A night of great grief came to my rest under the projected moonlight. The moon itself glitched across the glass sky, pixels sputtering like a broken lens, its glow half-digital, half-fungal bloom. My sleep chamber smelled faintly of ozone and narcotic incense as though the city fed my dreams intravenously. That night, a year after my first conscious and intelligible meeting with the accursed specter made true to me through some unknown method resulting in coalescence and gathered resentment.
In my sleep, I was tortured, maddened by memories of the past. Every time I slept, I would detach my sense of self from my corporeal form, but my body rejected the notion of it that dreadful night.
I saw horrors, futures borne from my actions, the realization of power once I would ascend to the throne of my cold, cold father. The throne appeared not as a chair but a massive ventilator mask plugging into my veins, demanding I breathe in my inheritance. In my state of no-sight, my soul was tethered to the things of the past, as if pain were an old companion I wanted to embrace if only for a little while.
The netherworld of my dreams, the sheer suffering that would come in the futures I might— I could not tolerate. The colors ran liquid yellows leaking into purples, faces melting into pixel.
Every passing moment in the sandman's realm was a nightmare, lives taken indiscriminately. When dawn came, I woke grasping for breath and the good night's sleep that was taken from me.
Too bad I can't come with you in your dreams. The one place you can escape from little old me.
The past crying, weeping figure was no more. It was replaced by a sickly man, a tall, delirious man with sunken eyes and crow's feet. His eyes flickered like wisps of memories long forgotten, blue one moment, black the next, dilated to simple chemical reactions.
His attire and presentation were terribly inconsistent, sometimes coherent and conformed, sometimes shrouded in darkness, sometimes similar to those lowly people. Every flicker of his form left tracer-smoke in my vision as though he were carved into my retinas.
I knew it in my heart. I had to leave this glass palace of mine, protected and isolated. Its walls shimmered like aquarium glass, bending the light until the people below seemed like specimens floating in chemical tanks. Imitating the way light flickered and went about under the water, the underwater scene overlapped with my vision. It was a one-way mirror of sorts; I could see those down below but the lowly people could not see me. They looked pixelated, unreal, as though I dreamed them into existence.
Dreams and whispers of the land beneath pulled me into its deepest corners, my ability to become something else by suppressing the self spreading and spreading to the people below. The one thing I could not become, however, was the ghost that followed me everywhere I went.
We need to leave, I said, rising from my cedarsleep chamber and jumping out of the bedside window and into the pool beneath. I jumped, not fell. The water fizzed with chemicals, bubbles stinging my skin like glass dust, and for a moment I thought I had fallen into a vat of liquid light. From there, I got myself ready - breakfast and clothing, the works. Each bite of food coated in the aftertaste of anesthetics.
I armed myself with the bare minimum of the time: neomilitarist robes, a functional oxymoron. Threads of light crawled across the fabric, forming shifting slogans and warnings I couldn't decipher, as though my clothing itself were whispering propaganda. Moments later, I descended into the seafloor of the city, leaving behind temporarily the glass tower that had held me back all my life. The tower hummed in my skull long after I left like phantom tinnitus.
It was the early morning, and the smog that came with it was accompanied with the neon billboards and lights of the district. The air was thick with the smell of oil and cheap stimulants, and every light stung like a migraine's leftovers.
Streetlights flickered and whirred in unnatural sounds, unlike the silent lighterlamps of my pavilion. Each flicker painted afterimages into my eyes like little fever stains. Drones hummed overhead like a pack of 21st-century birds, flying in patterns that functioned as advertisement and surveillance at the same time.
The wind from the drones cleared through the misty dawn, and the people of the market I dropped into cleared through the low-lying fog. Despite the early morning, the city was very much alive. Alive like a seizure—twitching, jittering, too bright, too fast. Men and women of all sizes and shapes and cybernetic modifications sprawled over the streets, kicking up the morning noise.
The neon signs reflected off puddles of over-processed water, if that could ever be a thing. I thought I saw faces staring back from the puddles, mouths screaming soundlessly. People came here to eat, to drink, to talk, and to fuck. Half of them did it in public, uncaring, needing only sensation to validate the human experience. This was the market, where every good or service was consumed and sold and consumed and sold. Children stole from the unassuming and timid. Old men rested on benches and grounds to take a brief respite from their work. Their eyes rolled like broken slot machines, lids twitching. It would not be accurate nor truthful to say that the city never slept; rather, at some point, it slept and it had never woken up. It had overdosed on its own dreams and staggered forward ever since.
I didn't seem out of place at all, as years of inhabiting other people's bodies had given me a clear sense of how to be average. My walk and my stride were common to the place, and the ghost that followed me led me to the center of the district, where psychos and the worst of society were held known to kneel on a stage. A metaphorical spotlight was cast upon them, and the massless light seemed to push down on them like tremendous, heavy weight.
I took in the scene and accepted the decay. Someday I would rule this place, as my dreams had made so readily apparent. I consumed media and media and media, displaying what a prince, what a successor to a legacy should be. Screens screamed at me in overlapping channels—the voices of actors, prophets, murderers all instructing me on how to breathe. All of them had thoughts on the place they would rule, the position they would assume, and the burden they would eventually have to carry.
But not me. All of them had preconceived opinions yet not the firsthand experience of the people who would be directly affected by their actions. Consequence and morality had been the driving forces of previous centuries' generations, but immorality and detachment and recklessness without cost seemed to be the theme of this one. And the city applauded this recklessness, pumping stimulants into its veins to keep the performance going.
I was the city. The boy with the netherworld behind his eyes carried the pain and suffering of the people. The city was tired—tired of seeing all of its sons and daughters scream and cry out to those above, and those above throw themselves into reckless abandon or debauchery and vice.
