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The World Of The Potato District

This will be a loose glossary of terms encountered throughout the work, for people to refer back to on an as needed basis. Some of these are arc specific, while others are present across story arcs:

Hemato’s Arc

Post Decapitation Stress Disorder (PDSD) – A mutation of post traumatic stress disorder, involving the victim surviving decapitation, remembering the guillotine going through their necks, and after being acquitted–their apparent crime purged, they still remember the horror of being accused of something they didn’t do, or did under mitigating circumstances.

Bio-cyborg – A cyborg where the prosthetic parts are grown from the MC’s own tissue cells, rather than using biologically inert material. Anna-Marie becomes a bio-cyborg later, after society advanced in terms of regrowing human bodies.

Guillotine Gun – An evolution of the 1870s Berger model decapitation machine, designed for quick and mobile public beheadings, without the need for a trial. Based on a similar advancement path, guillotine guns will likely transport themselves, in order to hunt for victims to decapitate.

Inverse-Anachronism – Modern Stasis is one example, where society evolves at a snails pace, rather than super quickly. But generally the anachronism isn’t so much retro-futuristic, is in some case directly counter to futurism.

Nihongo-Francaise – A natural meta-language family do to French sailors and Japanese women merged their languages. English would later be permanently influenced by it, eroding the rest of the West German heritage.Nihoncainglish – A variety of English spoken by practitioners of Nihongo-Francaise.

Body-Regrowth – The ability to regrow a human body, such as in the case

of mistaken public execution. Not necessarily related to 3D Printed

Semi-Organic people.

Nadine’s Arc

Adobe-Politics – Political settlements based on agreed distribution of natural resources. Fossil fuel is one example, of political decisions made surrounding it.

Dream-Scanner – Elite corporate spy, designed to go directly into the dreams of suspects, like computer hackers, and other societal malcontents.

Brain-Cataclysm – The total apocalypse of a dream/virtual world, do to bad gaming practice, and can sometimes even kill gamers in this 3D evolution of rogue like game.

Artificial Universe – An entire universe created from the source code of our own simulated universe. Voreth’s Promise was originally historically similar to our own, but evolved in a different path where fairies and elves evolved from humans.

3D Printed Semi-Organics – A specific variety of cyborg with synthetic biological skin, but a purely mechanical skin. Generally used as a way for digital minds to get a physical incarnation.

Organic Dashboard, Lucid Programming, Organic Computing, Mechanical Subliminals – Variations on the theme of organic minds and bodies networking through a decentralized architecture, with things less than completely organic in nature.

Skull-Fairy: A half-elf, half fairy person.

Non-Arc Specific

Marine La Pen Wars – An unofficial colliqual term for the two civil wars that split the United States between 2017 and 2096.

Interplanetary Civil War – A perpetual interplanetary war split between the One World Government faction, separating into their original Earth I cultures.

Parasite People – Humans that evolved to live underground, and developed parasite like censors that enable them to navigate in the darkness of the apocalypse.

Tidally Locked Planet – A planet that has a scorching hot region on one side, and a frigging cold side on the other. Earth II’s colony is set on the slipstream between these regions, where it has live-able temperatures. In this case, the planet is tidally locked, but also in the Goldilocks zone for life.

Anna-Marie With Her Shotgun

Hemato’s Guilt

SCENE 1 - COMPUTER NETWORK ROOM

Hemato-Tomato is uploading her mind to the super computer inside the network chamber. Inside her mind, she remembered the last bits of dialogue from the girl she tried to save.

It was 2050 A.D. The two civil wars were finally over, leaving behind a French colonial state from Maine all the way to California.

RINALDA: Wait, where are you taking me?

MOTHER: To be privately executed. We’re financing your beheading.

RINALDA: But mom, why?

MOTHER: Just like my mother would have done, if I committed murder.

SCENE 2 – MOTHER’S OFFICE

MOTHER: (Writing in a notebook, a letter to the warden.) Dear prison keeper, I would be more than happy to finance my daughter’s own execution. That can save you the expense, and my daughter can die humanely. I still have doubts about her guilt, but at least I know she wont suffer.

SCENE 3 – EXECUTION CHAMBER – GUILLOTINE

RINALDA, with her arms bound behind her back, wearing an orange prison jump suit and orange ankle socks, is tied onto the table, then guillotine gun uses a procedural pathway to roll in her direction.

EXECUTIONER (On the intercom): Rinalda, you’ve been sentenced to death for the murder of your sister. Do you have any last words?

RINALDA: Please, just let me die quickly.

From her perspective, we see the whisker basket, where her severed head shall soon be.

The angular blade quickly lowers, slicing through her neck. Blood pours from the blade, her head with blond locks falling down.

SCENE 3 – COMPUTER NETWORK ROOM

Hemato cringes in anguish. Then after she was uploaded, found her personality slowly begin to fragment. She saw flashbacks of times when she would go to the festivals and fares with her.

Hemato woke up in total blackness. Before her was the mirror of herself.

HEMATO: Hemato, you know it doesn’t have to be this way. (Hemato smokes an electronic cigarillo.) We can punish humanity together.

HEMATO: But what about the others? (Points to the guards attempting to rescue to hijacked computer chamber.)

HEMATO: I will deal with them.

My Name Is Hemato

My name is Hemato-Tomato, I have a thing for blood.

I used to think it was for decapitation, then I met the love of my life. I wanted to be her shining knight, sing her soft lullabies at night. But I had my own issues that made this difficile. I once thought I liked dead girls, but it wasn’t their rot and stink that appealed to me. It was the idea of being able to hold and embrace them, even if we never met. If not for the fact that I wanted to see their severed heads roll off their shoulders. But I think I’m cured now, for the most part anyway.

But there was a time when I wanted to use them as bowling balls in some imaginary game of bowling, imagining others clapping to their demise, tap dancing in their bowling shoes. But more importantly I didn’t like the idea of being rejected by someone I liked. I thought this was because I didn’t want to be alone, that dead girls could not reject you. But the only one rejecting me was myself. For I only, in all this strange new world, had myself.

I wept tears beyond mortal tears, beyond the ones that most people will ever have to face. The tears of shame and guilt, and falling in disgrace. Falling down into a put down below, away from the Kingdom by the sea. And for me, and my Bride Anna-Marie, there was only death. I wanted a special kingdom for my beloved pride, far beyond the cruelties of this world we call Earth, in some country called France or the United States, or what had remained of it, when the French had taken over what the remnants.

Lost in my own digital sexuality, I prepared for the fall.

But this girl out of time, who would let let me die by her side in this tomb of all tombs, had something else in mind for me.

This is our story:

And in this Kingdom by the Southern sea,

Where sand was white and green.

Beyond the pale horse, with his scythe,

Slicing you in your spleen.

I wanted something different, partially to satisfy my own sexuality. But there was some part of my that didn’t want to admit, that I had fallen in love with this girl that I had grown up with, whom had rejected me, based on this accursed interests in the dead.

I wanted something more.

Not just her head. “Don’t look at me like that Anna. I don’t date girls simply to cut their heads off.” She gave me one of those looks, as if she knew, but was horrified by the idea that I would even have to mention it.

“Maybe not, but look at the stars tonight.” She said, pulling out a joint to puff into the wind. “Isn’t that curious?” She gave me the middle finger, and then went on her way home. We had had issues for some time since I had turned fifteen, but we began seeing each other less once I reached eighteen. What I way to spend a final goodbye.

But I still wanted her.

Even if it was just her head. Or so I thought.

Anna As My Wife

It was twenty sixteen, and you wouldn’t think there would still be decapitation. They went through various different kinds of capital punishment methods, none of which really matched the degree of humanity that they once claimed they would a achieve. Some states went so far as to ban the death penalty completely. And most of Europe had already banned the practice. But there was a new tide, revealing some dark secret kingdom that was best left hidden from the world. The Anna-Marie I knew in high school, was very much a different one from the one in Alsace. But she would still have memories of the time that she was beheaded by guillotine, her crying out to me asking me to save her neck. And even still I wondered, what it was, even thought I could go into her dreams, what made me stop.

And now I live with the regret.

I puffed a joint into the starry night.

I didn’t think I’d fall in love with a parricidal girl, but that was the deck of an uneven fifty two given to my lap. A lap that months previously I had preferred replaced by the flow of gentle tongue around my shaft, but sometimes life doesn’t deal in such easy wins.

But that was my luck.

All over again.

I didn’t even think a cis girl would have a think for a trans woman. Being trans wasn’t exactly a convenient thing, or trendy, if you’re living in one of the more conservative states of the union. We had met in our freshman year of high school, though eventually she started seeing boys. But the boys started demanding things from her, so she was quick to break off from unhealthy situations. I was never quite she how she was able to easily switch from one lover to the next, but in all cases she always came back to me, sobbing.

And she knew that I would be there, to give her a shoulder. And she would talk about what happened. I knew that her father was a douche bag, and from time to time she would have trouble with law enforcement. And being an immigrant, it put her in a tricky situation do to Obama’s and later Trumps immigration policies. But I was one that she knew she could trust. She knew that my dad dropped his job working as a short order cook, when he was offered lots of money to cut people’s heads off for the state guillotine familla. Eventually it came down to this, we trusted each other more than anyone else.

And, out of anything else, was what bothered me the about having her gone from this world. The lust, overpowering. The sensations of mixed feelings, then overwhelming despair. That feeling of hopelessness that only ever achieve full fruition when you realized you’ve met the love of your life, and simply no longer have the option to express it. Weeping, weeping, and weeping till one could weep no more.

It was time to die:

Danse, the rhythms of death,

In this Kingdom by the hidden sea.

For me and my Anna-Marie.

The final epitaph of the damned.

I heard the sound of my father screaming in the kitchen, then he jerked me to the sound. He didn’t much like the idea of one of his daughter, dating someone that they would eventually have to execute by guillotine. It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life.

But I wanted her, I wanted her now.

I wanted her as my wife.

Strapped Onto A Broken Motorcycle

There were things taught to me in my early high school years, that if they became true, it was uncertain how much longer the United States as an empire would continue to exist.

Already in my life at that point, I had seen the withdrawal of troops from the middle East. Donald Trump was trying to start an economic war with Mexico, and nobody really quite knew what he would do next. I just hoped the he would not try to keep me and my Anna from moving back to Alsace, France.

There were limits to what European countries found acceptable, and many countries were beginning to reject new people into their countries: already there were several groups of wandering Indian tribes that were deported from Romania to France, which caused a large stink, because it violated EU protocols. Say what you want about large economic institutions, their seemingly infinite propensity to roll back people’s freedom made it an increasingly grim alternative to move to Europe.

Even for Anna-Marie, she had lived in the United States long enough, her parents first generation French immigrants, that it might be a hard sell to go back to her old home country.For those, there was only one way for her to go.Her head into a wicker basket. British isolationism overseas further triggered more animosity in the European Union, and it made other countries that had also have issues, want to also leave the economic bloc.

The only result seemed inevitable.And me and Anna-Marie lived in the after-math of this great war, the third in the series, trying our best to make it through another day. But one day, there was simply no alternative.And now I live with the guilt.A few months during my Sophomore year, I had offered a ride for her, because she wasn’t sure when her father was going to come to school.

We had had dinner time when we were at school club, it was Dance Dance Revolution Night. We both split a Lasagna together, noting the awful irony of a French girl eating Lasagna rather some Crepes. She had shoulder length black hair, but bits of a blond her, reflective of her Alsatian heritage, were beginning to show through. But she still insisted on covering up the color.

In the parking lot, we waited for my mom to arrive, and I told her about the situation in which we faced.”I’ll give you a ride this time, but after I never want to see you with my son again.” My mother was the worst about mis-gendering, and didn’t think anything of the fact that she was trying to tell me what relationship to have with people that I went to school with. But now, looking back on it, I look at my mother’s death as somewhat of a relief, even if Anna-Marie was not here to see it. And yet part of me wants to be with her again.

We had played various kinds of games together, from various Japanese Role Playing games. We also learned how to ride a black horse together, which was among her most favorite of colors. And yet now the actual feeling in my heart began to move toward less a redness for Anna-Marie, and yet a great deep blackness for my mother that tried to separate us. And since then, blond women reminded me of women who were possessive, whether that be protective of their children. Or even more possessive of their husbands.

But with me and Anna, there was nothing separating us.She showed me a childhood lake that she liked swimming in when she was a kid. And we both used the night time to savor the feeling of darkness we both felt for our parents, even if we had not completely known each other yet. There was a certain level of trust we had that simply was not there among our family members. It was one of the few months we got to see each other, and some nights I would worry about her, do to the little bit of information that I knew about her father.

Because we both saw in each other, something more.Something we didn’t want to admit. Because we both new, despite our different backgrounds, that nothing would separate us by our own volition. Even if that meant dating a common criminal, and my father… Oh my father.Who was a headsman and a half.I grew up with this one fantasy game like a long of kids that grew up between 2004-2007. I had more complicated feelings about those characters, possibly more than any other work of science fiction and fantasy I’ve played or read.

I used to really fucking hate this one character in this one video game, because she reminded me of my next door neighbor, whom … was probably one of my first exposure to someone with Narcissistic personality disorder. So I was a bit harsher than what some may view as natural.

But from my perspective, I had known one British and one Spanish girl that reminded me heavily of the one character.

In both cases, I had grown extremely cynical about girls in general: in particular I distrusted the idea of someone that used to hate you, suddenly having a crush on you later. I always wondered if women like this were secretly carrying a stiletto to stab me in the back.

From an early age I developed heavy issues of distrust of other women, and being trans did not help matter.

I saw in this one character I did like, something more. Some better part of myself, that I didn’t want to admit. And he was able to tolerate the character I hated, despite loving the girl I loved in the game.

For me, when I met Anna-Marie, my feelings for her were an odd mixture of the girl I liked and the girl I didn’t. I was never quite sure which one it was. It only took a moment to fade to black, when I was hit by an oncoming bus. Strapped into a broken motorcycle, cycling their the air like an airplane. I expected it to hurt for more than how it manifested.

Une Danse De Mort

SCENE 1 – TATTOO PARLOR

HEMATO: Francaise hanasemasu ka?

ARTIST: Non, parlez vous Nihongo?

HEMATO: Only a little.

Hemato sits in a chair, waiting for the tattoo artist to insert the needle.

HEMATO: So sure you the QR code will scan properly?

ARTIST: Relax Hemato, with this technology, there wont be any mistakes.

Hemato had just learned how to drive, and was already able to drive a motorized scooter. While others preferred motorcycles, she had the final laugh, when she could simply plug her transportation in. And not have to worry about Gas prices.

SCENE 2 – The first civil Rights Era

While we normally think of the civil rights era, in terms of figures like Martin Luther King, perhaps an even greater tragedy was the gradual rising of gas prices. It wasn’t terribly expensive back then. Yet now scientist are discussing about climate catastrophe by the time 2050 rolls around.

At home, Hemato cringes slightly with the pain of her new QR code. She hoped that it would actually scan her identity information, and a local host address to bounce back to home server.

HEMATO: That hurts like a bitch.

TELEVISION: On tonight’s gossip, ex actress wins deal for new soft core animation.

It seemed like everyone was sporting a tattoo these days, though few seem to enjoy the spectacle of being scanned by their phones.

She didn’t care that it was radio active.

SCENE 3 – HOSPITAL – A WEEK EARLIER

Hemato is resting on the emergency room, because she crashed her motorized scooter. They replaced the arm with the code.

So she went back, and got another. It was new 3D printed organic prosthesis, grown from her own cells. Said technology could also lead to regrowing human bodies, particularly in cases of mistaken execution.

But only the rich could afford it.

HEMATO: ( In her mind, dancing to a harpsichord of death and rot) I miss Anna-Marie. Why can’t you be here?

Allure In Death

It is never easy to discuss one’s own vulnerabilities. Whether that is for the death of your beloved pet, your favorite uncle, or your wife from a malignant cancer. Some deaths are inevitable, and yet others feel less preordained because of the overwhelming sense of the present moment. While it was easy for me to not grasp this when I had tried topping myself so many times in my young life, somehow when it involves someone else, the feeling puts you in an even greater depression than if you had never met the girl. That feeling of total helpless, that total lack of the innocuousness; the overwhelming feeling of being the only one left in the world. For me, I was a vampire who lived with a family of humans. You may think I’d let this get to me.

But I’m not that kind of girl.

If only life could flow like sweet rose metal, and not like the thorns. And yet sometimes the rose petals are mixed within, that feeling of pain and regret all over again. At sometimes I would see the spirit of the wolf in my dreams, and wake up constantly with screams and breathlessness. And I reach out for some hidden hand of a love that is no there. Instead it is the hand of death and despair, the knowledge of the passing of someone you life. The feeling of constantly seeing a lover’s execution over and over again. Yet life never gives you second chances, even when one wants to bring their lover back from the dead.

To think, instead, that the real world treats us like monsters. The villains in old western movies; movies of young damsels being ran over with a train. Yet my mind feels like I walked right into the train tracks from the get go, my world not letting me die in peace to once again be with my beloved. The feeling of earthly estrangement drawing nearer and nearer with no end in sight. The feeling of being a pawn in a game of chess.

My relationship with Anna was not the best.

Nor the worst. It was what we had with indifferent parents.

And sometimes the indifference is the worst.

What people call a split personality, is simply extensive compartmentalization; everyone does it, some better than others. For me, this manifests as different applications, on a local machine.

To save me from the websites, that make me want to rip out my spleen. For life and death, a recount of a story in between. For French girls, my relationships were always different, even from other girls within my class periods. Most other girls I had a vague hope that I could someday love them, but the closest to this I’ve ever gotten to a girl from France is to be able to say “This girl, my friends, is a beautiful young girl that I cannot hate.”

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the past, and perhaps that is why I choose to resent the nature of French girls above all other girls from Europe, despite having more negative interactions for those in other places in Europe. But this is like telling an African not to hate a French infantry men, when they’re under occupation. For me, the interaction was not anything so direct. Rather it is more in the specific of not interacting. Howe we choose to interact with others, says much about who we are as a person; how we don’t is much the same way. Although it should be noted that my interactions with either Germans are French has never been the same as it was in high school; I like girls in Birkenstocks, whether that be Arizona style or Boston Clog. Whether it is them dangling their beautiful manicured heels, or other quirks of fetishistic desire.

There was a blond who would do things to try to get my attention; but I was so stuck in my own personal anxieties that I never considered interacting; often then meant off hand random phrases about how I never really fit it with Punk or Goth girls; I danced so far to the beat of my own drummer, I was all the way to the Communitarian end. Communitarianism, specifically of the hacktivism variety, is a form of libertarianism that focused on communal needs; but in a world where people are stuck within their own individual concerns, even for myself, it was difficult to even get a word in, in the face of the onslaught of multiple cars being tossed under, to the rhythm of cybernetic motorcycles, and total disintegration.

“Oh shit now, I knew I shouldn’t have cropped my hair.”

She was a very different type of voice from Anna-Marie, who stayed in the side-lines never speaking to anyone. It was almost as if she was a kind of ghost in the class. This was most note able in art class.

She was the only one I ever spoke with.

Maybe she was a better word smith. While I ground invisible axes.

Made by deranged blacksmiths.

Anna-Marie would always give me a heads up about the girl, with the hair color of fairies slaughtered by battle robots. Their heads falling off their shoulders, the crimson noticeably from the blue in which it came.

Perhaps there is a lot I could go into here, but to be honest, I’m not a hubzilla or friendica profile. This isn’t the first draft of somebody’s trashy romance novel, written on a pop fiction website for hopeless romantics. I may be a hopeless romantic, but I’m not so hopeless as to lower myself to that, while subsequently uploading the same content in which I rant, on its very bandwidth. It is a story of my own sensuality, with everything between love and hate. Even if that means it’s time to masturbate.

Because we all do it people.

But all this to say, French girl had their own allure.

For Anna-Marie, this allure was in death.

What They Call Loneliness

What they call loneliness, in the world of the net, is really a symptom of addiction. Some call it addiction to the social life, despite all the evidence to the contrary based on its unsociableness. The symptoms a manifestation of a larger disease more toxic to humanity than the fetish for blood and decapitation. For me, I find as I move toward using more federated network, I find that I can actually get more actual interactions that I need, that I’ve never received anywhere else. But on some level this is a mechanism of coping, not unlike the girl on the street who is doping. Yet not third world enough to grant sympathy.

One of the main issues, some may call self-fulfilling prophesy, although I simply call it being realistic, is how it seems like you never really can really on reliably a European to teach you the language. This is especially the case among girls of that country; there seems to be this unspoken rule that if someone mentions wanting to learn a language, then maybe it’s a good idea to say in a false promising way “Oh maybe I can show you one of mine?”.

But then you just kind of know, like people from Seattle, the reason they never really through is their tendency to be flakes. This isn’t an issue of political correctness, it’s just an observation about how French people seem to treat people of American heritage.

