“Hello Mr. Kelly. You’re just on time for your 9 AM appointment,” the pretty, smiling woman seated behind her desk said as she stood up to greet him. Sean smiled reflexively back at her before he refocused his gaze on her offered hand. His eyes caught sight of the white nail polish she had on her finely manicured nails. “It’s the little things,” he thought before taking her hand into his and shaking it softly.

Sean had learned a bit of this and a bit of that from past girlfriends, but there was one in particular who’d opened his eyes to much of the grooming and preening that some women still did. When he was in his teens and twenties, Sean simply hadn't paid attention to those small things. His eyes, like most males, had glazed over and gone myopic when they were meant to be appraising them. Nice earrings? Didn’t care. Cute shoes? Didn’t care. Polished nails? He didn’t care! It used to be that he’d only had eyes for the more primal facets of what made a woman, well, a woman. A good figure. A pretty face. Good teeth. Plenty of plush on her chest, and lots of storage space in the back. To him, most of those in some combination could have offset any other personal defects. At least for a while.

Then it happened that the girl he had very nearly made into his fiancée finally explained to him (with much cajoling) why she so studiously engaged in these minute vanities that neither himself nor nearly any man on the planet factored into their appraisal of a woman’s beauty. He hadn’t been so stupid as to not realize that these were signals to other women, but what he hadn’t grasped was that they were supposed to also be signals for men. They were meant to give insight into who a woman was on first sight. Something like a set of natural, cared-for nails was meant to be as good as exchanging a business card from one person to another. It conveyed a meaning, “I am refined. I take care of myself to this standard, what about you?” And admittedly, Sean did not. He was a three-day-old beard, jeans and a t-shirt kinda guy.

Which was why that relationship finally hit the rocks and sank.

To some degree or another it was the receptionist’s job to take pride in her appearance, but it was more than that as he now knew. In that mere glimpse he perceived that her nails had been covered in more than just a dollop of polish from some nameless company, and what’s more he knew that this woman was refined enough to be well outside of his league. Which made a certain kind of sense considering he had showed up to this meeting at Everlast Enterprises sporting said three-day-old beard, jeans, and t-shirt.

“Dr. Miller will be with you shortly,” the nameless woman said as she retracted her hand and returned to her seat.

“Thank you.”

Hadn’t it been warm just a few moments ago? Or had it been hours?

Sean didn’t know, but now it seemed cool wherever he was.

What was he doing again? Oh right, falling. But… why? Did it matter?

Sean’s mind calmed once again, and he simply stopped caring.

“And as you can see here…” Dr. Miller patted one of the aluminum drums that were settled on steel supports which lifted a good five feet off the ground. “This is one of our thermoses.” Sean’s stomach got a little queasy when he thought about what was inside, but then noticed the doctor had softly caressed the drum before he pulled his hand away. That made Sean raise an eyebrow, a habit of his whenever he grew inquisitive.

“Each one can contain up to 45 of our Charges, and we currently have over 150 just such thermoses waiting to be used.” Sean was about to open his mouth but thought better as soon as Dr. Miller began speaking again. He had come to listen after all.

“This facility resides next to no major fault lines. There’s never been a flooding incident within a hundred miles. We can run the entire building in a suspended mode for two months without needing to refuel the generators.” As if he were reading his mind, the doctor then answered the next thing that had popped into Sean’s head. “That’s just the facility of course. Each thermos has enough supercooled nitrogen to keep all of our charges safely immersed for up to three years before boil-off becomes an issue.” The doctor’s friendly smile did little to set Sean at ease with this place. Why would it? He was basically at a graveyard.

Sean hadn’t sought out Everlast Enterprises on his own. A friend of his by the name of Charlie had recommended them to him. Everlast were holding onto some of his wife’s eggs in case of an emergency, and incidentally, Everlast also had a division dedicated to something that piqued Sean’s interest: human cryonics.

“How cold does it get?”

“Why? Are you thinking about taking a bath in one of these? I wouldn’t recommend it.” The doctor laughed at his own bad joke before going on to actually answer the question. “Oh, it’s a frigid negative 196 degrees centigrade in there.” He raised his hand and touched the side of the thermos again, and once again Sean noticed. “Cold enough to kill you almost instantly.”

“The thermos can self-regulate at that temperature; we just need to top off the nitrogen every now and then like I said before.”

“How long have you guys been doing this?”

“Oh, since the eighties! But we’re primarily invested in agriculture. We got our foot in the door when the president of the company wanted to cool things down for himself.” Dr. Miller grinned. “I’m told he was spry for an octogenarian, but it wasn’t like he was getting any younger.”

Sean hesitated before asking his next question. This place was so odd. Aesthetically it reminded him of a chemical plant he had done some contracting for, but in practice it was much more terrifying. “And how many customers are here?”

Dr. Miller’s face grew stern. “We don’t like to think of our Charges as customers. Nor do we like to present ourselves as just a company. It's in bad taste. No, we want to be stewards for the future, not technocratic crypt keepers.”

“Right, Charges. There are how many exactly?” Sean asked Dr. Miller.

“Well, this facility houses about a thousand right now, but demand grows more and more with each passing year. We’re probably going to have to expand our operations here within five years in addition to setting up further facilities just like it across the country.”

“You guys anticipate this”—he gestured around the expansive open floor that was lined with row after row of metal thermoses just like the one they were talking in front of—“giant place to fill up so soon?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why?” Sean was baffled. If it had taken Everlast almost half a century to get 1000 “Charges,” why would they be filling up so quickly now?

“Personally? I believe it has to do with the fact that people know the great things they’ve been promised are right around the corner, but they were born just a little too early to experience them.”

“But what would facilitate such interest?”

“The Net probably. More people are significantly better read, scientifically speaking, than we were twenty years ago. CRISPR, life-extension drugs, cellular rejuvenation, and so on are either here but we can’t use them, or they’re just around the corner and by then,” Dr. Miller snapped the fingers of his free hand. “Too late. You’re gone.”

“I see. And so instead of dying, cryonics is just going into something of a long sleep?”

“Ah. Make no mistake—you will be dead.”

Sean frowned. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Is there a problem?”

“Well, I don’t want to die, and I definitely don’t want you to kill me.”

“We all have to die!” Dr. Miller chuckled. “At least for now anyway. That’s what makes this whole system work. In order to live again, you’ve first gotta die, but don’t fret. We won’t be the ones killing you.”

Sean was becoming less and less convinced that coming here had been worth his time. This whole thing had at first seemed rather silly, a novelty for rich people from decades past, and it was starting to feel that way now. Instead of stuffing themselves in giant pyramids awaiting resurrection, they were turning to aluminum drums in basements. He grimaced at the imagery and then went on, “You know, your website was pretty sparse on details as to how exactly you’d bring someone back to life after they’ve been dipped inside of one of these nitrogen baths.”

“Ah-ah!” He tisked and waved a finger. “Remember, we don’t kill you. You go about your life normally, live, love, all that good stuff. Then when you expire? We bring you here.”

“You didn’t answer my question. When I die, how do I live again?”

“We don’t know yet.” The good doctor had put it bluntly and without hesitation.

Wonderful. He was going to have to remember to send Charlie a rather unkind text once he was done with this tour.

“So, if I understand you,”—he began to count off his fingers—“I’m still going to die.” Another finger. “You don’t know how you’re going to bring me back to life.” A third finger. “And you don’t know when that might be. This isn’t what I had been expecting.”

Annoyingly, Dr. Miller's smile just turned into a grin. “I know. Most people have all sorts of wacky ideas as to what we do because of video games and movies. They think you just go into ‘cryosleep’ and hibernate, then eventually we just prod you with a stick enough so that you’ll wake up.”

“That’s more or less what I am looking for.”

“Well, sadly that’s not what we do. I wish it were, but it is not. Our Charges”—he tapped the side of the thermos—“are gone for now, but one day they’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“The science says so. We know that it can be done, we just don’t know how it’s done. That’s why our Charges come to us: to hedge their bets. Eventually you’re going to die, that’s a certainty, but at some point in the future we’ll be able to bring you back. Why not take the chance? You’ll be dead anyway.”

“Like a bunch of necromancers in lab coats,” Sean said. That got Dr. Miller to bark with laughter.

“Why yes, something like that.” Miller flexed his hand out against the aluminum.

“Dr. Miller.”

“Yes?”

“Why do you keep touching the thermos that way? No offense, but it’s odd.”

“None taken.” He looked up at the cylinder and the grin turned into a half-sad smile. “My wife’s in this one, and one day I’m going to join her.”

Sean could feel the air in his lungs leave him, as if he had stepped on a bomb. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Why be sorry? We’re just apart for now, not forever.”

Sean groaned as he stirred once more.

It was colder now, and he felt that he was falling even faster than before.

But what had woken him? Was it that?

There, a pinpoint of light. Or rather, he thought it was light. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. And it wasn’t going away.

He groaned again and tried to shut the light out of his mind so he could go back to sleep, but still it shined.

Dr. Miller held Sean’s attention for another hour as he toured him around the facility. Miller had even wanted to take him to one of their operating rooms but found the theater occupied and the area restricted. Someone in there was being vitrified.

Vitrified.

That was one of the new words he had learned today. Meaning “to make like glass.” Dr. Miller stressed on more than one occasion that this process was what kept cryonics from being pseudoscience. Dr. Miller explained to him that anyone could freeze themselves, that was simple, but to vitrify someone? That was not. He found the explanation of how the process worked to be fascinating, if morbid. The specifics were unimportant, but what mattered was that when you froze something, you damaged it. The liquid in the object would freeze before it cracked. And that cracking could never be avoided. With vitrifying though, you were changing the composition of the material. You gradually cooled whatever it was you wanted vitrified over time, and this prevented the liquids in your brain from shattering your gray matter into a fine powder.

“It wouldn't do you much good if we froze you but also destroyed your brain in the process,” Dr. Miller told Sean. While he was not entirely sold on this idea, there did at least seem to be some sort of rigorous science at work in the background. Dr. Miller even offered to show Sean a video of a group out of Germany that vitrified a kidney of a rabbit if he wanted to see the process up close. That was when Sean heard the whine of power tools from within the OR. Before he could even ask, Dr. Miller had begun to answer Sean's unspoken question, “Oh, they’re just cutting off someone’s head.”

“Excuse me?”

The doctor shrugged at Sean and then restated his answer, “They’re cutting off someone’s head.”

Sean gaped.

“What? You didn’t think we just vitrified your whole body, did you?”

“I most certainly did!”

“Now why would we do a thing like that?”

“Because, because it’s important.”

“Not really.”

“How can you say that?”

Dr. Miller shrugged a second time before responding. “The idea that your mind and body are one in the same is very old and outdated, Sean.” He waved him off. “You may as well be placing stock in the four humors or think drinking mercury will cure your arthritis.”

“Then I really don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“How could you even possibly bring me back to life with just my head?”

“Through cloning, of course!” Dr. Miller flashed him yet another bright smile. “Any society capable of bringing someone back from the dead will logically also be able to clone you a new body, attach your head to it, bingo-bango, and you’re good as new! It’ll be like you never died in the first place.”

The man was absurd, and this place was equally absurd. He stared at the back of the doctor’s head as he continued on his way from the operating room. But damn if he didn’t seem confident.

The light grew from being a pinpoint to a blotch, and Sean was falling ever faster.

He began to feel something that he had not felt in a very long time.

He began to feel something that he remembered was called fear.

Sean was slouched over his laptop; it had been three months since he had gone to Everlast and he still hadn't made his decision. The doctor and receptionist had been nice enough to send him home with at least some of his questions answered, a few pieces of reading material, and Dr. Miller's email address just in case he wanted to contact him about anything that was left lingering up in that mind of his. The good news, he supposed, was that he had until the rest of his life to decide. The bad news was that the end could come at any time. As a kid and teenager, Sean's parents had always said he was neurotic. Now that neurosis had really started to flare back up as he approached middle age.

His mother said it was because he was still single and if he would just have settled down with that nice girl she liked so much he wouldn't be so alone with his thoughts. There might have been some degree of truth in that. When he was younger, Sean had never wanted kids or even really to get married. Recently though, he would feel a deep impulse to go out and not just get laid but procreate with someone. In a brief few seconds, he could imagine his new life with some faceless woman as a parent. Meeting her, falling in love, marrying her, having her become heavy with their shared love, being there when she gave birth to their child, holding their child in his arms. Holding their child in his arms? Sean shuddered; he thought only women got baby crazy. Now he was certain that his mother's paranoia of dying without grandkids was starting to rub off on him.

Secretly though, did he want that? Did he want a family? No. Of course not, that was just a flight of fancy brought about by anxiety when thinking about his impending doom. Just his body trying to convince him to give in to its natural programming and help make a few kids before he expired. Sean was above all that. It was why he was going to live forever, and not just turn to worm food or be spread to the winds as ash by people who pretended to care. Fuck that, the future was his. He just needed to be patient.

The document on the monitor of his laptop said before he did anything else, he would need to update his license so that he was no longer an organ donor. It apparently had something to do with keeping the state from delaying any vitrification efforts, and as he had come to find out, time was of the essence with that sort of thing. Dr. Miller had even told him, “Did you know that 1.9 million neurons will die every minute after brain death? Any delay will make successful recall unlikely.”

Sean gasped in pain as the light began to drill directly into his mind. He wanted to look away so badly, but wherever he turned the light just followed.

The chill had become all-encompassing, and the temperature continued to drop. He was so cold, but he could not shiver.

Sean's body refused to react to anything the right way, or in any way that he tried to will it to move. He wasn't even certain if he had a body.

Then something shook him, and the falling began to come ever faster.

It was cold in Colorado, but then, when wasn’t it? The mountain that he was dangled over was covered in fresh powder and the people propelling themselves down its side were insects at this height. The gondola, crowded with life, swung gently with the wind. It wasn’t the cold that bothered Sean though, it was the height. The swinging certainly didn’t help, and each time the vehicle teetered he was reminded of how far of a drop it was. Certainly no chance of surviving something like that. Despite the cold, sweat had begun to bead down his head. All thanks to the anxiety that was festering in Sean’s gut. Shit, he was getting up inside of his own head again. Just himself cooped up in there with all the bad thoughts about death.

Then, without warning, Cindy slipped a calming arm around his waist. She hugged him close before snapping a photo with her phone. Sean blinked at the flash, and she smiled. He glimpsed the photo on the screen before she pulled her mittened hand back to her face to study the image. In the picture, Cindy was smiling, but Sean just had a look of surprise on his face.

“We're going to have to do it over,” she told him as her finger hovered over the delete button.

