This chapter is longer than the last two, sorry for that. The next few will be shorter, hopefully taking less time to write.
This chapter was back to past tense because I thought it was the prettiest way to communicate the ideas I wanted the story to convey.
Start of Chapter() Three: This Place Wasn't Here Yesterday.
My human host took a right at Socialism, and made great pace from the azure waterways and last hours' dark events and back into whatever city this was. I was still recovering from my serpentine ordeal so I was woozy at the time and don't recall the locales.
"Hello, it's Jenny here, miss me," Jenny aerodynamically fuselaged.
"Hey, it's Antonym here. We saw everything back there and we want you to know that we are still alive. There are many things of import to talk about like ships and kings, but I would wish to say how I would have loved to fish with my butler on that water," he blue-screen techno-echoed, but everyone ignored his as he was unimportant for now. But there will be a coming interregnum where money will rule instead of my nonsense.
"Jenny, it's great to hear you again, so you're not dead?" they asked.
"Well," I started to finally explain, "people have Traces inside them, which is a terrible place to keep important information by the way, and they allow us Process to learn new abilities called Functions. But greedy, powerful individuals can use Process as tools and even weapons to bypass world laws. We must stop them by going places."
"Cool, so when will we get our bods back?" Jenny demandin'ly asked all unchallenging-like, so I muted her.
"When I look up, I only see you and the beautiful backdrop of ocean of stars behind you," Anton said creepily with innocence. To be fair I would also only see that in the eye of the hand without my Eye() Function gathering data for me constantly sometimes.
"Not responding to Jenny's question," they asked.
"No, I muted her," I replied.
"But now I'm all alone," they acknowledged.
"I'm still here," Ant reassured no-one.
"Everything was going smoothly," Jessant (prev chap goth girl) whined, "until you two hacked my refurbished water world Spine, that I captained, and killed everyone aboard, stealing my Trace thing in the resulting drowning."
"To whom am I speaking?" Antonym quizzed.
Later on, which is why that scene break is there, think about it, my living, breathing human decided to go to sleep - but not in the street! As they couldn't return to Cloudbank they wanted to look for an inn in town, but avouched to me that they would accept even a four-star Breakfast and Bed - as long as the price was right.
We asked around at various establishments which were likely to know about places of rest.
We tried the Cuddle Party venue first. We knocked on the door. As we waited, we could hear loud ambient music playing.
"Yeah?" asked the bumble-bee-suited man who opened the door.
"We-"
"Oh, no!" he interrupted with a startle. "You have a claw like that red-headed chick what done those murders here."
"Excuse me?"
He slammed the door in our eyes and must have despawned as the music stopped before our very ears.
"No-one go outside."
The used-carboard seller and mobile-marriage van driver were no help either. All avenues lead to the same response, but it was 2 in the morning so not too many people were open to us. I made a quip about how vestigial marriage and gender were not needed in this exit-only procreation-impossible virtual world of ours. Only Jessant said how amazing it was.
"That quip was amazing," said Jessant.
She gets me.
We eventua|lly reached Kazatzka Boulevard, the longest road in the city, and also the steamiest with all of the Neo Noir ventilation. We welcome the new | experience with GUSTING | ready excitement. Most shops had closed already due to the time and the times. Karma police had been busy these past years closing down establishments according to the whims of the people - plebiscite law via votes were all that they listened to; votes of the people were the only thing to stop them - except if I begged the Mother Board for power to save the world - redemption for all.
Two gay bars - Exit Night and Enter Light - meaty-sausage-sandwiched a vacant space.
"Why don't we be democratic about this and have a E-vote?" my host asked.
"No!" I shouted. "We must press on. I wish to leave this area at once."
"But how will I sleep? We must pick one of these places."
"Fine. But I wish you'd register my objections and remember them when we wake up in a completely transformed world tomorrow. There are reasons I hate the cities."
We took a nearby vote nearby using a nearby OVC terminal nearby. They typed on the touch-pad to enter both the question 'Enter Night or Exit Light' and the responses 'Enter Night, Exit Light or move on right now.'