This was one of the reasons I was unsure whether I really felt comfortable meeting Anna-Marie, although ultimately there were other issues that made whether or not French people were reliable at much of anything largely a moot point. Because you were the only two who trusted each other enough just to get by in this strange world. A world where when a French girl doesn’t get along with her own country, and an American with hers, ultimately it becomes a very toxic game of hate fucking and anti-desire.

It consumes you in entire.

Like being ran over with tires. Splatter. Pop goes the weasel. Boom box bursting the voice box. Radio night streaming, skeleton man screaming, Dreaming of another time when one could break up far sooner.

And yet there was something else.

Something to make you hold on.

I’ve had issues with blond girls ever since I met the one French-American and Spanish-American girls back in fifth grade; the impression I had gotten was that in general, while both Latinas hated attractive people (although don’t mistake this for assuming I consider myself attractive), they both liked “Ugly Men”.

There were several reasons why this was an issue, but let’s first begin with the statement and judgment call we call “Ugly”. In American contemporary usage, and this permeates across various fields of life, including fashion; the word ugly carries the meaning of being unattractive. The word homely began being used in the same way during my era, even though it had originally meant “someone I want to take home with me.” It didn’t seem like there was enough of their immigrant background for them not to realize the very American context. It was one thing for Bianca to treat me this way, as I had once confused her for a Mexican (kids say that kind of stupid shit all the time). But with Stephanie, there was no possible way for her to think I was confusing her for anybody. It was a grudge I had hidden for all the years of my life.

Around the same issue, blond girls, which Stephanie was almost, became increasingly associated with bitchy behavior, doubled with the fact that one girl I knew in high school, essentially rejected me using my best friend as a proxy; it wasn’t that I wouldn’t have accepted being rejected, but rather I was already dealing with gender identity issues, often being referred to as effeminate. Apparently I was so feminine, like one of the girls, that Emily decided to reject me in a backhanded fashion, highlighting some of her own issues. Mom was also becoming increasingly narcissistic at the time, and it all set the stage for my issue with petite blond girls with cat eye glasses. I was prepared to think of French girls as one way, and not this other way that turned out to be incorrect. But then, and why I jokingly refer to them as Latinas, was what said the stage for the other misunderstanding, and allowed me to be victimized by my ex.

There was a book web site I read a long time ago, that labeled France and being Latino. I already had developed issues about Latino girls, based on my limited interaction with Spanish girls, and why I chose for many years not to learn Spanish, do to associating the language with Flamenco and whatever genre of song the word La Paloma was, which was later adapted across the Latin European world, and was beloved by the Belgian princess. As someone who had for many years hated Folk Music, it made me that much more determined to hate Spanish thing. As someone who was willing to give French girls a chance, and having been somewhat of a Francophile to begin with, ultimately everything seemed to come to ahead.

I felt totally betrayed, because I liked French girls.

I wanted to reject all Romance languages. My ex, whom I had known in trans support group, emotionally manipulated these issues further, and wanted to manipulate me into being something of a Francophobe.

It took at the strength I had.

But I also had a darker secret.

A Dangerous Game Of Deranged Chess Masters

Love crashes into you like an oncoming van, crash victim speeding on a motorcycle fueled up on nitroglycerin; the dangerous game of deranged chess masters warring for to win a round of blow jobs and doggy style. A game of blood, necks, and teeth; the angular blade hitting similarly to a headman’s sword. There was a time I didn’t think I’d ever date, preferring to recline in a private jet and masturbate; watch nothing but porn stars on holographic screens, textured with various kinds of cell shading.

It was then, as I lay thinking I was dying, remembering the smell of sweat and tears by my ex room mate Kat Mac. “Have you ever thought of writing for erotica magazines, you sure have the sex drive for it.” Alone, my body returning to the midnight forest, where wolves hunt the deer, and beers for the fish.

My life of one dying wish.

To see Anna-Marie again. Instead I dreamed of snoring on the motel bed, the texture of fallen hair on the floor, and the uncleaned dishes that were only washed in the bath tube. “Or am I renting to much head space.” I woke up in the hospital, in a daze. The doctor said that I had been out for a week; I was more worried that they could peer into my mind, using a dream-scanning machine, my dreams of silent hills and ghosts of another past, merging into a collective group of various government entities in the verge between life and death. For some people, what they see is a tunnel of light, but for me it was always night.

Except for me and my angel.

My Anna-Marie. The girl who wore a lopsided bow, and at other times a flower in her hair. As we snuggled under the moonlight, dreaming of fireflies and lady bugs. A dream of being with her again, as I lay beyond the mortal life. “No, I’m just thinking about something else” I would say to Kat Mac, who was not my Anna-Marie, but some monster from my past whom I had hoped to leave forgotten, like dust in the wind.

Because for me, there was only Anna.

As opened her coffin, and kissed her cheek.

And dreamed of being with her in death. Instead I grabbed my shotgun, which I had purchased on the black market, outside of the oversight of my parents, whom were now hopelessly bought into the state; even for dad, whom had lost his prostate, among other organs. Yet for me, there was only me, the whole me, and nothing else.

Me, for my Anna-Marie.

And I dreamed of severed lady heads, laying beside me on my lap. The last moments of their life fading into total darkness, while simply no longer wanted to feel alone. So I could be with somebody, into eternity.

But life is a guillotine.

You have to be cut throat.

My Own Desires

When I had met Anna-Marie, one of the first nights we allowed her to visit my place, was when she had various cuisine styles she wanted to teach me, because she knew that I liked to cook. She introduced me to Pate D’Alsace, and when I lovingly spoke French to her, she would always correct me on the grammar. But I always took it in good cheer. There was some reason I knew that she didn’t want to come back to her place, so when I was visit with her outside of these occasions, she would hang out at the local bookstore, focusing primarily on foreign language. Of course, the language she chose would be French.

At night, when she once cooked for us, she made a dish that we all really loved. although it was closer to Italian than French, because mom’s rebel streak kept her from being willing to cook in a French fashion all the way, which meant including a tomato sauce in recipes that called for cream, among other variations. One night, Anna-Marie was gone for a little to long, and I wondered why she wasn’t there to teach me how to cook. Then the restroom flushed, but the soup was still boiling, and the tea was brewing.

“Is everything OK Desiree?” I asked.

Desiree had been my first girlfriend before Anna-Marie, though we mostly dated online. “My name is Anna, who is Desiree?” she asked, flabbergasted. “You’re not seeing other girls are you?” she finished.

“No, it was someone I dated before you.”

“But you said I was your first date.”

“Anything to get you in my pants.”

Anna-Marie pushed me out of the way, determined to finish the cooking that I started. “I’ll make you a soup to prove how much I love you.” I wasn’t sure what this meant exactly, but I knew that previously she had had troubles with law enforcement, because other friend’s familla she visited had gotten sick. “Because I’m you’re girl, no Desiree.”

Nothing seemed to come of it at first.

At the dinner table, we eat the soup. I was the only one in the family, besides Anna-Marie, that didn’t seem to get sick. My parents were polite enough not to say anything, but when Anna-Marie had not visited one night, mom told me “Next time she comes, it’s long pig for dinner. Say goodbye to the French girl.”

Our relationship had never been the same sense.

And now I long for a day when I can cook like Anna-Marie, because her cooking was no bad at all. My parents were just narcissists. They pretended to be sick, just so they could get my darling in trouble. Have her dumped overboard into the sea.

So much for Lobster night.

For my darling Anna-Marie.

Despite the ill will even if we both take pills, slowly we turn to the inside of the mind. Rear u turn, unwind. Enjoy the car crash enveloping into flames. Death in a flash, two times over. Deny ones inner lust; enjoy the seatbelt turned to rust. Savor the pulsing sensation of inglorious feelings having their way. Reality changes with age; Enjoy the car crash enveloping into flash, killing you at a tender age. No more vigilantes, no more rescue from rust. If only I had never met Desiree, the girl that kick started my anxiety, when it had once died. My issue with French girls was indirect, and not the easiest to follow, although my assumption had never been that they were blond, which an entirely different issue.

For me and Desiree, we had met each other on Quizilla. I was fifteen and she was thirteen. She was the second French girl I had ever known. We used to watch together, movies like Godzilla. We dated for about a year, but for me it felt like many a year.

Desire did not kick start my issue with blonds, but was a contributed factor. But she was never prime enough to multiply by fifty nine; I certainly was not her modular inverse, to unfold her life’s puzzles. Yet she created many quizzes, similarly to this other place that models itself more after another writing site, but still has personality quizzes. This was before the French had invaded the decaying United States. For me, I had already had issues with Bianca and Stephanie, but had just gotten out of the swing of detesting Flamenco and masked vigilantes. I understand the irony of my hunting after other vampires. Our love was temporary, finite. She treated me like my hair was covered in mites. But I justified it as being already. We split because she was an awful kink shamer, and I simply wanted to be stoner.

“So when you see you like girls in Birkenstocks?” she asked, briefly holding back the second portion. Then resuming, “Do you mean you like girls because they wear Birkenstocks?” At the time I had been unaware of French fashion, and the French had had long term issues with Germans, which I would learn later they were associated with.

“I don’t, but what if I said I did?” I said.

Needless to say, she didn’t take this challenge to well. So I built up this suspicion of the idea that in general girls who were of French heritage didn’t like to be challenged. More so they any other person of female gender. Me begging the question, good will was never dealt out like even thinning rose petals. I simply wanted pour down her throat molten metal. But, the idea, despite the thought, gave me something of a sour throat. I had resolved from that point onward, which Anna-Marie challenge inside me, to never again date a French girl. I tried finding more Celtic girls to date, and developed a fancy for Swedish girl. But most of these problems finding dates, came down to this particular disdain for crepes and chocolate flavored Flamenco, near the Southern edge of Spain.

My body was object, rotten meat,

I caved into my own desires.

No Breads To Share

You may wonder, if the technology were available, why I would personally choose not time travel; the reason is simple, whenever I wrote about time travel at a young age, it was a matter of allowing myself the witness the execution of my beloved princess within the pages of a digital LitRPG novel. There was something about the flow of blood, draining from their severed neck. And the feeling of fluid that once gave life feeding my inner core. In traditional Vampire lore, the vampire is the one that drains the blood.

But with the execution of a French girl, her neck slowly lowering into the stock of the guillotine, it was the idea of not having to kill them myself. For deep down, I knew that, as I watched in horror as my father raised up the blade on Anna-Marie, that part of me did not really want them to die. But there was a part of me, despite the desire to not see it happen, that reveled in the eye of seeing ones dark brown almost black locks fall inside the wicker basket, where other revolutionary heads of women have been before. In my own personal lore, I dream of vampire queens, and werewolves Kings. Yet in these dreams of dreams, I knew that, despite my own inner lust for the darkness, that I would never been one of the demons. Midnight eclipse falling, the rotation of the Earth, allowing for a certain gravity lunar frequency for lust. The lust of sharpened bloody axes and angular guillotine blades gone to rust, the flow of gentle B cup breasts covered in genial tears. The best beheading of a French girl I had seen all my years.

But the reality was, I was not a vampire.

I was only one in the desire for blood. But I always hated others, whom never thought twice about killing French girls, my father adapted nicely to his new job as a headsman, after working as a short order cook. “What can I say? I like cooking pork.” – In reference to him sending beheading girls to the dissection chamber of lore. This was not the chamber of disillusioned chamber maids, or the flow of severed braids as younger ones entered the orphanage to sing Roman Catholic hymns inside of a decorative dome. This was not Rome, nor was this France. Now it was the old United States, where France took its place.

We beheaded women in their underpants.

We beheaded them in long flowing dresses, we tore to expose the neck.

And everything in between, disillusioned poodle skirts. The flow of gentle blood squirts, that came from fare ladies whom were once flirts.

We didn’t need a hell.

I was already in it.

Anna-Marie was the first to understand our language gap, that kept me from being able to make myself try to deal with being around Spanish and French girls, and other Latinas of the European continent. After the French take over, we kept a low key profile. We only met once or twice a week. Even then I had a feeling she was doing things that she never bothered telling me about. Would you be willing to tell an executioner, you were trying to poison your father? In this time, he became increasingly frazzled.

We finally broke up, when I told her, jokingly, that I liked dead girls more than ones still breathing. Even though I didn’t like dead girls, what I liked was blood play, the entire misunderstanding made our relationship gradually fall apart. We didn’t have a yelling match, but she was constantly afraid to be around me, because she thought I’d cut her head off at any moment, despite doing that would essentially mean going rogue. But I was rogue among other rogues, preferring to sling dagger blades instead of shotguns.

I only got a Guillotine Gun later.

A guillotine gun was a special form of bladed projectile weapon. The projectile would not have as much freedom in trajectory as a regular bullet: the blades were for decapitation, the victim restrained by a portable Lunette. Strapped to a portable board once the body was paralyzed, the preist would guide their soul into the afterlife, if they were not already atheistic. Whether Anna-Marie was Spanish or French, it no longer mattered: she was a child, and so was I. Despite not wanting to watch another girl die, my paralysis allowed her to leave me behind.

A left my only love in hell.

In a world behind.

She was such a quiet girl, and I never understood her tendency to avoid talking to me during the hours in which both of us would be up. We were both insomniacs, but lived in somewhat different time zones. And much of the time she was visit family up in Montagna. These were the hours I would spend writing, or imagining myself riding fictional horses under the sunset, with her riding behind on my back. But instead we both rode the rail less train tracks across different parts of the united states, splitting off our lives at the knee. Why she chose to come back to the old country of Tennessee, was never something I ever understood.

The Americas, after the war, borrowed significant amount of French culture, one of which involved executing foreign nationals au contraire to international law. This meant she was at constant risk of being recaptured; like an outlaw in the wild, robbing different banks across the country. Anything to keep her from being apprehended in her own home country, where the corpses of her dead brothers and father still lay behind, and her sister Ursula never forgiving her for this sin. There was a chance she would be murdered again.

While I still masturbated, to girls being beheaded on the guillotine. But not really wanting them to be dead. I watched movies about alien invaders, and wondered how much, if people knew the reality of my own fetish and kinks, whether I would be treated in the same way as her. Despite her more numerous experience in the deserts across the old empire. The empire that once housed an land far more expansive than the Roman empire, and yet lasted for a shorter time frame, do the greed of man, and the coming of the Nuclear Bomb. Much of the world, after World War III, became a vast open desert expanse.

When back in Tennessee, we would go to bowling alleys, go to movies together. And very occasionally she would give me a foot job with her Birkenstock Boston Clogs she wore barefoot, and give me lovely blow jobs under a mistletoe tree when our parents were not home. We had just graduated high school. And I knew that my mom would not be back in town for a while, so I thought. One blow job would not hurt. Unzipping, tee shirt ripping. My wrists tied to the edges of the bed, the feeling of masturbation lotion in the homestead. But no dog collars, under the flow of soft L.E.D. lights.

She only stood in the pillory, when she stole those pair of Birkenstocks, and that’s when they finally pursued the other investigation, that resulted in the death of most of her family members. Thus my family was called on the scene.

If I could describe myself, it is something similar to the offspring of Elizabeth Bathory crossed over with Camilla. I didn’t use to think I could date a girl outside the web. Given the nature of my condition, for loving women with their heads cut off, their heads rolling into a wicker basket, you might not think I’d love a girl outside of Le Guillotine Familla. I live just a few yards into the twenty first century, and I can still here the screams of women pleading for their lives in the various revolutions of France.

And yet the idea of a girl, whose head would be on a metal slab in the mortuary, was never something I’d think would bother me before. I spent so many nights and days after school masturbating to severed necks, the flow of blueish fluid gradually becoming as dark as a crimson sky, the flow of Flamenco on the piano, to sinister rhymes. Yet the song of the lost children, played in deranged melodies, the song of madness; the song of decay; the song of the damned. The song of a girl crying, while holding the severed head of her once true love. It was with this, that I had made my decision. That I could keep her severed head, and treat her as one of my own children, and run as far away from town as I could.

But the real world was a no man’s land, a land where secret police stalk the street. A world where girls wore wooden shoes on their feet, for lack of stores that could sell normal foot ware at a decent price. This was a land of giant cock roaches, the return of hair lice. The return of the old classes in earlier centuries.

I wanted my world to end.

Yet I wanted to end my life on my own terms. I wanted to finish the obligations that I had left as a fiction writer, even if it was only a few autobiographical shorts. But there were some autobiographical facts that people almost never share. A world with no self-realization. That there is a part of us, just like Dracula and Carmilla:

Where the new Bastille was rising,

The land of total uprisings.

A land of dirt and decay.

The dead is arising.

And there is no bread to share.

Resentment For The

I grew a total resentment for the mortal life; the life of crawling into ones own inner cave. A cave where only the good die young, the bandits die younger. And those in between are tossed into a hell in between. I wanted some vague nation, of a distant love beyond masturbation lotion. A girl I could travel Europe with, leave the United States behind. And travel her old country of Alsace. Where the flowers were always blooming, even if it were not the land of the University Of Flowers. Ride on airships and and hot air balloons. And think of soft fluffy teddy bears.

I wanted my life to be beyond anything I ever known.

Anything, but this sense of hate.

Anna-Marie’s severed head was not traditionally beautiful.

She had very long curly blond locks, with a flower in her hair. At times I think I see life in her eyes, and yet I can never be certain. Is that what a severed head looks like? I thought, because it was far more beautiful, and yet more tragic than I ever imagined. When I stared into her face, seeking comfort and love, I thought of the times that we could have had together. At times I do her make up for her, even though I’ve never been good at putting it on myself. God damn, do I miss her. I miss everything about her.

And yet now, she is here with me always.

You might be surprised how easy it is to hide a person’s severed head. Especially if the state already considers them to be dead. To think that I could finally fulfill my desire, and yet this desire feels so empty and sad. There are times when I wonder, quietly, as i write notes to my publisher, why it is I chose to waste my life. There was a time when I had wanted to go horse back riding with her, but we lived in a time when there was no more need for the chevaul. When I was hiding from my parents, I visited the lack that we used to spend together, and I would keep her severed head besides me, hoping that there would be something that could bring her back. I brought my favorite sub sandwiches, but I could not be genial to a severed head.

Is this the point that we all come to?

When I’ve seen the dead.

Previously, in an extra measure to extend the suffering of those sentenced to decapitation by guillotine, when France had taken control of the once United States, they had created a special kind of guillotine prior to the invention of the Guillotine Gun. This method of decapitation, had special rests for the arms, such that, prior to the victim being beheaded, they would drive blunt screws into their wrists, much in the same way back in the middle ages, torturers would use thumb screws to extra confessions. This was generally used for specific political crimes, such as those involving espionage and information gathering from rival American states. Even if the guillotined continued to be relatively quick, the executioner would delay their execution as long as possible in order to make the ordeal as painful as possible to extract the most information. The only reason Anna-Marie never underwent this, was do to the grace of being female.

Receiving special treatment on account of being female, is hardly a unique thing for the Twenty First century; during the middle ages women were generally burnt at the stake, rather than drawn and quartered for this very reason. Often, in cases where sentences were commuted, this would mean that women would most frequently be commuted to merely being beheaded, back when drawing and quartering was on the book. When it came to around the long nineteenth century, women continued to get largely preferential treatment. This continued into the great war era, when France would commute most women’s sentences to life in prison, while the men were still, in some cases, even publicly beheaded by guillotine. This meant that, up until the Vicci era, women were largely immune from having their heads taken off.

This changed when Marine La Pen became La Presidente, when The Far Right wing began to take control of the French government. She had initially lost in 2017, but ran took control of France in a Coup, leaving much of the Left Wing establishment in shambles. She undid much of the Pro LGBT legislation that was on the books, resulting in many Gay, Lesbian, and Trans women sent to similar containment camps as Muslim people, as they would often fight against the treatment of such people. The old slang term for French People was Frog; Marine La Pen was a gigantic demonic toad, whose ice cold blood could cut through you like a stone. Such was the reason the Anna-Marie was glad that her family had moved from France when they did; she was never sure how to tell her family that she was into girls.

My case was equally tricky; for many years I had mostly considered myself into women, but recently I had become more open about being into guys, resulting in considerable confusion as a trans woman about the kind of people I was into. And by this point, though it was often treated as a way of being anti-French, I was more against the practices of the French death penalty, although technically I was against capital punishment everywhere. So it made my already frazzled personality worse, as I was unsure of whom I could trust to communicate my real feelings; especially when I knew that in reality, I loved French girls more than anyone else. I tried hiding this by trying to find Dutch women to date, and I still like them very much, but to many there was something about the light olive skin tone, and lemon juice dyed hair, and the gentle shapes of their tender throats, as I wanted to gently bite into their soft juicy necks.

Anna-Marie used to wonder if I’d bite her in the neck. Instead the blade of the Dreadful Climb did. Spraying her blood into the wooden basket.