Sean shook his head and exhaled out of his nose. “Did I ruin another one of our vacation photos?”

“Yes,” Cindy teased him.

He lowered his own gloved hand over the one she had on her phone and gripped it lightly. “Leave it. I am sure you’re adorable in it, as always.” She looked up at him in response and a small smile pulled at the edge of Sean's lips. “Besides, I'm supposed to be the goofy one after all. Let me look goofy.”

“Okay.”

Sean had met Cindy three years ago while he was at a software conference. He’d been sent there to evaluate the different Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) toolkits that various security firms were trotting out for the year. For the past three years, Sean had been working as a contractor for OMNITECH. They currently had him seated as a security advisor. It wasn't exactly his forte, but he knew enough to get by, slowly bulking up on his knowledge as he worked. His being a contractor was probably the only reason why he’d scored the position in the first place. The corpo conglom didn’t want the overhead of bringing on a full-time employee, and so, if they wanted to send him out to a conference to be sold some software that would ultimately make his job easier? Hey, why not, it was their money to burn.

He had been making his rounds through the booths over the past two days, mostly talking to the same people about network security. Sean had already shortlisted some ICE from a few different firms within the first few hours of the first day, and his overlords back at the home office seemed content with his findings. Now it was just a matter of burning time until he was recalled. Which was how he found himself making small talk with a graybeard by the name of Chuck. Sean had quickly picked up that the only people hocking ICE worth a damn were guys relegated to the smaller booths on the fringes of the conference. Companies with not a lot of money or marketing, but a solid product. Companies that would linger around just long enough to be bought out by a massive corpo conglom. Companies like the one that Chuck worked at.

Then there were corpos like the one with the booth babes, a couple hundred feet off from where he stood. Women who were hired not because of what they knew, but because of how they looked. These were the firms with a lot of VC money or ones that had been around forever and belonged on the NASDAQ. Corpos that had stopped putting out a proper product years ago and just ran on autopilot as turnkey operations. Sean had zoned out of his conversation with Chuck when he noticed a certain phenomenon happening again. One that he called “The Firewall”.

The Firewall was something he had first picked up on when he was a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old at his first tech conference. It always played out the same, and it always made him laugh. What was The Firewall? Well, simple. The pretty women who manned these booths would inevitably attract the most attention, but not the most foot traffic. Most of that attention was from afar by men who had never spoken to women for more than 30-second increments at a time. These men would crowd around the booths but never get up the nerve to actually step foot inside of them, let alone make conversation with the incredibly bored women who were just looking to go home. Sean had met a few of his girlfriends at conferences just like this one simply because speaking with anyone who could pick up on social cues and wasn't just ogling you from a distance gave the illusion that they were a functional human being.

And that was how Sean connected with Cindy.

He excused himself from Chuck, already resolved that he'd be the first one to breach The Firewall. Fortune favors the bold, and all that. As he made his approach, the gaggle of bent-necked nerds lifted their heads to look up at him while he waded through No Man's Land and stepped inside the booth's perimeter. Sean reckoned himself to be confident, something of a showoff even, but he was wholly unprepared this go around. The woman who greeted him did not have the stand-offish personality of a typical booth babe, nor did she even look like one. Instead of being something of a tart with some work done, this woman was like a doll. Petite, giant green eyes, brown curly hair, freckles, and a perfect smile. She was also dressed unlike the other girls that were waiting around to dip into their practiced routine of being just cordial enough to the pencil necks. Where they wore a top that stopped just below their ribs and was paired with incredibly short shorts in order to show off as much skin as their employer thought they could get away, her outfit was much more casual. Nerdy even.

For a top, she wore a hoodie from her university. It was branded with its initials: "BYU." She was a Mormon? Interesting.

"Hello! I'm Cindy!" she peeped before extending her hand for him to shake. He took it gently and felt how soft it was, then was surprised when she placed out her other hand and wrapped it over his before initiating the movement. This caused him to raise a brow and smile a little. Curiouser and curiouser.

Sean realized he was still holding onto her hand well after she had finished shaking with him. This faux pas caused him to blush and stammer, "S-sorry about that." There went his confidence.

"It's alright." She grabbed the hem of her sweater with both hands, becoming much more reserved. The social misstep had seemingly thrown her off balance as well. "So... have you heard about EXOCOMP?"

"Who hasn't?" Sean remarked. "They’re the largest provider of ICE in the US."

"Yup!" She grinned. "And that's why we have the largest booth here." The two other girls in the booth had switched from their holding pattern to complete disinterest now that Cindy had Sean taken care of. Their phones almost magically appeared from somewhere in their skimpy outfits and they tuned out.

"Of course." He glanced about at the kiosks that filled the area, each with a screen that glowed and flickered from sales video to sales video of the various products that EXOCOMP had on offer this year. "Where is everyone?"

"You mean potential customers?"

He nodded.

"Not here. Most of our business is done through direct sales with major corpos, and retail. Conferences like this just seem to get..." She gestured to the crowd of guys that he had passed. "Onlookers." He smirked; at least she knew the game. "I've told my bosses that it doesn't make sense to rent so much square footage when no one ever really comes here anyway."

Sean pressed on with the conversation, trying to be nimble and get far away from the awkwardness from before. "Do you work these conferences often?"

Cindy sighed and let her shoulders droop. "All year long. This is my second year and I'm feeling burnt out."

"Really, the whole year?"

"Yeah," she said with an exasperated tone and shut her eyes. "I even have to travel internationally. Mostly to China, Korea and Japan." Cindy shrugged and continued complaining, "And my Mandarin isn't even very good."

He chuckled. "You speak four languages?"

"If you can count my mushed mouth linguistic ability as speaking," Her lips pulled back into a full smile. "Still, I'm lucky, my sister is an interpreter for the UN, so she helps me. Now you want to talk about being a polyglot? She knows almost two dozen languages."

Sean whistled. "I've never been very good with languages that I couldn't type with a QWERTY and even then, I'm not very remarkable. Ended up failing high school Spanish twice."

Cindy giggled at his failings. Good, he was disarming her. "So, who are you with?"

"No one at the moment," Sean told her absentmindedly. Cindy tilted her head at this as he realized what he had just said. "I'm mean, I'm a contractor. I don't represent anyone."

"Oh."

He fumbled with his wallet and pulled out a business card, offering it to her. "Right now, I'm just a slave for OMNITECH. Toiling away. Getting free trips to places like this. Setting my own schedule. It's a misery," Sean joked.

She took his card and studied it before squirreling it away inside of one of the pockets on her hoodie. "I might have to consider turning free agent when I end up going pro."

"Pro?"

"Yeah. I am only sticking around with EXOCOMP until my stock is vested, and then I-am-outta-here!" She mimed swinging a baseball bat. "For my first job, this isn't so bad though."

First job? Just how old was she? Sean had suddenly become very self-conscious of the gray hair that had started to take over his head. "I'm 24, in case you were wondering." He started to open his mouth to speak when she cut him off, "You're an easy study."

"I guess so."

Just then a group of men in business suits arrived, extremely conspicuous against the backdrop of guys in jeans, bad haircuts, and forests of flannel. Cindy's eyes went to them; it was clear that she needed to go speak with them as the two booth babes got up from their lounging to attend to the men. The pair now wore broad smiles and emanated a fake air of excitement. Sean decided it was time to make himself scarce.

"Well, thanks for the chat." He reached out to shake her hand goodbye, and then she did the double grip shake again. He figured she probably did that with everyone, but still, it was a nice feeling. As he turned to go, Cindy called out to him.

"Hey, if you have any questions, give me a ring." His phone buzzed, and her contact card was on the screen. Cindy Shell. In the portrait she was wearing a pink hoodie and extremely wide-rimmed glasses. They suited her.

The buzz started and there was more of him now, Sean was sure of it.

He wasn’t sure what he meant by “more,” but he felt bigger. More aware. With that came the sound and not just the light and the pain.

It was like an ever-present buzz, and worse it was accompanied by a tingle that itched him in maddening ways. He wanted to scream STOP but no words came from his mouth, he was mute.

Then once more that damnable light that he couldn’t escape grew brighter, biting into his mind and causing his very being to throb in discomfort.

The light seemed to pass him now too before it flickered and died on either side of him. The flickering sped up as he continued to fall. He was still accelerating.

They met for a few days every month at different conferences across the US under the guise of him needing to keep up with different advances in ICE. The bean counters at OMNITECH didn't even notice. What were a few extra plane tickets and hotel stays to a company worth nearly a trillion dollars? Eventually, they stopped being mere acquaintances when the two met at a bar after a conference in Colorado.

"What about Aspen?" Sean inquired.

"What about it?"

"I don't know. There's snow, and skiing, and snowboarding if you're into that."

"Can you even ski?"

"With the help of one of those magic carpets I can!"

Cindy giggled. God, he loved that sound. "Why are you even asking this?"

"I thought it might be fun to go there this weekend. Just rent a little cottage in one of the villages and hit a couple of Black Diamonds."

"Ooo. A cottage in the hills with some strange older man? I wonder what you think we would get up to."

"Uh, drink hot chocolate? Perhaps roast some chestnuts over an open fire."

"Nice try." She smirked and nursed her beer some more.

Sean thumbed his and set it aside. "Ah, it was worth a shot."

That was when she surprised Sean by leaning her head into him and sighing. "I suppose it was." Her cheeks were flushed. The pair were only on their second beer, there was no way she was drunk.

"Hey, what're you—" Sean started.

"Just shut up and enjoy it." She nuzzled up against him some more. Sean didn't need any more of a signal. He wrapped his arm over her shoulder and brought her closer.

"Let's go back to your room," Cindy said quietly into his chest.

Sean's heart nearly flatlined. There wasn't enough liquid courage in him yet, but apparently two beers would have to do. He moved his hand down to one of hers and squeezed it to get her attention.

“Yeah?” she asked, almost sleepily.

“Are you sure?” Sean would have never needed to ask a question like that before with any of his past dalliances, but this was different. She was different. Not only was he nearly two decades her senior, but she also looked so delicate that he was scared she might simply ghost him at any time. He had often wondered what she told her friends about him, let alone her family. Maybe she didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone. He had been fine with that. Just being near her had been enough.

“I am.” She squeezed his hand back.

The buzzing continued to grow louder. Everything continued to grow more intense for that matter.

The cold. The pain. The light. The sound. The acceleration.

He had been trying to grit his teeth for some time now just to try and dull the stimuli, but he found he had no teeth to grit. This had been where the fear had begun to take hold of him.

He knew he was somewhere. He knew he was falling. He knew about everything else he was feeling; he just could not get his body to respond. It was like the entirety of his being was paralyzed.

Sean had once had a bout of sleep paralysis but the nightmare he was in now was far worse.

The light grew brighter and on came the pain.

Their legs were entwined under the sheets. He held her close and lightly stroked her hair as she snuggled up against his warmth.

“Did you know that men typically have higher body temperatures than women?” She said quite matter-of-factly.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, there’s a theory that it’s a vestigial trait from our primordial selves. Meant to get women to unconsciously desire to snuggle up to males during those cold nights.”

“Interesting. I had no idea.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure if I buy it though.”

He snickered.

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“How did you know I love skiing?”

“I snooped a little,” he admitted, embarrassed. “Found some pictures of you on your profile from when you were cute as a button and on the slopes.”

“Are you saying I’m not cute anymore?” Cindy mock pouted.

Sean rolled his eyes so hard that they nearly fell out of his head. “Jeeze, what a drama queen.”

“Am not.” She pinched his stomach.

“Fine, you’re not a drama queen. You’re a dramaturgical princess.”

“I’ll take it.”

They were silent for a few moments as she drew patterns out on his abdomen with one of her fingers.

“I already rented the cabin.”

“How impulsive.”

“Nah, just hopeful. I was thinking we could kinda make it our thing. Y’know?”

“Hm,” she purred. “Maybe we could.”

She tapped the finger she had been drawing with on his chin and looked up at him hopefully. He tilted his head down and they shared another kiss.

This year was the third time they were out for their annual excursion to Aspen. Cindy had just finished taking another picture of them together, this time while they were in the gondola. She was worried that he had ruined it, but he had chided her against deleting it. Sometimes imperfect things were better.

They had been floating above the slush below them for several minutes now. There evidently was a hold up somewhere ahead of them, and Sean was beginning to feel a little nervous. He had never been a fan of heights. Cindy meanwhile had her nose buried in her phone, busy uploading and tagging the photo no doubt. He was thankful for that; she wasn’t trying to hide her relationship with him like he had feared when they first started going out. Still, he hadn’t met her parents yet. The talk about those two had never come up, and he never prodded her about them either. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

The gondola swayed softly with the wind, and Sean took a fretful glance out of the foggy window ahead of him. It was a long way down. Shit. He tightly gripped the ski poles that dangled from his wrists. He was trying to transfer some of his anxiety into them. Did they really have to stop here? Cindy noticed the stern look on his face.

“Hey, relax. We’ll be moving again soon.”

“Yeah—you’re right. I just don’t like where we are.”

“What do you want to do tonight after we get back to the cottage?”

“Ah, I dunno.” His eyes were fixed straight ahead as he tried to ignore the uneasiness that his surroundings were making him feel. Sean still appreciated what she was doing, trying to take his mind off their present situation.

“Maybe we could watch a movie. Or just catch up on some TV.”

“If you want.”

Sean thought he heard a noise. It was like a faint grinding. He blinked and then asked Cindy, “Do you hear that?”

Then he heard a man toward the front of gondola speak up over the quiet murmuring of the rest of the group, “What the fuck is that?”

Sean’s head flicked to the side to see what was going on. The murmuring grew louder, but he couldn’t see over the heads of so many people in front of him.

He saw what the man had seen and said under his breath, “Holy shit.”

Then everything turned to chaos.

Like a train of freight cars trying to slow down all too quickly, several gondolas from up ahead had come loose of their brakes and were speeding down the cables as they bucked and broke against one another. The sound of the people and metal screaming filled his ears.

He had instinctively reached for Cindy, trying to shield her from the collision, but they were tossed apart when the gondolas impacted. Shattered glass went everywhere, as did the bodies inside. Nearly everyone was flung up against the walls of the cabin. Then they shook and were flung wide again. Bodies smashed into bodies and people wailed for help in unintelligible tongues.

Sean could feel his heart pounding a thousand times per second. His vision begun to blur as he started to pass out. In the mayhem, he could only make out flashes of Cindy’s pink jacket before someone else covered her up again or she was jostled to an entirely different part of the gondola.

