“What color?”
“Sorry?”
“The scarf. What color is the scarf ?”
“It’s… green. Olive?” Mary is flustered, this increasing edge of impatience in the woman’s voice making her nervous. “Like an army color.”
“That’ll do, close enough. Now give me the glasses.”
“What?”
“Give them to me. Quickly. Don’t make a fuss.”
“No!”
It’s too late. She feels the glasses being ripped from her face. Her hand grabs at air, but the woman is too fast.
The crowd disappears. Sudden disorientation, the feeling of being transported to a vast, open space. The street is empty.
Just her and the woman, who looks straight into her eyes. Piercing blue eyes, short blond hair. Familiar, just older. Tired. Worn. Recognition hits.
“It’s… you… the girl…”
“Yeah,” says the woman. “Well spotted.”
Anika slips the spex onto her face, and the whole world shifts.
Shadows realign, the sky changes. The world is full of ghosts, crowded around her. Pixels thrown at her retinas by twitching laser lenses. It’s both instantly a rush, that transportation to another time, and instantly familiar. Like seeing something that was once exciting and new for the first time in nearly a decade, and remembering it had become mundane, routine. Infinite fucking detail, just like the last time. It makes her think of biting into a favorite childhood candy only to realize it’s both too sweet and too hard.
Plus something else ain’t quite right. Double images. Ghost traces. People are floating, their feet not quite touching the ground. The buildings seem out of alignment. Either the motion and eye tracking is wrong or the lasers aren’t auto-tuning to her retinas. She tries to pull down a menu from her periphery but it’s a struggle, blinks not being recognized.
“Wow, your calibration is fucked,” she says to the girl. “It’s all out. No wonder you can barely control anything. I can’t even find the interface… You been getting mad headaches?”
“Y-yes…?” The girl sounds terrified, confused. She tries to grab at Anika’s arm, to get back her precious glasses, but Anika swats her away easily. She falls backward, landing on her arse. She looks up at Anika, a shocked child being trampled by an army of ghosts.
Then Anika sees herself, dancing in the crowd. Full of energy, happiness. Emotions that she’d almost forgotten. Music she’s not heard for a decade but recognizes instantly, a heavy grinding synthetic beat that triggers nostalgia spikes with each sub-bass hit. The space between the beats, dub-soaked air. It’s like stumbling across an old photo of yourself, and being simultaneously embarrassed and full of regret, being both glad you’ve grown up and wishing you could go back. She feels herself freeze, her mouth go dry.
“Give her back the glasses,” a voice says.
Ah, finally. The past disappears as she takes the spex from her face. The black kid is here, standing next to the girl. He’s hot, sweating, out of breath. He holds a battered-looking old knife out at arm’s length, aimed at Anika’s face, the tip of the blade threatening to scratch her neck.
“Give her back the glasses,” he says again.
Anika laughs. “Yeah, that’s not how this works, man.”
“The glasses. Give them to her.” She can see his hand shaking, a drop of sweat running down his nose. He blinks. Don’t fuck this up, kid, she thinks. For the first time self-doubt creeps in.
She looks down at Mary, still on her backside, close to sobbing. Looks back at the kid.
The kid says nothing. Just blinks again.
She could take him easily. No problem. Break the little motherfucker’s arm before he even got to twitch that knife.
But maybe that’s not the way.
She takes a breath.
“Okay. Fine. You got me.” She shrugs, holds the glasses out toward the girl. She pulls herself up off the floor and snatches them back.
Anika turns to Tyrone. “Okay? You wanna give me some space here, man?”
Reluctantly he lowers the knife, still holding it out but no longer at her throat.
“Thanks,” Anika says. She turns back to the girl, who is frantically checking the glasses, turning them over and over in her hands. “Nice trick you got there. But you really want to see some ghosts? You want to really know how they work? You come find me later.”
“What?”
“Tonight.” She turns, gestures at the 5102 building. “Up in there. Top floor. I’ll show you some real ghosts up in there.”
“You stay the fuck away from her,” says Tyrone, tremors in his voice.
“Hey, it’s cool,” says Anika, smiling as she turns and walks away from them. “It’s all good.”
13. BEFORE
“I just—I just can’t believe you’d do something like this just to prove a point.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“You’re so fucking infuriating. Everything is always about your stupid fucking politics, nothing is about us. You don’t really care about us, do you?”
“Scott, I—”
“You don’t, do you? Just fucking admit it. You don’t care about us. We’re just some distraction getting in the way of your fucking crusade to—”
“Scott! What the fuck are you talking about? What is this all about?”
“Don’t pull that shit with me, you know exactly what this is about! Holy shit, you’re so fucking INFURIATING!”
“Scott, I—”
“The photos! The fucking photos you deleted!”
“Deleted?”
“From iCloud! From the shared folder! The fucking photos you’ve deleted! They’re the only copies I fucking have! But you just don’t care, do you?”
Scott blinks open the iCloud icon, scans through to their shared folder. It’s empty. Scott had set it up so they could both drop photos in there, photos from when they’d been together. The only photos they had of them together. But now they’re gone.
Rush blinks the refresh icon, hoping they’ll magically reappear. Nothing.
He blinks it again. Nothing.
A third time. A window pops up, blocking his view of everything else. Error message. Timed out. Connection error. A string of undecipherable numbers and letters.
“You make me so fucking angry sometimes. I mean, I fucking get it, you hate Apple, you hate the Internet, you hate fucking everything. You don’t want to put photos on iCloud because it’s not safe, privacy blah fucking blah, surveillance capitalism blah blah, you’re so fucking self-righteous—”
“Scott! Listen to me! I didn’t touch the fucking photos! There’s a problem with the server, that’s all. Didn’t you have them backed up locally anyway?” He knows, the second the last word leaves his mouth, that it’s the wrong thing to have said.
“FUCK YOU! I KNEW YOU’D SAY THAT!” They’ve had a few blowouts, but this is the most angry Rush has ever heard Scott. “I knew you’d say that! I knew you’d say where are your backups! I knew you would! You’re so fucking predictable—”
“Scott—”
“You’re so fucking predictable, I knew this was all some fucking bullshit way of making a point! You’re—I’m so fucking sick of y—”
And then Scott’s voice is gone, replaced by low buzzing, echoing clicks.
“Scott!?”
Jesus fucking Christ, has he hung up on him? Has he actually hung up on him?
He blinks at the phone icon, tries to restart the call
but then
everything freezes
and all is glitch.
He rips the spex from his face.
Sound fills the space around his head like air rushing back into a vacuum. Like some TV show cliché, an audio signifier that something terrible has happened, incessant car horns blend with endless burglar alarms. But the noise seems to be the only thing that’s in motion, the Bristol that surrounds him seems to have crashed, as stuck and frozen as the spex that hang limply from his hand. Driverless traffic is gridlocked, crossing lights dead-eyed. The LCD billboard that makes up most of a nearby bus stop is looping static, gray through white digital snow, as the confused commuters sheltering in it gawp at their own now-useless spex in their hands, or crane to stare down the endless procession of motionless traffic, scanning for a bus that’ll never come.