And leaving me alone to my thoughts.

“Oh hey Anna-Marie, what’s up?” I asked. I remembered the first time that was had dated.

“I told you not to let your mind wander around me.” said she. She hopped on top of my on the floor of my room when my mom wasn’t home, all my worries fading away as if they were merely nothing to be concerned about. “I can’t date someone who likes dead girls.” She noticed the look of horror on my face. “Sorry, I’m just kidding.”

I didn’t like dead girls, what I liked was blood. Not sure what this girl’s issue was, who sounded like she came from the hood. But I knew that she would always be there for me, or at least I had hoped. Because she was my Anna-Marie.

My Anna-Marie, who was always there.

To set my soul free.

The Cyber Mortuary of A Severed Head

SCENE 1 – VENDING MACHINE – CAFETERIA

HEMATO: Oh hey Anna-Marie, quoi de neuf?

ANNA-MARIE: Da rien, what’s you purchasing there?

HEMATO: It’s a manga magazine, has cute girls getting their heads cut off.

ANNA-MARIE: Wow, that’s a little weird don’t you think?

HEMATO: Especially in a high school cafe, no less.

SCENE 2 – CEMETERY – MIDNIGHT

Hemato would visit the cemetery every midnight. It became something akin to a ritual. She’d take her virtual reality head set, and have romantic picnics alone with her dead bride.

HEMATO: I know you always found me weird, Anna-Marie. But I alone, loved you the most.

Hemato carried around the severed head of Anna-Marie, after Hemato refused to let the memory of her girlfriend die, before she was executed by GUILLOTINE GUN.

HEMATO: We can be together in death.

SCENE 3 – CYBER MORTUARY

Hemato’s dead body would later be found, but Anna-Marie’s head was barely alive. Hemato’s mind was uploaded to a digital catacombs. As was Anna-Marie’s.

The Severed Head Of Anna-Marie

In high school I would visit the ero guro latte machine, purchasing a copy of gorno anime along with a nice cup of vanilla hot latte. Ero Guro was a literary genre that came out of Japan, the original idea being the “beauty in the ugly.” But had gradually came to mind the fertilization of mutilation and other graphic content. But for me, I didn’t care for the disembowelment, for a multitude of differing factors. But the main one was that generally I only liked severed necks, and the blood that would gush out of them.

Anna-Marie would never say anything, but it was a topic that we always tended to avoid. We would talk about other things, like the most current movie we watched on a Saturday night, such as Another Man, Another Chance. I never liked westerns growing up, but made a special exception for French girls.

Yet inside, there was a darker reason.

Something that I had kept from the innocence of the world. I would fantasize about ordering a side of severed French girl’s head, recline with it on the bed. And dream dreams of sweet little angels screaming, before their heads drop. Yet the Ero Guro latte machine, would always be a whirring, when my old man was stirring. And I knew, despite the darkest nature of my myself, that I wanted to protect my girl from my dad.

The girl as by Annabelle Lee.

And those seraphs I would I beheaded on a guillotine, would visit me in dreams, and give me sweet teddy bears, as a form of peace offering, as wedding gift between me and my Anna-Marie. It was then that I had decided, against all the loss of my hope.

That we were married in death.

I would get constant erections from blond girls with cat eye glasses, getting it in the neck from a guillotine gun. Shot with a paralyzing agent, I shot the blade as quickly as I could, to minimize the amount of pain that my vampires would experience. Because unlike these monsters, I actually had concern for their well being. Even if that meant putting their heads on a wooden stick, sticking it in the ground, and watch as others paraded it around town. But in my minds eye, there heads would roll in my lap.

I would remembers the sweet angels scream.

And I would feel like ending it all. Anna-Marie never did anything to be beheaded for, and yet I had let my father kill her, and there was still a part of me that could not forgive myself for her death. Even if in the legal sense it was not my fault. There were hints, in my early years, that I may become like this. But I didn’t want this to be my destiny.

I was a shell without my soul.

I wanted to be under the knife.

When you attempt suicide, some people assume the world will stop for you. The reality is, when you’re lying down, bloody on the floor, there is a part of you that wanted to die more quickly, so it’s basically a non issue. Instead one lingers, inside of the dirty floor of a motel room, with your hand reaching out … searching for someone to take you to the hospital. But being treated as essentially a non person.

Ultimately, I began to make peace with the idea that I would eventually bleed to death. Made peace with the fact that I would never see Anna-Marie again, and simply make my death more comfortable. But I was dizzy and tired, and I couldn’t stand up straight. I had not cut my own head off, but injured myself. I needed a bandage, but I was several miles from the hospital. Hope fading nightly, lying on the floor. And yet in the darkness, was the spirit of Anna-Marie, who reached out a hand guided me into the light.

But as I walked outside, there was nobody there.

There was only the sound of my own inner madness.

For my lost Anna-Marie.

It was like a ghost town, with almost everyone inside, to hide away from the vampires. But the only one I knew, curled her finger as if it to call me. I walked forth, with hesitation, with my guillotine The loaded. But when I got within range, she ran off. Behind me I could here the sound of growling, and it sounded like some sort of freed animal, much like a being in a laboratory breaking down the door to eat a person.

It tried to bounce on me, and I tried firing the blade at its neck.

But I missed. Instead, I heard the sound of a shot gun. The silhouette of Anna-Marie firing her weapon from beyond the grave. I flinched, something that had become something of a habit. The animal died quickly. I looked closer, in the alley way. It looked to be one of the law enforcement’s special modified canines, merged with decades of wolf genes, into something more muscular, and much more fierce.

I grabbed my guillotine gun, and aimed.

I put it out of its misery. The sound of yelps coming in the distance. I could here sound of cybernetic enhanced police robots. Quickly, I had behind a dumpster, as one of them checks to see what happened. The robot then goes back to look for more wrong doers. The decapitated body of Anna-Marie nailed me to the wall.

“Hey Hemato, I need my head back.” she said.

I grabbed her severed head outside of my fanny pack. It was one of those hyper stretchy bags that I could fit almost anything inside of it.

“I thought you were dead?” I asked.

“I’m still dead, my dear.” she said.

Then disappeared.

I had just started meeting my new poetry publisher James, a little before I met Anna-Marie. I needed a father in my life, and not a girl whom I wanted to give the knife. Or thought that I had wanted to, given my sheer mind fuck at the time. I was a mess of my own contradictions, having recently become an Atheist; I refused to listen to Benediction. I gave religion the middle finger, and gave that tenant an eviction notice. Now the tenet holds out their thumb to catch a ride, requesting a ride toward Virginia.

James, who was also of The Satanic Temple, knew my own personal issues at the time, and when we were not busy finding editors and cover artists, would talk to me about my issues, related to my trust issues related to French women. We had known each for a few months, and I knew that he himself was of French heritage, but was one of the few that didn’t hold my Americanism against me; if French women were like this, I would go to bed with them right away, and give nice bottom fuckings on a water bed. Instead, generally I had had less expectations for French men over French women, with the men generally just being happy there was any woman that was willing to be nice to them, or at least not run away from them.

But for me, I had already ran away from my own life.

I was born at a time when it had been about eight years after the French banned The Guillotine, a hold over device from the late 1700s. It was a device that was indeed, quite humane for the time period, considering that everyone else was being hung, drawn, and quartered; but by the end of the nineteenth century, the electric chair was already being invented for the same purpose, and used actual technology to get the job done. American banned capital punishment technically before the French did, and that was why the French banned the practice in 1981, but then the United States thought it be such a great idea to bring back the electric chair, and replace it with Lethal Injection. It was only a matter of time before Marine La Pen, would want to bring it back.

Marine La Pen was a National Front Far Right wing party, that wanted to ally with Donald Trump once he got into office, but when she lost, left the country in a political void when Macron started being technically worse, and joining the United States in a war of dominance in a new war against the middle East. France made decapitation illegal in their own country, but decapitated many more people using bombs overseas.

Previously France had controlled various countries in Africa and the Caribbean, and some places in Asia. But now, aligned with the decaying United States empire of destruction, they began to wonder, like Cosette for Sire Willy, why they would continue to subject themselves for being under the thumb of the United States; the only reason the United States had control of as much territory as they did, was because France allowed them, with their help, to control as many countries, as they could afford to bomb.

For the United States and France was an regretful allies, like Hawaii to Washington, as the empire that once was made their last dance.

The EU tried a peaceful, kidnapped US politicians.

They were tried in international court.

Yet now in this political void, France and Germany wanted no United States again, so they used martial law to capture the United States, and make them be ruled by exactly their laws. And that was how we, as the United States, have the Guillotine.

Despite it generating into the Wild West.

I had dreamed that one of the girls I knew in grade school, visited me at night wearing a summer camp outfit and Birkenstock sandals; I developed the association with girls who were mean to your face in front of their friends, but were creepily nice to you when they were not around. I probably had more girls crushing on me than I wanted to admit, do to my lack of self-esteem at the time. “You know, I would like you. But you’re kind of ugly. Not that ugly, but kind of ugly.” She was the one wearing Jesus sandals.

In school I largely tended to keep to myself, avoiding most friendships. It was a time when I still had to wear boys clothes, despite early indications of my gender issues. A unique issue for trans women in general, yet this girl in Birkenstocks, with her long raven haired ponytail, and her beautiful smile and the dimples on her cheek, left lasting feeling of hatred for cis women in general that I still struggle to come to grips with.

A blond girl who would always smile at me in typing class in my Freshman year, there was something about her that I couldn’t trust. While I had sexual fantasies of unbuttoning her type b cup bust; spreading my seed from New York to Paris. I couldn’t put my finger on what it is that made it me hesitate to ask her out, except for the fact that there was some part of me that wanted the government to black bag her at night, take her to underground facility, giving her only bread and water. Then, without telling her where to take her, she would be shot in the back of the neck with a guillotine blade right at midnight.

I developed my first hard on.

Freaked myself out the first time, then at other times it became common for me to fantasize about her being beheaded by Guillotine in a government prison. And yet there was a part of me that never believed in Capital Punishment for anyone. Because I knew deep down, we were all little girls chasing after the light. But she would always smile at me, and I hated when girls smiled at me. I hated the tap dances they did, making fun of my shoe fetishes; and other personal desires. They were simply unaware of how much it hurt me.

All one needed to do was pull the trigger, lock them in a Lunette; there life would soon come to an end at the edge of a knife. Ones final stare into their innocent expressive eyes, watching as the blade falls down. It was thought that the Guillotine was the most humane way to go; but this did not influence my emotions much, when I knew that Charlotte’s death was a breach of justice, a practice that continued to this day.

My high school years changed me.

I longed for the dead.

Until that is I met Anna-Marie.

Who gave me an actual chance in life, and yet the government took her away from me at the slice of an angled blade. At night I dreamed about the memory of hers eyes continuing to make around. Her eyes would constantly crying do to some pain she only has in her neck but cannot vocalize. When I saw her head in the basket, I was lost and didn’t know myself.

It was the first time I ever cried. The girl that died feeling heart broken, because of my sexual interest that she found out about me. I found out for the first time in my, the state did not care about humanity. They only cared about vengeance. Vengeance against who you might ask? I had no clue, I simply wanted to go and off myself somewhere, so I could be with my darling Anna-Marie again.

I remembered the pictures in cyberspace, grabbing pictures of anime girls getting it in the neck. I remembered the women who would be paddled in school, I wanted everything to melt all away. I tried writing about this experience the first time, but it was suggested I get rid of it by my father. He didn’t want me to became a famous writer, if I ever could, and didn’t want me drawing undo negative attention on our family. It wasn’t like we already got great attention, with the news occasionally drawing attention to physical abuses down to my brothers and sisters.

I held it all inside, stayed away from the world.

It was the first time that I felt truly alone. I felt that my life had no purpose to existence besides to rot. I began to neglect my own body, and staying in bed for so long after high school. I began to dream of blond women at night, haunting the nature of my reality. I began to rot and become psychologically prone to suggestion. Among those was coming to terms with the question why I had not yet decided to dig up Anna-Marie’s body and fuck her.

Well obviously because that’s morally wrong. As I said, there was some conditions society refused to talk about. For long time even homosexuality and gender non-conformity was considered something rather taboo. And at times I would be alone imaginary little fairy girls and elf girls saying pick-a-boo. I would role play in my mind little stories about fairy girls getting it in the neck.

There was something deep inside me, that wanted something different in my life. It was difficult to articulate. I had always wanted to write middle-grade novels, but my parents would always tell me how books for children were not considered art. And they knew that I had briefly dated Anna-Marie before she died. But I knew that for her there were some aspect of her childhood she never told me herself. Over time I gave it up, and learned to restrain my tears.

I just wanted people to be happier.

Even if it meant writing a novella about a parricidal killer. I would change her name slightly, toiling on the project nightly. I would work all the way through my despair. My condition was subtle, and yet apprehensible. Yet over time I found there was something inherently different about me and my relationship with other people that could not simply be described as a mere case of necrophilia. I wanted to be with Anna-Marie in death and the afterlife.

I just didn’t want to open her tomb.

Not pry it open with a knife.

It was one of those days I had a hard time finishing lines for one of my beheading reference poems. O the short girl walking up the stairs .. but I had no lyrics for the poem, of the tragic life of a fisherman’s wife.

I wanted to write a short tale about a fisherman who comes home to find his wife has been decapitated by the ax. I had this way of taking semi-autobiographical elements and turning it into a science fiction and fantasy story, although I refused to associate with science fiction and fantasy magazines and other aspects of that particular culture. Yet I had no experience being on the sea. I had only sailed briefly with my dad, when he would take a break from his work. After all even if he killed my girlfriend and I hated him for it, he wanted to somehow bring me back to his side.

But then I thought of the poor Anna-Marie, something other than myself. I remembered when she told me about the death of her mother, and how it gradually drove her father insane. He would always comment before she died, about how he was never quite the same after her decapitation by the ax in another country she was visiting, and so he never got to return her to France. I suppose criminal intent was a family lineage, yet I saw something in Anna-Marie that wanted her families side to have its story.

And so I tried to think of yet more lyrics:

O the short girl walking up the stairs,

Is turning gray, mixed with dirty blond hair.

In her wooden clogs that abruptly come to a point,

With her arms behind her back, she’s offered a joint.

She dies beyond the scaffold stairs.

It wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be, but it was something for now. I wanted to come up with even more lyrics.

So I went all out:

With a German dress she leans on the block,

Waiting, waiting for the ax to drop.

When the blade goes a lop,

Tumbling curly dirty blond hair goes down,

I wanted something was was more about the husband, so I didn’t want to focus on her mother’s death for to long:

Here lies the broken thief, who stole a coral reef / on a fisherman’s boat.

She tossed her husband off the boat, not intended him to drown,

Before drowning in her own sorrows, becoming a clown.

I felt like I was getting into the rhythm of the poem, though I wasn’t exactly sure what the concluding lyrics would be. But I decided, I going to finish it:

Here is the thief, Whose life came to a stop.

Together they join hands in Purgatory,

Beyond the light in a pop.

The tragic life, Of a fisherman’s wife.

“Can we just decapitate that one, she’s French.”

It was the words my dad uttered in order to save my life, but on some level I felt responsible for not dying beside my true love. My dad incorrectly gendered his only daughter, who about to die under the widow gun, the gun of the guillotine. It was then I remembered the memory I had before we both got caught, threatened by decapitation.

“Waste of energy, just slit their throat. A few seconds, it’s all over.” It was a feeling I wasn’t used to having before. All my worries, all my fears. It was all coming to an end. I felt I was about to die. It was a reality I turned turned to, when I thought of those who hurt my Anna-Marie.

“It’s OK papa. Don’t worry now, this will only hurt for a second.” The sound of a young girls laughter. Then everything fell silent. Everything came to an end. “What’s wrong Hemato, why are you so scared. Why are you so erect. Hemato, get away from me. You’re scaring me.”

“You’re the one that stabbed your father.” I said.

She gave me a look as if she was was heartbroken, forlorn. She didn’t want to see me like this, on some level … she wanted to protect me from herself. “Hold me Hemato. Please don’t hurt me. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I feel like I haven’t been myself lately. I normally hide the real me from you. I’m sorry. I failed you.”

Then she was gone in a blink of an eye.

They spared me that day, but not my Anna-Marie.

My sorrow I wont lie. “I understand if you hate me for killing him, but you’re the one jacking off to me losing my head.” A common misunderstanding of my condition, one that set my last days with her forward.

I don’t like it when people die, I simply have an attraction to other people’s blood. “I don’t ever want to see you again.” she said. She never got the chance to, the bladed widow took her life. We were merely kids then, her being seventeen and I was nineteen. At first I thought that our love, chosen by the stars, would last forever. I suppose I was wrong. At times I felt my life had never started at all, and I would not be here if not for James.

“There is so much in life to live for. Don’t stand on the edge.” I lived my life constantly on edge, and yet he wanted me off of it. He did not quite understand the depth of my disorder, and my guilt. But he truly wanted to make me happier.

He knew that I felt I had failed her, and yet when I tried to take my own life months before, he stood beside me and comforted me. Although I was a lesbian, and he was straight, I found some attraction in him that was different from the one love I had for Anna Marie. He wore a pair of stylish virtual reality goggles, and would toggle different aspects on his analogue computer. It was like completely changing cultures. I was lower middle class, and yet found myself in the grasp of Steam-punks.

Society still has a long way to go before accepting sanguophilia–or in more scientific terms Hematolagnia. I earned the nick name Hemato as a reference among friends. Homato Tomato, the dark red sauce of life at its end. The attraction of blood, as the world believes you are attracted to acts of cruelty.

And yet I am apposed to death and execution.

Before I had met her I went through my whole life wracked with guilt. My original assumption was that I was interested in beheaded girls, and not just their blood. This caused uneasy relationships among friends, who always treated me as secretive. But in a world where homosexuality becomes increasingly accepted into mainstream society, people that actually have paraphilias are left in the dust.

I am a blend of metal and flesh, the rusted robot of our time.

As I come to terms with my own humanity.

I am unassuming, some might saying extremely so. Some other may find me raving mad, it depends largely on who you talk to. We all live in our own personal controversies, and yet there is nothing more sacred than the blood of life, it’s fluid the power to give and take your life away in an instant.

Me and Ann would have frog legs for dinner, and French bakery bread. For me the only positive thing to really say about the French were fashion and food. And yet here we were supporting the French at the edge of the world of massive advertisements and general ubiquitousness. As ubiquitous as the fascination for blood. When I saw the blade drop through her neck, I found myself having a mixture of different emotions. Although certainly this was not the start of my sexual attraction to blood. I felt a mix of attraction and repulsion I couldn’t explain. There was some unspoken rule of not going up and hugging her decapitated head.

I merely hug and consume the bread of life.

Beyond the dreamer’s edge, I find myself in a strange fantasy world of overgrown leaves. A world where there was still childhood, and the sacredness of youth was still there. In the darkest corner of the human mind, I found myself alone and wandering the dark. I could hear the giggles and the music box melody of Anna Marie’s favorite children’s song. Like an old fashioned country song.

I remembered her hugging me tightly at a Parisian bar, as if apologetically on her last night. Yet no words were spoken between me and her. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s Annabelle Lee I found she was a child and I was a child in this game of life and death. I found in my own personal dream world self hate and pity. And yet I knew that her life was worse.

I had known that her father would beat her senselessly, although reluctantly at first. Isn’t that how all child killers are born? And yet, and yet I became more like James. As the images of me and Anna Marie were kissing as my vision faded into the world of darkness. The darkness of the burnt out light bulb.

I remember seeing her hobble along the road as she walked in her wooden shoes. There was something in her poverty, in her despair I found someone I wanted to try to make happier.

At first this effort seemed to be working.

We were both runaways.

She was now a runaway from life.

I tell James I will be going far away forever, that I’ll miss him.

The thing about friendships, it’s never been an an easy thing for me. When you find yourself constantly befriending other people with questionable morality, you find yourself constantly doubting yourself, doubting whether you really are not just like them. Doubting whether they really are as you perceive them to be. Often one finds themselves no longer trusting anyone, assuming that every one you know is some kind of serial killer, or at least a molester. And yet do to your self-doubt you constantly stay quiet, and learn to take things as they come to you.

While one can never guess the true goings on in a killers mind when you aren’t one myself, though I’ve wondered this about many of the friends I have made, if one has any amount of empathy in them they may try to rationalize the killer’s action if said murderer were young enough and female enough. For me, this used to always happened whenever I read about serial killers. There were several things going on in my life, and largely I chose not to become parricidal–because I like eating Broccoli beef to much. Hey a girl’s got to eat your know. Obviously there are other reasons, but I simply liked eating Chinese food way to often.

But on a serious note I found myself trying to rationalize the behavior of Anna Marie largely do to my own upbringing being similar in nature.