Sean was vaguely aware that they had started to cartwheel. He could feel his stomach doing flips. Then Sean found Cindy’s eyes among the turmoil. Blood ran down her face. He was about to scream when the darkness took the words and world from him.

“CINDY!” Sean shouted with all of his strength, but no sound could be heard.

There was a buzzing noise that reminded Sean of a hacksaw sawing through bone. The sounds cut in and out from two different directions around him. Without any indication as to why the buzzing would stall and be replaced with a mess of clatter that fired back and forth around him.

Then a voice broke through, "-net training is done."

"About time," a second one spoke.

The darkness had finally receded all the way. All that remained was the bright white light that had been tormenting him for so long.

“CINDY!”

“Ah, would you look at that. We’ve got a live one.” The buzzing had been replaced with intelligible words.

“Indeed. Check the reading on the EEG.”

“Should I put them back to sleep?”

Sean screamed in rage as he tried to figure out what was going on, tried to move, tried to see, tried to speak and again the sound did not emanate from him inside of him. There was just nothing. It was like he hadn’t even spoken.

“No, leave them be. This one might be a fighter, and the increased brain activity will help with the mating process between the wetware and the housing.”

He tried to move his head as he shouted some more, “WHERE’S CINDY? WHERE AM I? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

There was a soft, discordant sound that vaguely could have passed for a chuckle. “'Sin-D?' I wonder... Were they a collective, perhaps? Do the records show how this one died?”

They could hear him even though he could not hear himself.

“No, this one was cooled before the First Sundown. Nothing survived that.”

“A pity. Well, maybe they’ll tell us what Sin-D was later.”

“WHY CAN’T I MOVE? RELEASE ME!”

The chuckle came a second time.

“Stop playing with the subject and get back to work.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“As you insist.”

“ANSWER ME GOD DAMN YOU!”

“Come now, it’s time to attach the Binder. I thought this was your favorite part.”

“It is.”

“Good, then do it. I’ll make the connections and load up the firmware for the housing.”

Sean continued to scream as the sound of a power drill erupted nearby, and the terrible grinding of metal on metal as something was riveted into place. He didn't stop shouting for several moments after the drill died down and something finally something clicked inside his mind.

“STOP! I SAID STO—AAAAHHHH!”

“They felt that!” Said the first voice in mocking tones.

“Excellent. We’ll test the Binder later to see if it took. It’s time to get the peripheral senses online.”

“Should we leave the vocalization for last?”

“What, what did you just do?” Sean muttered pitifully. He had suddenly been cowed by a stabbing pain which had been so acute that he nearly blacked out.

“Of course. I don’t want to hear this one actually screaming for hours while we work, do you?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s get started with the visuals and then move onto the tactile senses. Begin connecting the retinas to the housing, and I'll go load the optics.”

“Please stop, just tell me what is going on,” Sean pleaded.

There was a burst of static that sounded like wind blowing over a microphone. Was that a sigh?

“Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Kill you?”

Somewhere nearby the chuckle came again. “How deliciously adorable.”

“No, we're not going to kill you. Quite the opposite in fact. We're reviving you.”

“Reviving me?” Sean asked.

“Yes. What do you think we're doing just this moment?”

“Why would you need to revive me? From what? Why I can't move?” He didn't understand, this didn't make any sense.

“This one is thicker than most.”

“We're reviving you because you were dead.”

“I don't believe you,” he hissed.

“Your belief is not required. You'll see soon enough anyway.”

“See what!? What will I see?”

It was too late. The voices had gone back to work and had started to ignore him once more.

“Oh. Is that an optical projector?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I haven't seen one of these in years. Does that mean...”

“Yes.”

The chuckle came on once more. “Now that! That is decadent.”

“String it together and I'll boot up the program.”

“Certainly.”

The drill came to life once more, then the sound of more riveting, and what he thought was a welding torch sparking.

“Careful, you'll set fire to us yet again.”

“That was one time!”

“One time too many.”

“Do we have confirmation of a visual feed?”

“Yes, the optics have been powered up, we just need to turn on the connection now.”

“Let's offer them a choice.”

“A choice?”

“We can either let them see us first or themselves.”

“Fine. I am not sure why I indulge you.”

“Yay!” The voice got very near and very soft. “Hello, Little Subject, we have a decision for you to make. I am sure you heard me, so choose.”

“I,” Sean spoke hesitantly. His mind was still reeling, failing to grasp what was going on, and being pressed for an answer just made him more confused.

“Come now. You must choose, or we'll choose for you. Either way, you're going to see.”

He hesitated some more. “I, I...”

“You want to see yourself? If that's what you desire, so be it.”

The white light warbled and then flickered like an old tube TV being shunted from one channel to the next. At first, he did not understand what he was looking at. There was a dull gray box in the center of his vision. It was surrounded by cables on all sides, most of them plugged directly into the box. What stuck out the most to him was how wrong his sight seemed; everything was tinged in sepia.

“What's wrong with my eyes?”

“Nothing.”

“But it isn't normal.”

“That's the new normal.”

“The new normal? What am I looking at? I don't understand. A box?”

The chuckle seemed to be right on top of him now. “Look carefully, doesn't it remind you of anything?”

“I don’t understand!” he pleaded and was forced to look again; the box wasn't a box. It was smooth and rounded along the edges. Roughly obloid. There was a glow from various points of light along the top and several holes that had been drilled into it to hold a curved panel in place. The overall shape seemed familiar, and then he realized what they were showing him. "No, it can't be."

“Yes, it can be!" The chuckling turned into frantic laughter. "That's your brain inside of its new home.”

"Stop that immediately," said the other voice in an aggravated tone.

"Fine."

“I get it now,” Sean said with some mirth. “This is just a dream. I must have hit my head after the accident. Does that mean I'm in a coma? Where's Cindy?”

“Again, with this ‘Sin-D.’ They're trying to rationalize now. I wondered when that might start.”

“I can assure you; this is no dream. You're really here. We've really revived you, and that's really your brain inside of that housing unit.”

“Prove it.” Sean dared.

“If you insist.”

A hand (no, an instrument?) slipped into view along the bottom. Its “fingers” were long and needle-sharp. One of them slipped into a port along the top of the box, and he felt a presence. It reminded him of someone standing a little too close behind him. Then his vision shifted, blurred. “See? With just a little bit of tuning, we can make your mind do what we want. Influence your senses.” His sight returned to its new, sepia-toned normality.

Sean suddenly gasped in pain as the probe at the edge of the instrument prodded deep inside of the port. “Inflict pain.”

Then the pain vanished, and he wanted to shudder as he felt a wave of pleasure, which reminded him of when he had been given some morphine after he’d had his appendix removed. “Give you pleasure.”

“Whatever we wish, we can do so long as we have access to your braincase.”

The hand retracted and the presence went away.

“I still don't believe you,” he said indignantly. “The mind is great at playing tricks.”

There was the sound of air blowing over a microphone once more.

“Shall we reveal ourselves?”

“I suppose so.”

His vision twisted around like someone had turned his head in their hands, blurring as it did so before coming to a sudden stop.

It was then that Sean noticed how shallow his depth of field was. He could barely make out what was directly in front of him, let alone the things in the distance. Sean was certain he was in a room though, a well-lit one that was white. He was also aware of the pair of bodies that stood before him.

“Knock it off," Sean said in a most disgusted tone.

The cold chuckling began again. "I always enjoy it when they're confused." At last, he understood that this sound was coming from his left. The being standing there was the source of the noise. They were a dark color, which he could only perceive as potentially a gunmetal gray through the sepia haze. They stood at an indeterminable height, but they were exceptionally wide. Their head was teardrop-shaped, with three different sized red lenses built into the face. Below that was a grate, which conceived was some sort of mouth. It waved its needle-tipped appendage down at Sean before it answered, "We're human, just like you."

"Of course you are, but those are pretty good costumes. I bet they cost quite a bit of money."

"Costume?"

"A disguise." The other one spoke up at last. Its mouth moved as the words were formed, but the metallic tinge to its speech undercut that this was just an affectation. It could speak just as well with its mouth closed. This one was a dark flesh tone, but from what Sean could make out of its upper body they were crisscrossed with lacerations that glowed. It raised a hand and reached out toward Sean's vision. Instead of five fingers, there were a dozen little spindly ones that resembled the legs of a spider that ended in nubs. Sean shuddered, or at least he would have if he could. He could hear a rapid tapping sound as the little spindly fingers began to thump up against something firm just above his head. Strange, he couldn't feel that. Once again his sight warped and warbled before settling. "I've enabled the facial expressive functionalities."

He tried talking again thinking that they had fixed his mouth, but no sound came. "I still can't speak." Sean paused and then tried again, nothing. "How are you able to hear me anyway?" he asked quizzically.

"We'll get to fixing your speech, but to answer your question, there's a monitor over your housing unit that's automatically translating your vocalizations into text for us," the one to his right said. "Keep talking, by the way, it'll make the neural net's job of training for translation easier." Unlike the one to his left, this one on the right gave Sean the impression that they styled themselves as something of a surgeon. Impassive, methodical, single-minded. All the hallmarks of a surgeon.

The room was quiet for a moment, aside from the sterile hum of electronics. "Say I believe you. Where am I then?"

"You're in the heart of Metro. More specifically you're at Revivification Center 6 under lease by OMNICORP," Right told him.

"OMNICORP." He considered the word slowly. "I used to work for them. A few years ago."

"Sure you did," tittered the Left.

“What happened to Everlast then?”

“No idea what an ‘Everlast’ is,” Left replied.

"I'm going to start winding up the shell. You mount the face and prepare the housing for transfer," instructed the Right.

"Alrighty," Left said in a vacillating sing-song voice.

The Right moved outside of his field of vision and the Left stepped up to him. Its needle-like fingers grabbed onto something, and Sean's vision began to lower. Then there was a shake, a hiss, and a violent clack. He sighed, as he was now at waist level with Left. Their body was like a twisted band of noodles, just coils wrapped one over the other in a tight pack as if they were a squid. "That certainly is impressive looking."

One of the tendrils that made up his body rose up from the ground and tapped lightly at Sean. "You have no idea." Left ran the tendril down the side of Sean's vision. It was so odd that he couldn't feel any of this. Was this a symptom of being in a coma? Was this just an elaborate trick of some kind and he had been administered some sort of paralyzing agent? "I don't normally ask this, but what is your name Little Subject?"

"Sean."

"Shaw-n." Left tested out the word. "You holdovers have such odd names."

"What's yours?" Sean tested. Maybe he could ingratiate himself with these nightmare tormentors enough that they wouldn't kill him.

Two of the tendrils lifted up from the ground and made the universal sign for a shrug. "Does it matter? You may call me what you wish." The tendril on the right jabbed to the side outside of Sean's field of view. “They certainly do.”

"Stop lazing about and get to work," Right spoke up from somewhere unseen.

"Aye-aye, Captain." Left chuckled and then lowered a hand into Sean's vision from the top. Its fingers sunk down into a panel in front of Sean, and there was a click and a whir. "Alright Shaw-n, I am going to be mounting the software for your housing unit. Prepare yourself, it's going to get a little bumpy."

Two arms lowered from the ceiling and peeled open revealing fork-like tongs. They were each fitted with a horribly long needle that were coming straight for him. Sean began to panic, trying with all his might to will his body into movement. "Wait! Stop! PLEASE STOP!" he gibbered as the arms grew closer and homed onto him with mechanical precision. "What're you doing!?"

"I just told you, I'm mounting your housing unit. I've got to inject your wetware with some meaty progs first so it'll take." There was that sound that wasn't quite a sigh.

Sean's world shook again, and then there was pain. "Stop!" He protested a final time as the pain knocked him into near silence as if the wind had been kicked straight out of his lungs. Then without mercy or warning, he began to feel himself being filled with cold. "You're killing me!" Sean rasped.

"Killing you would be counterproductive," piped in Right.

The cold and stabbing continued for an unbearable length of time and then without warning, they stopped. In the absence of the stabbing and the cold, Sean's mind begun to throb in pain. "Christ... Christ," Sean whined, practically sobbing—if he could sob. The arms pulled away from his head and retracted up into the ceiling.

Left twisted its hand inside of the panel, and the panel began to turn with the movement. To either side of Sean, there were several hisses that went off in rapid-fire.

"Tethers are terminated. Hoist their housing unit."

Left twisted their wrist inhumanly on itself once more, rotating another 180 degrees. Mechanical whirring sounded behind him and he felt himself rise. He couldn't see what was happening or feel it for that matter, but Sean was reasonably certain that something had grabbed onto him again. And now he was being lifted into the air. Left's head came into view and they stopped there practically at eye level.

"Hello there, Shaw-n." Left's trio of lenses rotated on themselves, refocusing and narrowing their view on him. This had to be a nightmare, no costume was that good.

"You're not real," Sean stammered.

"Sorry, but if you're speaking, I can't hear you. The monitor’s been disconnected." The back of Left's horrible hand stroked the front of Sean's vision in a sickening gesture that could have been meant to be tender. "Don't fret though, we're nearly done." Sean tried to shudder, to pull away, but still, his body refused to react to his commands.

"The shell is ready and powered up. As best as it is going to be anyway," Right said from behind him. "We're ready to commence the joining."

Two of Left's tendrils clapped together loudly. "Finally!" There was too much exuberance in their voice for Sean's liking.

Left began to pull away from Sean, but they weren't moving—he was. Left waved at him with one hand and many of its smaller, tentacle-like arms. He desperately tried to turn his head about, to look around him, but his vision was fixed squarely ahead. He could not look away to try and find the doom that he could almost feel was encroaching on him from behind.

Servos whined and then his field of view narrowed even further as darkness approached on either side of his vision. He stopped abruptly, and then nothing happened. Sean began to panic once more as Right stepped back in front of him. Now he was holding some sort of transparent tablet in his spindly hands. One finger out of a dozen hovered over a portion of the tablet that Sean could see but was unable to tell the color of thanks to the damnable sepia hue that now plagued him.

"This will hurt." That was all the warning he got as Right pressed down on the tablet and Sean heard a sound like a drill directly beneath him.

"Sean."

He heard his name being called. It was a voice that was familiar to him, it was sweet, and he'd recognize it anywhere.

"Wake up."

Sean groaned as he fought his eyelids in a battle of wills. Eventually, he won and they began to flicker open. Standing over him was Cindy. She was still wearing her winter apparel, albeit slightly torn. Above her was the sky, gray and full of clouds, and the sun was directly overhead. He exhaled and the air fogged with his warm breath in front of his mouth. "Cindy?"

"Who else would it be, dummy?" She smiled.

"What happened?" he croaked in reply as he tried to shift his weight beneath him, but the pillowy snow sank with his movements. "Snow..."

