voice is Elvira’s, a sound I can only describe as flowery that I could recognize anywhere. “She has no idea who any of you are, and as far as she’s concerned, the Syndicate is the most prosperous first-world country on the globe.”
“She’s cute,” says a different voice that I don’t recognize from further off.
I can practically hear Maeve cross her arms as she says, “Really, Odin?”
At this, I finally allow my eyes to flutter open. My head aches, and I feel exhausted. It must hardly be dusk. Indeed, as my vision focuses, I find that the room is lit only by a dim fixture overhead and the crackling of a blazing flame in a stone hearth. I dare not call attention to my revival by turning my head; besides, the scene before me alone is brimming with enough paraphernalia to spend days analyzing. A deep crimson rug lies at my feet, the tasseled corners curling upwards with age. The floor is made of mahogany, and this paired with the warmth emanating from the fireplace nurtures the feeling of being in a warm vacation cabin for the winter.
However, the illusion abruptly expires as I observe the string of articles hanging over the fire, climbing up the exterior of where fireplace morphs into chimney. The headlines range from familiar to completely foreign: “ALTECH BECOMES FIRST CORPORATION IN THE WORLD TO SIGN LEGISLATION INTO FEDERAL LAW”, one reads. Blasphemy, I think to myself, especially when I see the publication’s date: May 17, 2068. More impious propaganda peppers the wall before me: “CEO OF ALTECH, JETT ALDERS, TAKES POWER OVER THE COUNTRY BY FORCE”. Then: “HUMANS FOR HUMANITY, ALIAS H4H, OFFICIALLY LABELED TERRORIST ORGANIZATION”. Now that one just may be true; as I glance a bit off to the left, I see three characters drawn grandiosely upon the wall: H4H.
“Guys… I think she’s awake,” says the high voice trepidly.
Everyone turns to me as if they’re moths, and I’m a lightbulb that just now flickered to life. Or no, I realize as I take in their expressions, rather that I’m some rare animal in a display case—interesting when I’m subdued, but they won’t hesitate to reach for their tasers if I threaten my enclosure.
Now free to survey the room at will, I see that the owner of the soft voice is a massively tall boy with taupe colored hair that falls over the sides of his face like curtains and eyes a shade of green that remind me of a time when I was at peace. The boy closest to him—or man, I’m not sure—has a square jaw and smooth chestnut brown skin. His black hair is cut short, and his dimples are striking.
On my other side, Elvira, Maeve, and the boy from earlier named Alaric surround me in a quarter-circle formation. Elvira and Maeve sit closeby on an adjacent piece of furniture, while Alaric perches upon a distant ottoman, appearing vaguely lost.
Elvira is the first to speak. “Hey…” she says, kneeling a little to meet my eye. I can’t help but feel the familiar sensation of being babied by her. “I know that was a lot earlier, but we’re safe now—they won’t find us here.”
Who? I plead in my mind, but she continues without explanation. Her tone is casual, and I hate how she placates me by refusing to acknowledge the pure madness of what’s going on—am I the crazy one for thinking none of this makes any sense?
“Like I said before, this is Maeve,” she says.
“Hi. I feel like we got off on the wrong foot earlier. But then again, you didn’t really give us a choice,” she says backhandedly, extending her hand out to me in the same breath.
I want to bite it. Instead, I return the gesture, but I don’t attempt to falsify a polite smile.
“We’re a group called Humans for Humanity,” Maeve says proudly—she seems to glow just from saying the title. “We’re carrying on the legacy of the founders, Mariana and Alejandro. They started this organization almost thirty years ago to warn against the dangers imposed by AlTech.” Her tone becomes suddenly serious, and she steps closer. “This year, all the AlTech technology is programmed to initiate the Great Plan, its sort of magnum opus of world domination.” She looks me straight in the eye as she finally declares, “If we want humanity to have any chance at survival, we have to stop it, and we need your help.”
Seconds pass where the room contains nothing but silence and the weight of a million possibilities, innumerable sparks flying randomly in the restless search for undying inferno.
“Ha!” I cry at last, unable to hold back my shocked laughter any longer. I turn incredulously back to Elvira, “Seriously, these are the people you’ve been hanging out with, El? There’s no way you actually believe this.”
She just shifts uncomfortably before saying, “It’s true…”
“It is,” says Giraffe, stepping forward and away from Dimples with a greater sense of urgency, and I can’t help but wonder what gave him the right to think that he can talk to me. “The proof is all around us.”