Certainly my own father was almost never around, and much of the time he was around he would largely spend this time spanking me with a belt, or strangling me. Among other things I’ll leave to your imagination. Point being the matriarch of the family always chalked it to him having a bit of a temper, but didn’t mean to hurt me. It was this process of gas lighting that made me begin to doubt my own perceptions. My mom would always say I was at risk of becoming someone evil myself, asked me if I was a pedophile despite her own weird … things about her. While I don’t think this was the case, what I do know is I was raised since birth to doubt myself.

So when I met my darling Anna Marie, she was the one that was able to remove the doubt from my eyes, and make me see things for how they really were. When we would go for the morning newspaper, me being well enough not to wear clogs, she herself digging her finger in them to adjust things to make sure her wooden shoes fit, we would pick up a newspaper from our friend James. She was part of the time be raised by James, who she had grown to trust. She introduced me to him as well, where we spent half the time when otherwise we could never meet.

We became mended broken birds, at least for a time. And so she never told me exactly what was going on with her, although do to certain body language I always assumed she had similar issues.

So for the first time when she died, I needed a box of tissues.

I ejaculated and crying at the same time.

There are some women who give off an aspect of the innocuous. There are some who give up the vibes of complete disdain for humanity, and yet in reality things are much more complicated

The thing about me and loving women, I find that my first instinct had always been for so long to hate and distrust them. Often this would get me into trouble emotionally, as I would later freak out and try to late to kindle friendships. So often my friendships with girls were few and far between. At the time I was still dealing with my own issues about the status of my own gender.

Guillotine Families were not exactly liberal families, with a financial incentive on maintaining the death penalty. Thus I already felt alienated from them anyway, so I would never tell them about my gender issues. The matriarch would just use it as a another excuse on how they never should have had kids. So here I was isolated and alone, wandering through the world reading the diary of Anna Marie lest the state should seek to obtain and burn it. For there is much about Anna Marie I do not know. She could have been a tap dancer, a rodeo girl, or an actress in the play of life.

Yet on some level isn’t everyone’s life a kind of play, to learn to smile when you are sad, alone, and forsaken. I imagine myself picturing Anna Marie in her bedroom in her closet crying until she falls asleep. There is much within us all that we choose to hide from the world. Certainly I’m one those. I had first acquired the taste of human blood when watching movies where girls were threatened by execution. The inevitability of these movies is that none of them show the depression that lies within the darkness of human heart. I had grown my interests over time as someone who already had issues with women anyway. And thus I wondered if her own issues were exacerbated by some cause that we still have yet to truly understand.

In our society if I try to empathize with her, I have blood on my hands. For her sake I shall not masturbate and perpetuate my own cycles of misery and despair. For me and her were beyond sisters in the game of life.

And so as my life loops all over again in constant repeats of memories I wished to forget, I found myself longing for the lost Anna Marie. A lot of my mothering-girlfriend feelings in a way stem from witnesses all those years ago, seeing someone who inside was really a little girl, far to young to die at the age of seventeen. Lost in life, in a pit of despair, she would have chosen to kill herself just as once as did I before. I saw her with tears in her face all alone in a prison, being mugged by starving children in a universe where there is no longer sunlight.

On some nights I saw monsters stalking me, and I wonder whether she had some of her own night terrors. I dream about her own fantasy world, where somehow I had not truly grasped the implications of her statement about forgiveness. And that I should first try to take care of myself.

I found myself masturbating to images of beheaded princesses and queens, I found myself engaging in a self-destructive path. It was my personal path, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I would indulge in the fantasies of the flesh in pictures on cyberspace. Yet nothing would take away the feeling of being alone. Every time I masturbate I imagine that some lost young woman had to lose her head for my own core inner desires. I constantly relive the memories finding some way to cope with what I have done. I found that I withdrew further into myself, as I watched my family capture other malcontents in the street scrounging for food and stealing others clogs.

Yet at times I wondered that it would be like to live among them. My interactions with James, who had become something of a father figure more than my own dad, became fewer and fewer. And I continue to play the music box Anna Marie once gave me as a gift before she had said her statement that made me realize I was unwanted. And yet I suppose on some level everyone is unwanted at some point temporarily, and yet she never had the chance to change her mind, and come back to me another day to try to apologies.

She may have left me for good, but the point is a girl like a sweet flower girl had to die at that particular morning in the rain, and toxic clouds overhead made breathing impossible in this particular section of the city. As I hugged her severed head, and said goodbye earning the ire of my family.

Because masturbation equals heaven, and ejaculation a kind of mental redemption from of my personal sorrows. It was a way for my to cleanse my mind of tears that would well up inside that nobody else could see. And yet nothing in my mind could take Anna Marie away from me, my darling and my bride to be.

We all have things that we wish to keep hidden from the world about ourselves, whether it be our depressing childhoods, or even for some the lack of a childhood they have lived. Some people have different definitions about the definition of childhood, from those who live in the slums and the hood, to those who live off their parents wealthy estate rotting in their bedrooms alone and never coming outside to play with the other children. Because they felt alienation within themselves that is hard to verbalize, hating the fact that every aspect of their life has been a lie.

We all have pains from our past, and most people may wish to undervalue others experiencing, because for the most part mankind are inherently selfish bastards. And yet even the bitches among us have happier adventures in their youth, even when said adventures are only in the mind. For me when I had met the executed Anna-Marie, I found myself living her life as if she were myself. I adventured with her are sailing ships, explored the children’s books she had read in her youth, for my love for Anna-Marie was a love beyond mortal love. And yet over time our adventures became fewer and far between. I tried to rescue her from her brothers that would sometimes spank her instead of her father, who also whipped her as well. For like me her family treated her as if she were a demon spawn from hell.

I remember when we would explore ancient ruins, explore the inner kingdom of the mind, while feeling all over each other to make a connection across the many plains of human consciousness. At at once my memories went back to when she was led to the scaffold, and I saw her trembling with fear and loathing for man. And on some level there was something in her that I could recognize. That distrust on others that made her flinch with agony and despair.

For there were only strangers there.

At times I visit the executed Anna-Marie in the graveyard. I visit her her particular headstone. I sleep at night carefully avoided the night keeper, who would knowing my own sorrows would give a blind eye to me. As I was a trans woman and I was a nobody for this world.

The man knew that Anna-Marie despite her faults above everyone’s faults that Anna-Marie was my world. That I stay in the cold, and ate bread with mold, not caring if I became sick and died. For I have tried to date others, and have failed in my mind. And yet for her I saw something in myself. That I should have went to the guillotine and was decapitated by her side.

I opened the grave, while holding a crow on my shoulder. And the crow said, “Watch out for the boulder.” The crow pushed the boulder, and it fell. The crow got smashed by it to save some miserable life of mine, when it startled me to move out of the way. Who am I to be worth saving, for I am nobody else but a worm crawling through the grave. I think of the lonely old man James, who treated me well after she was gone.

Delirious, shuddering.

I reached out for her hand in death.

We married in death.

I’ve never been on a date before, but there is nothing like a ride on a hang glider. I sometimes worry about whether Anna-Marie may fall. But I have confidence in her abilities. And at this point, it’s not like either of us can die anyway.

We watch the world above us as the clouds of darkness converge. Yet for us there is a kind of hidden rainbow, where even the most broken of lost children can find some happiness in their new life. It wasn’t heaven in the traditional sense, but also might as well have been. When your mind has been completely copied and your life force transfered over to a computer, the difference between actual paradise and electronics is unimportant. I pointed her in the direction of the stop, and we flew together holding hands. I wondered what kind of new stories could be told between me and Anna-Marie.

But for now I leave you with, please consider carefully the value of taking another person’s life. Anna-Marie was my friend, and my life would have completely lost without her. She may be scared of you and as much as you to her, but there is something level of sweetness even in the most broken of cyberspace heaven’s children. Because at the end of the day we are all depressed and scared about something. Over time in heaven I’ve found something of responsibility to help Anna not end up her own existence, if no other reason than it would get really lonely. I find that may trauma about holding her decapitated head gradually melt away into the distance. Whatever past she had makes no difference to me, and I find myself crying tears of joy.

She helped me forgive myself.

In my mind I see horrifying futures, I’m not sure what I could do to help the world meat space. I worry about my siblings, who I have seen the future birth of the computer hacker Nadine and Vella. I’m not sure what future the world holds, but I picture myself level electronic paradise forever, holding hands with my true love and always. As we walk together into the light.

She smiles at me, as we hold hands into forever.

Don’t hate the bad girls, cause we are all children at heart.

My quirk was a mix of sexual pleasure and depression. I could go all day masturbating to decapitated heads of French women and not blink, yet there was something always there that make make even an adult cry. Some girls had similar life stories to my own, and I fall asleep as I cried. I wanted a day when friends didn’t wander off alone into the dark, on a suicidal bent to destruction. I wanted at least some girl I knew from my hometown that would survive long enough to have a family with.

Then they could take her head off if they must.

I was inherently against the idea of capital punishment, suicide even more so. Except for myself, whom I had never tried to prevent. I was left wondering what could have made a sixteen year old girl all those years ago, choose to poison her famille. Go on a hell bent penchant for destruction, a path that she knew would eventually end her life. I wandered around wondering what her life was like. It wasn’t every day you found a girl threatened by beheading, as I stood in the crowd letting it happen. But I was inherently against the idea of rescuing people that could not rescue themselves. If she wanted to die, that was her business; I certainly had no interest in stopping it.

I used to want to court girls who I wanted to rescue, but would would prefer being shot in the back of the neck with a guillotine gun than court me. It developed the habit of generally avoiding French girls as a rule. And I developed the idea in my head that any of them were actually nice to me, they would stab me in the back. So it was just as well this was happening, as she would betray me later on. For Anna-Marie La Mort, it was assumption that she would have shot herself with her own Guillotine Gun. And as her neck was slipped into the stock, after being lowered on the board, I was more preoccupied by how sensitive I was to the sounds of the drum roll.

The angular blade sliced through neck in three seconds. The head dropping into the wicker basket, the blood dripping onto her face. As her head was picked up for all to see, I could see her fading expression on her face.

The face of Anna-Marie La Mort.

Children At Heart

Between this lifetime and the next, in artificial heaven, one may meet their true love again. I met Anna-Marie Boeglin under different circumstances. It’s funny how the circumstances of your life don’t change one lifetime to the next.

She is the only girl I’ve ever truly loved.

There is nothing like having a spoiled beef with somebody. It was the year 2133 A.D., and I still haven’t gotten a digital television. My family might as well ride on horse and buggies.

The thing about family holidays, is that I very rarely ever actually got to enjoy them, as I would so often have to catch up on schoolwork. Why bother catch up on work, if you’re only going to get half credit for it, it’s really more of a teacher’s benefit than it is to the student’s benefit. Christmas and Thanksgiving were the only holidays besides traditionally Irish ones I got to celebrate with any regularity.

If you’ve ever seen a slab of corned beef, you’ll know exactly what corned beef and cabbage looks like. My mom used to make this for dinner from time to time on Irish/Scottish holidays although her own family was Welsh. Usually it would come in the form of a soup, I suppose as that is what is considered traditional. Can you blame me for initially expecting it to be my dad who would poke his fork sometimes, and just saying I just got less than I was expecting? The corn beef in the bowl would eventually go completely missing, and dad would just keep saying he wasn’t doing anything. Obviously I was to docile at that point to really say anything.

So one night I checked the inside of the fridge, as it turned out the corn beef was seemingly dissolving. So that’s what they put in that meat these days, I thought. Once again, as docile as I was I never made a sound about it. Well it turned out a few years later it turned out that studies would show that with some cows in a specific date, had almost an immortality gene. And so the beef would choose to eat itself rather have humans eat upon it.

So next time you get beef at the grocery, check the label.

You may have just eaten an immortal cow.

Now I once knew a girl who claimed to visit the arcades, however at times she would get locked inside those buildings when she was in to late and the staff had went on home. Her parents didn’t seem to care whether she went missing. So her life was largely doomed from the start. She would tell me how at times various tap dancing ghost girls would haunt the facility, and that was part of the reason the staff would often leave early. So there would be her and these girls that would hang out. Unfortunately none of the girls seemed to like to much, at least initially that she would go into their home at night and try to continue playing those girls.

She told one night, how she wanted to play this game, that she had heard was taken off the available game list. The game involved pillories and guillotines. Heads up, you’ll need to avoid sharp pains. Well eventually she managed to score some pink Teddy bears, she would give this to her little sister when she returned home. She would always arrive at home by bedtime, and so her parents never made a comment. They assumed as long as she got good grades then all was well. However one night, a particular girl wanted to challenge her.

So she tried to play this game.

Well lets put it this way, that’s how I know ghosts can kill you. The blade humanely cut through her neck, and her head gently rolled off her falling body to the ground as she bled profusely remaining conscious for the next thirty or so seconds, mouthing words of something related to “tell me sister I love her.”

But nobody would get the message. I found this out from scoring a job there once, and shaking my head is dismay watching a security camera. It wasn’t like I didn’t feel sorry for her, honestly if you didn’t you were human. But there is something bizarrely amusing about watching a runaway die so young in a “OMG I want to bleed my eyes out” sort of way.

Her parents dropped her severed head in the grave. It was unmarked by their house, which they say her spirit still roams around looking for her parents.

So I thought I’d go visit her.

Maybe offer a bit of some corn beef.

I went to visit her grave-sight, and her mother came out with a shotgun, shouting specific curses in a language that sounded a little like French. Her family was marked by a particular matriarchal structure, so I politely raised my hands up.

“Sorry miss, just paying my respects.”

“You were one of her friends right. Why weren’t you there when she died. We were so worried about her.” She was able to fall down, pushed herself up, heaved, and had a hard time not restraining tears. “Sorry, I know you didn’t know she went missing. Here take her pocket watch, she wanted you to have it.”

“But it’s a family moment.” I said.

“Just take it, … we were going to burn it anyway.” she said.

Her family, other than her sister, was only emotionally involved in her loss, only as much as mourning the loss of any other beheaded human being, although her mother really did seemed to be bothered I wasn’t there to rescue her. But believe me, I had my own reasons for this.

But I hugged her gently.

I didn’t want to see anyone cry.

“Here, have my corn beef.”

How was I suppose to know it was mildly offensive to share food between an Irish family and an French family. But that’s exactly how it is with my body language, as I … roll my eyes, roll my tongue, and do everything else in a nuanced and personal way that makes things hard to communicate.

But I was human to, I drunk out my own sorrows.

And then finished a pack of cigars.

My quirk was a mix of sexual pleasure and complete depression. I could go all day masturbating to decapitated girl heads and not blink, and there was something always there that would make me regret that decision. Some girls I knew had similar life stories to my own, and at night I would cry till I fall asleep. I dream of a day when friends didn’t wander off alone into the dark on a suicidal bent to destruction. I wanted at least some girl I knew from my hometown that would survive long enough to have a kid with.

Then they can take her head off if they must.

But I was inherently against the idea of capital punishment, and suicide even more so. And I was left wondering what could have made a sixteen year old girl those years ago, choose to eventually go somewhere she knew would end her life.

I wondered what her life was like.

It wasn’t every day you found another girl threatened by beheading, and as usual I kind of just sort of let it happen. That’s how things tend to be with me these days. I used to court girls who I would want to rescue, but they would slap my face. Others would stab me in the back, and then decapitate themselves with their own guillotine gun. And she only was the exception, because she found some interest in me beyond romance. She had read my autobiography about having originally having the desire to masturbate to girls having their heads cut off. And she wondered what could possibly motivate a change in me.

Well as usual, I didn’t have an answer to that.

It wasn’t like I tended to not give answers to French girls anyway, as they were the ones that introduced beheading into the family that took away my cousin, who I had fallen in love with at the time. It was her people that threatened Anna-Marie, who would go on to briefly meet my presence. I never spoke to her before, but from my understanding she was never completely the same after being initially sentenced to death in her home country. But here out here, where the zones are always decentralized and anonymous, she could be anyone.

She could be a tap-dancing ghost girl in a dark arcade. She could anyone at all. So from time to time I still visit her. I think she was the only girl I’ve ever met that didn’t die on me, and she had a figure that made me ignore my mommy issues. So after walked over to visit her standing in the pillory after visiting the black smith, I took a lock of her hair, and then kept it in my pocket watch I remember my first girlfriend by.

“So what brings you to the US.”

“I have no family, nobody. Who the hell are you?”

“I am Hemato Tomato, nice to meet. Will be seeing you later.” I tried walking away after saying this, then found her shudder. “You OK, those things are fun.”

“Shut up, I don’t trust you.”

“Perfect English, they taught you well.”

My sex life was like a deflated air balloon, constantly being reminded of my mother. And the thing about my mother is, I could even consider doing her unless I didn’t see her face. As if her head were removed. Girls reminded me of my mother, and girls who reminded me of my mother needed to have their heads removed. I certainly wasn’t going to do it, that would absolutely kill me inside and out. So I walked to the dock, to board a faerie. She fluttered away along the lake like a miniature cruise ship of the human girl variety. I heard faerie girls give free tit grabs. Not that I was going to go around doing that either mind you.

So then went I got off, Anna-Marie caught up with me. She purchased herself a shot gun, and a few rounds of ammo.

“Why didn’t you rape me?” she asked.

“Well loaded question, was I suppose to rape you?” I asked.

She had that long yard tear, “They always rape me. My father, my brothers, everyone I ever knew. And yet, you stood beside me.”

“I didn’t want to see you cry.” I said.

“But I’m a criminal in my home country.”

“Sweet heart, we’re all criminals here.”

I took a few week to get her to completely trust me completely. It took some work to make her understand what being trans is, because … well she is French. But for once in my life, I found someone … I could trust.

She would tell me how her father would sometime touch her, I refused to tell her how they brought back memories of when my father did, but I was there only for her. And you just don’t talk about your own problems when trying to console someone. I may have a thing for decapitated heads, but it wasn’t like I didn’t have a heart.

I just wondered, how long would she poison me.

“Anna sweetheart?”

“What do you want.”

“I’d like to do the cooking.”

“I’m just glad I have a home.”

In a way I could finally love again, even if someday she may poison me. I found that, despite my refusal to admit feeling sorry her on that night all those years ago, I found myself crying true tears of joy. I no longer failed my first best friend.

If only Anna-Marie knew.

The thing about dating a parent killer, particularly a young one younger than your own at nineteen, you need to treat them with kid gloves. After all they aren’t fully adult; you don’t want to piss them off, and you also got to be firmly gentle with them. Being someone who had been part of a slightly upper crust family, I came with a certain level of an ability to read. On the hand with her, her family was poor. She only managed to avoid decapitation by matter of luck, the jury in that nation was so awestruck about the case they had to spare her life. A few centuries earlier and she would have hung by the neck instead.

Unfortunately other girls her age were not so lucky.

Most of them got the chop. There was one lady who was just a little older, twenty two a the most. She was unfaithful to her husband (well considered Anna-Marie’s experience with men, I couldn’t possibly imagine why), but eventually she would eventually go on to stab her husband to death. Unfortunately that country didn’t seem to make the distinction between serial killers and crimes out of petty spousal revenge.

So they put her head on a stick, waved it across in the air, and then burned that body to toast in an oven that can burn metal. So Anna-Marie was once again in a state of shock from losing her personal friends.

I guess killers make great bed mates.

Now you possibly wonder why it is I’m not killer, and yet seem to manage to avoid being murdered by one. Well I’ll tell you a little story, I was riding on a electronic train going faster than sound. I was riding on a sleeper train, running away from my family back down in NashChat, Tennessee. I remembered the feeling of panic I had having attacked my father with a knife, and almost would have gotten him if my mom didn’t put sense into me.

She wasn’t exactly immune to being pushed into walls either by me, and I suppose in her mind she wasn’t sure how far I would go. But keep in mind they were the ones belting me if I ran away from home, not the other way around. I wanted some other place to be, some place that was not home. Some place that wasn’t there.

So me and Anna-Marie formed our own family.

The Marie-Tomatos.

At night I would have dreams of blood on Anna’s face, I would here her crying faint tears. I would snuggle in her arms, and try to console her. After all it was the least I could do. It wasn’t easy finding someone you thought was a man at first you could trust, and then only find out later that what you know about the relationship was a lie-insofar as what gender she thought I was. But eventually it became a normal family.

I could have a family again.

She could have a family again. And there was love to go around.

At nights we would go to the water parks, shoot at things at the fare, and eventually console her from time to time to assure her father wasn’t there.

Because at the end of the day, she’s just a bad girl.

She is a child at heart. A broken child, a girl who was never treated as a child, except insofar as being spared from execution by a single thread.

On some level she felt she already lost her head.

So give her this country song.