"Yeah, we were in the gondola. Don't you remember?" Her face turned to concern, and she rubbed her nose with her sleeve. "God, it's cold out here."

Sean's hands gripped at the slush, and he heard it crunch in his fingers. The cold wetness began to eek through his gloves, and even through his insulated pants and jacket. "I remember we were falling."

"Yeah, that was pretty scary." She laughed down at him. “Now get up. We’ve got to make it back to civilization before it gets dark.” Cindy gestured beyond his vision. He tilted his head up and saw that she was pointing to the blur in the distance that had been where the gondola had started sending them up the mountain.

Sean tried to push himself up again, and this time found purchase in the flattened snow. “Where are all the other people?” he murmured as he pulled his knees up to his chest.

“What other people? It was just us in there.”

He listened to her and knitted his brow. That wasn’t right. “No, there were at least a dozen of us. I saw it. It was crowded.”

“Wow, you must have bumped your head pretty good on the way down.” Cindy snickered and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come now. Get up and we’ll be alright.”

Sean frowned. This didn’t seem right. He thought for a moment about the weird, terrifying dream he had just experienced and then began to stand.

“Something wrong?” Cindy asked him. He looked up from the snow.

“No, I just had a strange dream is all.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it later.” She began to walk away as he finished standing.

“I suppose I will.” Sean surveyed the land. The mountains looked different. There was no snow on them, and the light seemed too dim despite the sun overhead. Even with the clouds, it should have been brighter.

“Hurry up slowpoke!” Cindy shouted back to him. That was odd, when had she gotten so far away?

Sean stopped again as a punishing wind blew against him. His hands rose in self-defense, trying to shield him from the snow-filled onslaught. “What the hell?” he murmured and tried to press on, only to be pushed back into place by the wind a second time. The chill had caused his teeth to begin to chatter, he set his jaw and attempted to step forward for a third time.

This time the wind came with such fury that he fell. He didn’t stop falling.

His world began to somersault, each flip nearly causing him to puke. Dizziness came over him almost immediately and he felt himself screaming. The snow-blanketed ground continued to spin in place over him again and again. He felt as if he was folding inward on himself.

Then with a sudden sense of whiplash, he began to spin on his side. Through burning, tear-filled eyes, he noticed his position had changed. Now he was falling from the sky, flipping from one side to another in a completely uncontrolled roll. Incapable of making a noise except for the sound of his heart beating like a jackhammer in his head.

Perspective shifted again, and now he was back inside of the gondola. Cindy and he locked eyes as they were splayed helplessly on opposite sides of the gondola’s interior. The din of dying people and the whining of metal filled his ears, dampening even the sound of his heart. He flexed his hand and reached out. Desperate to grasp the girl who was just feet away but may as well have been a million miles apart from him.

There was a crunch, and Sean found himself in the middle of the wreck. The cabin crushed in on all sides. None of the bodies around him stirred. He flailed, and only felt pain before blood rushed up from his mouth and through his nostrils as he hacked up a sound closer to a squelch than a cough. Sean lifted his hands and looked down at himself.

A piece of metal at least as thick as his thigh jutted out from his abdomen, covered in his blood and viscera. There was too much of himself outside. There was too much of himself everywhere. “This is it,” he thought. Blood flooded his lungs, and all he could do was gurgle as life left him.

“They’re baaaaaack.” The washed-out singsong of Left’s voice churred through the air as his vision flicked from black to static, and then muddy sepia. His vision was canted off its axis to the right.

Sean erupted with emotions as he began to cry. He vaguely realized that Left was knelt upon the floor, its many tendrils shaking with work as they scrubbed and polished something directly below him. No tears came though, only the sound of keening as he wailed.

“I was dead!” his voice warbled like a radio set in between two stations. “Oh, God. I was dead.”

“What part of ‘revivification’ did you not understand?” Left lifted its head up and looked directly into Sean’s eyes, their tendrils still scrubbing and polishing away.

Sean tried to move, but still, his body refused to obey.

“I was dead,” he repeated to himself. “I was falling and then I died.”

Left’s many arms pulled away from their work down below. “Sounds rough.”

“I don’t understand,” Sean squeaked as his voice vacillated between a low baritone and screeching soprano. “Is this… Is this hell? Am I in hell?”

“You’re not the first one to ask me that, but no one’s ever explained to me what exactly Hell is.” Left’s tendrils started to work again.

Without any forewarning, there was a loud slam and the sound of footsteps as Right’s feet stepped into the top of Sean’s vision. A glimmering hand grabbed the front of his head and tilted it up. Right frowned and began to look over Sean with an appraising eye. “You’ve done a good job of cleaning the shell up.”

“What happened to me?” Sean whispered through static hiss.

“Your brain seized as soon as the contacts met for the joining. You’re lucky. Most don’t get to skip out on their shell’s synthetic nerves meshing with their organic ones for the first time.” Right continued to look him up and down.

“How long was I out?”

“About forty units,” said Left from below, out of sight but still working diligently by the sound of that grinding.

“You might call them minutes,” Right told him. “How easy is it for you to vocalize?”

He gasped. He hadn’t even realized he had been speaking. “It’s, it’s fine.” Then he considered how he sounded. “What’s wrong with my voice?” Right only half paid attention as he snapped his many fingers on either side of Sean’s skull and then around the perimeter of his head, testing Sean’s hearing.

“The vocoder is trying to find a stable signal,” Right told him, and then stepped back, examining the tablet they had in their hand.

“Why can’t I move still?” A tendril shot up from below and grabbed onto his face, tilting his head down so that Left could look straight into him with their burning optics.

“Because silly, it’s too dangerous for that.” They wagged a finger at him. “There’s no telling what mischief you might get up to without the Binder activated.”

Sean’s head was flicked up as Left pushed his head away, and he was now looking at the bright, white ceiling. “Please… just tell me what’s going on.”

“We have always found the different ways holdovers animate themselves to be intriguing.” His view changed yet again as Right lowered Sean’s gaze back down to his.

“It’s a lot like what the Fleshies do!” Left cried, and Right nodded in agreement. “Which I suppose makes sense because you were a fleshy.”

Right’s eyes bore straight into Sean’s. They had taken on a terrible glow. “The odd thing is that your bodies never seem to acclimate to their new forms.” He tried to shake his head out of Right’s hand. “You still try to breathe. You still think you need to piss. To shit. To eat. And all of the other disgusting things that organic bodies do.”

“What do you mean I’m not breathing?” Sean asked incredulously.

“You have no lungs. You can no more breathe than either of us.”

Sean then became all too aware that he had in fact not been breathing. He tried to gulp in air, but none came. “I can’t breathe!” his voice strained as he continued to try and force his lungs to inhale and exhale.

This time it was Right’s turn to sigh, it was one out of pure frustration.

“Please,” Sean gasped. “Stop this, I just want to wake up.”

“As I said before, you are awake,” Right told him in a chilling monotone.

“You’re going to scare them,” whined Left, as if they couldn’t conceive that Sean was already terrified.

Right removed their hand and shrugged. “Fine, but I’ll leave it to you to explain. I have no love for the decompression phase.”

“If I do that, can I be the one to activate the Binder then?” Left asked eagerly, the sound of polishing coming to a brief halt.

Right shrugged again. “If you wish. I’ll finish loading up the rest of the progs.” They began to tap on the tablet once more and stepped away from the pair.

“Yes!” Left exclaimed and then in a flash drew themselves up to their full height. They were terribly tall now, with a height advantage of several feet over Sean.

Sean continued to gasp in a futile attempt to breathe. “How?” It was all he could mutter in an electronically tinged croak.

“How what? How are you alive? I think that’s self-explanatory. We were told to bring you back, so we did.”

“But how. How did you do that?”

“Simple. You were vitrified, so we un-vitrified you.”

Vitrified. Sean hadn’t heard that word for several years. He recalled Dr. Miller in the basement of Everlast explaining it to him. “No... I was dead.”

“And now you’re not. Isn’t that great?” Left chuckled at Sean as they lifted two tendrils and place them on either of his shoulders. At least that’s what he thought they did because he still couldn’t feel anything. “I am not sure how you ended up inside of that tank we hauled your head out of, but everyone I’ve asked says they paid to have theirs put in one.”

Left tilted their head and continued, “I’ve always felt that was so odd. Cutting off your own head just to sit in a vat of nitrogen.”

“You’re telling me that they got to me in time?” Sean whispered in disbelief.

“I suppose so.” Left pulled up a third tentacle and tapped him in the center of his vision. “Whatever that means.”

“All I know is that you were in there, and you were selected to be reanimated.” Left’s tendril shook his head from side to side rapidly and then they stopped. “Aren’t you lucky?”

Sean said nothing and was quiet for a time. “Where am I?”

“Yet another question you’ve already asked. Can’t you be a bit more original? You’re in Metro, Revivification Center 6, leased by—”

“Leased by OMNITECH,” Sean repeated what he’d been told earlier. “But where is that? Is that in the United States? Is that in Colorado? Where?” His shifting voice became more demanding as the questions continued to flow out of him.

“I don’t know about any of those places, I just know Metro. Perhaps that was what you called this place back during, well, back during whenever you were first alive.”

“2030,” Sean told Left. “It was 2030 when I died, I am sure of it. How long has it been since then?”

“Again, I don’t know. We don’t use that dating scheme,” Left replied to him in soft tones. “To me, it’s the fourth year of GAMMACORE and ESPER.”

“GAMMACORE and ESPER?”

“That’s right.” Left exaggerated the pronunciation of the last word, holding onto it for several seconds. “They’re currently worth the most out of all the corpos in Metro, meaning they’re in charge. ESPER is the junior partner of course, but that could change in the next quarter if GAMMACORE posts some significant losses. They’re about due for it.”

Sean was baffled. “Fine. I suppose if this is real then you cloned me a new body like Dr. Miller said, but why all of the theater? What was that about organics and synthetics?”

Left burst out laughing. It was hard to tell that it was laughter over the bursts of static that came with the sound, but Sean knew it for what it was. It was several moments before they calmed themselves enough to speak.

“Clone you? My dear, did you really think OMNICORP would spend money like this just to give you a shell that’d break down in a few years?” Left shook their head. “No, no, no. You’re already on the hook for enough credits as it is. Be glad they didn’t do anything so extravagant.”

“Then what exactly did you do?” Sean placed stress on the word ‘did’.

“Nothing out of the ordinary if that’s what you’re wondering.” Left tapped a tendril against their own face for once. “We just turned your glassy little brain back into flesh, put it inside of a housing unit, and then attached that to a retired shell.” They twisted about on their tendrils so as to stand in profile, “You’d be surprised how much all of that costs though. Don’t worry, you’re going to get the bill before we’re done here.”

Sean paused, terrified of the question he was forced to ask, "What do I look like then?”

“We usually hold off on doing the display until after we’ve turned on the Binder.” Left walked around Sean and shuffled behind him on their many tendril appendages. “Speaking of which. Can I do that now?”

“Yes,” Right responded from somewhere in the room. “I’ve finished prepping the last of the packages.”

Sean suddenly had his head thrust forward. “Hey, wait!”

“This is going to be cold,” Left declared and then he felt as if he were being probed. It wasn’t painful like the stabbing pain had been, but Left wasn’t lying when they said it was cold. To him, it was as if someone was pouring a slushie directly into his brain.

“Ah!”

“Just bear with it, you’re nearly there.”

Windows began to flash in his vision, popping up and closing with such rapidity that if it wasn’t for the fact that Sean couldn’t blink he would have missed them. They continued to manifest and fade away in increasing numbers until most of what he could see was just windows. Along the bottom of his sight was a bar that had begun to fill.

“Holy shit, this is really real.”

“That’s what we’ve been telling you.”

As the bar approached completion, the windows slowed down considerably. He could read what they were saying now. Or at least he could if they were in an actual language and not barcodes. Strangely, as they continued to blink on and off at their slow pace, the barcodes began to form into something very nearly intelligible to him.

The bar finished filling, and the probing sensation went away. However, now he could feel a presence just at the back of his mind. It was like being stared at from across the room. Sean really didn’t like it.

“Why do I feel like something… Something is inside me.”

“Something in your head? That’s because something is in there.” Left pulled Sean’s head back all the way so that he could look up at them. “It’s the Binder.”

“You keep saying that, but you haven’t told me what a Binder is.”

“It’s an incredibly low-level process, may as well be actual organics for how low it is.” Left’s three eyes ‘blinked’ as the light flickered inside of them flickered on and off. “It exists to keep you from doing anything naughty and helps incentivize the things you should be doing.”

Sean would have raised an eyebrow if he could, “Such as?”

“Self-harm. Violence. Destruction of property. That sort of thing.” Left stroked the side of Sean’s face again. He really hated them doing that. Even if he couldn’t feel it. “On the other hand, the Binder makes sure that you want to keep your battery pack charged, gives you an urge to want to earn money.” Left chuckled before pulling their tendril away. “All that, and much, much more. I’m sure you’ll come to find out what you can and can’t do as you go about your days.”

“How is that even possible?”

“The Binder is tapped directly into your CNS. It takes real-time EEGs which in turn allows it to more or less read your mind.”

Sean was horrified. “Get it out.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that. That shell of yours is OMNITECH property, and until you pay it off, that Binder is going to stay there.”

Left pulled up a host of its arms. “Besides, it isn’t so bad. I have one. You’ll come to find that the Binder has your best interests in mind.” Left started up an attempt to indoctrinate Sean. “It feels good to work. It feels good to recharge my battery. It feels GREAT each time I pay off a little more of my debt.”

“I didn’t, I didn’t want this.”

“Oh yes you did,” Left informed Sean, “I know all about how people used to keep records on paper. It’s basically the only thing that survived the First Sundown. OMNITECH has them to prove that you signed up for all of this.”

Left pushed Sean’s head from behind, this time angling it straight ahead. He felt a surge of anger well up inside of him, “I’m telling you; I didn’t want this!” The voicebox screeched some more as it tried to manifest the volume at which he was yelling.

“Then why did you pay to have your head vitrified? Did you really think you could live forever on someone else’s dime?” Left chuckled yet again. “No, no. You racked up quite a debt since OMNITECH started counting. That Binder in your head is going to be there well after my own is gone.”

“They can’t do this! I’ll sue them!” He had turned frantic as he considered his options, and coming from a very litigious culture, the threat of a lawsuit was still something Sean considered very real. That was until Left began to laugh uproariously.

“You can’t sue anyone, silly. Even if you could, it takes money to do that, and you’re going to be so far in the red that it’ll be hundreds of years before you could even think about doing something so foolish.”