“What, the newspapers? This is all just a bunch of crap written by holed-up conspiracy theorists!” I exclaim, rising to my feet and making my way across the room to indicate the drivel with the back of my hand.
“She knows about newspapers,” observes Dimples thoughtfully.
“I told you,” says Maeve, “she has special Kingdom knowledge. Isn’t that right, Vira?”
Vira. El hates being called Vira; she has since we were kids. She just nods in confirmation.
Maeve talks about me like I’m the enemy, as if I’m stealing some precious resource from the rest of them. What’s so secret about newspapers? And what else has El been telling them about me behind my back?
Giraffe interjects before the conversation can devolve further into accusation. “It’s more than just the papers. If you go anywhere outside of the Palace, you’ll see it: ghost towns everywhere, guards regulating the streets. We can’t keep living like this, and the Great Plan is just going to make things worse.”
I feel as though I’m speaking a different language. I look disbelievingly from one serious face to another; miraculously, no signs of humorousness appear on their visages.
“Go on, then. Show me,” I concede.
The faces look warily to each other now. A collective breath is held so that the only noise is the crackling of the flame behind the hearth’s metal grate.
Oddly, I feel as though I can see better in the silence. Behind the black leather couch is a bookshelf, just a bit longer than the sofa. Books of various colors and shapes span from one side of each shelf to the other. The wall it sits against is a buff shade of brown beneath a layer of haphazard chalk art. None of the walls remain entirely blank, colored patterns dancing playfully across each surface with no rhyme or reason. Scanning the perimeter of the room, I notice that it’s devoid of windows. There’s a slight inward movement from the walls that separates the main room from what appears to have been a kitchen before being transformed into some sort of large study. The sizable table in the center is covered in materials, and I can make out a 3D model of the Kingdom from where I stand near the couch. From the kitchen, there are multiple doors extending to unseen rooms.
In the corner diagonal from where I stand, slabs of wood are nailed to the wall like the steps of a treehouse. A ladder. That plus the absence of windows can mean only one thing: we’re underground.
“Well?” I say impatiently.
“It should be fine,” Maeve concludes. “Come with me. You’ll need your goggles.”
Still in a state of great confusion, I trail Maeve through the wide threshold to the kitchen and through a vermillion painted door that’s chipping its pigmentation at the edges. The curved antique door knob squeaks achily as she turns it with some evident effort, and the door flies open after a moment’s hesitation as if it had been glued to the spot. I half expect dust and dirt to rain down from above and pepper my red hair from the sudden movement, and I flinch in anticipation of a storm that never comes. Maeve seems unbothered. A dark hallway unfurls before us for several meters, and there are two more doors on each side of the hall. The walls are painted a deep plum color rather than the previous beige, but they’re likewise decorated in heaps of childlike chalk art.
“This is the storage room,” Maeve says bluntly without making eye contact, indicating the first door on the right.
It’s painted a soft deep green to contrast the purple hall, and its door knob is a cheap gold. The door swings open with slightly less struggle than the last, revealing a fawn room lined with filing cabinets. Wooden boxes rest upon most of the flat surfaces—the tops of drawers, messily installed makeshift shelves, and the dusty wooden floor—adorned with more nonsensical designs. The splashes of color vitiating the interior are reminiscent of how I imagine Verascene-induced hallucinations to appear. I don’t know much about the drug, only what I’ve heard Father say about it in the privacy of the Palace—that it’s the market’s most recent narcotic used by the worst of junkies and addicts.
Maeve dives into a crate in the left corner closest to the door, a wooden box embellished with psychedelic spirals and spots. She extracts a pair of leather-bound goggles with their light red lenses like those which sit on the heads of the rest of the crew.
“Come here, let’s see if these fit,” she commands, but she may well be speaking to the goggles themselves for the way that she’s still refusing to fully acknowledge my existence.
“Did you make these yourself?” I ask, the first sincere thing I’ve said to Maeve since our meeting in the woods. I wrap the goggles experimentally around my head, and the rims droop over my nose.
Removing the goggles from over my head and handing me a new pair procedurally, she replies, “Yeah, the blueprints and materials were all here at the headquarters. They built a lot of original equipment to counter the AlTech technology while they were still together—the H4H founders, I mean. Now we’re here to carry on with the innovating,” her voice fades in concentration as she tweaks the new pair of goggles to sit snugly around my head. She has to rise to her tip-toes to do the work.