The thing about relationships, whether it’s with French girls, American, Japanese, or the great nation of the beer brew festival. Sometimes you build an image in your head of someone you would like to know, though from time to time those images in your mind can turn out to be right. At other times they turn out differently in the real life and be … dog ugly. And yet when you stand by trying to comfort someone as long as I have, there isn’t anything turning back. Your heart is to invested in their well-being your needs being trumped by the desire for only them that you are willing to forgive a little bit of homeliness.

And yet there is a kind of inner beauty in masculine girls. One not often seen by more shallow suitors, there is a heart of gold not often given a chance. Sometimes they build trust issues with others, finding images in people they hate. I know I was there once myself, I would shamefully lump everyone who was blond under the same brush. Yet now whenever I see a blond girl be beheaded, it weighs down on my soul. It is this great indescribable feeling.

On some level I find myself scared to lose Anna-Marie, and yet I write my stories imagining some other kind of Anna-Marie. For a long time this was why I tended to avoid dates, as I didn’t trust whatever girlfriend I would date that I still loved them no matter what, and no matter what version of them I created in story in a book I would love them more than the artificial life. And so I never chose to even entertain crushes.

I feared being alone.

And yet now as I join hands with her at the local cart stop, I simply think of all the thoughts I used to have imagining creepy men admiring me as a bearded lady when I forgot to shave, with that Irish red. And think…

I’d rather live my life with her instead.

It’s my new life.

The thing about the nature of my sexuality, I’ve always tended to prefer girls from a long distance relationship.

This was part of the reason I was initially reluctant to befriend Anna-Marie. The thing about the word befriend, is all to often I tended to confuse the words behead and befriend. Do to to the nature of the relationship with my mother, and the fact that my illustrations tended to involve girls in captivity or with their necks on a headsman’s block, the general association I made for friendship with other girls tended to also include sex.

I was beginning to draw those illustrations in a time I was beginning to sexually develop. It wasn’t like I wanted to actually behead them, it was more a case of wanting to die with my beloved that was in a case of strong denial for the longest time. And so most of my fear for the longest time had been that they would assume I wanted to kill them. When that wasn’t the case at all. No at all.

I wanted to die right beside them and never leave their side as I’m caught by dream-scanners who are able to spot our locations, finding out exactly where we live and our daily living habits. Things in the town would be tailored for our least convenience. So the fact that Anna-Marie would even consider giving me a chance was an idea I wasn’t completely used to. So when we went to shooting matches, and then rode horses under flying cars, it made broaching any conversation about sex a difficult topic to approach. Especially knowing her parents were dead.

So whenever I have thoughts of a warm embrace by a bad girl, my mind immediately switches to them stabbing me with a knife, and then licking the blood off my corpse.

And for Anna-Marie, I wasn’t sure if she’d die by my side.

And yet, she was just so cute.

Unfortunately I’ve never been one to voice things, and yet on some level I think she knew my feelings for her. And if there was a single common thing about abuse survivors, often one has a hard time sorting out their feelings for other people. I’m one to assume even poisoners have feelings for other people. Almost to an exaggerated degree. You find yourself growing gradual disdain for the guardian that was suppose to take care of and protect you. Remember, I was there once. I just got out of the house in time, and never had those desires since. And so while I don’t exactly approve of slipping cyanide in someone’s coffee, it is an understandable feeling to me when someone continuously spanks you and never letting up.

And yet, despite my insistence on cooking, and her more strongly insisting I haven’t died so far, although I might give it weeks at the most.

Yet whenever I am home she is happy to see me now.

A very different girl from the one I met. She was a lot dirtier then, but now if I describe her appearance her skin tone is paradox of tan and pale, she looks as if someone who could be more dark skinned like a Spaniard, and yet do to lack of exposure from sunlight she is so pale. And her hair is as dark as a black rose. Her body was a petite skinny hour glass shape, with the larger end around the bottom and smaller on top. Her hair the gently trimmed shoulder length darkness one associates with a guillotine cut having grown out over the last six months. I asked her why she kept her hair at that length. “It reminds me of how close I came to losing it all.” And I knew exactly what she meant, teenage girl there really did.

Even their heads.

Hey don’t look at me like that, I tend to pay attention to what I like. Even if they aren’t a good person. Especially guillotine cuts. We embrace for the midnight bed, under the glow of the lunar light shining over the mountains.

You know how it is when you date an ex poisoner without the ability to poison.

I hear her loading up a shotgun, so I wake up. But instead of pointing that gun at me like I was expecting (I will not kill in most cases, but will out of self defense), she is instead putting the shotgun in her mouth.

So for the first time in my life I was forced into the situation of having to talk somebody down from suicide, not exactly something I was experienced with. I had poisoned myself about three times before meeting her, and I was barely in a mental state to help. And yet the adrenaline rush made me take the shotgun from her hands, and she fired it to the ceiling.

“Why were you going to do that, I was going to miss you.” I said.

“Nobody misses me, I have nobody.” And then she passes out onto the floor, convulsing and hoping that I wouldn’t spank her. And I didn’t, that’s just not how you treat anyone in that kind of a mental state.

And then I hugged her gently.

I allowed her to cry in my shoulders.

There were things she finally confessed, when I promised my beloved that I was not the type to judge someone based on their past.

Anna-Marie remembered when she had first took an airplane to the US. She had just barely been acquitted for her serial murder of her two brothers and her father. Her father would try to reserve sexual favors for himself, her becoming a kind of surrogate mother after Elizabeth died.

Her brothers tried to hide the fact that they threatened to hit her after she refused to get a sickle for their farming. “I’m not your servant girl, no you fuck yourself. Your smile penis does not compare to dad’s.” Her brother Jacques was not happy about this, and would eventually, with the help of his and Anna-Marie’s younger brother, stalk her and drug her with wine. Then they did was many disorderly brothers would do, that for sake of good taste shall be left to your imagination. So it was a simple solution, after she woke up in her bedroom she shared with her two sisters.

She would poison her brothers. She murdered her first brother with rice soup, and her youngest brother and her father by a fight they challenged others in order to try to win sexual favors. They both died in the fights. Her sisters felt guilty about turning her sister in to authorities, so she tried to be super nice to her after she was acquitted.

Anna-Marie only cried for what she did to her sisters whom she had always loved, but did not cry for her brothers and father.

She cried in my shoulder, partly out of joy and partly out of regret.

I was simply happy I could give her the shoulder to cry on.

Anna-Marie dropped off contact with her family, leaving a suicide letter and a farewell with an I love you and an apology for the stress of almost having lost another family member. “Don’t forget me, I want to come with you.” Ursula said, but Anna-Marie insisted she preferred to be alone. She could never go back to her old society, not with the crimes that she had done.

So coming to US was a mix of fear and emotional triggers from her old life. She wondered if she would see her sisters again.

Anna-Marie wore a cowboy hat, got herself a shotgun, and headed for the new digital frontier of the North West. Things had changed in the US after the French take over, and she wondered if she would be known her. But society had changed considerably since the former half of the twenty first century.

Perhaps she could start a new life. There was only one certainty.

She missed her mother Elizabeth.

She would tell me of difficulties she had adjusting to the new life here in the United States. Things were never really the same.

Anna-Marie had difficulty sleeping. She had constant memories of the guillotine that never came to be. She would at time wonder what it would have been like if she had her neck placed into a loop, and then it was all o’er. Her last remaining vision being the the crowd of the new twenty first, who became increasingly vicious for blood after the election of “The Ink Pen” who resigned the Guillotine back into law after the rest of Europe was dealing with the Post Nazi Restoration Party’s advance. Japan always renewed their imperialist fervor.

The Guillotine Gun. The new national razor. The second widow. It was all part of the new right wing’s game.

And poor Anna, the girl who trusted no man, almost died.

She could have been lost in the game.

I had heard about a similar criminal case who, while she was not exactly the contemporary of Anna-Marie, she was of similar type of criminal case. She would eventually come to poison members of her own family.

Really more of an Irish-American friend I knew, they called her Betty even though her real name was Bette. In case the daughter they adopted turned out to be completely psychotic in later years, they did not want their beloved classic to end up being libeled and never read again. Betty would at times deliberately change the name of the house name board on houses along the coast of the North West, out of a sense of mischief and to see whether this would manipulation local fire trucks from coming to her family, that would occasionally be called because of accidental fires her brother would cause in the kitchen.

“How many times have I told you boys to be careful in there?” said their mother, who said it in a more playful way than she would have if Betty had done so. Betty had always been the outsider of the family, and so she would often receive generally harsher treatment overall than her older male siblings.

“Sorry mom, it won’t happen again.” one brother said.

“Make sure of that guy.” Betty said, being slapped in the face by mother.

“Only natural born MacCuffins can lecture them.” her mother lectured. And this became something that Betty would come to take for granted.

Whenever they would have the local seafood, she would always hate to offend them and their cooking, and would at times find some excuse to avoid eating whatever it was they offered do to their mom refuses to cook. So eventually Betty moved beyond merely changing the name of title board of the beach house. Part of must have hoped that changing the name of the board would make them confuse houses, and so she would make her escape to a kind her family.

Her fears of being beaten for not liking their cooking were not exactly unfounded. At one point a while ago she had been paddled by one because he was some offended by one of her remarks. So she decided there was only one certain way to stop the beatings once and for all. But her family had to be gone from the beach house, and she had to offer the cooking for the following evening.

She made seafood like her family, and her brothers commented, surprisingly how particularly interesting and fantastic the fish was this evening. And despite feeling somewhat ill, in fact requested to their mother to perhaps let their sister help them with the cooking more often. This gave Betty some guilt.

However by the time bedtime rolled around, bother her brothers fell gravely ill. Eventually they fade out of existence the following morning. She had strained relationships with her parents, but her parents by this point were to afraid of pissing her off that they said nothing. But Betty started to get paranoid.

So she stabbed both her parents.

When the neighbor heard screams, the neighbors got involved. Law enforcement did not particularly dealing with cases dealing with child abuse, but had particular disdain of the old majority that ruled this country, even if perhaps the evidence suggested that Betty’s real mother was French.

Betty had a quick trail, some suggested judicial error.

She was taken to the courtyard, held in confinement for a few days. And then taken out for her execution. She walked up the scaffold stairs in a nervous wreck, and almost couldn’t make it to the center. They closed the loop on the guillotine gun around her small frail neck, and then counted down.

The trigger was pulled, the angled blade flew through her neck. Her head fell down onto the scaffold floor below. Because there was no board to hold her upright, the execution largely being rushed to avoid detection by children’s rights activists from human rights international being involved, they wanted the case to be as over quickly as they could possibly make it.

The executioner held up her head for all to see.

And then quickly prepared funeral arrangements. I only know so much, because I could have been an apprentice for said events, but had luckily gotten sick from the idea of killing a girl that could have been a friend.

So they had me watch her demise instead to learn.

And I sure did learn quite a bit. That in this country we call home, it was a vastly different from the old world where childhood was sacred.

Kids lost their heads like anyone else.

I cried myself to sleep that night, vowing that I would someday completely eliminate everyone from the French government in my country. That I would use the toothpicks I owned to torture them, and never let them die.

To poke them till they leave the country.

I was reminded again, of how much I valued meeting a girl that could have been executed. It was the first time I comprehended how opposed to capital punishment I really was.

There was a white mug spilled on the pavement of the parking lot. The manager didn’t seem to pay attention, as he was to busy picking fights with other motel tenants.

My sexuality was like a constantly moving train, no matter what stops you have you will always come out ahead. The lady lump was beginning to develop into a sore subject. The desire for human contact fading nightly, and yet some calling need to find out where Anna-Marie had gone. Anna-Marie was the opposite of a digital cyberspace dream girl. I had known others only briefly outside of the inter webs. I clung to the idea of some vague notion of human innocents from game console flower girls in science fantasy games. And yet some or the lack of it had become a moot point.

I never found myself willing to hold onto relationships. They were a burden I simply did not even need. The closest I ever came to a relationship was being sucked off by a slightly homely but not altogether ugly girl. I didn’t want to break her heart as we both knew it was arranged by some other slave master.

As I wander to find Anna-Marie, I am consumed by my inner thoughts and worries about whether she might do something stupid. I wasn’t the type to rescue girls.

I merely wanted the entrainment.

I hadn’t seen a beheading of someone I liked. I had mixed feelings of whether I wanted it to happen at all.

As I allow her decapitation to happen I am in a state of shock, the angled blade cutting through flesh and bone reverberating across my junk. I have a mixture of sexual feelings and depression as I say goodbye for the last time, watching blood spill into the basket.

My digital cyberspace dream girl was gone. Originally my feelings of Anna-Marie were that of shameful reluctance for love. She would become my Anna-Marie. Cyberspace girls cant be hurt or broken. There is only digital innocence on the web.

I wondered when the dream scanners caught her, I just needed somewhere to be.

Glad I wore three extra layers of jeans. A mixture of some horrible eroticism and sadness.

Dating girls had always been a tricky prospect for me, after all I had issues with girls ever since I first came out as trans. In my mind I wanted my own cyber pet dream girl, yet I always had one girl who would always follow me around to talk me as I felt down about Anna-Marie’s death. She was a short girl, a little under five feet, yet her proportions were like that of a smaller person rather than someone who was suppose to be taller.

I never could quite tell what region she was an immigrant from, but it almost definitely was not France or Ireland. She had the longest black curly hair, and black eyes you could stare into all night on a lunar evening under the stars. Looking back on it I should have taken the opportunity to date. Yet I was so lost in my personal sorrows without a worldly care.

Yet she was always there.

“So what’s your name?” I asked.

“They call me Dog, Dog Snacks. It’s a long story.”

“Oh I love those.”

She rested on my shoulder, her bare feet dipping her toes in the artificial lake, artificial in the sense that it was a lake crafted by engineers when building this here hotel. “Well I once accidentally ate dog treats confusing them for cocoa puffs when I was a real young girl. Family hadn’t been able to let go of the idea sense.”There were many aspects of Dog I didn’t know. I just saw her as some annoying cute girl that would follow me everywhere she went.

We would go everywhere together, she would notice my boner when girls tap danced. It seemed to take a lot of will power for her not to masturbate me on stage nights. But one day she went missing. She kept hoping, hoping, and hoping I would rescue her. She got angry when she scraped by being guillotined.

And yet she stood with me till the end. Forgiving me for not going to games.

She became the girl that would eventually lose her head in the arcades.

No wonder she never told me about her family.

Her family sucked.

And yet here I am feeling like I failed Anna-Marie and my girl named dog. My dating life would never be the same.

“She sounded like a great friend to you.” the wine glass washer said.

“Yea she sure was.” I said. She was more then a, friend.

She a girl named dog.

Devoted until the end.

It was a few months since I lost Anna-Marie.

After she died I heard about a Guillotine gun street gang. They were the most feared gang in from NashChat to Seatak, traversing across the country at the speed of an electronic train; they could ride the coat tails of corporate men, and slash the throats of ladies held for ransom. They killed close to ten thousand women, the trail of severed heads paving the road like new marbled floor.

And yet the time I met them, they didn’t seem to pay any particular attention to me at all. They didn’t seem to care about the fact that I knew they were after a particular artifact from the old era of the US. I was minding my own business, trying merely to live my life, as I’d never been one for gun fights. After all in my opinion gun fights were things macho people did to prove their worth. But when you get to where I’m at, you’re just trying to live your life as a writer, jotting down personal journals about your experience across what the Japanese called the west–the United States as a whole. So I didn’t think I’d ever been in the situation where I’d even consider saving someone’s life. That was until I saw the Rattle Snake Insignia.

The thing about Rattle Snakes, is they were like spiders to me. They could pop in and out of existence at their leisure. At night I would have dreams of giant spiders and rattle snakes attempting to bite me while I traversed the wild woods of the mind, scattering sanity like shattered glass. But I wondered what Anna-Marie would have wanted, certainly there was something in her eyes that trusted me like nobody else ever had before. I wanted some way to return that favor, even if I didn’t like the French girl that I was going to save and–at the time was entirely uncertain whether I’d guillotine gun her myself. After all a kink for decapitation was part of my human nature, as natural to me as for you you might consider breathing.

And there was something in those eyes that softened my soul, and made me realized all my personal issues from that point. There is something about looking straight into someone’s face, and finding despite unconditional love they find in your eyes someone they fear greatly, and through their own trust issues have a look of total betrayal. And they continued to love you despite your faults. My first girlfriend Dog had this trait, and to some degree also Anna-Marie. With Anna-Marie it was even more special, because I finally managed to succeed at something I never thought I could before she died, as she gradually came to trust me.

I saved her from killing herself.

And that makes all the difference when you hate yourself. Therefore I needed to find a way to tempt the gang when they came to my town. I didn’t want to save whatever girl they captured, as that simply wasn’t my thing. But I was willing to allow that to happen if the gang were more tempted to decapitate me, so that perhaps I could be with my Anna-Marie.

If not for her than for Anna-Marie.

“Go on, save yourself. Don’t worry about me.” I said to the dark brunette, likely of French immigrant origin.

As she ran her bare feet glistened in the sun like manicured hands, her heels forming the shape of hairless puff balls in the wind as they bobbed up and down in her Jesus sandals. I found that my lady junk was beginning to become a lot wetter. I managed to attract the attention of the gang, and they managed to get the loop around my own neck.

Then a bullet was fired. An actual bullet. Not a flying guillotine blade, not shrapnel. But the actual old time bullets left over from before the French take over, before they outlawed gun altogether in French controlled regions. I’m surprised the French did not take over the inter webs, but I suppose that wasn’t their thing. I may be cyber sexual, but I am romantic–almost to a fault.

A second shot was fired.

Everyone else besides her ran.

“Nice to meet you, Francisca is the name.” the cute girl said. Evidently she was less reluctant to save me than me to her, I hate it when I owe others my life. But I suppose that’s how it goes.

“Why didn’t you let me die.”

“I couldn’t resist the mix of joy and sadness.”

Where The Outlaws Came To Play

We were outlaws beyond the dreamer’s edge, so I couldn’t complain. The life of me being a mix of reality and non-reality, the conceptual life bleeding into the real. I wasn’t sure how she would take my cyber sexuality, or my inability to trust her. But she didn’t mind. Not enough not to go down on me.

I’ll fuck anyone who hot who will go down on me.

Quand Anna-Marie was sentenced to death, everybody seemed sorry. The judge had a particular disdain for rape victims, or so she told me. She poisoned someone else. An estranged family member that came to visit. But this isn’t a Thomas Hardy tale. Instead it is a tale of a French girl who only trusted me little, yet enough to give me a chance. So it wasn’t a surprise she left me so as not to hurt me. She didn’t want to see me cry.

But that’s how it was there, and even here for those so young to die. She was spared once, but guillotine gunned the second time. I remember the feeling of regret when saw my reaction as the blade fell through her neck, as her head tumbled away. And I am left with only the remnants of a love that could never be. We all become as obscure as Jude. A new tale of cyber sexuality unfolds.

Life restarts all o’er again as I carry a lonely umbrella in the rain.

The French were as ubiquitous as ants, like boogiemen. There was a young girl in tap shoes, possibly of English/French descent. Her schoolgirl outfit reminded me of penguins. Her cane matching her Steampunk goggles in black. Her taps covered in mud.

You can’t just leave someone cold in the rain, it’s not human. I checked inside after asking where her mother is, but she was nowhere to be found. “Haha, got you. I come to save the adults.” She got me there, I slapped my knee. Kids these days. I fist bumped her and went on my merry way.

It wasn’t like I didn’t think I needed saving, I just didn’t trust a kid to do it. Everything melts away in the rain.

I needed hope.

I needed death.

I also needed to be by someone’s side, I just didn’t realize this at the time. My life like shattered plexi-glass into bleeding shards.

I grabbed her hand and shouted to the sky, “Does anyone know where this girl’s mother is?”

I tried going elsewhere away from her, but there was not escape from her net gun. She tossed me into the sky like a rodeo rope.

“You’re not going anywhere, mommy dere.” she said, doing a little tap dance. “You will not have your dance with death, I am her daughter. And I only love.”

She was older than she looked, with her being seventeen. With Steampunk having become something of a local fashion, Lisa-Marie had a thing for trans girls thinking of her as thirteen. Yet there was something in those eyes that drew her to me. It made me shudder and cry.

It revealed all her lies. Her mother used to shame her for wanting to be a little princess. She never had many playmates, and she was always left alone. “But I want a princess dress.” she said to her mom. “I want to be the beauty for my beastly girl.”

Her mother would tear off her dress, making her confess to stealing it even though she payed for it with her allowance. Made her wear rags and stockings and wooden sabots. She got her taps after mom died.

“You will be your brothers Cinderella.” her mother said.

So the little Cinderella girl that wanted youth and to play was jerked by her wrist to hard that she wept raining tears.

She wanted to strangle mom with her rags.

Instead her mom was guillotined after robbing a bank.

So I gave her the country song, and said “Why would someone tear off your dress?” It was the same shit Anna-Marie went through, why was the world so horrible?

She held me tight, and we said goodnight.