“Don’t patronize me.” Sean stewed in anger. Not even being able to look anyone in the eyes was maddening enough. To have his defiance thrown back into his face just made everything worse.

“I’m not, I am just explaining the reality of your situation to you.”

He seethed, “I hate you.”

“Now, now. Don’t go all sour on me just because you made a decision you regret.” Left wrapped its tendrils around Sean’s body. He couldn’t feel them still, but he could see the edges of them along his periphery. He felt as if he was in the grasp of a boa constrictor that was preparing to strangle its prey. “Besides, if you hate me now...” Left whispered. “You’re really going to hate me when I show you what you look like.”

Sean felt real fear yet again. It was true. He still had no idea what they had done to him, even if they had explained the process.

“I think it’s time we activated the viewscreen. Don’t you think so?”

“Fine.” It was Right. They hadn’t said anything in so long that Sean had nearly forgotten they were there.

He heard a beep and then a massive, black panel began to lower itself down from the ceiling in front of Sean.

He was waiting to feel his heart thud away as the anxiety grew, but there was nothing. Why would there be? He didn’t have one anymore.

“Let’s take a look.”

There was a second beep and Sean’s mind seized.

“What do you think?”

Cindy held up a photo album that obscured the bottom half of her face and looked at him with her great big doe eyes. There was a new photo inside of it. It was a picture of the two of them at a beach in the Cayman. That hadn’t been a cheap holiday, but he considered it well worth the price. They had made some good memories there.

She was sitting on their bed, the comforter wrapped around her legs. She had on a very loose-fitting shirt that only made her look even more adorable than she already was. “Well?”

“I think it fits perfectly. You’re organizing by our vacations, right?”

“I am indeedy.” She flipped the photo album around and laid it in her lap. “Still not sure what else to add though.”

“What about that picture of you playing with the dolphins?”

She was deep in thought as she considered the pages. “Maaaybe.”

“You were having fun until that one blew water on you.” He grinned thinking about how miffed she had been at what could have been considered a very rude act. That was, of course, assuming dolphins knew how to be rude.

Cindy frowned. “It wasn’t so funny when you thought you were going to die when we were rock climbing.”

“Hey!”

She giggled and then closed the album, and when she did, he felt she was closing the album on him.

“Little Shaw-n. Come back to us.”

When his eyes rebooted back into their sepia tones, he could see that Left still had him tightly coiled in their tendrils, but there was more than he was willing to deal with on that screen. Even with significant portions of the shell obscured. If anything, the tendrils did him no favors as they accentuated various assets.

“Good God.” The horrible statement caught in his nonexistent throat.

The thing that greeted him on the screen was horrifying and could not possibly be real. The shell had the appearance of being female, which was bad enough, but all the details and the shapes nearly caused him to seize up again. There was no face to speak of aside from a convex mask. The shell was full-figured, but not so grossly overexaggerated as to cross into parody. Running up the legs and the arms were honeycombs that showed off how the interior of the limbs were mostly hollow. On the chest was an ample pair of breasts without any definable features, just a perky set of teardrops and nothing else.

The shell seemed to be mostly be made of hard, curving surfaces aside from the breasts and abdomen. Around the head was a facsimile of hair, the strands pulled back behind the head and each made of thick cord. He couldn’t tell the color due to these damnable, unseen eyes, but there was a distinct difference in tone where the softness ended, and firmness started. If he had to guess, the chest and abdomen were gray, but the limbs and head were blue or black.

“It’s not so bad. I spent the entire time you were out the first time getting you cleaned and polished.” Left pulled the shell closer to themselves. Sean grimaced. “You should thank me. Before I did that, this shell was in real bad shape.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he whispered some more; his voice was a quiet stir of static bursts in the air. Then the face lit up and a bright symbol filled it, one he was well acquainted with from his time on the Net:

;(

“What the fuck is that!”

The symbol shifted.

):<

“It’s your face. It can’t express full emotions. Too complicated for a shell so old. So instead it projects an image of what you’re feeling as you’re feeling it.”

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Sean whined.

“I am not, but I would relax if I were you. Things could be worse.” Left chuckled as they unwrapped the shell that he fervently denied was his. “Much worse. I’ve had to put holdovers just like you in walking protein pack dispensers before.”

They rounded on him from the front, blocking his view of the screen. “Do you know how long a person can hold on before the pre-canned advertisements they’re forced to blurt out every few minutes begins to take a toll on their psyche?”

Sean didn’t want to know the answer to that.

“Not very long,” Left teased before grasping Sean by the hands of the shell. “There are some upsides too.”

“Bullshit. Change me back. Now.”

Left ignored him and continued without stopping. “Gynoid shells like this can take a real beating, they’re made to last, have surprising strength, and a couple of very high bandwidth data ports.” Left slithered an arm around the back of the shell’s head, teasing it forward. “Although mobility and range of motion will leave something to be desired.”

Left took their more normal hands and took those of the shell in their own before they turned the palms of the shell up. “Your sense of touch will also be severely limited when not doing certain things.” That was when Sean noticed the bumping, stipple pattern on the palms and fingers.

“What the hell are those,” Sean said in a weak, horrified tone.

Left made one of their trademark chuckles. “I am sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Please, I beg you to put me back.”

“No can do, Little Shaw-n. Once you’re in, you’re in. Until the Binder releases you, that is.”

“I demand that you put me back!” He screamed each word with force until the vacillating tones finally broke and there was a smooth, dulcet that just so happened to have their voice raised.

“My-my voice.”

“We probably should have mentioned that. This shell is equipped with a vox that’s meant to sound only one way, and your voice has just come into its own.”

He could do nothing but stare down at the shell’s hands and begin to cry again. The sound of the unknown voice made him keen all the harder. “This is not my life!”

“It is now,” Right said as they joined Left. “Whether you like it or not, until that debt is paid, this is how it’s going to be.”

“I’m going to kill myself.”

“No, you’re not. You can’t.” Right tapped on his forehead. “The Binder will know, and I promise you that it’ll stop you from making any rash decisions.”

Sean began to sob even harder than before; no tears graced his now nonexistent eyes.

“Stop it,” Right said viciously. “It’s always the same with you people. We revive you and nothing is ever good enough.” Right smacked the side of the shell’s head, forcing it to shift to the side. “You made your decision, accept it. If you didn’t want this you shouldn’t have come here.” He growled; it was the sound of metal scraping against metal. “You should have died with everyone else when it was your time. This world has moved well on without you.”

Sean was too stunned to say anything.

There was a beep, and he felt the shell relax. The joints shook and the knees buckled from under themselves.

“There. You wanted your freedom so badly; I’ve given it to you.” Right planted a foot on the shell’s chest and pushed it backwards with enough force to topple it over. “You have ten of your minutes to get out here, and if you’re not I will summon OMNITECH Enforcers.” Right stormed off, but Sean couldn’t see it; he just heard it as the unseen door slammed.

Left stood like a statue. “Well, I guess the show’s over.” They reached out with their tendrils and heaved the heavy shell back up into a kneeling position. “I don’t have much advice for you but trust me when I say you’ll want to start earning money as soon as you can. Your Binder will make life rather unpleasant if you don’t.”

They tapped a tendril to their chin, thinking. “You should be able to summon a rudimentary overlay that’ll give you limited access to the Net.” Left paused and then started again, “I would suggest you take advantage of that. At the very least it’ll help you find charging stations, among other things.”

Sean couldn’t move. He was still trying to process what had happened to him in what felt like an instant.

“Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but we have more Subjects to process today, and my workmate has already given you an ultimatum.”

With shaky arms, Sean leaned the shell forward. There was a whine of servos as he willed it to move. The legs dragged beneath its frame, and then it pushed off the ground. He vaguely noticed that only the front pads of the feet felt as if they were touching the ground. As he made the shell take a step forward, the gait felt entirely unnatural and the shell nearly fell over again as it tried to keep its balance.

“Ah, it may take some time to adjust to the way the shell moves for you,” Left cautioned. “Just don’t think about it and you’ll be fine.”

Sean willed it to move forward again, and the shell shook some more but at least it didn’t fall over.

Instinctively he lifted the arms to reach out and steady the shell on something, anything. Left caught it and held the form straight.

“I can’t do this,” came the unnaturally feminine voice that had taken over Sean’s.

“You can, and you will,” Left urged. “I would be lying if I said I didn’t take pleasure in applying Binders to people, but you’ll see. It isn’t so bad. I can’t even remember if it’s my Binder making me do it, or if I just wanted to do it in the first place.” Left shrugged. “I figure it doesn’t matter anymore.”

The tendrils parted and Left literally pushed the shell straight through their tentacle form, and toward a blank wall. It took a second, but then an orange highlight outlined a rectangular shape, identifying this as a door. Sean used the shell's hands to tentatively reach out, and with a loud sliding sound, the door opened.

What was on the other side Sean had not even the slightest bit of fortitude remaining to prepare himself for.

Sheathed in Silicon - Chapter 2

Author:

JacquesTF

Caution:

CAUTION: Not Work-Safe

Audience Rating:

Mature Subjects (pg15)

Publication:

7,500 < Novelette < 17,500 words

Genre:

Science Fiction

Character Age:

Mature / Thirty+

TG Themes:

Physically Forced

Other Keywords:

Permission:

Posted by author(s)

Sheathed in Silicon

Chapter Two

[Previous] - [Next]

The sky was nickel green even through the sepia, and the atmosphere overhead above seemed to boil. There was no sun to speak of, only the glow of LED's from a million different monoliths that made up the skyline. They dominated everything and were singularly brutal. Little care was given to aesthetics; this was entirely unlike the cities he remembered.

Sean could not fully grasp the astonishingly tall height from which he gazed upon Metro. From where he could see, there was no bottom to the world. Even with him not being anywhere near the ledge of the causeway he stood upon, he felt the full gravity of the endless fall that awaited anyone unfortunate enough to spill over the ridge. The legs of the shell refused to obey his will. They crumpled at the waist. The machine's knees hit the steely floor with a loud thud, and only by some autonomic response did the use of its now extended arms keep the entire shell from falling flat on its face.

“I'm so high up,” he thought, feeling an awful sense of vertigo that went along with being perched from such a height. “Where--”

Something struck the body, and it keeled involuntarily over on its side. With Sean's vision turned about, his eyes were greeted by a giant made of steel towering over him. How had this massive thing crept upon him? The how became entirely unimportant as he appraised the golem. Its fists were the size of catcher's mitts, its feet were large enough to crush a man's chest, the entire thing lacked musculature, but it was square and bulky to a degree that was only capable of exuding raw, industrialized power. On its chest was a glowing banner that read "OMNITECH ENFORCOM," the words scrolled along horizontally one letter at a time.

“Extract yourself fifty feet away from these premises.” Each word was a crushing baritone that reminded Sean of a muscle car's engine firing on all cylinders.

Sean pushed the shell up from the ground but was only capable of lifting the upper-body while the legs and hips continued to rest on their side paralyzed. He felt like a deer caught in the headlights.

“You will comply.” The Enforcer's right arm began to unfold with a hiss, shifting about like a Rubik's cube being shuffled.

"Wait." He pleaded and began to push the shell up from the ground a second time, begging the legs to move. "I can't even control this thing!" Sean could barely make the useless chassis that he was now slaved to walk with his full concentration, let alone try to make it run in the face of crippling, imminent danger.

“10, 9, 8...” The arm continued to manifest into something altogether different. A large arrow appeared in his vision, pointing to the left as if it were a GPS instructing him to turn. Sean whipped the head that housed his mind around, and he noticed a waypoint that identified itself as exactly 50 feet away from where he currently was. “COMPLY.” The Giant repeated.

In a desperate scramble, Sean started to drag the shell against the floor, causing an uncomfortable sound to cry out as the various materials that made up its form ground out against the steel. He was putting that polished finish from Left through some real hell in just the five minutes he had been out in the real world.

A spotlight flicked on and surrounded Sean, tracking the movements he forced the shell to make as it crawled away. “5, 4, 3...”

"Please!" He screamed back at the Enforcer. The unfamiliar voice of the shell rose several octaves above what he had previously been capable of. The waypoint was tantalizingly close, so close that it practically filled most of his vision. Sean reached out with one of the shell's hands and drove it straight into the bronze point of light. As he did, it burst into a thousand digitized cubes.

"Your compliance has been noted," The Giant stated mechanically, and the light around him cut out, "OMNITECH thanks you. Remain productive." He could hear the OMNITECH Enforcer begin to stomp away. Each step was a piston driving itself into the floor.

Sean lowered the body's head until it brushed against the ground, getting detritus on the mask. He began to sob pitifully again. All he wanted was to curl up into a ball and cry. It was then that he noticed the arm of the shell was extended precariously over the side of the causeway. The vox emitted a feminine gasp. He pushed away from the edge with all of the haste that he had mustered when trying to escape from the Giant's gaze.

He leaned back on the shell's posterior and kept the thing upright with both arms flung behind its back, legs splayed out in front. Now given a moment, he could really focus on his new surroundings. Between the narrow gaps of the buildings were lines of movement that reminded him of ants following their invisible trails. There were many of them, and each was carefully positioned in the air. Sean wondered what these were until a tremendous brick of a vehicle flew by the causeway at blinding speed and utter silence. He watched the brick shuttle away as it shunted down one of the "alleys" between the skyscrapers.

“Cars...” He gawped. “They have fucking flying cars.”

Sean, at last, pushed the shell back onto its unsteady feet and wiped the debris from the shell's faceplate with one stippled palm. He still couldn't fathom why the palms of the shell looked like that, but at least he could FEEL with them, sort of anyway. The sense of touch was nowhere near sensitive as his hands, his real hands had been. The way the shell's own provided feedback reminded him of trying to touch things while wearing thick gloves.

Sean took stock of his situation as he overlooked the unending metropolis. He could feel basically nothing. He could smell nothing. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't eat. Couldn't drink. He didn't even know if he could sleep. Sean balled up the hands of the shell. At least he could feel that.

"Fuck," the shell's soft voice emitted.

Then something occurred to him, something that was most perplexing. Sean had done well enough to stay away from tall buildings in his life, but even he knew that as you went up higher, the winds got stronger. Much stronger. Strong enough to literally make skyscrapers sway, and yet here there was no evidence of wind blowing. He reached out with one of the shell's hands to confirm his theory. Nope, nothing. He cast the shell's head upwards and gazed at the roiling, angry sky overhead.

What exactly had happened to this world? Sean wondered. This wasn't the Earth he knew, not even close.