“And what is it that the AlTech supposedly does that needs countering?” I ask at last. Conspiracy theorists and online trolls, those are the varieties of people that hate my father and believe him to be some kind of evil mastermind, walking around in their tin foil hats and cursing my family name as if we’re somehow responsible for their psychotic states. I await Maeve’s flabbergasted expression and spew of nonsense, the conspiracy theorist’s defense that follows the offensive use of logic.
“It happened to you,” is all Maeve says, embodying an uncharacteristic take on something like sympathy as she looks me straight in the eye.
I feel hyper aware of the extra pound of metal and leather snaking around my scalp, bringing me one step closer to being one of them—and to think I actually thought I wanted that mere hours ago.
“What?” My patience is growing short; I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
“Don’t you remember, at least a sliver of it? A feeling of peace, almost a feeling of nothing at all, of all sensation leaving your body and mind for seemingly no reason? And then you woke up, and it was like you were suddenly alive again, but to some lesser degree? Like a smaller version of yourself, almost entranced?”
I’m briefly reminded of the way that El had practically managed to kidnap me, making it all the way to the outer perimeter of the Palace grounds before I summoned any will to protest. Against my better judgement, I allow an introspective moment of stillness to pass. “Sounds like some hippie-dippie bullcrap to me.”
And at the same time, I’m reminded of the horrific shriek that had echoed its way through the millions of square feet in the Palace, but had somehow managed to dodge my train of thought’s periphery until this very moment. Disorientation from the kidnapping and the chemicals is a logical enough excuse.
The thought eats away at me as Maeve and I pass through the warped wooden thresholds and half-stuck doors on the journey back to the proselytizing living room where the others have broken out into whispered conversation, perched keenly on the ragged furniture.
“Hey, what happened to my father back there? I heard him scream,” I say, partly out of genuine concern but also in an attempt to hear my own voice, or really anything at all other than the piercing cry of my father ringing in my ears.
Silence falls, and a nervous exchange of glances ensues. God, why do I even bother asking these people anything? Alaric steps forward this time. He’s rather small and thin, and his glasses are a bit oversized, giving him a mousey effect. His messy black hair doesn’t help; it appears to have been mussed about by loose twigs. The sight makes me wonder how far we really traveled from the Palace…
“Listen, you’re dad… He’s not who you think he is—”
“That’s enough, I think,” Maeve interrupts quickly, side-stepping in front of Alaric to block him from view. “Come on, you wanted to see the outside, right, Princess? This way.”
“I’m not that easy to distract!” I shout, because she’s already crossing the room and climbing aboard the wooden slats that crawl towards the low roof.
“Didn’t say you were,” Maeve retorts, completely out of view now.
Leaving me powerless, sputtering and incredulous as she ascends into the unknown, I offer El one final pleading, desperate look, but she just averts her eyes and nods towards the corner of the room. Fine, I think, storming towards the ladder exasperatedly, it’s not like I expected you to have my back or anything.
The thick wood nailed lopsidedly into the wall is soft to the touch, but still rough enough to splinter. I struggle to get a good hold on the beams, but I do my best not to let it show—I’ve been lacking in my visits to Pent, the rubbery scent of the FitCorp gyms having turned sour with the site’s recent shift towards large-scale advertisement infrastructure and wildly increased membership prices. Not that that necessarily obstructs my access to the health clubs—Father would be aghast if I ever passed up an opportunity for the cost of it—but the knowledge of the scam alone, the sight of the desperate gym-goers squandering their livelihoods just for some essence of routine or purpose, it’s enough to confine me to a psychological prison of guilt and pity, the kind that makes me question why I have my life of excess, and whether I even deserve it in the first place.
Luckily, Maeve is the one to unlatch the trapdoor and swing it to its open position before it’s my turn to rise from the chasm, mercifully relieving my upper body of any further responsibility. The scene that surrounds me is the antithesis of the bunker below, a dilapidated shack of cobwebs and too many safety hazards to count. The timber roof is caved in as if it was pelted by cannonballs. Open craters in the ceiling allow streams of moonlight to flood in and illuminate the room arbitrarily, as if highlighting microscopic clues leading to some kind of grand revelation. All I see in the puddles of moonglow are dust bunnies and the stiff corpses of polypod insects, their too-many limbs contracting inwards as if gripping some invisible poison disguised as treasure, like a flower unbudding. The window frames encompass thin glass panes tarnished with grime. They bear imperfections that modern nanocrystalline smart windows never do. The ground feels almost mushy beneath my feet, and I think of the mold that’s likely eroding the wood planks, how it could seep into the shelter below and corrupt the minds of misfit teenagers if given enough time to spread its diseased breath.
