The Wasteland
Chapter I
Alice Christina Sorne, AC to her friends, bored. Her bore seemed existential; without end, form, or tolerability. The pretty pastel images of her friends bored her. The luxurious trappings of her room drained the life out of her.
She wanted to sweat, and be uncomfortable; wanted to run away and be afraid. Of what she didn't know, except that it wouldn't be boring. As she nihilated she automatically made the imperceptible REMs that controlled her prosthetic lenses (why her father had got all cheap on her and wouldn't let her get the vastly superior implants, she couldn't understand!) and skimmed the vast library of posts and media designed to mollify her and keep her from boring. Because she knew she was being mollified, she wasn't. She briefly considered a new Avatar 'unmolly', who would be unsatisfied no matter what her friends did to mollify her, and as her thoughts raced she pinched them off like an unfinished turd, and swallowed them back into the wrinkled sphincter of her overexcited boredom.
Somehow... somehow she knew something wasn't right. Anger began to well up inside her, welcomed, and replacing ennui with abandon. Everyone was happy, everything was fine, but none of it was real, none of it...
...was real.
A chill crawled over her skin, mingling with her angst and anger, and she grinned (with her real face, not her avatar). That was it! She'd have a look at the real world, without the AR overlays that she suddenly couldn't stand another moment. While the thought of searching for instructions on prosthetic removal crossed her mind, she knew better than to advertise her intentions, and kept even the thought at the back of her mind, where (she hoped) they (whoever 'they' was) couldn't read it.
Determined, as only a girl on a mission could be, she cased her room for necessary tools. The fingernail file. That would do it. She was pretty sure all she had to do was pry them loose from her corneas, and her own eyes, just the meat part, would be the only visual input to her brain. Maybe it was a good thing she only had the prosthetics, rather than the implants, after all!
Humming distractedly, she quickly, yet with the grace of a woman on display, as she always felt she was, rose from her pallet and stepped lightly to her vanity, where she daily matched her face to her avatar, and the latest fashion. Idly toying with her makeup and toiletries, keeping her intentions veiled, she considered the extent of the prosthetics to contend with.
First, the eyes. A quick flip with the file and the lenses would be gone, and her naked eyes would see. The tiara would slip off, and her ears freed as well. As the thought came, she in fact removed it, and brushed her hair, blankly watching in the mirror.
All her clothes were linked. They'd have to go. She put down the brush and began to strip. Naked, she reached for a towel, and deliberately stubbed her finger on the shelf. AC exclaimed softly, and sucked the fingertip into her mouth before looking at it with feigned interest.
She sat back down and began to gently stroke the nail with the file, as if smoothing a chip. She felt a courage buoying her, unfamiliar, yet as thrilling as a cute boy's smile. Her breathing deepened, and she felt the heat in her loins as she gathered strength and purpose for what she was about to do. She'd never been so excited before, but the clarity of her purpose instilled a calm she'd never experienced either.
She felt the swell of destiny lift her up to her fate.
When the moment felt just right she didn't hesitate. With the smoothed finger at the tip of the file, she lifted it to her right eye and delicately detected the edge of the corneal lens, slipping the tip of the file under it. A sharp spike of pain almost deterred her at the contact with her eye, but it was not entirely unexpected, and she pried the prosthetic from her eye with a flip of her wrist.
THEN there was pain! A blinding sun exploded in her mind as the tendrils of the device ripped free of her cornea. Even so, her purpose never wavered. Before the tears even flowed from her tightly clenched eyelid, her hands had already moved to the left, and repeated the swift action.
PAIN and fear, and amorphous, unnamed horrors tried to overwhelm her as she dropped the file and pressed her clenched fists to her tightly shut eyes, trying to squash the pain into her head. But, unable to wait a moment more, she suddenly and deliberately placed her hands on the vanity and looked at the mirror.
