Free Transcendence by Christopher McKitterick Page B

completely devoid of life. His father shifts along the hall like an automaton, avoiding unseeable objects, touching non-present items or people or god-knows-what. His mother is involved in her own waking fantasy or nightmare, her body merely an obstacle or a trap. No human sound fills the apartment’s hollow except the rasping of his father’s shoes on the floor tiles. A background of unlocalized static. The distant boom of sonic grenades. A nearby scream of pleasure or terror, coming from an adjoining apartment unit. Heavy scraping along the street outside. A jet’s roar. A whining machine buried in one of the walls. Underground explosions. Wet noises coming from his sister’s silently moving lips. The scattered evidence of death and decay.
    Jonathan squeezes his eyes closed so hard they ache, then opens them again, trying to see this place as home. Though burdened with the soundtrack of Jonathan’s nightmares, the world feels terribly silent. He fights the desperate urge to power up and splice in. His eyes cast around and finally settle upon his sister, alone on the pink couch. Again, regret prickles Jonathan’s scalp for having spurned her. He had so wanted something other than this, but look what’s happened. Look how the past creeps into the present and wrecks everything. Change is the hardest thing of all.
    He takes a few steps closer to Josephine, his hands unconsciously extended toward her, his eyes pleading, staring into hers. Her lips are so beautiful, full, he wants to kiss them. But he knows that isn’t what he wants to do. Though he begins to shake with the need to communicate with a living human being, a real person intheflesh, he can’t think of a thing to say. Her final words begin to echo through his head. Crashed out, crashed out . . . .
    The words echo and muffle, begin to transmute into other words, then sprout red thorns and bushy black fur. Yellow eyes flip open in his mind as the creature growls the words, “Crashed out, crashed out,” over and over, a curse.
    “ No!” Jonathan yells, clasping his hands to his ears, once again shutting down the blackcard that had initiated itself without his command, realizing that he’s not crazy, that it’s only electronic intrusion again. Every emotion within him swirls and whirlpools stronger and stronger until they gather into a vortex of only one, the way a bowl of paint stirred together ends up brown or black: the color of terror.
    More than anything else he doesn’t want to engage his headcard again, he doesn’t want to admit his feed-dependency, but he can’t stand the barrenness of this reality, can’t stand the worse-than-loneliness of being home. Isn’t there anything more? he wonders. Nothing? Nothing?
    All at once he 3VRDs and splices in full fivesen revmetal, then overlays Lone Ship Bounty from the pov of the bombardier atop reality.
    The image of his sister—gold-skinned and entwined with bands of rare metals—appears to dance with the Captain as he struggles with a Nik, an NKK soldier. In the background, ten men scream songs; the musicians are swathed in ultrablack robes embroidered with intelligent colors that shift across the spectrum and tug memories from the show’s subscriber.
    Memories: Jonathan hears rifles firing and feels bombs concussing and sees a girl falling into a heap of trash as his sister’s beautified face smiles and talks on and on about nothing he can understand in a voice overpowered by music and the thunder of memories he hadn’t realized were so traumatic. Then he realizes why:
    érase. Long-lost love, if it had been that at all.
    Like a punch to the gut, Jonathan feels the flesh element of his body collide with something hard and splices an overlay image of his intheflesh reality in halftone—an editing applet he snapped-in to his blackcard. It takes a moment for him to recognize that he is staring down at a sidewalk, that he has fallen to his knees against the weedy concrete. This image is blurry, as if