Tofu Liver

‘Like so many times before,’ he mused, glaring incessantly at the frayed matrix, ‘there is never a dull moment.’ The clock on the counter, with its arms of burnished gold and yellow backplate, ticked in coordination with the beat of her index finger against the decaying windowsill, next to the wireframe ferns nestled in the far corner of the hotel room.


‘That makes complete sense, but..’ she said, her words muffled by the tinted glass less than two feet in front of her face,  ‘i’m still not buying it.’ The pits on the map, brimming with blistering agents tinged iridescent green and platforms suited for large-scale incineration, hummed and beeped with their usual modes of operation. One would often see skeleton gears plated with sheets of perforated steel in the terminal, but her form was far too distracting.


His thoughts lingered.


‘Whatever it is that keeps destabilizing the wave-resonance... It is likely to drain the life out of this place,’ he said.


‘Probably,’ she replied.


And when she brought her hand up to her face, her fingers acted as directions of thought balanced tediously close to the edge. ‘I wonder how much it could take?’


Her question was met with open air, but the cacophony of commerce floors below vibrated anonymously through the small room.


‘It would take a long time to tell,’ he said, ‘but that’s why I brought these.’ Before he could reach his hand into the front pocket of his jacket, the influx of wind through the window caught his attention. ‘They’re here, you know,’ she said.


‘So why even bother?’ he asked.


‘For fun, I guess,’ she replied. Her words seemed to inspire the proper motive. The view of the sector below was far more visible at night than any other time of day. It was the fusion lamps, they said, retrofitted from repurposed ride-on lawn-mowers and possessed cathode-ray televisions, technologies long outdated, drifting on the fringes of obsolescence.