I voted for 'move on.' They went with 'Exit Light.' Jessant decided to pick 'Enter Night.' They entered Jessant's result for here. Antonym and Jenny were mysteriously absinthe from the discussion, so they counted as 'invalid vote.'
"A tie?" They slumped infront of the terminal. "What do I do now?"
"You didn't even enter the names of the bars right," Jessant added.
I felt for my host. They were little more than a vehicle for me, but they needed time to prepare for our journey and time to sleep nightly. Time is the one thing we didn't have. Out of pity, I remotely hacked the terminal to create a command for the shackled Process to follow. 'Turn the vacant space between the bars on Kazatzka Boulevard into an expensive, yet tasteful place for a thirty-something to spend their last night.'
"Look," I said, "a new place just opened up across the street."
They got up and gasped. "The 'Happening Bargepole Bed and Breakfast' wasn't there when I last looked."
I promptly turned of the terminal to prevent her from seeing the earlier vote. Insomniacs, light-sleepers and late-night garage workers of the city started having arguments about spelling and city night life. Also, 'move on' had won the vote by 31.4 per cent of the vote. The unasleep masses had chosen me and my ideology over two feircly-competitive businesses, but my host deserved at least one night's rest.
Inside the Happening Bargepole was a reception with black granite features and a fish tank full of tropical fish on the reception desk and towered over the furniture. There was somebody behind it.
"Been working here long?" They asked, keeping their claw behind the rhipidate-shaped desk's haematicly-hued horizontal horizon as if it were suffering from hypsophobia.
The lady behind the tank filed here nails and replied with, "I wasn't here yesterday is that's what's you're query." She chewed gum and blew a bubble. It popped and she added: "What do you want?"
"Bed and breakfast would be nice."
"You're the last person to ask me that. Other guy ran out without paying. Do you have the money up front? That's how I like it."
"No. I thought we paid when we check out." They replied.
"Nobody 'checks out' of this place." she replied.
"Okay, I'm leaving now."
Back outside, Antonym said something revolutionary, "I have money. Lots of it. I'll give you the code if you have a MEM-drive."
Jenny piped up. "What are we waiting for? I've had my eyes on that account for years."
They walked over to the terminal across the street. "So, 'Out of hors d'oeuvres' is a joke right?"
"No," I replied. "Must be a serious problem if even the error is wrong. You see what my Eye() shows you, right?"
"Yeah," said Antonym. "That waterway looked like prime-directive fishing territory. Would have like to fish there with my butler."
"Oh, I hate you," replied Jenny with a human-powered aircraft. "Listen to your imaginary friend. We have treasure to chest."
"Antonym," I started calmly, "we need you to money for us and for your Function I'm extracting, but please obey local fishing laws and not fish in protected areas. You're Reich, but not a God."
"Please," they interviened,"my body, my rules. Thank you for the money, Antonym. Thank you for the company, Jenny. And thank you for not being angry at us, Jess."
"What about me?" I ask.
They took a deep mountain stream of breath. "I have nothing to thank you for. You have ruined my life. I will deal with you in the cold morning of light."
We went for a walk down an alley and up Memory Drive. I was silent.
Memory Drive was a lush, verdant paradise compared to the rest of the places we had been to. The buildings' corners turned at right angles.
The host and our Traces had a conversation this and that. The conversation started light; the conversation became dark. I stayed mostly silent, only speaking when spoken to.
"On, look!" they said shouting, "a place of worship of my choosing."
"No time," I replied, attempting to take over their body in order to move along the money getting.
The resisted. "Not this time. I'm in control."
There're a lot of cats and dogs outside the surrounding area totalitarianly not glitching or dejavuing or anything. Nothing was repeating.
The streets were quiet and no-one was here. There were an unquiet multitude of cats and dogs awaiting the long day's ending. Circling, linear; light, dark; having with the pact, isolated redemption; forever, never. The world was full of conflicts this night. We will be back here later.
Further down the road we could see neon signage, closed curtains and flickering street lamps. Most had notices of murder enquires and unfulfilled promises to repair broken electronics in the area.
A disheviled man was setting up an early morning - very early morning - black market early - stall from the boot of his trunk on the forecourt of a gasoline limerick (We don't have those in the UK, but maybe in the US?). He waved us over but my host payed him no attention.
