So, I had this in my mind for a long, long time. I wrote this in Italian, of course, but I never had the courage to try to translate it in English. But, in the last week, I got a message from a user, about Under a Black Sky, and so I told myself: come on, Haru, we can do it.
So, here I am… You know, my English is not that great, and this can be a bad translation, even if I prey it won't be. So… well, here it is…
Oh yes, this also is a story that I wrote after a dream, so there will be some oddities in it. Please, don't let you bother by the names, I swear it is a ShizNat fanfic :P
1.
She was falling.
She was falling in a black abyss, made by virtual codexes, dancing around her figure, as the mad whirls upon a wintry sea. She was unable to say if she felt cold: no sensation was able to break the dolorous wave that was tearing every single layer of her body, while the falling was becoming an ecstatic fly, emphasized by a wordless cry. She had her eyes wide open, her arms outstretched as if that simple gesture could grant her the necessary ability to reacquire control upon her trajectory. The truth was that she was falling inside a sort of funnel, a dreadful funnel that was created by her own foolishness. She could feel the pain of her limbs, as if they were lacerated by a thousand of swords, while her thoughts were fluctuating inside her projective mind, led by the fumes of her last drug cocktail.
She desired so much to be able to cry out all the pain she was feeling, but she couldn't. Oh, even if she had been able to find the strength and courage, inside herself, to declaim the divine ecstasy she was feeling, and then disappear for the eternity in that flow that, in her most precious and remote dreams, hadn't a very end... Oh, even if she had been able to find that barlume of hopes, of identity, that – she knew – that there was, that there had to be, somewhere, hidden between the folds of her soul. If so, then everything would have been all right, everything would have had sense.
If so, she had been free, for the last time. About that, she was absolutely sure, in that unconscious way that only the children, or the defenceless, or maybe the fouls, had. But, that barlume isn't in her, anymore, and for that reason, now, she was falling.
Nor that, that kind of thoughts had any importance, in that moment: the falling was leading her nearest to the hard ground, beneath her figure. She could see it right in front of her: a thick and black stain in the darkness, a threatening menace even more near, even more real. If there was the wind, around her, hissing around her black hair, she wasn't able to feel it, anymore. If there was a reason, for her state, she didn't knew it, anymore. The hard ground beneath her was changing under her green eyes, wide open in the flux of the fall. It was acquiring shape and colour: here there was the fangs of a dragon, there the scales of a dinosaur, over there the torn wings of a black bat. And, everywhere, there was the quiet and noiseless of the code, with its vortexes, its geometrical and stylized structures: even in that foul situation, she could read and understand it as if it was her native language, as if she hadn't done anything else in her own life, other than read it. She could recognize the Melton's program signs, the Kaim's barrier that it was told to be impenetrable, but... she had avoided it, hadn't she? Yes, she had when her life was really hers, when she could define herself as a complete woman, before the arrive of the Legates.
If she focused her mind above it, even if for an instant, she could still perceive the wave that gave sense and solutions to the alphanumeric flow, vivid as if it was illuminated by a pure and divine light; that echo that, she knew it, would have driven her once more near to the Barrier, to break it, and to find the pulsating fulcrum of the Pyramid of the Possibilities. It was so, wasn't it? She had done it, hadn't... she?
Had she truly done it?
The code unthread around her figure, without arresting her inglorious fall, the upside-down ascent toward the nothing of the eternity, while the abyss assumed the form of a distorted alcove and the ground was always nearer, incumbent. Soon. Soon Alex would be ended straight against it, and there was no verse, there was no way to prevent that: even she couldn't desire anything else that her own cerebral death, that death that would have made her free, forever.
Here and there, feathers of black angel appeared from the walls of that inverted funnel, unthreading nearby her figure, as if she had been a Cherub sent away by the heaven toward unknown beaches, bathed by the fluid wave of the primitive sin. And, after all, she was indeed a fallen angel, in her personal way to be: she had lost everything, every reason, every possibility, every future.