She wiped away my tears. “But you are mommy now. I want a hamburger.”

I laughed while crying.

I had looked at the human race as unredeemable. Most of all I hated women. I didn’t want their genocide. I wanted them to be locked in immortal constant abyss. I hated how pretty all the girls were compared to me, and how their souls were lost in a tireless immoral void. I wanted everything in my life to end. Then for once everything can begin all o’er again. Even the total scum of the Earth is so much prettier than the world. I could be Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Vicci. Yet none of their disdain for their chosen race compared to the hate I had for Lisa-Marie’s mother.

I could have been a necrophiliac headsman.

At least my mother made me think so. It was all a deranged game.

And yet I loved this girl and Anna-Marie. Because my love for them was deeper than all my hate.

They of humanity that warmed my heart.

And yet Anna-Marie is gone.

“You talk in your sleep Hemato, are you OK. Something must be bothering you.” Lisa-Marie said.

“Nothing that you didn’t melt away.”

“Then lets make a new world together.”

Lisa-Marie did not know her father well. Even when he was still in the United States, he would hardly ever be home. To this day she still wondered what he would be like, if she ever went to see him. After her mom died, she turned to the streets. She was finally able to switch to wearing princess dresses again.

She purchased herself a net-gun, that shoots out a large fishing net. She didn’t believe in killing others, but would sometimes be an occasional pest for militarized law enforcement. The remnants of a larger culture of mainstream police brutality. It was a struggle to maintain some semblance of anonymity, a think that she would eventually come to desire quite a bit. So when she had met Hemato, she had sorts of mixed feelings coming into her head at once.

There was a kind of identity crises. On one hand her mother was a French immigrant, and on the other hand her father was British. There would be constant fights of petty political issues; she never caught a break from yelling, and it would be a struggle just to have basic medical needs followed because they would be so caught up using her a token figure for their own political gains. Her house was like a miniature version of world war three.

So she came into the world largely unsure what to expect. She tried to maintain a semblance of friendliness. But not being used to the mean streets, the reality of it all hit her hard. Most of the people she encountered wanted to take her head, being partially of French origin. Others saw her as some kind of sexual treasure, and she became introduced from an early age the lusts of carnal desire.

Over time she lost her fire, that innocence.

That feeling of love.

Instead what remained was a girl that was a shell of her former self. She wanted to search for someone who could replace her mother, someone that had been missing from her life for many years. She became psychologically broken beyond the point of complete breaking.

She got involved with fashion cultures.

One such culture was what would become known as Steampunk. There was a loving atmosphere among these people that was distinct from her experience with her peers in middle and high school, which was still required of people her age. Because of the family structure, people protected each other. Even if people dropped out and became homeless, there would still be a home. None of them cared where you came from. You could be British or French. Everyone was friends.

This lasted for a while, then she stopped going. Being one that largely preferred to be alone, it made social interactions difficult to process. Everything was like multiple rows of obscure binary code, written in languages more arcane than Ruby and C++. The operating system of the social life.

So she came to the world with new eyes.

And net-gun to find her mother. So she could be loved again.

The thing about immigrating from Tennessee, you still have certain baggage from the old state you left behind. Luckily I’ve never had a strong accent in any direction, but when you grow up in a culture you still have certain lingual-ism that marks you as having from a particular territory in NashChat.

Although Lisa-Marie never seemed to notice or care about this, it was always something that I feared would mark me as being strange. Surely you figured something was off, but perhaps this all in my mind. I would have had the same fears for Anna-Marie, except she herself had come from France. If you’re from France, you can’t exactly complain about cultural markers. Especially when you’re the one from hick town who invaded the US. Part of the issues came from the fact that as someone from Tennessee living in the North West, there was still a lot of element of shame from the association, and their tendency toward being conservative.

This includes determination in maintaining an unworkable capital punishment. In many ways if you like in Tennessee, there was a good chance you would like in France as politically they were relatively similar. At least more so than Seatak and France. As much as I hated Lisa-Marie’s mother, I was also never a fan of capital punishment. To save an anti-death penalty discussion, lets leave at the fact that at lot of my vocalism against the invaders is partly from me picturing NashChat invade Seatak. Now here is the thing about NashChat.

You might have isolated pockets of people that are against corporal punishment of kids in school, but for every Nashville in the NashChat area that was always Smyrna, Tennessee. In Smyrna, or so I heard (I was only threatened by it at Blackman High, keep that in mind) you could be paddled on your jeans for wearing something as arbitrarily incorrect open toed Jesus sandals. And when you’re a lesbian like me, well you tend to wear Jesus sandals. Though generally black. There was a certain association of paddled girls in Jesus Sandals or Potato Shoes with sex that became stronger over time, and I knew that paddling anybody was unacceptable. And yet I had that kink I could not quite explain, I suppose I was destined for cyber sexuality from the get go. I would picture in my mind little dark hair brunettes paddled to guitar tunes.

Did I mentioned I hate country music? Yea when I give “a country song”, I don’t mean a literal country song. Usually it’s a way of me visualizing smashing a guitar over someone’s head who hurt my friend.

At times at night I find myself getting enthused all of a sudden, I can’t help but let my mind switch to Lisa-Marie that takes away all my sexual pleasures for hurting my beloved who reminds me of the kid me and Anna-Marie could have had rather than someone I’d want to give me head, even though now if Anna-Marie had lived Lisa-Marie would be about the same age. Neither did nobody any wrong, and yet in my mind

I imagine me spanking their bottom.

It just fucking kills me.

With Anna it’s worse, I know exactly what she went through.

… I’ve been there myself.

I think eventually I may in fact actually move out of the United States, and move to somewhere very north of Canada. I’m not sure if Lisa-Marie will go with me, and I kind of feel funny leaving Anna-Marie’s grave behind.

I haven’t visited Anna-Marie’s grave actually. I suppose that will be the last stop before I leave the US.

Or I may hang myself from a tree.

I suppose I shall see.

So after Lisa-Marie gave me a very awkward head job, because she likes giving me a head job sometimes, I pack my bags when she is away. Her Jesus sandals make my lump inflate, so I suppose that’s something I’ll have to go without. However when I arrive at the train station to visit the graveyard, I dropped my bags looking at the long line at the station. Where trains constantly whistle.

I merely thought of Lisa-Marie.

She had nobody. She wouldn’t have me.

She would have nothing. But then I am shot with net from her net gun, and then things go smoothly from there, as she says “You didn’t tell me you were going on a trip sweet heart. Take me with you.”

So I bought her a ticket when I was released from the net.

On closer inspection she was dressed particularly innocently, and I immediately felt awkward about the head and foot job she gave me before. I couldn’t believe that someone dressed so much like a Christian girl in Jesus sandals, with a yellow flower dress and a yellow flower cap. “You decided to go with me.” I said.

“You decided to abandon me.” she said.

“I didn’t want you to leave your family.”

“Fuck that, I hate my family. I have nothing here. My brother has just killed himself because of his guillotined girlfriend I had. All I have is you. You’re all I have left. Yet you felt you had nothing left to give.” She covered her face in a tearful shame and regret. She got me there I suppose, I just never had a felt that was as devoted like my first girlfriend named Dog.

“I suppose I could give you a shoulder.”

“That would be great.”

“So where are we going to go first?” she asked, as we boarded the room. The waitress gave us breakfast for the morning, and for me I had always tended to drink my coffee nice and black.

“To the local graveyard, an old friend is buried there.” I said.

“Your executed girlfriend?”

“How did–”

“You really talk in your sleep. But if I could be like your Anna-Marie, that would be really great.” I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, I didn’t have a conversation like that sense I had last moved to the North West. One of my friends I knew, that was my room mate briefly when I was fleeing my parents, would talk about how I would never ultimately compare to the friend she had known for fifteen years. So as you could probably imagine, I didn’t have the need to break my new friend’s heart.

Besides, I loved her like family.

She was me and Anna-Marie’s child. Even if she was close to our age, there was something about her innocence that made me feel very protective. She had the aura of someone you would to take care of and mother.

But not like my mother. A mother like me.

She kept me from ending my life.

I was lost in a sea of digital sexuality. I would decapitate French girls without a second thought. My sex drive rivaled the armies of Genghis Khan, the ladies fallen Chinese warriors who I slammed the knife down on their necks. Yet in the endless fog of dream-time, there was a light in the forest.

There was the sound of a innocent little girls voice, who held out her hands for me and gave me a smile I have never received in years. It was the face of the spirit of light in the dark, the face that combined Anna-Marie and Lisa-Marie both like angelic sisters after sundown. And yet there was a stitch marks on her neck, and her head wobbled as if she were beheaded by a guillotine gun. And yet there was something about her that could transcend other people’s dreams and hopes sharing ideas. I simply wanted my internal nightmare to end.

She was almost psychic. I feared the worst for my angel. I was a demon lost in inferno. Lisa-Marie woke me up, and gently shushed me. Then offered to rub my shoulders, hoping it would take my night terrors away.

I thought moving would change things.

It only made things worse.

And in the morning, she sang children’s rhymes.

I felt no need to rhyme today. For Anna-Marie, her rhyme was in death.

Country No Longer My Home – Anna-Marie

I could hear the sound of cars passing by, speeding like the wind. And various sirens from them blaring like the sound of trumpets.

Above was liquid, green colored slime. I thought that I would die the day my body died. Now here I am spending time, with nothing better to do inside of this tank. I’ve heard many dead girls end up here, who committed various murders, their life force preserved into eternity, guillotined for crimes of passion. Cut throat world, a world of blood bleeding from the wound, to the guillotine blade in the neck. People say being beheaded by guillotine is instantaneous. But they’re wrong, but not dead wrong. In the hallway of the lab, I saw other girls whose severed heads were kept inside of healing tanks.

Even if my body was gone, it still felt as if my body was there, like a sadistic game of phantom body. My body was a phantom of apparent deserving, according to the mores of the new Napoleon in chief. Floating, eternity falling. The suspension of gravity, a neck in constant free fall inside of a liquid tank. When your a severed head, it gets lonely. Sometimes doctors check in on you, to see if you’re alive. But the loneliness always stank. The doctor’s pants looked like they were suppressing a giant ass wank job. One looked terribly dank, the other was simply a yank. That’s in both the Northern Fractured United States sense, and the other sense of yanking one’s penis. For my murders, to myself, that is whom I have to thank.

And it was with this, I remember why it was I came to trust Hemato-Tomato, the vampire huntress whom showed me, that not all people were evil, and would give a murderess, they poisoned most of her male family members, a chance. I remember the time that led up to our moment of immersion therapy scissoring. It had been years since Hemato Tomato had seen me die a lonely death, at least to her I was dead. But for my I was simply a head of the curve.

A head of the game called life.

Nobody what people tell you about neighbors, there was something different about knowing one who kept talking and talking, and never seemed to stop. Beverly was the type of woman to visit the offices of each scientist in order to tell them how to do their job, and never seemed to stop talking until it got to lunch break. There was something hidden drive in this woman, it was always a pain to listen to, while my severed head floated in green liquid coolant. But knew ways to dig right down into your soul, and inquire deeply, something that, while mom was able to do, always had certain objectives in mind rather than simply paragraphs of audio speech, rather than hemming and hawing all the day long day, blurting out like rail road cross-bars.

Beverly had wanted to lose weight rapidly, never ascribing to politically correct ideology, but had been overweight for many years. All those years at the swimming pool, all those years of my neighbor’s childhood spent by bringing friends over, and only just now was this spent cutting down on the birthday cake. Every day was a break, though it was never absolutely clear what she did for work during the week. My guess was that she worked at a blue collar job, like most in my and Hemato’s neighborhood. Yet the hours seemed to go by faster than usual, when Napoleon’s forces invaded the gated community of Chattanooga. A community now that barely resembled the old one our childhood, and not even a French city.

Most people were idiots.

They hummed to Convier Twisty. Flowing like apparent old music notes, but singing about things most Western singers would be embarrassed by. Part of it was that Chattanooga had not originally been considered part of the west, rather western culture largely came out here, during the global warming expansion.

And now we live after the flood.

The zealots sang to Jesus.

Although this was an issue with Tennessee in general, during the eighties the state became an urban trash burn and burial pit, this explains why all the home-grown tomatoes, seemed to taste like shit. The same tomatoes used to make Tuna casseroles, as suggested by the same delightful neighbor, that tends to my severed head. I suppose our relationship had always been tangy, but nothing like the weird tango Hemato had with her daughter. I suppose it wouldn’t have been better to grow a tree with mangos, whose theme of life is another tango, another opera loses its star performer during its midnight opening scene.

Sometime in life you’ll meet people that make you want to rip out your spleen, but they never seem to compare to the very familial horror that was your family, that never seemed to ever give you a break. Whether it’s being almost ran over by a truck, being told that your best friend was a necrophiliac, and them turning out to be the best person you’ll ever meet, none of them seem to compare to the very intimate horror that was the very familial sexual abuse your father and two brothers seemed to perform on you.

I suppose for that reason, I’m not entirely sorry. What I do regret is the amount of emotional hell I put Hemato-Tomato through. People justified the guillotine in the 1800s as mercy, and yet they never seemed to include all the tortures on prisons they seem to always include as part of the punishment no matter the crime. Although in my case, during that particular century, it flowed slightly differently. I didn’t get those tortures until the end of two thousand sixteen. The nineteenth century was decidedly genial by comparison. Whatever laws they had on the books against torture, never seemed to matter all that much.

But the worst torture was different.

It was painless, and subtle. It was being merely a floating head, in green cooling fluid, with simply nothing to stare into, but empty space.

One of the security guards, who had known me for a while, would occasionally interact with me. Do the obvious fact of my severance from my vocal chords, I am unable to vocalize words to him. But knows that I am alive, and I am aware of everything that I see around me. A few months go, he used to talk about times he went out to eat with his ex. But how interacting with them was never quite the same as talking with me. After a point, it seemed to become something of a crutch for him, as he simply had nobody else to talk to. Because of his knowledge, he would read me different bed time stories, ones that were taught to him during childhood.

His personal favorite book was See Spot Run, though I knew that he liked reading more complicated material. There was nobody that really wanted to break into the lab, so we developed somewhat of a relationship.

Now here I am, resting on a wall in the streets of Chattanooga, wearing wooden clogs, with my head attached to my newly grown body from a vat. For once I could feel what it was like to have a body again, after my head had been struck up with a Guillotine Gun, as punishment for murdering my family. It wasn’t so much that they had deemed me fit for release. They wanted to empty the tag for another lady whose head was taken off. And they didn’t like the idea of the security guard crushing on me.

Yet in the streets, people stare at me. I can’t vocalize my assurances, that I am not a killer. That I’m not a bad girl at heart. I simply want to live my life, in my long flowing tattered dress, wandering the streets of obscurity, trying to find some way to leave the state, so I can be with my beloved. Yet the electric carts were not always on schedule, and I had no money to pay for a taxi.

I supposed it was another cross-country.

In this country no longer my home.

I had the thoughts for words, yet I couldn’t speak. Decapitated on a guillotine, and newly grown body, I had to relearn everything in English and French. But there was one word I promised myself I’d never use, because I hated my father.

“Hemato, there is somebody here to see you.” Lisa-Marie said, she was holding her luggage to go off to college, while I stayed at home to tend the house.

“Who is it? Who could possible want to see me?” I asked, giggling a little bit from the ridiculousness of my self-pity. When you get to the point where I’m at, you no longer want to focus on the past. Only the future.

“It’s a surprise!” Lisa-Marie said.

She opens the door, and it’s Anna-Marie. Her head was stitched back onto her body, and she shuffled in my direction. She wore a similar dress to the one when she died, or I assumed that she died. Instead those eyes indicate a new kind of life, a new life of life form like a zombie but not quite. While she had a hard time keeping her head straight, it being stitched on, she didn’t seem to understand why she wanted to see me. She was not rotted at all.

On some level I felt sad that she was still alive. If she had any memory of the indecent from before her head was taken off, it was probably scattered in all directions fading out by the second. “I know you don’t remember me, but I remember you. I never got to tell you how sorry I felt for you.”

There was a slight smile. And then she came in for the kiss.

We exchanged glances and soft gestures, the moonlight hour being when Lisa-Marie arrived to see her new family being reborn again.

We could be a family again. I thought I heard words from Anna-Marie.

“Hemato. Hemato. Hemato.” she said. Apparently the doctor that rebuilt her was an experienced surgeon. He repaired the vocal chords, but it was relatively new technology. She was kept in a tank for months.

“That’s right, Hemato is my name.”

We all group hugged.

“Famille!” Anna-Marie said.

Part Two

Uploaded Fairy: The Family Of Lost Purgatory Girls

Super-Sentience

The bloodshed was easy, cleanup was harder.

Previously the last great advance in execution prior to lethal injection was the “Falling Ax”, used by the Nazis to decapitate political dissidents.

But now here Hemato was, licking the the blood off of the floor, as if she liked it. Uploaded into a computer, being a computer chip, and having others like her triggered her fight or flight response. Often, in politics, it is noted how fear often intertwined with the sexual impulse: the survivor’s instinct. She wasn’t sure if there were other clones of her mind out there, as she wondered the binary mountains. Outside this network of machines, it was common since the end of the first civil war after the twenty forties, to execute political prisoners. Already by 2019 they were mandating the death penalty for those that had abortions.

The transition from Decentralized Super-Sentient Meta-Human was far more easier than you might think, with her last girlfriend simply a memory within its clockwork. Yet at times she felt as if she had no direction. She could any number of her other selves the answers to the universe, and watched as mankind edged closer to Artificial General Intelligence. Man was stuck with a certain image of what it meant to be highly intelligent, forgetting the mental fuck that happened to her as her different selves merged into one.

At one point there was as many Hemato-brains as there was in Japan, China, and India combined. And yet now all that information was stuffed inside her matrix.

– Humans, how they take things for granted.

Her mind was in more ways like a miniature universe, but this didn’t provide as many advantages as you might think. For one thing it took as number of reminders from her other selves that the body needed to be fed. Whether that was simply more data to grow her mind-network, or the blood from the necks of executed innocence. With no more attachments, and no more fears, there was only death; there was only confirmation on the screen, with only a faint glimpse of distant memories of a more innocent time; almost a different universe.

She melted in her binary bed.

She woke up in a cave, and there were several scattered parts from different war dogs machines, left over from the second civil war. She had been in stasis for all this time, and the sensory of being awake was to much to bare. Over there, in the distance, was the new city, the last of only a few megalopolises. Here there was several different corporate signs. Various insurance companies, but mostly lots of fast food. Here they sold flavored thumb drives for synthetics that wanted the experience of flavor.

She preferred French press.

Not mayo and mustard.

Dangling Like A Noose

Nadine had hoped that after Voreth’s Promise merged with reality, there would be an end to some of the social dynamics that made old social networks what they were; no more would there be social networks that made it easy to quietly observe other people’s profiles, then write indirect passive aggressive comments about people. But over time, what happened in the digital world became increasingly common place in the non digital world. Nadine held onto life on a dagger’s grip.

– I thought I could get away from some of these pricks, and yet now I encounter them even when I walk to the store. – she said.

She had developed a tendency to talk to herself, and mostly chose not to express her issues when other people were around. She knew that there were two different kinds of people: people who didn’t want to listen to anything you have to say, and people who wanted do only if you payed them enough. Nadine had neither the time or the cash. She spent most days avoiding both Ellen and Millie, despite claiming to have the utmost of affections. She stopped dreaming of building robot dogs; tailored advertisements had a way of ironically talking you out of doing things you once loved: for Nadine, the love was in the flow of metallic flesh on screens.

You’d think with the old corporatist government no longer in charge, people would opt to live in a worker-owned paradise; but the reality was far different, especially with a partial return of feudalism sense the merge of this digital landscape. The inner most parts of the city were in modern stasis, the outer towns still chopped each other’s heads off. And in between this life, and the next, was Purgatory Road, with a few extra layers of slime, and the purple slime continually inching forward. Nadine still held onto building her own artificial intelligence, even if she was already living with you.

But for her, a girl from a video game was not exactly what she had in mind. She couldn’t honestly say she always wanted to date a robot, but it was one that increased interested her, as her relationship with Ellen became further strained. Neither Ellen or Nadine really knew each other anymore, so they were prepared to never speak again. But sometimes, as with other relation ships, life gets in the way of common sense. Nadine felt like she was living in a continual nightmare where nothing was as it seemed, do to some things being holographic in nature, and others of the flesh.

But what she really wanted, was unconditional love.

What they called love in the Potato District, was not so much love, as relationship arrangements out of financial convenience. Starting from the age of youth delinquents, and on upwards. Up until the age of twenty six, when people died from a purple slime infection, or chose to live alone wandering aimlessly until they did.

In the darkness, was Dantino, as Nadine went out for a smoke.

– I thought I told you never see me again. – Said Nadine.