A set of hazardous stairs leads up to a second story whose floor appears to maintain only half of its original form, hence the moonlight spilling in through the visible roof above. The place is a mess. I miss the Palace and its gorgeous interior, the marble, gold, and shiny mahogany surfaces as far as the eye could see. Mainly, I miss the feeling of immortality it instilled—however illusive—the sensation that nothing could even touch me while I was inside.
A cold hand lands forcefully on my back, causing me to jump as my heart stops momentarily.
“You with us, Princess?” says the hand’s owner. “This look like the almighty King Jett Alders’ perfect utopia to you?”
“A great Kingdom isn’t always without poverty,” I spit, stating the painfully obvious. “So, you have some issues with housing security, take it up with ArchCorp. Not everything is my father’s fault.”
Maeve just rolls her eyes again, muttering something about “ignorance is bliss” as she hustles towards the shack’s front door impatiently. When she pulls the door open, it miraculously doesn’t fly right off the hinges and clatter to the floor, joining the heaps of ruined wood scattered below, instead remaining intact by some dedicated commitment to the skeletal building’s survival.
“Better put those on,” she advises, pointing casually to the absurd goggles still resting on my head, pulling her own over her eyes before turning to face the outdoors.
Begrudgingly, I comply. The metal rim is cold against the bridge of my nose, and the leather strap is heavy over my ears. Once the lenses cover my eyes, the night itself seems to sharpen at every edge and border. The same can be said of my senses. Everything is enhanced, as if life before had been two identical layers of an image set slightly askew, and now they’ve been perfectly aligned for ultimate saturation. I face the open doorway, and it hits me that the white crescent hanging high in the sky is the same one as that which lit up the Palace at midnight not so long ago, setting ever so slowly as the hours creep by. I stand on the front steps of the shack that astoundingly don’t fall through as they support my weight, and I know we’re no longer in Geronto.
“Don’t go any further,” Maeve warns quietly, as if there’s some beast of the night that she’d prefer not to wake. “We can’t afford to attract any attention to this place. But look,” she remarks, guiding my attention towards some colossal monuments off to the west made slightly smaller with distance, “there are the Twin Pinnacles. Guess what they do.”
From where we stand, barren land extends for miles and miles, beige dirt and tumbleweeds forming most of the terrain. The only signs of civilization as far as the eye can see are miniscule specks of light that appear greasy and smudged from our place on the doorstep, speckling the horizon line. However, if I look hard enough, I can just make out the sparkling tip of the Palace, and before it, there are two huge billboards, the things that Maeve referred to as the Twin Pinnacles. And I’d be a fool not to realize those billboards as Father’s “unfinished projects”, the advertisements never put up due to concern for citizens’ quality of life.
Even from here, the Pinnacles loom over the rest of the world like a great set of eyes, watching without ever blinking. Images flash across them, mainly AlTech advertisements: A bright pink screen with the various AlTech technologies flaring over the screens—Juniper home devices, Aspen vehicles, Y apparel. They spin and slam eye-catchingly as humanlike figures offer their various gestures of endorsement, seeming to transcend into celestiality somehow as a result of the AlTech’s essence. Their animated figures are uncanny, almost human, but still retaining that eerie hint of artificiality that seems to render them as some close cousin of the homo sapien at best.
If the Pinnacles appear daunting and intrusive from what is likely over a thousand miles away, then I fear for all of the residents who live beneath those monstrous displays. They’re unwelcome exhortations, festering sources of artificial light and sound, blocking out the sky itself and surely with that, the sun and clouds. The birds and trees and stars. How is one to tell day from night, reality from fantasy?
“But he told them not to put them up, they’re not healthy,” I protest, an anger welling up within me for whoever decided to breach my father’s orders for the sake of their trivial corporate interests.
“Yeah, and who told you that? Your father?” Maeve questions.
“He said there were too many complaints, that it would cause health issues. Whoever did this is obviously going to face serious consequences,” I retort. “When did these even go up anyway?”
The Great Plan this, the Great Plan that. So, two billboards go up in the Kingdom and everyone loses their minds. Just because one unfavored act is carried out, it doesn’t mean that the whole world is ending. I know people like this—people who feel unseen by those in power, using every little wrongdoing as an excuse to try and spark some pathetic revolution. It’s time for these H4H kids to look inwards and accept that the source of their unhappiness can’t always be blamed on those outside of themselves.