He lowered the shell’s head back down and studied the innumerable pillars. While he noticed that they all shared the same shape and were dotted with light, a few of their number glowed radiantly from their corners. They seemed to pulse in time with one another, as if they were a great, synchronized heart beat. Did that mean something?

Then in the guts of three of the cyclopean towers was a trio of pinpoints of light. They glared directly into Sean's vision. Each shone like beacons in a sea, but it felt to him as if he were staring directly in the sun. Individually they burst forth from their own skyscraper. One was on the left, one in the center, and one on the right. The lights continued to grow brighter and grow larger before dimming, as if they were stars collapsing in on themselves about to go nova. Which was exactly what they did.

In perfect unison, the lights came back and expanded at such a rate that it beggared belief. In the first few milliseconds of their expansion, the facial projector's eyesight cut out. Going from pure sepia to perfect darkness. Deep inside, Sean knew what those lights were, but he could not believe it. It was impossible, but this day had been full of impossibilities. He felt a chill in his mind as the panel that gave him sight was overwhelmed and shutdown. Fear filled him, with the possible chance of him being blind began to take hold. No sooner than it had come, the terror from the lack of sight was shaken out of him as the causeway began to buck violently under the stress of a massive earthquake.

The previously absent wind had arrived. It blew into the shell's frame with the power of a mighty gale. Even blind, he instinctively willed the shell to raise its arms and protect him from the gust that threatened to knock the unsteady body over.

The legs of the shell shook particularly hard. He willed the shell to stand. "Not again!" he shouted to himself. Through the din of the world crashing down around him, the shriek of his new voice went without notice. To his surprise and sickened delight, these legs did not fail.

Several moments went by before the sound, the shaking, and the wind ebbed. Strings of code ran down his sight at such a clip that it was impossible to parse. Everything went fuzzy like a TV tuned to a dead channel. Seconds later, his sepia world blinked back on -- channel found.

Three mushroom clouds greeted him as the vision found the city once more. The trio of disasters emanated from the titanic buildings where the lights had beamed. The unspeakably tall lengths of the skyscrapers were now stunted. Fiery plumes replaced much of what had visibly been cement and steel. Each of the structures now sagged under their weight and began to cave in. Smoke and dust vented from their sides as they crashed down on themselves with miserable groans. They disappeared into the ether below. There was no sound to be heard as they soared towards the ground and out of sight.

What was this insanity? How many people had just died in nuclear oblivion? Would this happen again? Would it happen to him? He began to think of a billion different ways that things were about to get even worse as if he hadn't already reached his nadir.

Almost in response to his panic and definitely in response to the nuclear weapons that had just detonated, three incalculably gargantuan waves of light bronze reached up from the dark. Each one collided with the husks of the skyscrapers. The force sent the remains of the structures reeling, bending, and fragmenting under stress. Sprays of the bronze went shooting up into the air as they broke upon the skeletal skyscrapers. Each wave sent mists of bronze droplets all through the air. They were tiny from Sean's perspective, but he knew in reality that every single one was easily the size of a city bus, if not larger. Instead of breaking well past the ruined structures, they stopped as if frozen like ice.

"What the fuck," he cried and then repeated, "What the fuck."

Sean could not comprehend how such a thing was possible, how such a thing could be. Every ounce of his being screamed at him to run away, that this thing could only bring doom upon him and everything around him. He was but a speck in comparison to this ocean of bronze. All he could do was fear what should happen if the tides were to shift towards him. Before he'd finally managed to get the legs of the shell to obey him, now he was thoroughly incapable of producing the will to run or even just walk away from the precipice. Terror had locked the joints up cold.

The bronze goo began to stretch above the husks, reaching for the sky, spreading itself apart, and creating a lattice that gleamed and shimmered. On and on, the waves drove up. Twisting and shifting until they reached the same height as the buildings were before the detonations. Then the waves broke, the tops of the spiraling towers of bronze popped, and the rest of the bulk scattered in a wash of metallic foam, falling back down the emptiness from where it had come. Steam wafted off what remained behind.

It was impossible, inconceivable. The buildings had been fully restored as if Sean had not just witnessed enormous portions of them being atomized. There would have been no way to tell what just happened to them, save that the newly rebuilt skyscraper's edges glowed. The ocean of bronze had somehow rebuilt them in the span of a few heartless beats.

None of this seemed possible. None of this could be possible. Yet it was, Sean knew that now. Only a world this mad could astound the most vivid of imaginations, outdo the worst nightmares, confound the most bizarre dreams. This world was preposterous. And only a world like this could have been real for he could never have possibly conjured it up.

All was silent in the endless metropolis once more. The quiet was unnerving. This city was more extensive than anything he believed to be possible. Silently he wondered where it ended if it ended at all. Sean was lost in thought when he heard the sound of soft padding, like a cat walking on carpet.

"Thinking about jumping? You should know you can’t."

The voice that popped behind him intoned. Sean was startled by the sound in the soundless place. Their vocoder was boisterous, good-spirited, like a friend from days long past had stumbled upon him. Sean twisted out of his malaise and struggled to turn the shell around. Evidently, the hips and spine could only bend so far before he was forced to step round. This must have been what Left had meant about a restricted range of motion. No one was there to greet him.

"Down here."

It now dawned on Sean how limited his new vision was. Not only was he forced to see everything in sepia, what he could see above and below him had narrowed significantly. Why was that? He was dumbstruck as he realized the answer. His eyes. Sean could not move eyes that he no longer had. The only way for him to change his eye line now demanded that he move the head of the shell.

"Hey, are you listening to me?"

Sean tilted the head down to look at what had been addressing him and found a most bizarre sight. Still, he decided it was rather tame when compared to oceans of bronze that could rebuild towers of Babel.

On the ground was a man, or rather the top half of a man. His body seemed to be made of mold injected plastic. The face was frozen in a permanent smile. Full lips, cheeks hit with blush, a chin that you could cut stone on, and perfectly coiffed hair. In place of real clothes, there was a simulacrum of them molded into his body. To Sean, it seemed that the man was wearing the top half of a dark brown tuxedo with a black bow tie. There was even an imitation pocket square protruding from his chest. He hovered the bottom of his body off the ground, placing his weight on the palms of his hands in order to mimic legs.

"What are you?" Sean asked slowly, each word lazily rolling out.

"A bartender. What do I look like, a monkey?" The bartender lowered himself and scratched at his side with one arm and the top of his head with the other, "Oh-Oh-Ah-Ah!" The line between where the bartender's lips contacted glowed with each word, "What's it to you anyway?"

"No-nothing," Sean stammered, still thoroughly off-balance in more ways than one. "You were the one who started talking to me."

"I suppose I did," the blinking between the bartender's lips continued. He lifted a hand and pointed it at Sean, "Let me guess, you were just defrosted."

"I was, at least, that's what I've been told," Sean admitted. "This hardly seems real, but what else could it be?"

"Don't worry, kid," the bartender replied, "I don't think anyone truly believes this place is real." The bartender got a little too friendly and slapped Sean's shell on the shin and laughed. "I mean, if I saw what you did on the first day I was reborn, I'd think I was going bananas too."

Sean was silent, not sure of what to make of this. The bartender was right. Maybe he was going to lose his mind if he didn't find some sort of stability soon, some way of just slowing things down to a more manageable speed. Perhaps ground everything back to some kind of totem of reality.

“Could you tell me what just happened?”

The bartender sighed, "Ah, kid. If I had to explain it we'd be here all day, and trust me, there are more important things."

“More important than that?” He stressed with the word ‘that’ with some incredulity and tilted the shell’s head back towards the impossible.

"You'd be surprised. These grand scale events will rarely impact you." The barkeep paused and made an awkward shrug by raising and lifting his body, "You're simply not important enough." The bartender backed off slightly and appraised Sean's shell, "I see that they at least took the time to clean you up before kicking you out on the street."

“Yeah,” Sean was suddenly all too aware of the fact that the bartender was looking the shell over. He crossed an arm in front of its breasts and another over the groin. “Could you not stare?”

"Sorry, sorry." The bartender did a little spin on one hand and turned back about to face Sean before bowing in apology; well, as much as a man without a waist could bow. "My mother would be ashamed of me looking over a vulnerable girl in such a state."

“Bad guess,” Sean muttered angrily.

The bartender took a moment to process Sean's meaning and then figured it out. "That's a rather unlucky roll of the dice."

He rubbed at his chin. "My manners have been atrocious today. I should have gotten your name."

“Sean.”

"That's a good one. I knew a few Sean's back in my day." The bartender picked himself off the ground again with his arms and 'walked' backward a few feet away from Sean. "I don't really have a name anymore, but I guess you can call me Barkeep, Bartender, or just Bar if it's important to you." The barkeep raised a hand up to Sean for him to shake, but Sean ignored the gesture.

"Alright, Bar," Sean's mind got to turning. Perhaps he could use this man to figure out how to find some blind spots in the Binder. Maybe he didn't even have a Binder. Sean felt a little jolt of pain. That was odd. "Can I ask you a few questions?"

"Okay, but make them quick. We should get outta here."

“Were you brought back like me?”

“Yup!” Bar answered loudly. “Although I am not sure I would do it again if you offered me the chance.”

“Uh-huh, and what are you doing here?”

“Always good to know more people like us.” The barkeep drummed his fingers on the ground. “Besides, they don't really give you a handbook before you're tossed out like garbage.”

“How noble,” Sean said with some sarcasm.

"I wouldn't call it that. It's more like... you scratch my back, I scratch yours." Bar replied. "Besides, you already thought I was a monkey, so a little mutual grooming couldn't hurt."

“And what could I possibly do for you?” Sean hugged the arms of the shell tighter against its body, trying to cover up as much of it as possible.

Bar took notice of what Sean was doing. "Nothing like that. Believe me!" The barkeep continued, "And it isn't what you can do for me, but rather what you can do for us."

“Which is?”

"Well, some of us are a little less able-bodied than yourself." He waved a hand up and down his shell to exemplify exactly what he was getting at. "And a few are much worse off if you can imagine."

“I see.”

“Yeah, it's tough out here, kid.” The Barkeep sank low. “I'd like to help you if you're willing to work with us.”

“In exchange for me carrying you around or whatever, you'll tell me how to disable this Binder?” As Sean said those words, he felt the nub of something at the back of his mind grow large as it unleashed a zap of pain straight into his mind. Curiously, as he shivered from the hit, so did Bar.

“You shouldn't have said that." Bar said sadly. "Talking about disabling the B-word is forbidden around these parts. Not worth the pain."

"It's sympathetic, you know," Bar informed him. "You say it, and everyone nearby feels it. If you're gonna think that sorta stuff, keep it in your head. No reason to make everyone else suffer."

Sean winced. Perhaps getting around this thing was going to be tougher than he thought, especially since just talking about it was penalized with pain.

“I can take it.”

“Not all can.” Bar lifted a hand, cautioning Sean against making the mistake a second time. “Second piece of advice, the pain only gets worse each time you break a rule.”

Bar turned around after telling Sean about this little bit of horrible news and began to clamber off, one palm at a time.

"Now come on," Bar called back. It was then Sean noticed that his head was fixed in place, which meant he was basically just shouting ahead, "Follow me, and I'll show you to our home."

Sean stepped away from the lip of the causeway and began to walk on unsteady legs down the endless road that stretched out before them.

They had been walking for what felt like nearly half an hour. Every once in a while, Sean would look over to his left at the featureless wall of the skyscraper. Just to see if anything had changed, nothing had. Now and then, he'd notice a rectangular outline carved into the face. The pair said nothing to one another as Sean forced the shell to walk behind Bar. His concentration would falter at times, and the shell would nearly trip over its own legs. There had to be an easier way. He could control the arms and head well enough, but the legs felt as if they'd never stop eluding him.

At last, he broke the silence, "How much longer?"

"We're nearly done with the first leg."

First leg? Sean thought. This was going to be one hell of a hike.

Sean was inherently distrustful of the barkeep. He doubted that new friends just appeared out of thin in air. They certainly hadn't when he was alive. but it wasn't like he had much choice. This guy, Bar, was the only one who had shown up after his expulsion from the Revivification Center. The dark crevices of his mind began to wonder as to what his real motives were. Perhaps he would be made into scrap, or turned into some sort of living sex doll, or there was always potentially a fate even worse than either of those that he hadn't thought of.

“At last,” Bar declared.

Their first destination was a portion of the wall that had been jammed open. A pile of scrap kept the door from slamming down to the ground and sealing up once more. It wasn't a particularly large gap, but Sean estimated that he could probably make the shell crawl on its hands and knees through there. Bar stopped at it and turned back towards Sean, one hand on the bottom of the pried open door.

“Just through here.”

Sean could not make out what lay beyond the threshold, but it was dark. Anxiety sloshed about in his mind. “In there?” Fear in the unfamiliar voice of the shell dripped out of the vocoder.

“Yeah.” Bar slipped inside and out of sight, wrapped in the darkness.

Sean turned the head of the shell about, trying to see if he was being watched. No one was nearby. No one had been following them. He wasn't sure why he thought there might. Perhaps it was just the Binder sitting in the back of his mind like a voyeur.

“Come on in,” Bar called to him. “The water's fine.”

For a moment, he considered running away, but to where? There wasn't any other place that he could go to. Sean forced the legs of the shell to lower themselves unsteadily, the knees brushed up against the ground, and he reached out with the blunted hands to feel about in front of him. He was definitely going to die, wasn't he?

A hand grabbed one of the shell's without warning, and Sean cried out in terror.

"Relax. It's just me." He guessed that Bar was in front of him, but Sean couldn't find him through the gloom. "Get on up. It's time to walk."

“I can't see,” he said as he began to force the shell up from the ground, Sean realized that Bar was still holding onto the shell's left hand.

"I figured as much." Bar began to tug at his shell. As he did, Sean heard a rhythmic thumping sound just ahead of him. That was probably Bar's body smacking into the ground while he dragged himself along with one palm instead of two. "Just hold on. I'll guide you to where we've got to be."

Sean made the shell squeeze onto Bar's hand as if it were a lifeline. He was afraid that he'd be left alone in the black that filled the space around him. He was worried he'd be unable to find his way back out should he need to run.

“I'm going to let go of you for a minute, have to fix the lights.”

Bar pulled his hand free. Sean could hear him carefully balance his body on both palms as he walked away from Sean. A few seconds later, he came to a stop. There was a sound that reminded Sean of his father pulling the ripcord on his lawnmower. Rather than the noise of an engine starting, however, the night suddenly vanished under the oppressive glare of a thousand hidden lights.

They stood in a wide room that had a ceiling that stretched up several stories. The room itself was full of junk, most of which Sean couldn't identify. The piles looked vaguely like broken electronics or robotics.