Reaching the terminal, my human host pulled out a small memory-credit chip with gold tips and uxorious bits. They comely walked past hearses and through herses and past crying execrable homeless people in the street. They walked up to a vacant OVC Terminal and started working the controls. They plugged the console into the credit chip and I half fused with the machine's circuitry while remaining as part of the host so no one would detect this transgressional transaction. Dowdy people gathered around us.
"I don't feel right for doing this," they whisper as to not be heard.
"You need the money more that little-dead-ghost-soul me," Antonym started. "Just use my extremely wealthy bank code 15-22-5-18-18-9-4-5
"Override. A simple sipher," I mad man yelled.
Integrity: compramised.
The chip began sucking and syphoning money from his account. But this is where it got weird. The legal currency tender of this world was memory. That meant that instead of absorbing money onto a disk, it was actually expanding its capacity - erasing old files, destroying rental agreements - and to buy things, you gave up empty blank memory off the stick in exchange for something of 'value,' anything to use up space and void further potential. But this meant that people without possessions - the homeless, the weightless, the scavengers on a bad day - were actually the richest people in existence. They didn't have material things, but were able to trade nothingness and car and lamp-shaped void-holes for cars and lamps because they had empty space to exchange computer processing power for virtual presence. This is what the Hackours desired from the Process. They wanted us to blank out existence for a clean slate - to attain anything they want from the Motherboard below and the Datalines above.
Turning around, all the homeless people were gone.
'Leave Feedback?' the machine asked with words on the screen. 'Thanks x' we feedbacked to the machine.
We went back to A.R.E.A. where the black market dealer working from his car on the poetry square rested.
The host felt pity for him. Pity was felt.
"What are you selling?"
He - not knowing about the pity - woke up startled, snorted loudly and peered up past the peak of his hat. "I needed to free up space. All I had were broken bits the wife destroyed in water damaged."
"I'll take everything you wish to part with." They handed over the MEM-cred card to him.
"You must be the richest miss in all this conversation," he said, taking her card and forcing random broken objects into it. Lamps, synthesises and pets were just two of the things he didn't put in. "Need anything else, miss?"
"No." We turned.
He gotted out his own misery stick and sucked up his car into it. "At last, I can buy me a sandwhich." and brought a sandwich from the lymaricsist.
Fight scene immanent.
I afeared that making our way to the Boulevard from Memory Drive would be difficult. I detected an individual ahead: Bailey Gilande. Her Trace was not actually in the city, it was stored elsewhere and projected here to stop me from reaching my destination.
When we reached the place of worship it was drastically different than last time. A circular arena of graying trees replaced the street corner. The animals were missing and the faulty electrics were being repaired by three-legged Process with. Bailey stood in the middle of the tree circle sipping a glass of wine. They had a bleak visual aura surrounding them.
"It's one of the Traceur." I informed my host. "You will have to fight them and win or they will erase us. Don't worry, they aren't really here. It's just a projection."
"Okay-"
Before my host could give a full reply Baily had used her Get() Function to pull us into the arena.
"Give in." Bailey began. "Do you not wish to return to your life? Do you not have dreams or hopes for the future?"
They looked down at me, the vile claw responsible for yesterdays events. "I would love to return to Cloudbank more than anything. And I will go back there one day, after we accomplish what we need to do."
Bailey finished their glass of wine. "I was once like you, wanting to change the world with accountancy and archiving, acquisition and statistics- my own way. I once, too, lived in Cloudbank. I went to banquets in my honour, but none of that matters now."
I alpha'd negotiations."But isn't that what motivates you? Your past does matter. Well can talk about this."
Bailey threw down the glass and it shattered. "I have a job to do. Please don't take this personally," they omega'd negotiations.
Bailey used Get() to pull us off the ground and threw us onto the ground infront of her. She succeeded to use Get() on the broken glass, embedding most of it into our left shoulder. Some of it missed us and hit her instead.
My host wheezed in pain. "Can you get us out of here?"
