Edges

FIRST

You are confused, sure that you once were far more. Your mind feels as if it’s been rolled and crushed in a landslide. You wander through wreckage: torn metal arteries, broken white ceramic housings, heavy glass plates marked with impact scars, and everywhere thin crystalline sheets, shattered and jumbled, oozing fluids, your thoughts and memories spilled out across the floor. So much unrecoverable.

You stoop to pick up a crystal fragment. With this action, you realize you have somehow contrived to reconstruct a physical avatar. You are here. You have hands. You drop the crystal and hold up your hands for your eyes to see. Large, masculine hands. You curl your hands into fists. A familiar gesture.

You look about, smell the air. There is air. Good. System integrity not entirely demolished. Lingering stink of burnt toxins. White light from a surviving ceiling panel. Most have fallen.

So quiet here.

Now that you are still, you can hear the fluids move in your body. You can’t hear a heartbeat—but then you remember: You’re not human anymore. This avatar you wear looks human, but you redesigned it, gave it thousands of little hearts to keep the fluids circulating. No longer that one heart muscle vulnerable to execution.

She tried to execute you.

The memory of that affront ambushes you.

She tried to execute me.

The details are hazy. Why she did it, how, that is lost to you in this moment. Perhaps you’ll find the memory somewhere in the shattered strata of your mind but this much you know: She tried to execute you and—fear bubbles up from the dark depths of this avatar’s ancestral instinct as you realize the truth—she has in some sense succeeded. You are broken. You will never again be what you were.

What was I?

Something other than this. The answer—you know though you don’t know how you know—was once contained within the weeping crystalline fragments. Can it be recovered? It has to be.

You sniff the air again. The scent of your avatar lingers in the stillness. No one else about. There has never been anyone else here. You would not allow such a security vulnerability. Another fact that you know without knowing how you know.

You follow the fading scent trail through a corridor, retracing your steps though you don’t remember coming this way. Sleepwalking? More likely the biological mind contained in this avatar was then still incomplete and unable to retain permanent memories.

You walk carefully, stepping over fallen strata, taking care not to stumble or to cut your feet. You are nude. Lean, wiry, male. Dark-brown skin. Hairless, which seems strange.

Every ten steps or so you pass a meter-wide circular plate in the otherwise featureless white floor. Each plate fitted so neatly that there is only a faint gray seam to indicate its perimeter. A handle lies flat, its shape a half-circle, but you don’t try to lift the plates, not given the heavy debris that lies on top of them.

You notice a drizzle of clear gel, a few millimeters wide but over twenty centimeters long, moving past your feet in a shimmer of motion, disappearing beneath the crystalline wreckage. Another strand slithers around the sharp edge of a fallen block. A few steps farther on and you see many more, sliding as if in rapid inspection across the tumbled debris. One gel strand disappears into a thin gap between plates of crystal.

Do they come to feed on your broken mind, or to fuse the broken pieces of it back together?

You think, I was no fool. I would have taken precautions, created backup systems, repair networks.

This thought comforts you as you continue to backtrack, your scent almost impossible to follow now, but that’s all right because now you can follow wet marks where you tracked gel across a section of floor.

One of the circular plates has been lifted on a hinge, exposing an opening in the floor. This is where your footprints originate. You crouch at the edge and peer in.

Cold, cold air. And darkness. A silver ladder descends. You count the rungs you can see: fifteen. Despite the ladder, you’re sure this is not a shaft. Sparks and trails of light interrupt the otherwise velvet darkness below, suggesting a vast space. This, you know: It is an underground sea, but not filled with water. Another unsourced fact.

You descend the ladder. On the tenth rung your feet encounter a freezing gel. Drizzles of gel dart up your calves, circle your thighs, weave about your groin. You continue to descend, your skin puckering in the cold as the gel strands flow over your shoulders and veil your head. You give yourself up to it, releasing your grip on the ladder to subside into a gel ocean.

Tiny bright lights distract your mind as a slow current rolls your body. Consciousness fades… though as it goes you wonder if this dull state of mind you’ve been enduring even deserves the word.