Leaning against the ground in front of Sean was Bar. He had pulled a previously unseen cable from the back of his head and jammed it into a control board that'd been cannibalized from the wall behind him. Wires hung between the panel Bar held in his hand and the section that was now missing.

“That better?” Bar asked, almost sounding concerned.

“Much.” Sean began to step towards Bar while he looked around at all of the piles of junk and defunct instruments. “What is this place?”

"This is an antechamber," Bar explained as if he were telling Sean the difference between up and down. "This is not." Sparks flew from the cable that connected Bar to the board, and lights on it flashed. The wall behind the barkeep slid apart and revealed that this was just the entrance to something far more significant.

Bar unplugged himself from the board. The cable whipped about and disappeared into the back of his head. He then slipped the panel flush back into place where it practically disappeared and turned around before continuing inside. Sean had the shell follow close behind.

Bar began by asking a question of Sean, “Do you know the word 'arcology'?”

Sean shook the shell's head and then realized there was no way Bar could have possibly seen the gesture from behind his tottering form. “No,” he replied as he began to take in the sights.

The new room, if it could be called that, seemed to stretch on for a mile in each direction. Surrounding the expanse were walkways jutting from its walls, paths of them crisscrossed in the air overhead and below as they led from one side of the interior to another. The walls that Sean could see and the floor he stood upon were made out of odd containers with handles flush with their faces. Almost all of them had a single light blinking around the handle. Others were dim. The containers weren't particularly big. They reminded him of a good-sized safety deposit box.

The ceiling overhead was vaulted, and a single beam of light projected from the center illuminated the entire expanse. The dome reminded Sean of his visit to the Hagia Sophia. There wasn't much difference, save that this one was so high up and so broad that it might have been a true relic from heaven. Tan colored clouds hovered and danced with one another just below the ceiling. He was taken aback by the enormity of it all as he processed that this room was large enough to create its own weather system.

He also noticed little things, such as the flocks of drones that flew around. They soared through the air, perhaps performing little duties throughout the vast complex, but he was wrong. One from the droves above dove down and came to perch upon a nearby pillar made of the boxes. It was an ornithopter, a mechanical bird. The apparatus rested only for a moment before another of its kind flew over and pestered it away.

Moss and vines clung to the walls, water poured through ancient cracks. It was a collision between three equally powerful aesthetics. One was industrial and sleek, the other was old and European, and then there was the verdant sheen that seemed to be steadily swallowing everything. This place would have been majestic if it wasn't for the extensive disrepair.

Sean gazed down at the bottom of the room. He quickly regretted his decision to look. In the glimpse that he sole, Sean noticed the water streaming from all across the chamber now collected at the center. There was a natural waterline that was marked on the walls, soon it would rise above that. Perhaps one day it would overflow flood the entire complex.

“Well, this basically is one.”

“One what?” Sean had been lost in his sightseeing.

"An Arcology." Bar had begun to move again, forcing Sean to cut the lollygagging short. "Keep up."

Connected to the walls were strange vertical gantries that were mated to the walls via sliding frames. Most of the gantries slid this way and that, moving up to the boxes seemingly at random, connecting to them for a split second and then drifting away to another and performed the same action. Sean wondered what exactly they were doing and what was in these boxes that seemed to make up everything.

Bar started to unpack his explanation once he realized that Sean had no idea what he was saying.

"An Arcology is a self-sustaining ecosystem within a structure of some kind. It runs on its own power, has its own atmosphere, its own food chain, sources of water." He stopped and pointed at the creeks and vegetation that had begun to form all around them. "All that good stuff," Bar explained. "This building and the others you saw outside are essentially arcologies. Near as I've been able to piece together anyway."

Sean only half-listened as he noticed sections of the interior had been broken open and cannibalized for their electronics. Copper thieves? Sean doubted it. What would the people of this society need to steal copper for when they could build skyscrapers in seconds?

Before them, a stream of water several inches deep ran from a crushed water main. The stream plunged off the side of the walkway and created a waterfall. Bar splashed through as if he didn't even notice and continued beyond the other side without any impediment. He had most likely waded through this stream a thousand times before. Water dripped from his shell, leaving a trail behind him.

Sean stopped at the edge and made the shell's head look down. Slipping while trying to traverse this would be a considerable blow to his now fragile ego.

"What's the matter?" Bar called back to Sean. The bartender had turned around and was now staring at him.

“I don't want to slip.” Then he quietly added, “I am tired of falling.” Sean hated how pathetic and vulnerable the shell’s voice made him sound.

"Hang on." Bar started back through the water and came to a stop just before Sean. The bartender offered up a hand, "Just take it like you did before, and I'll walk you through nice and slow." Hadn't Bar been the one who took the shell's hand, and not the other way around?

Sean had the shell grasp onto Bar's hand. The barkeep then began wading back through the water.

"Like I was saying. I am fairly certain each of the skyscrapers is like this one," Bar said as his shell splashed the water. "Although I've never been to any other. I haven't needed to. Some of my compatriots have though and they tell me stories."

"Even if they are different, one thing remains the same," he continued, “each of these structures is staffed by people little better than drones. Hordes of them slave away, never bothering to look up from their work and ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing.”

Bar stopped as they reached the other side. “Not so bad, right?” He pulled his hand away and tapped the shin of shell Sean occupied with the knuckle of his index finger again. “I am sure you'll be able to do it without my help next time.”

“Yeah,” the disturbingly gentle voice of Sean's shell whispered.

They started walking once more, and Bar began speaking again about this and that. Sean was starting to realize that Bar was a chatterbox, or maybe he just hadn't had anyone to listen to his speculation in a very long time.

He began to tune him out entirely as they ambled along. Sean pitched the head down and looked at the ground. What exactly was in these boxes? He stopped when one of the box’s lights turn on and off in rapid succession.

"What's in these?" He gestured to the ground.

Bar stopped and turned to look at Sean. "Ah, I wouldn't worry about them," he snipped. "These guys are either the logical conclusion of this world's society, or they have it worst of all." The barkeep tilted his head left and right, trying to make up his mind. "Truthfully, it could be either-or, but it isn't like we can help them."

“What guys?”

Bar patted the ground, touching the boxes they had been stepping over. “These ones.”

"You mean to tell me there are people in there?" he said in a hushed tone.

Bar grabbed onto the handle of one and twisted it. This pulled the box up and open. Inside was a housing unit very much like the one that Sean's brain had been encased in.

“If you can still call them that.”

Sean stepped closer to examine the box's interior. Connected to the housing unit were a thousand tiny wires, either slotted into ports or attached magnetically.

“What are they doing?” Sean asked, equal parts interested and horrified that someone would volunteer to be slotted away like that.

“Mining blockchain.”

Sean swept the shell’s head around to take in just how many there were. Between what he could see lining the floors they had been walking over, the walls, the ceiling, there must have been hundreds of thousands of them. Perhaps millions.

Bar continued, "I don't know the specifics of what it is they do. Blockchain was a little after my time." He turned the handle and pushed the box containing the housing unit back down into its holster. There was a sound like a hiss as the case was closed shut and replaced.

“When did you die?”

“1987,” Bar told Sean plainly. “You?”

“2030.”

“Neat. Were flying cars already a thing by then?”

“No such luck.”

Bar laughed, “Decades of futurists were probably horribly disappointed.”

Sean would have smiled if he could have.

“There we go! A smile,” Bar quickly pronounced.

Sean was about to ask how Bar knew he had been smiling, then he remembered what the projector did. Turning his emotions into fucking emoticons. He quickly squashed any sense of levity and willed his demeanor back into neutrality.

This time Sean restarted the journey. Bar quickly scrambled to catch up and began heading their expedition once more.

“I was told I’m in crippling debt. Any truth to that?” Sean asked after a few minutes of silence.

"Absolutely. We're all in debt. That's the point of well, of everything." Bar shifted from one hand to another. He had a perfect balancing act going. Sean wondered if the barkeep could help him out with his own issues.

“How do you figure?”

"Simple, as long as you're in debt, you're going to be kept under the thumb of a… well, y'know, that thing in your brain." He swerved around saying the B-word. "And the longer you've got one of those, the more you're going to work, and the easier it becomes to turn you into a wirehead."

“Wirehead?” The longer strides made by the shell could easily keep up Bar’s pace, but Sean struggled to take advantage of it out of fear that he’d collapse into a pile.

“That makes two words that you don't know. You definitely weren’t much of a reader were you, kid?”

“I only cracked the books for work and school. Was never a fan of them otherwise.”

Bar sighed as he trotted along. “Without any cultural references you can circle back to explaining all this is going to take a while.”

Eventually, they came to a hole in the wall. This one, like the first, was pried open by a pile of scrap.

“Finally. My hands were starting to get sore," Bar joked.

Blessedly, this time the door was held open almost all the way to the ceiling, which meant he didn't have to crawl. Sean wondered how Bar had managed that one given the difference in height. The hallway that they gained access to flickered with dim light at its end.

This was home?

He'd sooner take his chances in a dark alley than voluntarily walk into this place on his own. Then again, he wasn't exactly alone. Plus Bar was leading, he could still potentially get away if this was indeed a trap. It wasn't very long before he found what they had been headed for all along. A room full of shells. Almost all of them lay inactive except for a smaller one that sort of looked like an oversized PEZ dispenser. This one hovered above the floor under its own power.

Some sort of apparatus was attached to the ceiling, thick lengths of cable hung from it with an unusually thick one falling down the middle. Each of the shells had one of the cables attached to them. The specific location for the connection didn't seem to matter. The strange device hanging overhead was also the source of the light. It sputtered in and out of life like a loose light-bulb.

“Wake up!” Bar shouted before tugging on the larger central cable.

When he did this, the room grew bright as the power to the light was restored. Each of the cords fell away from their individual shell, now all at once, they began to stir. There was much grumbling to be heard over the sounds of whining servos, creaking metal, and the compression of pistons.

“What the hell…” came one voice.

“Fuck you!” cried another.

“I was nearly done cracking some ICE,” whined a third, it was tinny and scratched like an old radio. “I hope whatever you're here for was worth getting us up early.”

Then a rapid beeping came from the PEZ dispenser as it flew directly into Bar's face. Sean wasn't sure, but they seemed pissed. Bar pushed the floating shell back away from him with some effort.

“Sean, the gang. The gang, Sean.”

The drone-like shell spun out in the air before making a circle around the room's perimeter and then came to a sudden stop in front of Sean's shell. The beeping started up again. It performed a flip in the air and tilted from side to side on its axis.

“He can’t understand you yet, idiot.”

More beeping.

“Yes, he.” Bar placed emphasis on the pronoun.

One loud beep. The shell hovered away quickly and took up a position behind the largest one in the room. To Sean, it looked like a domino made of steel. Taller than it was wide or thick. There was no discernible face on it, but there was a ticker like the one that had been on the Enforcer's chest. The word "Greetings" popped up on the display.

Many of the shells said nothing. In fact, they acted as if Sean didn't exist. That was fine with him. He was in no mood to socialize with a bunch of 'people,' even if they were in a similar situation as himself. After all, he was only here to find out what this society of survivors knew.

Bar’s shoulders sagged at the silent exodus of these shells. From his upper-body language, Sean got the impression that the barkeep had anticipated a wholly different reaction. Bar straightened up and began to address the small group that remained, including Sean. Acting as if whatever plagued him had never existed.

"Now Sean, since you like names, we'll call that one--" Bar started and then stopped as the shell furthest to the left flicked an antenna on its head towards him. Then he started back up again, the lag in between words was almost imperceptible, but Sean heard the hitch. "Sticks." Bar thumbed at the same shell that had just done something with their antenna.

To Sean, that shell looked a bit like a frog, except skinnier. Its hands ended in four round digits. Their eyes were bulbous and round like an insect's, their chest was concave, and their legs ended in curves hooks. On top of their shell's head were two thin antennas that wobbled as they looked around. 'Sticks' turned to look at Sean but made no other indication of greeting.

The PEZ Dispenser peeked out from behind the domino and instantly caught Bar's ire. "You can call that flying dumb fuck whatever you want," Bar raised the sound of his voice to make certain he was heard by the mostly concealed drone. "They're more of a pest than they are human."

Sean didn't give a suggestion. He frankly didn't care about this at all, but naming these people would at least make identifying them more manageable.

"I don't care."

“You hear that? It’s either Dumb Fuck or Pest. Your choice.” The drone was silent for a moment before beeping back. “Pest it is.”

He then directed a finger at the domino, “Honestly, I’d call him 'Wheels.'”

Sean wanted to flick an eyebrow up at this designation, but he resisted the urge knowing full well what this would probably look like on the projector. That domino certainly didn't seem like a Wheels. Bar must've known something beyond this one's surface appearance that Sean did not.

"Cool." The word blinked into frame on the domino's screen.

A cherub walked into Sean's line of sight. One wing on its back had been removed, and the other had been wholly plucked of its metal feathers. "You've added a fuckin' Bimbot to our happy family now?" Despite their diminutive appearance, this one had a foul mouth and a very self-assured swagger.

"I am not in this body because I want to be," Sean grunted in response, but the voice of the shell simply turned husky, inviting even.

"And you think I wanted to be in this broken little shit?" The cherub scoffed and flicked its right hand out from under its chin. Sean knew what that meant, 'Fuck you.' He might as well have spit on the ground too.

“I can see you two are going to get along famously,” Bar said with great sarcasm through his cheery voice. “Hm, for this one... What about Cher? Short for cherub.”

"Pronounced like Cher from Sonny and Cher?" Sean offered. The shorty had managed to get a rise out of him.

“Exactly.”

“I'll be dead before I let any of you shit stains call me that.”

“Cher it is then,” declared Bar.

"YOU MOTHER FUCKER, I'LL KILL YOU." For the second time today, someone attacked Bar. Instead of striking him, the bartender nimbly caught the cherub in both hands and began to toss him up and down in the air.

When he started babbling in baby speak at the newly dubbed Cher, they began to go berserk.

“Who's a good baby? You are! Yes, you are!”

"PUT ME DOWN YOU PIECE OF SHIT. I'M GOING TO STRANGLE YOU IN YOUR SLEEP."

“Naughty baby!”

Cher soon stopped shouting expletives and threats upon Bar's life, choosing to instead focus on breaking the bartender's grip by pushing, punching, and kicking. They made absolutely no headway and eventually went limp.

“Alright, I give. You can call me Cher.” And with that, Bar placed the cherub upon terra firma again. Cher whispered as they walked away, “I don't even know what a Cher is.”