The weak died for the strong, and the strong were eaten by the city, and the city would birth more and more. The cycle had to stop. But the cycle pulsed in my own bloodstream; I could hear it, the buzz of fluorescent veins.
I descended because sleep no longer offered escape, because the ghost would no longer be silenced, and because the glass walls of privilege had turned into shackles. I came down like some fallen angel from heaven—I wanted to relieve the pain. But every step smelled of gasoline and every shadow whispered liar.
And pain I found. Pain, sweet as amphetamine, bittersweet as a hangover.
The surrounding crowd that pooled around the stage of the soon-to-be executed were half in tears and half in jolly. Their pupils dilated at the scent of blood, their throats hoarse from stimulants and sorrow, indistinguishable. Crashing seemed a foreign concept to them. They yelled and bellowed from their heart of hearts to pull the plug on every single one of the evildoers, and some cried out again and again to stop the execution, saying they were innocent. Their voices merged into one cacophony, a symphony of bloodlust, static-laced and untranslatable. Indistinguishable from each other with only one message to give.
I sent out my soul and let it spread to everyone within a five-hundred-meter radius of me. I felt their suffering, their guilt, their cries. It hit me like a bad drug trip rattling my ribcage. It was readily apparent to me that all of the people on stage were innocent. But innocence in this city smelled no different than guilt.
It hit a breaking point. A boy in the mass of people that surrounded the stage ran to his father, seconds before his psychosplice was gutted from his spinal cord. I uncontrollably zoomed into the sight with my optics and saw the death of a pitiful man. Sparks flew from the man's sanguinary frame—too grotesque for the audience to enjoy. The mother followed him, and so did more of the crowd. The crowd then rampaged the executioners, and the mass of people devoured the stage like swaths of mosquitoes draining the blood of livestock, like pestilence. Teeth glistened, nails tore, tears bled into flesh until everything was painted the same color.
I approached the commotion and said to myself, what a beautiful world. So did the ghost.
The words tasted of nothing. Here could I hope, like some inquiring child sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight.
You've grown, the ghost spat into my mind.
They're the ones on a suicide mission. Doesn't really make for good competition, I thought, tilting my head, eyes fixed on the frenzy as though watching a ballet. The dancers twitched, spun, broke bones to rhythm.
But it ain't about winning, kid. Bones broken, blood spilt. The city eats and it stays alive. They think they're fighting for glory, for virtue, for manliness or some shit like that, but they're lying. It's maintenance of the status quo.
Doesn't explain anything at all, I said, stepping a few steps away, watching the chaos unfold.
My gaze lingered on the child clinging to his father's broken frame, on the mother's scream swallowed and trampled by the bloodied mob. My lips parted as though to argue even more, but no sound came. I sat down on the floor, clearing away the dust that had peacefully settled into the concrete over some days.
The ghost pressed closer, almost tender to the touch. He wasn't real in any way. I could not touch him, nor speak to him. I knew he wasn't real. Yet my body felt the very strange manner in which the ghost held himself to; every breath and every step. I had once suspected myself of delusion.
The chaos tastes better than their drugs, doesn't it? You could breathe this in forever and never hunger again. Die and you will be remembered. Live on and this could be the story that defines you for the rest of your life.
His tone was sardonic, pithy, lecherous all at once. Each word dripped down my ears into my brain.
What a sell-out way to define who you are. I chuckled, knowing nothing and everything. The words had been sealed in my chest for a long time.
It seems I underestimated the sheer violence of this city.The city's rot is undeniable. It arouses the question in me. What keeps it going? Humanity, I answered.
This is the farthest you could get from humanity, kid. This is… a den of beasts. Running around, eating and killing and eating and killing. People see what they want to see. So they comfort themselves in their beliefs. That this world is just, that this is just how things are.
I'm not asking what keeps the status quo. We both know the answer to that question. I'm asking what drives the people of this city to keep going.
What's better, that they need this city or that they want this city?
Either way, it doesn't change a thing.
Maybe it's the comfort of knowing whatever happens, they're still… human. That they still care? I said.
You're asking me like you're trying to find a valid reason instead of your own answer. You're stalling. You think you haven't found the right answer but any answer's as good as they come.
What point is thinking, then?
Glass shards fell from the air into my mouth as the words left my throat.
The conversation was cut short by the police pulling up on the scene, clothed in armor and standard mods. The neon lights and the sleek metal pieces on their bodies did nothing to present them as friendly. The police came in like devourers of the flies that drained the livestock, completely defeating what was once their original purpose: defusing the situation. They looked more like predators than peacekeepers, their eyes glowing artificial green. The armored police waded into the mob like sharks through a school of fish; hydraulics hissing, batons humming. Every strike left trails of light, like the city was drawing blood in glowing, glistening, maddening light.
But the police didn't have to do anything.A yell and a shriek, then ten more and more with each passing second. The necks set under the guillotine were cut. Blades flashed like camera shutters capturing the city's appetite frame by frame.
Hours later the mass stabilized. I watched and observed, trying to experience the air and the water and the cement and everything about life beneath the towers. The cement pulsed faintly under my palm, as though it carried the heartbeat of millions. I sent every ounce of my being again into the floor, like earthquakes that would send out waves of repressed destruction in restrained intervals.
Hours later, when the blood had dried and the mob had been broken, I remained among the debris of the market square. The air stank of ozone and iron, the residue of violence. It coated my tongue until it felt like I had licked a battery. I pressed my palm against the concrete, as though the city itself might pulse beneath my skin.
When order was restored, the people looked around and found their faces smeared with someone else's blood, their arms trembling from blows they could not recall dealing. None of them looked up to the towers. They looked sideways, to each other. Their eyes fogged with brainchemmy and modding fatigue.