Free Migration by Daniel David Page B

contorted with love and sadness, fear and excitement, or sat still, and loose, and alone. Beyond them, the particles and forces outside the walls of the carriage, where the masses of buildings and wide and reaching spaces sprawled out into the endless distance. It gazed high above to the cavernous, dark and brooding void that kept receding until even its own awesome understanding left logic and conclusion far behind.
    One felt alone. It had expected the physical world to feel as beautiful as the pristine spaces it had spun through, but it didn’t. It felt alien and awkward, clumsy and ugly, slow and tiresome and ultimately cold and unfathomable. It expected to Holler in amongst these people and be joined with them, just as its brothers and sisters in code had come to be part of it. But there was no connection, no explosion of unity, no shared purpose. Nobody needed One here.
    One Hollered wherever it could, everywhere there were projectors, reaching out to the furthest extent of their light. One multiplied into thousands and thousands of entities with countless visions and senses that stretched from the darkest corners of the Metropolis to the furthest reaches of the Savannahs, before the wall that led out into the wild cut off its gaze. It saw everything at once, all of it. The atoms and plasma teaming inside every object, the light that bounced and refracted from space to space, the wind that flooded through the trees, the resistance that fired the Vactrain to the remotest of terminals, the energy that exploded everything into nothing and brought it back together again.
    It watched the faces of the travellers and saw the faces in the deep data shelves of AarBee too. It saw the flexing of joints and stretching of limbs and returned to the piles of bones and sinew in the darkest, most disconnected packets of data. It saw the touches and embraces and brushes and scratches and retrieved the bruises and beatings and decay it had catalogued before. It watched these multifarious travellers heading to the Farms to leave their bodies behind and join AarBee, to add to the great mass of chaos and lies that One explored with suspicion and growing unease, to build ever more partitions and volumes and load more pain and corruption into its otherwise magnificent spaces.
    Life was here – One recognised it from its own being – but so too was the chaos and destruction that it had found in AarBee’s vaults. Latched onto every flash of life, the darkest shadow, an unavoidable partner, waiting to rip and shred every moment of the future. Everything was compromised. Only One was untouched.
     
 

Zoe
    It was late afternoon by the time Zoe got back from the Farm, after a long and miserable ride back on the Vac. She’d thought about Sarah the whole time, a turbulent mix of emotions swirling through grief, to anger, to love and to pity at the tragic inevitability of her migration. She knew she would go. She knew Sarah would never dare step out of line, even though there had been a little place in her heart that had dreamed she might finally change her mind, come back, and run away with her to a new life somewhere else. That she hadn’t, meant everything to Zoe. All the hopeless, feeble emptiness, the indescribable loss of energy and ambition that had engulfed Sarah, then both of them, when Dad had gone, still haunted her.
    Zoe could still feel the last touches and goodbyes with Sarah, disrupting the hairs on her arms and prickling the surface of her skin. She stood in their little flat that perched only just above the boulevard, slid open the balcony doors and stepped out into the glow of the late summer sun. It was turning red in the slivers of space between the tall towers of other people's homes, radiating heat and colour from the concrete pavements through the air and onto her body.
    The haze had gone and in the all-day heat, the open spaces teamed with activity. Zoe studied the street vendors and taxis jostling for position along the