"Why leave now?" Bailey asked. "We can provide the best health care around. Just forfeit your friend. Then you can go."
My host didn't say anything to me, they didn't need to. They knew that losing me would mean losing the Traces of my pawns Jenny and Antonym. They meant so much to them even if I couldn't see that yet. I hoped that they would embrace my ideals of rebelling abonst the current system. We needed history and order, elsewise we would circle around and around.
"Do it," they said.
Bailey reached down to force me out but I used Antonym's Function, Short(), to create a short-ranged blast from my eye in the claw to repel her advances.
She outstretched an arm to focus her Functions.
"Turn around I cried."
Lampposts and streetlights were being propelled towards us in quick succession. I used Jessant's antigravity Function, Rush(), to send them gently floating into the sky where they crshed and violently exploded oximoronically into the upsidedown city hanging above overheads.
Bailey rushed towards us, holding one of the repair Process by its head cone which floated about their eye. I saw her from the claw's backhand. She struck my host with one of the Creep Process and they fell down.
"Would this be easier if you had control of my body?" They asked to me.
"Not narcissistically." I replied from me to them.
I processed my hosts forearm slightly more, reaching their elbow and turning her forearm white and elbow deep with circuitry. I used Jenny's Function, Long(), to create a not short-ranged blast from my eye in the claw to knock the droid out of her hands. I probs should )have done it( before she hit me us.
We got up.
"You've acquired some rather convenience abilities there," she snarled.
We faced her.
"What motivates you now?" we began. "Money? Power? Being a miserable nothing in a world full of secrets?"
"I don't want to hurt you," the host added.
"But we will if need be. We can re-shape the world to our desires if we get enough people on our side." I deformed my host
Bailey's fists were firmly clenched by the time we had finished. She stood their, bright red blood on her dark skin, and simple said this: "Limiters."
The Process stopped what they were doing and surround-sounded us. The star-studded line up changed from white with red eyes with gold eyes to black. They started fireing three gravity beams each and this started to apply force to us on all sides. We were being pulled apart by the attacks.
I did the only thing I could. I augmented the Rush() Function with the Short() one and used that combination to lightly lift up all of the Process in the surrounding-short area, ignoring the below lady 'neath us. The gravity beams still acted on us and lifted us up as well, but they struggled to keep us supported and we were suspended below them (like the balloon movie), all their force acting only on our top half which would not cause us to be ripped apart.
I spammed Long() on Bailey while she tried to bring us back down with her Get() spell. The force just wasn't enough to act upon us although it did slow down our ascent as I had previously predicimented.
"What do we do now?" they unpresidented.
"The Mother Board I'm looking for is above the upside-down city," I el presidente-d.
"The one we're hurtleing towards?"
"Yes. That's the one."
Our host had a librarian idea to save us. I would have just let us explode and salvage what I could, but they didn't want to die. They started pulling out random objects out of their money creds. They threw a series of objects to the ground until they found a heavy weight and passed it to the claw. They cashed the cred chip and transfered the weight back to normal hand. I shot with Long() two of the Process. We started to ascend in reverse, a kind of descent back to the ground.
Bailey had her own problems. A man, bumble-bee-suited man, was wrestling with her in hot-argument-ed furry fashion. We landed and blasted the remaining Process. We tried to intervene but it was too late. Bailey grabbed the man from behind.
"To shape the present, and the past," she detonated.
I had no choice but to use Rush() on her and the man. She floated up and exploded in an orange sunset at 4AM. Her virtual presence removed. The body of the man fell down. He was in bad shape - let's just say square-based delta.
They host used the weight to smash the eye on the remaining Process and I manipulated the claw to remove the cores from them. I masticated on them furiously with my hand. We had to make sure humans didn't contact them - even if they were fixing 'lectrics.
Bumble-bee-suited man was badly burnt. His suit was more of a necro-carbon weave than previously. His Trace floated up and spoke.
End of Chapter() Two.
After uploading this, I've thought about changing the rating for the story from T for Teen to M for whatever M stands for. This is due to upcoming plans for the plot - I'm thinking of adding adult situations and I want to be on the safe side and not get this deleted. We will see when we get there.
See youse in the next update!