Maeve turns towards me, a significant expression possessing her face. “Over twenty years,” she answers bluntly.
My jaw drops dumbly, just for a second, before I snap it shut and return to reality. “That’s impossible.”
“Why?” Maeve responds exasperatedly. “Why on Earth would your dad protest against a project that would advance his own brand? Why wouldn’t he be interested in converting as many citizens as he can into customers, sucking as much attention and money out of them as possible? Velvette, your dad is a billionaire, a CEO, and the King of the Great Avant Syndicate. He’s the single most wealthy man on the planet, so you tell me, how is any of this anywhere near impossible?”
“He’s not a monster,” I respond, and I hate the way that the words come out clumsily with the edge of a stutter.
Maeve purses her lips disappointedly. “That’s what you think.”
What’s given these kids the nerve to disrespect me like this? I’m the Princess of the Great Avant Syndicate for God’s sake. People from the Palace should be patrolling the streets and skies for me right now, and for crying out loud, they should’ve saved me already. It’s like some new force has taken control of the universe and turned the world on its head, attempting to shake me off of my throne as I hold on with everything I have.
Realizing I’m still wearing the apparel of the enemy which may well be driving me further into insanity, I reach up to my face and grab hold of the ridiculous things. A strong part of me believes that once the goggles are gone, the billboards, the so-called “Twin Pinnacles”, will disappear from view, some kind of indoctrinating hallucination weaponized for the sake of revolution.
“You don’t want to do that,” Maeve says in a slight sing-songy voice, but she doesn’t stop me.
I cast the goggles aside carelessly, and Maeve picks them up from the ground and walks back through the doorway and just stands there. If she’s waiting for me to follow, then she can stand there all night for all I care—I’m done being dragged around by these lunatics.
As I face the outdoors again, the world goes fuzzy. The night splits back in two, but now it’s as if the layers are being sundered further, getting dragged apart towards polarized sides of the Earth. The Twin Pinnacles are still there, although they’re more like the Quadruplet Pinnacles now. And there, in the center of whatever it is that I’m looking at, there’s the field with its grass so smooth and soft it could hardly be real and its gorgeous flowers that smell of sweetness and sweetness alone. Am I weak for giving over all control just at the sight of it, or am I justified in seeking out this feeling of ascension, of transcending into a realm where all of my problems can magically disappear? The sensation is like floating, like closing my eyes and entering a dream, so of course, I let go.


I wake propped up on the bunker’s peeling leather couch, a sickening sensation of deja vu curling nastily in my stomach. My head feels heavy, as if filled with thick vapor. As I blink, reality slowly comes into focus. Elvira sits before me on the floor, her hands lightly holding my own. By some defensive impulse, I immediately snatch them away.
“Where am I?” I ask, head still woozy.
“You’re back at the headquarters. What do you remember?” El asks in that notorious flowery tone.
I survey my surroundings, taking in the sight of that girl, Maeve—why is she still in my life? The boy who’s hardly spoken, Alaric—the two of them sit at each of the furthermost ends of a feeble loveseat positioned diagonally from where I sit. And there’s Dimples and Giraffe, the tall one sitting in a worn leather chair arranged perpendicular to the couch, the dimpled boy standing sturdily behind it, leaning forward with either hand gripping the armrests. He stares me down curiously, and his demeanor comes off as a bit tone-deaf considering the current circumstances.
“I… I was just here,” I say, staring at the palms of my hands as if some answer lies in the ridges of pale skin. They seem to be the only indication of consistency, everything else changing around me into unrecognizable versions of their original forms.
“Yeah. You went outside, remember? To see it for yourself,” Elvira says cryptically.
“See what?”
Maeve nudges Elvira over to occupy the space before me. “The Syndicate. The real Syndicate, not whatever fairytale land Alders made up for you.”
“It’s not my fault!” I respond pleadingly. The words spill from my mouth before I have time to process what’s even meant by them.
A name blossoms in my mind like song lyrics: the Twin Pinnacles. The sight of them, their forcefulness. And Maeve had turned to me like I was the dirt on the bottom of her shoe and tried to convince me that everything I’ve known of my family, of my Kingdom, was a lie.
I search for the contempt in the faces of the other members, the terrorists for all I know, their disgust with having royal blood in the midst of their righteous underground bunker. Instead, I see pity.
“It’s not your fault, Vel. You didn’t know,” El whispers.