She had got only that instant, subtracted to their control, the fervent expectation of her own end and the innate ability to read in the string of letters and numbers, launched on the net at an impressive speed, multiplied by the cybernetic grafts that the Legates had brought her as a gift; that same grafts that, in the exaltation of the decoding, made its eyes of the colour of the pure obsidian, almost to remember her that, after all, she wasn't human anymore.
And, perhaps it was really so. Her humanity had gone lost: they had stolen it in a night without moon and, somewhere, there was a headstone, with her name engraved above, that name that, despite all of her efforts, she wasn't able to remember. Yes, her true name, lost forever as the whole rest.
And then, her whole anger made its own road from her torn heart and inside the heart of the world, and there was no other way to break that flow, to destroy the monster that they had created, if not that to complete that unnatural flight, that would have conducted her soon among the arms of the nothing endless. Because Alex was only that: a monster, a forever lost monster, a pawn in unknown hands, that had the consistence of black claws, dark fingers in accord with twisted, distorted laughters, illuminated by a white light that doesn't heat, as the neon lamps, in the lanes of the hospitals.
They would have been able to kill her from a moment to the other, if they had wanted it: after all, she was only one of the so many "lost children", assassins without face and without name, able to penetrate data barriers that would have made to desist the best among the programmers, the more expert among the hackers of new generation.
And it didn't care if she was the best. Others would have come to commit new crimes, because, indeed, all of them were only this: lost souls in the vortex of the events, invaded by the blind anger of whom has seen his own life eradicated, cancelled with a hit of sponge and knows very well that can't do anything else, if not obey, to continue an existence consumed by the sinister fire of the revenge. And constantly to crave the vault key, the ability to grab that only extreme instant of radiant freedom. And it was only for that purpose, that Alex kept on living, in the absurd research of that moment that belonged only and exclusively to her: the exaltation of an instant, that instant looked for, built, made perfect by her own inflexible wish. Only by her wish. And, it didn't care if such instant had also been the apex of the fall: her own death.
And yes, for this reason now she was falling, she was sinking in a ripped reality that didn't belong entirely to her. For this motive, now, she was running toward that dark wall, jagged, with a distorted smile again drawn on her lips, the face illuminated by an unhealthy light, that face that in any way would have been able to pass unnoticed, between hundreds of people, in the constant tide of the whole world. Beautiful. They would have defined her beautiful, if only they had had the time to stop to observe the high cheekbones, the eyes of the colour of the jade, the hair's joining, far toward left, that made her face oddly asymmetrical, impossible to be forgotten.
And lethal. They would have called her lethal, if only they had had the time to understand the way according to which the Death danced around her eccentric and thin, harmonious and elegant oriental figure, made unforgettable by the way to move of whom is grown in the slums of the "Districts' Tokyo", where the standing out towers of the multimillionaire empires created only black shades over shades even more darker. But Alex didn't care about it: in that instant, she would have swapped every part of herself, if only she had been able to find herself somehow complete and free, once more, even if for the last time.
Instead, she was falling. And the distance from the ground was so miserable to be able to feel the thin and threatening sound of the wind on the walls of that deadly trap, that it existed only in her mind, projected in the Matrix. Somehow, that increasing buzz brought to her mind distorted, distant imagines. Perhaps memories. The sound of remote sirens in the roads, animated by the pushers, as extended cobwebs on the world of the living beings and, here and there, the cry of a distant drum, stolen to the African nights, and then the rhythmic sound of the percussions that grows in an unknown world and that becomes energy and then returns to be protagonist in its upside-down universe, and again changes consistence and returns to the native nucleus from which everything has had its beginning... and becomes again code. The code. Black and dense, fluent, launched in so many complex, incomprehensible geometries.