Shock froze her in place. WTH was that?!? That couldn't be her! Even as she thought it, she knew it was, because her trembling arms matched perfectly the reflected image in the horribly dingy and cheap mirror that had suddenly replaced the quite attractive one she'd always seen hanging over her vanity. The intensity of her cognitive dissonance threatened to drop her to the floor in a dead faint. Light-headed and overwhelmed with feelings she had no name for, no experience with, no prior conception of at all, she blinked away the tears and turned to look at her room, that familiar pastel princesses palace that had so recently bored her, into what seemed now to be the entrance to Hell itself.
Because her room was like a vision of Hell to her, even blurred by tears, pain, and shock. She felt her former excitement and heat shrivel and shrink upon itself, as shock after shock began to pierce the veil of incomprehension at what she was seeing.
A concrete cell, with walls unpainted and filthy, instead of the mauve and teal she'd always known. Her lovely bed, rags on a thin mat on the floor. Instead of the vanity of textured marble and elegant lines, bare particle board and cheap plastic. The beautiful, stylish clothes she'd stripped off just moments ago were monochromatic, grey burlap, falling apart at the seams, and stained with unnamed and unidentifiable bodily fluids and dribblings from...
Panic surged and overwhelmed her, and she frantically stood and threw her door open, more afraid to not see what was there than at what looking might reveal. As she stood startled and alarmed beyond her ability to comprehend at the cramped and dirty anteroom that confronted her, instead of the spacious and smartly appointed parlor she KNEW was there, the robot sitting in her dad's chair said "what's wrong AC?" in a voice eerily like her father's.
Horror utterly vanquished any attempt she had made to keep it together, and she ran right through the place that seemed to be where the kitchen had been, and out the front door, now a mere bare metal slab. Despite the continuing nightmare that unfolded before her at every step, she continued down the stairs and along the street at a full sprint, instinctively heading towards the park at the corner.
She almost ran right past the vacant lot, seemingly filled with random construction debris that mimicked the play structures and trees that the park featured. As she recognized that this was the park, the real park, and not the image she had in her mind, the panic began to, well, not recede, so much as be competed with by an ability to reason, again.
A moto pulled up behind her, and she almost began to run again in panic, remembering suddenly that she was completely naked. She turned her head to see who was certain to be leering at her, when a filthy sheet was flung at her from the passenger window, and a hideous, ancient man opened the door and got out.
Like everything else in this hellish vision, he was bedraggled, filthy looking, and clad in rags. She clutched the sheet in utter confusion, frozen to the spot, staring at him with eyes bugging out of her head. He shook his head wryly, and his face crinkled at the corners as he apparently repressed laughter. At what she couldn't fathom. Nothing about this world seemed able to bring any happiness or cause for joy as far as she could ascertain in her stunned state.
"Cover up, and get in! They're coming." He gestured towards the back seat of the moto, by now having opened the back door.
She realized suddenly why he was trying not to laugh, and quickly wrapped the sheet around her naked body, hesitating at the thought of getting into the moto. Why would she even consider it? Questions began to erupt in her mind, and she opened her mouth to start demanding answers, but they all jammed together, and she stood there, eyes bugging out of a face she'd never seen before, mouth hanging open, paralyzed with indecision, emotional overload, and felt panic burbling up, threatening to set her trembling legs to flight again.
"AC. You can come now, with us, or go with them!" His voice was gravelly, but not unkind; firm, but not loud. He looked her in the eye while he spoke, and then at the sky, and pointed. She looked up, and saw the silent drone, hovering 30 meters overhead. She stopped hesitating when she realized he must know her, must be known to her, because he knew her name.
Like everything else, he just wasn't recognizable without the AR sugar coating. She practically dove into the back seat of the moto, and fumbled for the safety harness as he firmly closed the door and got back in. All she saw of the driver was the strange round hat, like a seaman's cap from the ancient film clips from the 19th century.. or was it the 20th?, and short dark hair.
The moto lurched into motion as the driver looked over his shoulder to check to see if traffic was coming, and finally the shock was too much for AC.
It was her father! At that realization, her rapid envelopment in the series of horrors overwhelmed her, and she passed into a dead faint, simply unable to process one more unimaginable revelation of what had lain behind the sweet nothings the prosthetics had always whispered into her bemused ears, like the seductions of a con man reaching for your wallet, while his beautiful eyes lied of love...
