An entangled story from the Mind Fields timeline. 1,390 words.
Step step step step, go around this soom. Step step step, Keep your eyes down low.
I’m excruciatingly aware that if anyone could see inside my head, what they found in there would profoundly shock them. This Pure-O, the worst of all possible OCDs, compels me constantly to narrate my life—internal monologue, thank the orange martyr—like a never-ending soliloquy. It’s fucking delu. Seriously, I’m the smartest person I know—smarter than Simon, way smarter than Kev—but the inside of my skull is a streamshow. I Truman myself every minute of every day, constantly observing my smallest move—and commenting on it, the most boring oral history ever. Having eidetic recall makes it particularly annoying, cos I can replay it all in technicolor detail whenever I choose.
It gets really bad when I’m outside, especially on stressful nights like this. Push shove, push shove, yell yell yell. Everyone’s angry again. What else is new? Whoosh. A plastic autonomous goes up in flames, it’ll be a rainbow puddle soon—pretty. Wait, is that Kev behind the screaming Zoox pod? Shit, gone, probably just wishful thinking, Keep moving, it’s good to keep moving. Now everyone’s looking skyward as the light swells yellow—real bright—and thunder rolls down. Woah, a cop gunship slapped into a stack, biggest fireball I’ve ever seen. Bits of machine and cop rain on us and we all scramble to get out of the way, hooting and yawping. Some crow wives’ll be crying tonight, little crow kids all, Mom, when’s dad coming home? Life’s a virtSoap.
“Time to get gone, Toni.” Good idea right now. This place’ll be swarming with pissed cops in a bit. Step step step step, turn down alley. Step step step, stop n listen. Air smells smoky, go a different way. Turn a corner and I’m back on a bigger throughway. Soomers here throwing stuff at a cop tank. Glass bottles splashing against armor. Lots of different colors, tinkle tinkle.
Step, step, step, dart down narrow ped, step, step, step, stop. There’s a big cophole—back to me—standing over a soom, just a girl, maybe my age. He’s got his extendable out and he’s wailing on her. Her screams are pitiful but there’s no one to hear her. Except me. “Hey, stop! Fucking crow. Stop hitting her!” The big bastard turns just his hard-shelled head toward me. I can actually see myself reflected in his night-black visor plate. I look very small.
“Stay back, Toni Prinz. Any attempt to interfere will be met with force.” His voice is amplified by his helmet comms. His words also scrawl across my insplay in all uppercase text, just so there’s no ambiguity. What can I do? Even if I were cut, I still couldn’t overpower a combat augmented crow. It would just be suicide by cop. Back up back up back up, I turn and run. Slap slap slap slap, my fleeing shoes on the steelmac. Thwack thwack thwack thwack, the crow’s baton on that poor girl’s arms and back. I know I’ll be hearing that sound in my dreams. Fucken crows, Fucken Downtown.
Slap slap slap out onto the next street, nearly get splatted by another tank. The crows are really out in force tonight. The titanium beast rumbles forward dispersing a large mob with gas canisters and a water cannon. Critch critch critch, go the treads over a carpet of broken glass. I was stupid to come out for this, just been feeling so itchy lately, needed to scratch it somehow. But tonight is madness. There’s no catharsis to be had when they can shut you down in a blink. Or worse.
I’m going home. This is bullshit. Not worth dying for. Step step step, push shove push shove. I move quickly but carefully through the roil of meat, sweat, and stink. I’ve been thinking a lot about the moon lately, lots of anomalous stuff going on up there. Tonight, though, I know that won’t distract me. I’m way too sketch. Instead I think about him. He’s my favorite subject. I’ve loved him since the day we met. I think we were like five. He doesn’t know of course, only Simon knows and it’s safe in his vault. Even Michael doesn’t suspect. Poor Mike.
I think about Kevin a lot. I don’t know why he has such a hold over me, why I can’t just let it go, find someone who can give it back. I know he doesn’t love me. Fuck, he’s never once looked at me the way I see him look at others but I can’t stop. I wish he never knew me as a boy, we got off on the wrong foot. Now he’s always going to see us as we were. Great, now I’m crying, boo fucking hoo. Suck it up, girl. I mean, it’s not like he’s even all that clever or bright. Except, that’s not really true, he can be so fucking insightful when he wants to be. And he has that almost precognitive awareness. In a weird way, it’s his mind that I find so attractive. He might talk all trashbilly but he thinks about things in such an interesting way. He surprises me constantly. Speaking of surprises—
I turn another corner, walk smack into a pair of crows. Downtown’s black with them tonight. The female grabs me by my shell, puts her visor right up in my face. I can see my breath on the mirrored surface. “Zone-wide lockdown started fifteen minutes ago,” she snarls. I look about at the literally hundreds of soomers swarming around us. “Being on the street during lockdown is a social credit violation.” Okay, she’s pissed I bumped into her. The crows never actually enforce the lockdowns, there are just too many soomers to arrest. Piss one off, though …
“Look, trooper … Davis, is it? I’ve been tryna get home n’at all night.” I usually find things go better with crows if I dumb down the vernacular—makes them less suspicious. “Every way I try to go, I run right into more trouble. It’s totes cray out here.”1
“And where are you coming from exactly, Ms. Prinz?” the bigger one asks, not bothering to keep the boredom from his voice.
“Exactly? Comin back from the popcon clinic, if you must know. The one on Mayfield.” Absolutely not true but I like to make the moment as uncomfortable for everyone as humanly possible in sitches like these.
The female cop sighs. “You know we can see your entire medical record, Toni.”
“So?”
“You haven’t visited a clinic this evening.”
“Well, no. Obviously, the riot got in the way.”
“So, you’re pregnant right now, that right?” The big one’s cynical. That’s understandable.
“Maybe.”
“Again, we can see your bio reads.”
“Okay, no. I’m not. It was a mistake.”
“Your history is also showing you are, uh …”
“Yes?”
“That you have …”
“Go on, you can say the word.”
The Vigilates look at each other then back at me. Davis says, “And yet you thought you might be pregnant.”
“What’s your point?” You can feel the uncertainty radiating from beneath their blank-faced helmets as they try to formulate a safe response.
The next second, both cops stiffen. They start to turn away. Something else must be going down. The female turns back toward me. “You’re on notice as of now. Another violation and I drop your score thirty points, Her black-gloved finger juts at me, just centimeters from my nose. “And I will be checking.” They both book off down the street at the trot. Well fuck.
On the walk home, I pass someone lying on the sidewalk, shaking. Ohio syndrome. Kevin has it. There’s a strong smell of shite coming from their direction, so I keep my eyes ahead and don’t look at them as I pass. There are thousands like this in Downtown. Much worse as well.
Pretty shitty night all around. At least I was able to snow the cops down to a warning. Step step step step. For the rest of the walk, I think about Kev—and about the general weirdness of our moon. I’ll have to bring it up with him the next time we talk. I think about Kev and the moon so much that, by the time I’m back safe in my box, I don’t sleep a wink.
M1ND F13LD5 