The last of the motley crew rolled into view. They were a sphere roughly the size of a basketball. Sean could tell that despite appearing as a dark bronze to him, the newcomer was definitely a glossy black.

"Hello," the ball quacked. Their voice had been the tinny-sounding one from before. "My name is Neo."

“Seriously?” Sean couldn't help but ask.

“No,” the ball replied.

“Be careful with this one. They like to lie,” Bar warned in a tone that meant he was mostly joking. Mostly.

“Only when they're good ones to tell," teased the ball.

"Then, if that isn't your name, what is?" Sean asked, his curiosity stoked.

"It's really 'One Who Greets With Fire,' I was named after my mother."

"You never told me that." Bar feigned disappointment with the one in the ball.

"You don't need to know everything, nosy," they chided Bar in a low crackle and then spun slightly in place. "You can just call me Fire if you'd like, Sean."

Bar coughed. "We should all sit and talk. There is a great deal for you to learn in not very much time." The bartender moved into the chamber, shuffling forward from one hand to another.

And so they sat together, save for the one that Bar had identified as Sticks. That one continued to stay apart from the rest, just as Sean would have done in their situation. He was beginning to feel like he'd been thrust into a freak show as the small group gathered around. Everyone here had been normalized to what had happened to them by now. At least as much as they could be, but to Sean, these people skeeved him out. He was dead set on denying his situation. To accept it would remain a bridge too far.

Bar led the conversation for what felt like hours. In that time he gave Sean a primer on how he could bring up the overlay that Left had told him about. There was considerably more than what he expected. Built into the housing's software were hundreds of options and settings he could play with. Most of those he stumbled across seemed to do very little or were just QoL adjustments. What he found most interesting, from a purely aesthetic point, was how the display eschewed icons of pretty much any kind. It was just line after line of text that became more and more justified the further into the settings he clumsily dove.

As time passed, the crew that had stayed behind began to leave with very little fanfare until only Bar and Fire remained. He also found out why Bar called the domino 'Wheels.' As they left, that one had fallen flat on the ground and then sprouted a set of wheels before setting off.

"You'll get to know the others later," the bartender said in a reassuring tone

"Really the only three things you're going to use are the navigation controls to you know where you're headed, your credit account so you can pay off your debt, and the job punch that way you can upload logs to prove you were working."

Bar at last, blessedly, exhausted himself of information about the overlay. Yet he hadn't given Sean any information about the thing he was genuinely interested in. This stuck out as a glaring oversight.

"What about access to the Net?" Sean asked Bar.

"Ah, the Net." Bar considered what to tell Sean. "Well, the housing uses the Net. It's how our overlords at OMNITECH know where you are and what you're doing, but... Eh." He held a hand out in front of him and shifted it side to side at the wrist. "Not much besides that. However, if you really want to know about the Net, you are best off asking this one." The barkeep patted the top of Fire. So it seemed that Bar invaded the personal space of just about everyone.

"Yes, ask me." The static-filled voice of Fire was clearly excited. Apparently, they had been waiting for this moment to come. "I can tell you everything you want to know about the Net. This old codger certainly can't."

"Bah. Just because I don't understand the Net doesn't mean I'm backward." Bar crossed his arms.

"It does."

"Now wait--"

Bar was cut off by Fire, "What do you want to know about?" They then began to rattle off different topics for Sean to ask them about with such velocity that Fire sounded positively manic, "Are you interested in data harvesting, phreaking, cracking ICE, tagging servers, causing host meltdowns, forced discos?"

"Fire--"

They continued unabated naming equally bizarre and interesting concepts that Sean had never heard of, "Or are memory injections, synesthesia replication, and recall spoofing more your speed?"

"I'm not sure," Sean hesitated. Many of the options had already slipped from his mind due to how quickly Fire had shot them out. "I mainly just want to use the Net so I can get my bearings. Figure out how much time has gone by. Read up on what caused all..." He gestured around. "What caused all of this to happen."

"Oh." Fire peeped.

"What's wrong?"

"That isn't really what the Net is for."

"Not what it's for?" Sean asked, shocked. The feminine voice carried his incredulity as if it were an insult upon a maid's honor. "I don't understand. This doesn't seem like an outrageous request." Given his tech background, Sean was well versed in what you could do on the Net with a terminal at a casual and professional level. To be told that he couldn't even look up basic information was counter to everything he knew.

"Well, if you just wanted to check up on the Exchange or the News--" Bar made the quotes sign around the word 'news.' "You can do that from your overlay," he informed Sean.

"I just said I want more than that."

"There isn't more than that."

Now Sean was getting irritated. Bar was acting imbecilic, and his evasiveness only frustrated Sean further.

"You're from the '80s. You should know about the Net," he spat with venom. The synthetically produced tone made him sound particularly patronizing.

"I wrote stories about that kind of stuff, but by then, I was a septuagenarian."

"You wrote stories?" Sean questioned, unsure of what that had to do with anything. He narrowed his nonexistent eyes in anger while he appraised the ersatz bartender. What was going on here? Was this ignorance genuine, or was the Binder in Bar's head making him sidestep Sean's questions? He quickly stuffed the rage he was feeling down into a hole. Sean couldn't stand to think about what stupid faces the projector had been creating.

"Fine." He ditched interrogating Bar and opted to instead go after Fire. They at least seemed to have some technical expertise. "You, Fire, you seem to know a thing or two about a terminal - what do you mean I can't look this shit up?"

"Ter-min-al?" Fire sounded the word out one syllable at a time. This was precisely like when Left repeated his name.

"Oh, Christ." Sean reflexively lifted the shell's hand and placed it against where his forehead would have, should have, been. "Are you telling me that stuff from before was just fluff you made up?"

"Not at all," Fire said coolly, the static in their voice purred. “I'm a Netrunner. All of what I told you is very real.”

He couldn't take it anymore. The gap between what he was being told and what he knew to be possible was too significant. Worse, they didn't even try to explain the disconnect. Sean forced the shell to bend at the knees and fold up into a squat. Both hands reached out and grasped the ball on either side and lifted it close to the head of Sean's shell.

“Then stop fucking around and tell me what you mean when you say I can't even do the most rudimentary of tasks on the Net.”

The hands began to hum, and a blurb appeared in his vision, but to Sean it was just a series of bar codes. His frustration was such that he paid no attention to either curiosity.

Bar gasped. He reached out with one hand and placed it on the closest forearm that was part of Sean's prison.

"Put them down, Sean," Bar commanded.

“It's okay,” Fire told Bar in an unexpectedly gentle voice, “He's just trying to make sense of what's going on. I am sure that today has been overwhelming. All of ours were.”

"Your god damn right, it's been overwhelming." Sean shook Fire's shell in frustration before dropping them. The humming stopped, and the bar codes disappeared from his overlay. Fire bounced on the ground once and rolled away before coming to a stop back where they had started.

“Listen,” Fire implored him. “I have to go to work now, but you should take some time to recharge. It'll help.”

“No, you can't just go. I want answers now. I want to know why this is happening. I want to know what I should do.” The hands of Sean's shell balled up into fists. “I want this to have never happened.” The weight of the shell became too much for Sean. He let the joints collapse in on themselves to form a kneeling pile of cybernetics, he had begun to hug the shell's arms tightly against itself in an attempt to self-soothe.

“I think we all want that.” Fire's synthesized voice broke with sadness as they rolled their shell up to Sean's. They lightly bounced off of the body's numb knees. Perhaps this was meant to be a hug.

"We'll finish this conversation later when I'm back. I'll even show you around the Net, but first, you need to recharge."

“Sleep is what I need, not whatever it is you do.”

"Ah, don't be like that. Eventually, you won't even remember what real sleep used to feel like," Fire told Sean encouragingly. If that was meant to be a good thing, Sean certainly didn't see it that way.

"They're right." Bar slipped a hand inside of one of the shell's fists and tugged gently. "Stand up, and I'll show you how to prepare to hibernate."

“I don't want to,” Sean growled. To do what they were encouraging meant he was taking his first step down the road of acceptance.

Bar had turned away and began to tug at the larger shell again, this time with more force. "Oh, yes, you do. You're already getting cranky, I know that look anywhere -- I had five kids and 20 grandchildren, you know."

Cranky? He must have let an emotion slip through again. He couldn't fathom why he felt so tired, then he remembered how to pull up how much battery life the shell had remaining. Sean called forth the information awkwardly, like someone still learning to use a keyboard. After the fourth attempt, he managed. The blurb that rolled into his vision said there was 18% battery life remaining.

That was far too little, he thought. In between his unceremonious entry into this terrible new world, walking here, and their conversation, it couldn't have been more than six, maybe seven hours. Yet the shell was already that low? How? Then he recalled what Right had said: "The shell is ready and powered up. As best as it is going to be anyway."

"Those fucks. I am going to kill them--" the Binder surged forth with a vengeance and applied a liberal shock to Sean's nerves. He cried out yet nonetheless managed to finish his threat, "--if it's the last thing I do."

“How cliché,” Bar remarked. "I hope that was worth the pain."

"Who will you do that too?" Fire asked, expertly sneaking past directly mentioning the promise of vengeance that Sean had made.

“The ones who put me in this horrible thing,” he breathed, lights flashed in his vision. He began to feel equal parts rage and panic. “This thing's battery is shot," Sean spat out the word 'shot' as if it were a curse he wished upon the world.

"We all have battery problems. Comes from having retired shells," Bar admitted. "Although your own is probably even worse than ours. After all, I'm only half as big as you are, and Fire is a sentient ball of polymer."

“Rude.”

“Just payback for you calling me a codger.”

“That's fair.”

Sean sunk even further down as he considered his options. If the battery pack he'd been saddled with was already so depreciated, then how was he possibly going to do anything? Getting here had taken so long. Having to walk back and forth from this place would only burn what little time he had before needing to recharge. No, not recharge, sleep. Sleep was required.

For a second time today he considered killing himself, with that thought the Binder erupted. This time, however, he wasn't given a healthy dose of pain. It just sat there, tangled around his mind, monitoring his thoughts, anticipating his actions. Somehow he knew that he absolutely did not want to find out what it would do should he try to die.

"18%."

“Hm?” Bar looked at Sean right where his eyes should have been.

“That's all I've got left.”

“Already?”

“Yeah.”

Bar and Fire whistled in unison. Coming from the Fire's vocoder, the sound was especially creepy.

“We'll need to do something about that.” Bar rubbed the thumb of their hand across the inside of the palm of Sean's shell, trying to instill some sort of calm into him, letting him know that he wasn't alone.

“For certain,” Fire agreed.

Sean almost sobbed, despair began to flood in.

"What am I going to do?"

Bar sighed sympathetically, "You're going to get up is what you're going to do." He started to urge Sean to make the shell stand again. "And then, we're going to get rid of these damn things in our heads together. No matter how long it takes."

Sean sniffed. He sounded like a little girl. He felt repulsed.

"Okay." He sniffed again.

At last, he acquiesced to Bar and forced the shell into motion. Pushing off the ground to stand, the body's knees shook with a whinny from the servos built into the joints.

"There we go." Bar started to pull at Sean once more. This time he made the shell follow.

Fire rolled away from the two of them, "I'll be back later. You'll take care of Sean?"

"Of course. What do you think I've been trying to do? Besides, it's not as if tree stump like me--" he pointed to himself. "--can really make him--" he pointed at Sean "--go anywhere."

Fire cackled in static as they rolled down the hall behind Sean and Bar.

Bar eventually managed to tug Sean under the apparatus that hung from the ceiling. "Okay, stand, kneel, sit, lay down. Do whatever feels right." He tottered away. "I have to get a tether for you."

Uneasiness trickled into Sean's chest, or that's what he convinced himself he could still feel. This was really happening, wasn't it? Bar dragged himself back into Sean's line of sight. He was holding one of the thick cables. Attached to the end was a connection that vaguely reminded him of an oxygen mask. Except that it was opaque and well worn. The edges had started to split, and the face of it was flat. He could hear it humming in Bar's hands. Oh God, this was really happening. The fear had him now. He felt strangled by it and started to gasp for breath. The gasping turned into hyperventilating. His mind demanded that he try to suck in air that he couldn't breathe. He began to overheat. He felt a pain in his chest. He was going to die for good this time. This was just like before with Left and Right.

The eyebrows of Bar's shell flicked up in concern, "Hey, hey, hey, don't do that. Just relax."

"Relax!?" Sean screeched as he continued to try and gulp down air. The sound of his voice and the rasping would have sounded pathetic coming from anyone, but given the circumstances, he sounded even worse than he could have imagined. Further embarrassment over what the projector must have been reflecting caused him to startle and try to push past Bar. He needed air. He needed to cool down. He needed to get outside. He needed this to be over and never happen again.

Before Sean could take one step further, the bartender slapped the leading edge of the cord's head against the body's thigh. The retired shell instantly went rigid before toppling over, unable to keep balance on one leg. There was a loud thud from its collision with the floor.

"Sorry about that, but I couldn't have you running away with a battery that low," Bar said kindly, consolingly. "And you were being so brave, too."

The sudden stiffness had shocked Sean. His hyperventilating stopped abruptly, and much of the fear was swept away. Now he was filled with disbelief over what Bar had just done to his cage. Facedown, he could see nothing else besides the ground in this land of sepia. He tried to sit the shell up but found the body paralyzed

"Not this again," he whined.

Still stunned and now agitated at being locked up, Sean tried to formulate words of rage to throw at the bartender. Only to find those attempts stymied by an unannounced and unexpected trickle of warmth.

"What the hell..." Sean murmured into the ground.

"Starting to feel better?"

The trickle quickly turned into a stream of pleasure; Sean groaned involuntarily. The sound was foreign and unwelcome in his ears. He had only made sounds like that for his girlfriends, now it came out like the gasp of a whore.

"Yeah, you're feeling better." Bar laughed softly.

“Oh God,” Sean muttered as he felt the warmth suffuse every neuron in his brain. “What did you do?”

“Just applied the charger is all.”

Sean could hear the bartender step around him.

“Do you want me to turn it off?”

He was quiet for some time; this bliss was making him forget his immediate troubles.

"Off then?"

“No...” He groaned again. “Leave it. Leave me alone. So I can..." he sighed like a delicate flower. "So I can think.”

"Uh-huh. Well, Sean, you're going to want to relax while you 'think.'"

“How?”

"Just imagine the word you desire, and you shall receive."

Sleepy with the euphoria that was dragging him out into a sea of calm, he dully noticed that the Binder had retreated into whatever hole in his psyche that it had staked out for itself.

He thought the word: 'Sleep.' The screen he viewed the world through went dark, and the shell sagged.

Then he was gone.