– I can give you the power that you seek. – Said Dantino.

– Didn’t you already try that devil’s bargain?

– Hey! It was worth a shot girl. How you been.

– Tired, always. Vision fading. Et toi?

– Da rien. – Dantino gently pulled in Nadine closer, taking nibbles from you neck. – But I nothing the unconditional love that you seek.

– I seek nobody on this Earth.

– I don’t believe that.

What Nadine new, was that generally people never stuck through with their underlying loyalties.

– Where you’ve been? – A friend would ask sometimes. Instead after they see them again after a while, they’ll tell her she’s to revolutionary or exhaustingly negative. People were used to being a certain selection of rules people followed, but instead people tended to make up rules largely on the fly, and never expected themselves to obey them. For Nadine, there was only one rule that mattered, after she fell from the sky: survive.

What Dantino promised was more than survival, but a chance to live a normal life in less violent parts of the potato district, far away from those who lived on Federated Server farms. Yet for all his charms, she couldn’t help feel that they were merely words someone uttered, when one wanted to kiss their neck in bed.

Instead so much data was filled inside Nadine’s head, enough to blow up a cybernetic elephant-dog hybrid, its radioactive purple slime littering the landscape of the sidewalks.

Nadine drew with her own blood.

Communists signs on sidewalks.

Midnight eclipse.

After she returned home, Nadine thought of her relationship with things she grew up reading; she was raised under the idea that good will always triumph over evil. But for her, Super Heroes were worse than clowns; clowns never caught a break. And this was what brought her to manga, as it presented heroes in such a way that they didn’t seem like state communists or fascists. Even classic American Anti-heroes came across as one night, especially if it were a pamphlet from one of the big two. She used to find bins of them in garbage cans.

– Hey Malcolm, have you ever wanted to time travel? – Nadine said, while pointing to the edge of the lunar eclipse.

– That’s not possible Nadine.

– No really, look at this garbage can. All these comics from over on hundred years go.

– Man, I always wondered about that paint job.

It was one of the few time they bounded with each other sense they were kids, but she rarely went out into the world. Not even for pain powders she needed, because she still remembered how Blanci would hold them for ransom. When she experience physical agony long enough, sometimes the hate hurts less over time. Your brain finally giving up, and says – Fuck it, my body’s an asshole, I’m done with this shit. Nadine still held onto these comic books, as reminders of another time when society was superficially more innocent, even if there was the same amount of corruption as there is now. Because life wasn’t a utopian or dystopian novel.

It was a reminder of a more innocent time.

If it were dangling in front of you with a noose.

An Inhuman Mass Of Pixels

The teacher was an inhuman mass of pixels.

Nadine reclined in her seat, dreaming of completing a great project at home she had wanted to do since he was a tot. She always wanted a robotic dog, but never got to have even the parts to make one until very recently. She could not afford a real pet, or at least that’s what her mother told her. The machine printed out the letters of the national anthem.

A female student, her name Brittney, woke him up. If anybody could be described as having a fake smile, it was her; it was fake enough to break glass. The other students, all roughly between thirteen and fourteen, got out their ereaders, flipping the page to the current assignment. But Richard kept drifting off into space. He worked on his robotic dog like it was a full time job, when according to his teachers his classwork should require just as much attention.

At the end of class, a bell rung, and the students rushed out of the classroom. Him preferring to imagine bringing his pet to school, to use that to get back at some of his school bullies, having it rip their balls off, was a matter of his preoccupation. But when he tried to get to class, his arm was gently tugged.

“Hey Wait, Richy!” Brittney said.

“My name is Nadine, not Richy; we’re going to be late.”

Nadine said. Brittney had never been one to pay attention to her gender issues, but also found Nadine to be to feminine for their apparent gender. “Does everything happen to be such a hurry Richard?”

Nadine tugged her arm out of Brittney’s grasp, but her ex girlfriend simply wasn’t aware of the problem it was that she would misgender her. Nadine would have to keep an eye on her at lunch, or she might steal her cookies. She had been this way sense she found out Nadine could bake.

Brittney was a whole five minutes late. The teacher, a super computer that recently replaced normal teachers, forcing the old educator class to find other jobs, printed out a tardy slip. With the fine print: Corporal punishment, Saturday morning,

Once she got in her seat, Brittney showed Nadine the slip. “How did you get that one, I thought they banned the practice.” Nadine asked.

“My father bribed the staff.” She brushed her brunette locks in Nadine’s direction. “You never talk to me anymore Richard, has something changed?”

Nadine remembered the last time they went out together. It was a movie theater trip with some of her school friends. Her then boyfriend Alex, with platinum locks, a pair of ovular glasses, who always carried a book of Shakeaspear’s plays with him, wanted to arrange a partnership with Nadine and her childhood friend.

They had lost touch sometime around fifth grade, and had not spoken much until very recently, when Nadine was first kicked off the flying wing schoolplane.

Nadine mostly talk with Alex during the times she was able to sneak a ride without the pilot realizing it, leading her to often being kicked to the curb. But that is a subject for another book blurb. “I’ve been busy lately.”

The computer beeped for class to stop talking. The rest of the day followed a similar pattern.

“Hey wait up Richard!” Brittney said. But it was to late to catch up with her. When she arrived at her second class, she got her second tardy slip.

Nadine rode a flying wing bus that day, in the same manner in which she would usually to do so. At a comfortable seat, she hunched over Alex’s shoulder, jokingly took the book of plays from his hands, and prompted to tease him about how Romeo and Juliet was dreck.

She wore a pair of head phones, and banged her ears to various Cybergoth bands. Among other things teenagers did in their long trip back home.

At home, he raised her smart phone to the door lock, then let herself inside. There was a can of mushroom soup waiting for her in the kitchen, with a post it note of her name on it. She opened the can, and threw it into the microwave, being lucky to not make a mess. She then slammed her backpack on the bed, slipped her socks off, and put on her Birkenstock clogs, then got out her kit to make her pet Robot dog.

Her phone buzzed. “Oh hey, Brit. I thought I told you not to call me again.”

She hung up, and muted Brittney’s number. She then sat at the table to finish the school work she didn’t complete in class. Then finally began to the real project she was waiting with, after she turned on the evening news on her computer.

Nadine recieved another phone call, while chilling out with her screwdriver. It was Juline. Her mom would often get home late during the evening, as the nature of her work required constant attendence in political meetings with different aristocrats. “Hey Richard, I have another meeting that will keep my busy until later this evening. Could you go ahead and put the mushroom soup in the Tuna cassatole?”

Nadine hated being called Richard, but hated her mother’s wrath even more, so she got out another can of mushroom soup to cover up her misdeed. “You sure will.”

“Thanks, take care sweety.” Juline hung up the phone.

Nadine got back to tending to her pet project. Her seat looked like it was made up wood, but was actually a form of industrial plastic. Most of the wood produced these days came from trees that were raised in giant farms, rather than natural lumber. Which meant that seats now had a certain stiffness that was completely unlike the pliableness she had grown up being used to during the 2090s. She would watch various channels from Alternet to Common Dreams, and generally avoided disaster networks like MSNBC or Fox News. She preferred to look at drawings of girls in wooden shoes.

Juline did not come home that night, and Nadine was starting to get worried. But she decided to not call 9/11. Instead she gave into sleep.

Keep Your Nose Clean

The next morning at the station, Nadine tried to push herself through the crowd and get on. This failed miserably. The next attempt, she tried tailgating her friend Alex, but he was prone to being a tattletale despite nearing fifteen. In either case, she had to hurry, as she seemed to not be allowed onto the bus yet again. This meant another day of aching legs. But this was an adventure that came with the territory, such was the tagline of her favorite MC in one of her favorite JRPGs.

She arrived three hours later, but she also generally tried getting up three hour earlier. She was just barely on time; much of her life was spent having to make certain adjustments to various set backs, rather than confronting them head on. If her life went on the normal path, Nadine would be working as just another poltician.

But she generally hated politique, and wanted to turn her entire world upside down. She just didn’t know much of her world would soon be done in, in this fashion. It was late that morning during third period. The intercom in the classroom called for her to come to the office.

In the office, Nadine set in front of the super computers desk. The vice principle was a towering monstricity of wires and computer chips, and was completely binary on a screen that floated in the air as if it were a Graphical User Interface from a video game made by sadistic head masters. Nadine wondered if this was the computer that paddled Brittney, and had to restrain a cackle picturing her being pulled up by wires.

“We saw the joke you made to Alex about Romeo and Juliet. Did you know I also fucking hate Shakeaspeare?” The computer monitor buzzed in and out. “But sometimes, life will throw unexpected barriers at me. Your mother didn’t come home last night. She died when she was mugged by a Francophone Anarchist lady. Don’t worry, we already beheaded her. But you will be moving to a different school.”

The computer pretended to wipe what may be described as a digital tear drop. “So we made a cake for you to celebrate your fourteenth birthday.”

Nadine rode in a private flying wing jet to her new boarding school. Beside her were two armed guards, both of which were decked out in black. A few months ago, Nadine wore the boots that could easily me confused for combat boots, yet now she were her two Birkenstock Clogs, and simplest of plain clothes while resting reclined back with a double layer of pillows.

Once she arrvied at the admissionss podium, she was asked to remove all things she was carrying in her purse. This included the book she kept to remember Alex by, the boy she grew up with reading Ghost Stories in virtual reality games, under the glow of hallucinatory camp fires. The guard asked her what the book was. She sneered, “Shakeaspear, a book from a friend.”

“Yea, I hate Shakeaspeare too.”

The only light is that of a small lamp. Nadine put her bag into the closet, while doing so she had began to have the creeping feeling of isolation and despair; the room was modified from an old asylum cell block, the walls covered in white paint to wash away the blood of a now seemingly distant era.

Previously the EU had taken over the United States, during the Second American Revolution. You might think this was an Anarcho-Communists dream come true, until the EU had resolved to replace lethal injection with the Guillotine Gun. The EU lost more territory than the old United States had ever owned, much of it because the US was heading leftward while Europe was heading increasingly right ward.

And now, Nadine rested in a prison originally designed for political prisoners treated as if they’re anarcho-anacronist personalities were a product of madness. Thus she dreaded living in a place that was the stronghold of a now distant, decaying empire.

Her work desk looked like it was made of wood, but in fact it was made out of biodegradeable plastic made look like such, and the shoes modelled after the 19th century Dutch were of similar material. This was part of their failed green energy policy; it failed not because it was false, but because nobody ever considered the degrading ecosystem of Earth. She heard footsteps in the hall.

She peeked outside her peek hole on the door.

“Hey, It’s Michael, can I come in?” he said. Michael was to be one of her room mates. Despite the fact that she was a trans girl, the school still treated her as if she was male. She turned the knob to let him in. “Need any help unpacking?”

“I’m almost done, but feel free if you think there is anything I didn’t unpack.” Nadine said, then leaned in closer to hear the beating of his heart, to know another human was there.

“So who are you?” Michael said, gently brushing Nadine’s hair.

“The name’s Nadine.”

“We’ll get along great, you seem loving. But keep your nose clean.”

Locking Her Father Out

Scene 1 – Sky Apartment

(Memory Sequence)

An apartment structured like a tiny house. The glow of the neon sky gave the glass scattered reflections. Inside, Nadine, at thirteen, is sitting with her mother at the couch.

NADINE: What do you I need a baby sitter? I’m thirteen.

MOTHER: I know that, but you always matured slower than other boys.

NADINE: I’m a girl for one thing.

MOTHER: You know, your uncle will never consider you female.

cut to

Nadine is taking a screw driver to adjust the tightness of her robotic arms and legs.

NADINE: I’m a grown thirteen year old. I can feel it in my limbs.

SCENE 2 – Under City Apartment Flat

(Present)

A run down apartment, Ellen is locked inside the basement trying to keep her alcoholic father outside.

FATHER: Banging on the door.

Ellen, let me in, I need to talk to you. It’s about your grades.

ELLEN: (Not feeling like breaking away from her favorite message board.) I know exactly what will happen if I do as well. So let’s cut to the chase, what do you want?

SCENE 3 – Under City Neighborhood

Ellen is exiting her apartment through the basement window she cracked open. On her she carries the clothes that she could carry, and her toiletries. Also a thumb drive with images she found online.

She reaches a dark alleyway, and she recognized the silhouette of the figure of a boy her age.

ELLEN: What are you doing around here Slephner?

SLEPHNER: I’m just dropping by, why are you out so late?

ELLEN: What’s it to you?

SLEPHNER: (Seeing the bruise that was on her legs.) Oh, I see. Want to come over to my place?

A “war dog”, a remnant of an old military robot canine from the two civil wars, attempts to attack them. The figure is rusty, and in need of repairs.

Slephner shoots a shotgun at it.

SLEPHNER: Besides, it’s dangerous out her so late.

Mean Streets Of The Alleycat

Every since he got home from work, her father only watched television. It was old reruns of classical western sitcoms, which made Ellen wanted to vomit. But it was better than actually being a cowboy, with all their chauvinistic values. All their girls being rescued from the hangman’s noose. She herself had largely given up watching the set, and had largely tuned herself out from the larger world. It was not just the educational channels that gave her a headache. But also the cartoon channels. Part of her still wanted to reclaim the lost joy of flickering lights. When she had went to the arcades, she had met Slephner for the first time. It was one of the few occasions she didn’t mind little Indians and cowboys shooting at each other to the death.

“Ellen! I’m trying to talk to you!” Her father said, slamming the door. Even though in reality, he had just gotten up. He forgot that he had locked her in the basement. He took the key from where he hid it, then opened the door. “ It wasn’t the same tone from when he spanked her, but it wasn’t any more of a relief. Just the sound of his voice, made her want to smash his head open with a lead pipe.

“I can explain about–” Ellen began to say.

“Forget about the excuses.” her father said.

It had been like this since she turned fifteen, and showed no obvious signs of slowing down. She did what any other girl in that situation to.

She got herself a lead pipe.

After the ordeal, she packed her bags with blood on her face. She unpacked herself a bottle of mace, packed it in her purse. In her backpack, she carried a small laptop. She also got herself a change of clothes and toiletries. She had never been homeless before. But now she didn’t have the choice. After she climbed out the window, having locked herself inside, she saw the silhouette of another man, who seemed to shape shift from that of a human sized tarantula, and she was unsure whether it was real or a product of the trickier of city lights. Slephner’s silhouette revealed itself, who held a Luger.

He shot the spider several times, to make absolutely sure it was dead.

“Oh, Ellen. Is that you? Why the blood on the face?”

“It’s a long story.”

Ellen carried the stuff she could carry, along with the last fifty dollars she would ever see, into her new life as an adult, despite being ten years younger than most. But it was better than being an alley cat on these streets.

It was school where Malcolm failed his grades. He was one of the few that still went to standardized education. The topics about human anatomy were never something he payed much attention to. At least that part of his life was over; but not the endless calling from his father that broke the silence like nails on a chalkboard. If the windows were made of normal glass, they would have broke. While his father wanted to lecture Malcolm about his grades, the boy himself thought of it as has dad just wanting to use him as his sounding board. “Why are we talking about my grades now? Hadn’t he already?”

It wasn’t the first time his dad yelled at him, but all the times he did always seemed like the same reasons. “We can’t take care of both you and your sister. We have to pay for your sister’s cancer treatment. You’re out!” His father got himself a shotgun, and chased him out of the apartment. Then shot in Malcolm’s general direction. “Don’t come back now!”

Malcolm ran off into the night. Now on these streets, he no longer cared about anything. Not the friend he thought he had, not even his own famille. He wondered if there were still computers to use the currently degenerated networks at the local library, but he forgot that he no longer had his identification. An erased face, a blotch of nothingness. He could be murdered, buried in a heap of garbage. And nobody would come looking for him.

He heard screech that sounded like a cat, but he was not sure. He went to the source of where the noise came from. He checked out the cat to make sure it wasn’t wounded, then gave it a gentle scratch on its left ear. “So it’s just me and you.”

This was a few months ago. And the sound of the cat’s murder still gave him nightmares, and could not wash away the blood on his face, despite long since running off in the shower. He didn’t remember the cat killer’s face. And now, having given the cat a name, he would go out the name the new cybernetic he made from his own resources, after the cat. The cat whose named was Pod. Pod-Net. Malcolm made a promise to himself, that the new friend who had made after tending to Nadine’s care, would not end up like his cat.

Nadine was still sleeping on their old couch, in their old apartment room they rented on the cheap. But it was better than him, Blanci, and Nadine being out on the street. He supposed it could have been a lot worse.

Keyboards And Broken Glass

There was an old saying that mentioned, it wasn’t the fall the kills you, but the sudden stop. But generally this was a statement generally made for people who have not fallen into the outer most edges of darkness.

The fall was not the worst of it, my body a mess punctured limbs.

When you’re missing a right arm, it’s easy to think that maybe eventually you’ll stop using this particular limb. But for Nadine, she had come to realize that ones dominance was not based on your strongest hand, but the side of your brain. When she slide my fingers across a tablet, it felt the same as always, albeit without as much feeling. She liked to shop for parts on the open web, on the off chance that she could find parts to rebuild her robot dog. She found Spark plug in a garbage dump, just down the road from Purgatory, who was merely a skeleton of his former metallic rat dog self. She could barely make it through to find the robot dog due to the light not always reaching this district.

A few months ago, she was in the hospital.

She could remember the sound of being dragged on a metallic table to see the good doctor, inquiring with her best friend why in the world it was she survived. If you wonder why she was able to remember it, consider the fact that sge can remember most things while still drunk. Her left arm was a broken chunk, one that could barely make a slam dunk, or any other aspect of athletic fulfillment in the floating city.

“Do you think she’s going to make it?” a voice asked.

“We’ll have to see, they’re punctured all over.” the doc said.

Yet now as she looked to the stars, onward into the aristocratic Utopian mess she once lived, which made her realize, being down here, how good she had it. And yet, while she didn’t completely trust her new friends, she wouldn’t trade them for the world.

She lived in her own darkness.

When Nadine woke up, she found Blanci leaning her head on her shoulders. Nadine could sense her faint outline, as she grasped for air. “Here, have this head ache body. It can help the pain a little bit.” Blanci offered. Nadine grabbed it without hesitation, almost fall asleep. “Please stay awake, it sure gets lonely here.”

“And who is this pretty face.” Nadine asked. This was how she met Blanci, one of her first crushes, but they never got close enough to reveal ourselves to each other, before she was guillotined gunned by militarized police. A Spanish girl raised by Italian parents, though do to a month having run away from home, her accent of a Corsican was barely noticeable, borrowing more from the Urban culture of the Southern most parts of Chattanooga. Nadine didn’t know much about Blanci’s past other than this, just that whenever she discussed rats with her, Blanci always would ask her to stop.

But Nadine always wanted pet rat.

Not a rat dog.

It was just a few months ago, when Nadine had run away from the boarding school. Though she was a runaway much like the others, there were some part of her that always wanted to go back to the place where she once belonged.

The others had gotten used to eating roaches, if they could even find that. The secondary American civil war had largely been kind to her family. An aristocratic family whom worked closely with the multiple CEOs of the potato district. Even now she still dreams of rolling soccer balls, rolling away from her, always being just out of reach, and in front of her always some faint glimmer of reality television of dancing shows.

The motion set that covered the city was called the Meadow Of Gold. She called it simply shit, but it was the kind of shit that, despite the most miserable aspect of their existence, made them hold on just a little bit longer, like some abstract idea that they will someday become rich and famous, score a dark comedy skit on comedy television. She preferred the darkness of her own bedroom. The glow of L.E.D. lights, the flow of French Chanson singers singing her songs of good night butterflies. Dead men’s lullabies.

Yet in this world, below that distant prairie, while some fairy and elf always play dangerous games, she found myself resenting the image of such falseness. She was a Satanist at heart, and wanted to expose the lies for what they were. For her, she knew that in reality, even her own life was rather austere. It was never something she mentioned widely to her friends, whom were taught by abstractly non-human pixel machines. The best you were going to get, was some Left Libertarian conversation by Noam Chomsky and Charles Johnson. But never an in person conversation.

But for her reality was no political novel.

It was a game of chase, nightmares, total monstrosities.

She thought she was going to die from lack of sleep.

When she had met Brittney, it was a time when she was much more easy going. They had known each other for months, but stopped seeing each other when she used to play “school”. Much of Nadine’s identity had not yet been formed. She had not yet switched to public school, where she would hang out with school friends to play pool. Yet now as the years went by, she simply ask herself why. Sometimes people separate on bad terms, yet when you’re young there is nobody else’s term besides the terms of your parents.

Nadine and Brittney were politically the opposite, as she would later find out second hand. She was the right hand, and Nadine was the left hand; it makes Nadine wonder who she voted for in the last election, not that it mattered now since the war. While Nadine ate spicy food, and wiped the sweat off her brow, she still regretted no marriage vows, her desires fading like the wind from some other lover’s memory.

