Lolcats p. IV

It was hot, the night he burned the Cube.

    In the fields of long-grass above the compound, fireflies fought against fluorescent lamps, and often lost. Moths didn’t stand a chance. Closer to town, the neon logos from bar signs lit the rain-slicked streets like electric mist. In Trace’s loft the only light came from a Miyagi panel screen and a Lolcat alarm clock with red LEDs for eyes. He had bought the clock from a shady meme dealer named Koak who’d been high on PTC. 

'A web license is all crazy-talk!' he had said, 'but so were seatbelts! And when everybody crash and die, they take it away! They tell me I can't live off pop-tarts only. They fuck do they know!' 

Mindless, he was, no rails and no trains running for the midnight express. Back in Korea, Koak was revered as a veteren of the meme wars. Starcraft battles in real life. Thousands of cloned Koreans wasted in endless battles for the purpose of resolving political conflicts. UN War admins soon banned the use of all replica Starcraft tech, and the Koreans were forbidden from clone-based cyber-war. Koak had been a Ghost, and his eyes were still stained silver from the ocular implants. The only way he could live after the war was through a  fortitude of shadow, spoken only by the swamp shamans on the outskirts of Virus city. 

Trace was passed out on a delux Mellonsky futon and a tigerstripe Snuggie used as a pillow. A lurid thing, that snuggy. He wondered if there existed a secret alliance of snuggy cultists, and that the loose fabrics of the thing were lying mindspikes and soulcoils into his brain. It was almost unspeakable.

Three in the morning.

Sitting in a corner adjacent to his bed was a filter unit that he’d rewired to block the output of lithium dust. In an age where clean air was scarce, oxygen was doped with anti-psychotics; lowers heart-rates and keeps the tenants numb to negativity, a legitimate alternative to ease the minds of a population wired for constant stimulation.  Some felt it slowed them down, killed their thirst for information. Most were burnouts looking for another escape, another plug of hype for the outlet of social miasma in the form of rainbow puke.

Trace’s desk was worse than an architects’. A half-eaten burrito lay atop an external hard-drive enclosure and a stray pizza slice lived on a grease-stained graphbook drowning under an empty bottle of Old Spice. The last time she came over, she’d swept a castle of junk to the floor with a hockey stick. But now, two weeks later, it had reformed, and the castle had evolved into a heaping metropolis of yesterday’s refuse. This place looks wonderful said nobody, ever. 

‘I see you’re resting comfortably,’ she said. Her avatar glowed outside of a twin-panelled window parallel to the sharp strips of moonlight cutting through the blinds. ‘Do you remember my voice?’  Trace jolted up from a deep sleep, eyes jittering back and forth like an overclocked metronome. ‘See you tonight.’  The face shattered into a million crystal fragments.  

Silver suicide doors racked with six-pronged exhaust pipes. homeless man/street warrior with pizza-stained beard. dwarves in red visors and yellow jumpsuits waiting in lineups with a giraffe-grafted go-girl smoking a cigarette. packs of feral cats patrolling alleys unchecked. Hotels bleeding bass lines and laserlight. 

Friday night. 

A view through her eyes. White static and ripple-waves where coastlines dissolved into silk and melted into liquid steel. Another power outage. Grids died. A resonance cascade in the pre-dawn light. Lightning bolts weren't hurled from the talons of stormchasers or uttered from the ancient tongues of timewardens. 

They weren't lost in the depths of a burned out suburb, or in the minds of self-indulgent addicts. Kyoak laughed as the Dwarves rode home on a bus-sized Ultralisk. 

 Each rip of shrapnel was a part of the whole Cube, and a Cubebreaker knew that each fragment was an ever-shifting grid unfolding like a prism, each angle a reflection of her in a different light. Is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?

The bright stars wrung mental sponges like farmers reaped fields. A mess of unmade beds in a sun-stained loft with a red-eyed Lolcat. She gave him that Lolcat.

The Cube's light burned for over twice the length of a real Inferno.

When the city lost power, the transformers waned, and the grids slept. 

Cubes burned.

Sleep swept fast. And later he’d tell himself that none of it was real.