“I still don’t! I don’t understand what’s happening. And honestly, if you weren’t here,” I say, leaning in close for some form of privacy as my voice lowers, “I wouldn’t have let things get this far,” is what I finally settle on, wary of the consequences of making outright threats. “I’m not playing this game anymore. Tell me exactly what you want from me, and maybe then I can try to understand what the hell is going on here.”
El looks prudently to Maeve, a cautious hesitancy spelled out on her face. Maeve nods firmly, and knowing tension seems to zap between each of the room’s occupants. El reaches into the duffel bag sitting idle by the couch. From the bag, she extracts a velvet box embellished with a gold emblem. She lifts the lid carefully, and inside, glass syringes full of blue liquid rest eagerly.
I exclaim, “That’s—”
“Verascene, yeah,” says Elvira, but she names the drug casually as if completely oblivious to what it actually does to people. It’s not just a casual recreational substance—it’s a narcotic capable of turning the brightest of people into monsters unto themselves, disregarding the common laws of humanity and becoming completely unpredictable. No wonder I can hardly recognize Elvira anymore.
“W-what are you doing with it?” I ask as I push myself further back into the couch cushions, heels retreating from the floor, squeezing my knees to my chest.
“Don’t worry,” she says quietly, flicking the side of the syringe with great concentration.
My heartbeat quickens to an uncontrollable pace. First kidnapped, then drugged. Then what—converted into some kind of enemy of the state? The Princess of the Great Avant Syndicate, turned monster by four rebel teens searching for purpose in the hopeless age of Generation Epsilon. Or maybe I’ll just be dead, who knows. Just looking at the Verascene with my own eyes feels illegal, like the particles themselves will radiate off of the syringe, an opiate exocytosis of death, and contaminate me from the outside in. I close my eyes and turn my head away just as I feel a thin cold hand land on mine on the couch cushion.
“AAAH!” I shriek, a blood curdling cry ringing through the increasingly claustrophobic space.
“Velvette, look at me! I won’t do anything without your permission,” Elvira says.
“Then why are you touching me?! What are you doing?” I cry, but the air seems to have vanished from my lungs, and the words come out rushed and breathless.
“I know you’re confused! You feel lost and hurt. I know the feeling. The Kingdom was my home, too,” El urges, but nothing she says can comfort me now.
I go silent, curling in on myself further in fear. My pupils jet around the room frantically, taking in the items: the potent headlines seeming to scream directly at me, the fire now raging behind the grate like a monstrous beast, the string lights hanging chaotically above like bullets ready to pelt down at any minute.
“Trust me, Vel. If you can’t, then what has this been between us for all of our lives?”
I glare down into Elvira’s hazel eyes, my face going blank. “You tell me,” I say, barely above a whisper. I feel the rush of emotion leaving my chest, washing over me like magma.
El purses her lips and looks away. The syringe is still in her hand.
“Where do you inject it?” I ask while my emotions are still exiled to the place where I can’t feel them.
“The side of the neck,” El responds, in equal measures of expressionlessness.
I pull the collar of my silk night shirt to the side. Surrender—hasn’t that been the theme of my life so far this year? I make sure to stare at the floor opposite from the injection site as a searing sensation spreads from the angle formed by my neck and shoulder. Liquid diffuses underneath the skin, freezing cold and real. I clench my fist, but don’t move. 2089, the year of surrender.
Perhaps it is the end of all things after all, is my last fleeting thought before rising to my feet on my body’s own accord and suddenly falling forward. But no ground stops my movement; nothing solid contacts my body at all. I just keep falling and falling, until my feet land on new ground. I’m in a room that I’ve only ever seen in the chambers of my own head, one that I’ve heard of in the infinite legends of my childhood and could only ever dream of entering. I’m in the AlTech lab, the first one—the one lined with monitors and analytics running for several meters across the walls. I take in the view and savor it. Early versions of my father’s creations sit like children’s playthings on the metal tables rather than the historic pieces of genius that they are. A hologram screen illuminates the back wall, complicated notes splattered across its surface.
The longer I take in the scene, the more I sense this unsettling feeling snaking beneath my skin. There’s an urge to run. I turn to leave, but a strong hand grips my wrist, sending shocked adrenaline through my veins like ice. I slowly turn. It’s my father’s face, appearing decades younger and more alive than I knew was possible. He wears an intimidating smirk, one that reeks of power and certainty. When he speaks, his voice is like that of a bully on a playground, an unnameable threat buried under the teasing tone.
“Won’t you stay? You haven’t even seen the best part.”