How in the Hell, would she have been able to stop observing it, now that it was dancing around her figure, transmuting under her eyes, and reproducing itself as if it were animate by the same eccentric life that animates the complex relationships of the double helix of Dna? Now that in the flow of the last instant, once more, it was revealing itself as her perfect lover, ready to answer to every stimulus, every thought come by her, how she would have been able to part from it?
No, she would never have succeeded in stopping to observe its schemes and its ramifications, the crystalline structures that only few others were able to discern with so much simplicity and naturalness, to modify them with the ability of a musician that draws pure notes from the ropes of a harp. To lose herself in the tide, in the smokes of the code, was the same to forget.
And to forget meant, somehow, to grant herself the luxury to dream that there had been a time in the sign of the purity of her mind, by now forever lost. And, yet, she didn't care if the hard ground was always nearer, as was the naked earth, ready to become the altar for her very desired, extreme gesture. She would have granted herself to the death in that way, scrutinizing and studying the kaleidoscope of numbers and letters in complex structures; yes, it was all right, this way.
Yet, once more, for the umpteenth time, something in the structure succeeded in escaping her understanding, her control, something thin that seemed to be there, ready to make fun of her intelligence, and then able to disappear under her proper nose when she believed to have found the correct key of reading.
No, she couldn't certain allow that her death, extreme act of abandon and redemption, turned out to be imperfect. It was the only thing that she had, and she would never have consented to any, miserable particular to ruin the only thing for which it was still worth to continue to exist. Yet every time she went so far, every time the ground raised against her upside-down flight, the trace reappeared. And here it is, hidden behind a spiral of ascendant numbers, sinister as the malicious smile of a baby that has just committed a prank.
A look toward the ground was enough to become aware of the inevitable impact, while the characters of the code, that were animating the walls of that unnatural cave, were straining down as ink, as the desolate painting in Dalì's pictures, downward, inside the apex of that parable torn apart from the plans of existence. And the last part of her conscience recorded once more the imperfection, because it wasn't the right way according to which the things had to go, and she knew it well. However, the code's flow was recomposing under her obsidian eyes, answering to the dynamics of unknown commands, exactly in the place where Alex was about to break.
She was here.
She was almost there.
It was over: "More".
The infiltrated letters were shining in a strange character of flaming gold, repeating the same message in an endless way.
"More".
Anything it meant, anything that trace represented, Alex wasn't able to understand it, and despite her desire to find its source, every time, she found herself in and endless battle against dense and mocking shades; every time, she found in her hands the usual fist of flies that became ash among her tapered fingers. Every single time, was the same. As if something or someone constantly wanted her alive, animating her soul with an unhealthy challenge in that hunting without end.
The impact was devastating. She fell in the exact center of the golden "O" of that so much hated word, with her arms crossed above her head, as if that simple gesture could protect her, while for the umpteenth time the projective barrier of the Matrix creaked and then broke. She felt the stroke in her bones, in her head, in every single vein of her painful body, when the hard ground opened in a golden pentacle. With arcane symbols of an ancient magic, made by programs and structures, dynamics and incomprehensible syntaxes, the ground changed itself in new seals, that her unknown hunter had interwoven in her most unconfessable nightmares, subtracting the girl from the desired death. And Alex passed straight inside the circle of the possibilities, in the swaying sphere of her broken identity. Unharmed.
When she opened her eyes, she lay to the feet of her bed, with on her lips, the rancid taste of blood and bile. Once more, she had been so nearby, and yet, once more she had survived to the cerebral death that she was searching, still holding in the narrow fist of her right hand the little box of black pills. She could feel the cables of connection to the Matrix, connected at the base of her numbed neck. They were painfully pulsing. Everything had been ruined by that damned virus, by that damned word, that now was echoing inside her broken mind. "More." She would have sold her soul to understand who was hiding behind such joke. She would really have done it, only to be able to rest in peace, finally. But, despite her desire, there was no verse to come to and end. And, even if it hurt, she was condemned to a life that she didn't want to live anymore.