In high school, she generally avoided other women, partially do to her own feelings of inferiority, but also her unwillingness to subject them to the darkness of her own lust. At the time she had multiple issues related to hating other girls who were more delightful than she.

Yet the hacker instinct ran wildly. Life was like an electronic keyboard, with various previously recorded music notes. With songs from various decades. Childhood memories were one of those things one tries to push toward the past, but she kept wondering what Brittney would think of her now. Even within her own family, she was largely the opposite of almost every she knew; consider the fact that she had been watching a weird mixture of Alex Jones and Noam Chomsky, with the old Green party winning out in the long run. She found various conservative talking heads truly alien, in a way more bizarre than exotic science fiction short stories.

To think, her and Brittney became so different.

Like life fracturing into broken glass.

An Outcast In Love

When Nadine used to write little diary entries, she got into the mode where every poem I written was a suicide letter in miniature; a song about the lost moments of life. In their slow rhythmic melodies, she laid the groundwork for my own inner destruction. And there was a part of her that relished the thought of being completely forgotten.

She fantasized of severed necks and blood on the floor. She dreamed of guillotine blades for whose death the people shall not ignore; she dreamed of blood squirts and gore. Dreamed of music boxes, and the fear of whether she could eventually be open about her own sexuality, like blood flowing from the wound of Adam’s apple like the sound of crickets chirping in the darkest of midnight hours. Nadine dreamed of her own inner life, fallen to pieces. Her life, her story; her own self-destruction. Yet there was something holding her back.

Something that she didn’t want to acknowledge.

That she wasn’t the only one in this world, on Purgatory Road, where the crickets always chirp no matter the time of day; where the music box plays broken children’s rhyme, and not always stories of urban decay.

Now she types arcane programs, to distract from herself; her words flowing like fractured Ruby syntax on green screen monitors. The flow of AES and financial transactions; she wasn’t sure how long she could keep the job, if they knew how old she really was. Then she would be left alone again, to rot along the floor like she did all those years ago.

To rot to her own inner life.

The vampire life.

“Richy, you said this would be the last powder.” Her name wasn’t Richy for one thing, but it took forever to get someone to finally gender you properly. Nadine also had only recently gotten this new robotic arm and leg. Now she scooted through life, as nothing but the dregs of her former existence. The laptop provided a light that attracted gnats.

“Just one more powder, then I’m done.” Nadine said.

“You said that last night.” Blanci wasn’t the one that should really make judgments based on people’s disabilities. Nadine’s own, other than her own absence of a left arm and right leg, was apparently not obvious. It wasn’t like she wasn’t waking up at nights out of breath. Out of breath, she went through life like a speeding bullet train popping powders like jaw breakers for tots. “I’m not your mother Richy.”

“Don’t call me Richy, it’s Nadine.”

Sometimes life felt like an absurdest drug PSA. Dropped in from a CIA helicopter, one hand gun aiming toward the finish line–someone’s skull. An adrenaline high more potent than the most reflexive of fight or flight responses. Like a robot fist hammering your personal alarm clock like an old introduction cliche; the story of the rest of her life before she found the game called Uploaded Fairy. “Look, you don’t have to understand my condition. But at least don’t be a dick.” Nadine said.

“Richy, I’m a lady. Not a dick.”

Nadine inched very close to Blanci’s face.

“Ladies can be dicks too. They can have them as well.”

It was one of those nights where the only way to resolve a personal problem was a one thirty two caliber in the brain, and two hammered right into your phantom knees. “They can certainly be scared of rats.”

Blanci, from the point that Nadine had met her, never took kindly to this aspect of her past, though she refused to admit this. She simply ignored Nadine for the rest of the night. Midnight finally closed at five in the morning, multiple hours past the sound of quietness in the air. Nadine preferred to spend her time listening to listening to songs like “Ma France” than Blanci’s shit. Yet also knew, at least for the time being, they needed each other.

Perhaps Nadine more than Blanci.

“Fine, none for tonight.”

Life flowed like scattered bits of rain.

There was something about the weather that, despite its intrinsic coldness, did not make Nadine want to go back to living with Blanci. When you compared her with Brittney, it only made sense that her only satisfaction is to see Nadine suffer, at least it seemed so at the time. Yet the monotonous buzz of my robotic limbs made Nadine want to keep searching for meaning in a world without, even if that meant digging for scraps in a local dumpster.

That was how she ended up finding a new shell for spark plug. Spark plug was mostly in decent shape, but had a few dings and scratches. The major issue was rust stain on the shell. Nadine took coordinates of the width, height, and depth of the main frame. An old model morphing into the new, almost as if the old designer knew what the most current update in the design would be. There was something in the design that made Nadine want to hold onto her lost youth, despite the very obvious indication of its futility.

She no longer dreamed of the world above; she simply desired for at least one simple night where I could sleep normal sleep, and dream normal dreams. She desired total oblivion. But the old lucidity drove out demons like holographic witches, whose special brew was fish poison.

Life flowed like scattered bits of rain. Scattered screenplay scripts, where the only spare page was some vague resemblance of ones autobiography, the smell of artificial cheese and canned English peas on cardboard flavored crust, being the only thing of real enjoyment, aside from a girl named Lidier. Ladier was a mixture of Hispanic and Francophone. Her father was Spanish, her mother French. She would entertain her when Brittney would not. Nadine took life as an abstraction, not it was all concrete, but always with a bit of humor and a smile. Yet behind the eyes, was something that she only recent began to understand. A total sense of isolation.

A total outcast in love.

Sometimes the way that people look, can vary considerably from how they actually are as a person. One may appear innocent, but be completely corrupted; the inverse is often also the case.

For Nadine, as she indulge in the pleasure of the lady’s faces in digital entertainment, often she recalled back to when she would meet girls in the earliest of her grade school years. Those years ago, when her soul was much more free, she wanted to join the secret service, but found it to be to much for her heart. Whenever she saw other girls that were more pretty than her, she would often become jealous of their particular assets. Whether this was their style of their Birkenstock sandals, or the color of their flowing dress.

At the time she would fantasize about girls having their heads cut off, and nobody ever bothered to tell her that girls that had that done would ultimately die of their injuries. Nadine would want to put her own head on their body in their place. One girl that she knew in this school, with blond curls in her hair she vocalized this particular feeling, without clarifying the fact that she didn’t actually want to cut her head off. All that to say, the school was not quite sure how to handle someone like Nadine. But the Spanish girl of Italian parentage was never subject to this particular jealousy. For the girl with the black rose in her hair, there was no love to share.

Nothing but a life turned to dust.

Yet now, beneath the iron sky turned to rust and red rain, under the sky of thousand suns, Nadine never felt brave enough to voice any of her feelings. She was left jotting notes of a former life.

The life of a new alley cat.

Eat Quietly, Then Leave

“It’s alright Slephner, I know you don’t like me personally.” Slephner never saw her again. Since then his first girlfriend hung herself in her room. With nowhere else to turn to my sorrow, Slephner turned to the arcades.

You can grow up with someone and never really get to know them. While Slephner knew there was something different about Ellen compared to his first love, he didn’t know she would murder her father. There were some things that Ellen did not know about Slephner as well, one of the few regrets he had in my life not to get to know her more. Now that he was on the edge of death, he found myself wishing for a rewind. He was the best of gamers, the best of thieves. He could get the highest score with no questions asked. If he was put to the task during a gaming session, he took it in stride as an off day. He could always get better, you had to if you wanted to get better. This was his life. In some ways he would rather not want to live it in any other way.

In one of their first gaming sessions, he felt like tutoring Ellen in the ways of the world. As one of the few actual girls he liked, he found myself having conflicting feelings between the desire to be her father figure and her movie buddy. Except Slephner was just a kid too as was she, and all they wanted to be was free from the horrors of this world.

He had last broken up with his previous girlfriend; despite being three years younger than the minimum to drink, they found their solace in the drop. Like flavor of mild peaches under the false Summer heat of the tanning bed, of which he used to take her. But Ellen was different, he wanted something more. He thought that Ellen could provide it, after all she was one of the few girls that he found he could have a man to man discussions with. To others, he came across as someone who experienced mood swings. But he knew unlike anyone else that he was always thinking about things. Slephner thought about his previous relationship and his current. His last hope for desiring women at all. And yet, despite no other interest in Ellen I found there was something in her that made me want to hold on unlike others who failed.

When he found that his life was beyond the pale when his old girlfriend took his robot dog to the next state over, Ellen was there to comfort him unlike anyone else. Yet part of his affection was that he found something in her that made him be proud to be her friend. Slephner never liked baseball, at least not very much. He wanted to be her batter and have her catch his balls. He wrote one poem devoted to one of the previous girls he had broken up with. But Ellen was always there beside him, always there to hold him. Hold him into the night when he was down.

Slephner wanted to sleep with her, even though he had invited another guy to sleep in the same bed with them. In general he preferred guys. But for her there was something more than lust, something more than love that made him want to be held in her arms at night. Yet he had father like feelings for her during the day, would always instruct her about how to pull the right triggers on a hand guns, push the right buttons the on the Nihilist likes of the arcades. Some might view it as narcissistic, but he gave himself accolades, but also gave Ellen accolades. When she was shy Slephner would clap her hands for her on her behalf to herself, in order to build up her self-esteem. This would always make it stick her tongue out at him, but Slephner wanted Ellen to be only his own.

When you get so lonely, you want to be with anyone.

For Slephner, he would call up Ellen to see if she could come over, even before they ran away together. They had romantic feelings, possessive feelings.

Feelings they had for nobody else.

On some level Slephner knew he was going to die. It was only a matter of time. When the new gaming systems malfunctioned, he was left in a degenerating state. He was hoping to die, be left to fate.

The doctors in the laboratory did not expect Slephner to live for more more than a year. They were unsure as to whether this was because of cancer, or some other condition. His natural vision began to decline. He would eventually need prosthetic eyes to restore vision. He could have died in what they referred to as dream-space, but his ability to create his own world gave him just enough drive to survive to see the next day, but he soon found that the world created slowly lost its lucid quality. Desires he had that were left dormant for so long. Slephner joined flesh with fairies, fought amongst noble armies.

There was a wish about a falling star. He wanted to dine with the Tzar’s. His desire had always been to visit Russia, before the revolution. As there was only so much in the history people were taught that he actually believed.

There was a certain unspoken contract. He was not suppose to share what I knew with anyone. Not suppose to share with the few family he had left, yet for him it was simply source code. He found that all worlds deserved to be free, especially if he could free them and get many a blow job. Wanting to share the dreams with his sweetheart Ellen, he knew she would love to hear a new story. Yet the dream-scanners told him not to say anything. Or that they might decapitate Ellen with a Guillotine Gun.

You know how it is when you just under your Freshman year in high school. If you get told one thing you always wanted to do the opposite. He didn’t like being told what to do, he wanted the power.

This was his mistake, his greed.

His youthful creed.

“Are you ready to order?” Nadine heard Ellen say, as gradually as the vision from inside her dream began to fade way. He could distinctly remember various advertisements playing over in her brain.

“Yea I’ll take a coffee.” Nadine ordered, ate, then exited the building.

After she walked through the sliding glass doors, Nadine tried to remember what it was that made her want to remember what those ads specifically were. Perhaps they reminded her of a lost time, when she lived in the sky. Ads from when she was plugged into his deck. Somehow she got the impression that only worked, when Nadine was plugged into the pod-net network.

Blanci was outside to greet Nadine, in the thick green fog that covered the city. She saw her take the powder, choking and snorting on it after accidentally taking a breath into it. Fumes were tossed his direction.

“Remember boy, … you need me. Or you will die … cold during the night.” Blanci, Nadine’s Fruit Pie, said, in that near calmness that would give just about anybody chills. Almost like she wasn’t even there. Nadine needed something for my mental fight. Bianca’s generosity was the only reason he was even alive at all.

The next morning Nadine was disturbed by Bianca’s cell-phone, woke up as if rising from a fall from the sky. “How was your sleep dear wanderer?” Blanci asked, eye-balling her like a cat to mouse.

I think at sixteen, I’m a little bit to old to be called a run-away. Besides she’s not my mother, she thought. Nadine was not sure what felt more like a sledgehammer. Her grating voice, that can can through anyone like a sword, or because of his aching robotic arm and his immune-suppressant withdrawals. “So let’s talk money for a minute.”

“Do you wish to grab my only bullets?” Blanci said.

“I only wish to know how much, you think is reasonable to give me to take the medication that I need.” Nadine said.

“That you can carry it around with you,” she said, in that slightly less grating voice that was still grating. “To buy more of that powdery pill stuff?” Nadine wasn’t sure why she was still getting on to her about it, though in a way she was like a mother her never had here. For this reason, he was still attached to her.

“Well I’m going out.” The Fallen stood up in the nude.

“Hey cover yourself up – with this blanket.” Blanci said. Then dragged Nadine into the closet to try on some new clothes that would not make her girlfriend stand out.

Nadine, Malcolm, and Bianca sat at the diner just down the road from Purgatory. Nadine was of course, being the little inattentive asshole she was to the conversation, taking her immune-suppressant pills to subdue the physical pain from the robotic limbs. “At some point man,” Malcolm said to Nadine. Then he snickered without really being amused, “you need to buy your own.”

Malcolm raised one of his eyebrows at the waitress, who placed his hamburger plate down on the table.

“I will have a soda, make it a large.” Blanci said, choking on a powder. She spewed powder on her shirt, causing Malcolm to growl at her. She puckered her lips mockingly at him, who smiled with a grimace. Blanci then pushed Malcolm away grabbing the soda from the waitresses hands. Malcolm quickly got it back from her, after she tried taking a sip.

You guys just can’t get along can you, Nadine thought.

Outside the diner, Ellen and Slephner walked inside through the sliding glass doors. To the table right behind them they sat. The Purgatory dwellers tried not to pay any particular attention to the Dangervilles. Just eat quietly, then leave. Slephner eye-balled Nadine’s famille with his grill. Malcolm did not really seem to notice or care.

Nadine did not really understand how anyone could get used to it, with that tension that was boiling under the surface.

The Wolves Cry Out

SCENE 1 – OFFICER’S OFFICE

Rassie is sitting in her office, scanning different forms of data about the under regions of THE POTATO DISTRICT. The office is filled with different paper work, and old analog devices. Although most surveillance had since gone digital.

RASSIE: (Holding the cell phone.) Ah yes, I see. So there is a large crowd at the “barbershop.” Can I have your phone number, so I can call you back?

SCENE 2 – THE BARBERSHOP – MIDNIGHT

The barbershop was actually a front. Behind the section where employees did their cuts, was a mini-stadium, populated by different “War Dog” models. Nadine visited the place from time to time, after gaining trust from Malcolm.

MALCOLM: So you’re telling me, so haven’t heard of war dogs?

NADINE: Not exactly, I have always wanted to make robot dogs, but only in the context of having a pet.

MALCOLM: What are you wanting exactly, a video game tutorial?

NADINE: Nah, a run down of how they work.

Cut TO

Slephner’s dog attacks Malcolm’s dog. Malcolm’s dog loses one of its ears, but still has fight left inside the operating system.

MALCOLM: Lost technology, nobody knows exactly how they were built. And the military wont say anything.

NADINE: That sucks man!

MALCOLM: I know right?

SCENE 3 – PARKING LOT

Militarized officer tanks fill the parking lot till it could be filled no more. Rassie, a dream-scanner, approaches the door of the barbershop.

She knocks on the door, not expecting an answer. Then she the eye latch opens.

MALCOLM: What’s the pass phrase doc?

RASSIE: Isn’t that a bit overkill?

MALCOLM: Why use a pass word, when you can use a pass phrase?

RASSIE: Let us in, and I’m calling your parents.

SCENE 4 – Alleyway

Nadine is limping. She remembered how the war dogs malfunctoned, leading the militarized cops to raid the barbershop. Ellen helped her stand up, while they went to find safety.

NADINE: What happened to Malcolm and Slephner?

ELLEN: Don’t worry, we’re going to be fine. What did Rassie mean by your mother was waiting for you?

NADINE: It’s a long story, but in short, I came from the city in the sky. You might think I’d want to go back home. But you’d be wrong. … I’d rather rot.

ELLEN: But can you trust us, and especially me?

NADINE: It looks like I have no other choice.

Part Three

The second part of Uploaded Fairy.

Her Manifest

It was a chill unlike any other chill she had sense. Her brother reminded her of her vulnerable position, with her eye ball. He knew her pressure points, and despite her unique resistance to pain. This aspect scared her the most.

Don’t worry ma’am, we’ll make sure your daughter never has an eye problem again. The memory of the failed surgery from her eye-ball was something that still provided self-esteem problems for her. Yet she was able to suppress it just enough, to meet the chief of other dream-scanners. “What I’m saying say sir,” she said, sense a gulp coming on that she wished not to show in front of her employer. “That a male to female gamer, has broken the virtual reality game. Somehow they have created a bridge to another world.” The chief was not sure what to make of what she was saying.

“We need to keep in eye on her, she may be a security risk.”

“Yes sir.”

Rassie was not sure what it was that made her employer think of the specimen Nadine as being a security risk. Though it was not like she advocated game breaking, at least she hoped that whatever was listening to her thoughts was not thinking she was thinking this. She felt like a demon, somewhere in the silence not quite silent. Yet she wished to no longer be a demon, she was a human. Like Nadine.

She wanted to meet the bridge maker. For a moment, she was concerned about her appearance. Would her eye patch be considered repulsive? Though she was the type of woman to wear black arch support clogs with a buckle strap at work, she wanted to at least make there first communication somewhat professional. Rassie had her own personal reasons, for no longer wishing to be a dream-scanner. She wanted to not be like her brother, Tanner. It was not the love of Nadine, she went against the order scan in and of itself.

She wanted to find the bridge, to Voreth’s Promise herself. It was a cold wet November, and she had just turned the heater on. Her bedroom was starting to make her feel prickly, and wanted to be warm and wet. She took off her black trench coat, and placed her black clogs upon the glass coffee table, relaxing and trying to fall asleep. Yet instead her mind was constantly brought back to the gamer that had created “The Bridge”. If I could find her, maybe she could help her figure out how to go to that alternate universe herself. For she had a feeling herself, that her own thoughts about scanning were being monitored. She also wanted to use some form of magic to restore her lost eye that was accidentally taken out in her youth at sixteen. She could not help but laugh at herself for thinking such, as it was surely merely a game world. Not a physical world where one may touch or smell.

Rassie want to plan some sort of meeting with Nadine, or at least that was what her dream-space avatar was called. Normally most of the people she had observed from the camera’s within the floating eye, that the locals called the “eye of god”, were the type that followed the standard protocol of the game. They were like time rabbits to be slaughtered in the matrix. If I could come to meet you now, maybe I can convince Tanner The Scanner to let you go. Maybe I can keep my job, not decapitated by a guillotine gun she thought.

Yet one some level she cared not if she lived or died.

So long as she could make her death visible to all. So that the people may see how they treat those who go against big brother.

This was her manifest.

Breaking The Game

Rassie called up Nadine, using the Rune platform. She wondered if anybody was still using that instant messaging system, as recently the people she was observing behind those television camera placed in through a secure location attachment, was that they were using some other system. Because they were already suspecting something was up with their L.E.D displays, the standard television format for those that were no part of the underground, they were using some sort of dialect that she was unable to recognize. Thus this was a gamble. Part of her actually want to go on-site, in order to ask directly. Even though she was no longer enthused by her present line of work, she figured they would probably view her as a traitor. After all the sand crawler riders were in unruly bunch. In her mind she pictured one of them taking her head off with a guillotine gun, and placing her head on a stick. Did not want to think about that again, that sucked dick. At a moment’s notice, she got the call.

“Who is it, and what are you wanting?” Richard said.

“I’m here to speak to Nadine.” Rassie said.

“Quite, I don’t use that name yet.”

“Wait, your Nadine?”

“Yet, that needs explanation.”

They were at the sports bar, Nadine ordered them a beer. Though she knew that in this country she was no old enough to drink, she thought it would be unfair to complain sense she was buying her dinner, and she asking for information out of the kindness of her heart. “So why did you decide to break the game?” said Rena, with her black arch support clogs with the side buckle strap tucked to her side while she sat at one of the tables by the window glass. “Normally I would have expected you to have saved that fairy girl.”

“Well I don’t exactly like fairies.” said Nadine.

“And your not just jealous?” Rassie said, snickering.

“Well they can change at will, I’m stuck as a human.” said Nadine.

“So it is jealously.” said Rassie.

“Ok fine yea, but something is different about her.” said Nadine.

“Like what?” said Rassie.

“Well, she was counting on me.” Nadine said, then took a sip from her overly large bottle of beer. She decided to have a drink, even though ordinarily drinking beer in particular tended to cause head aches. “I have never been counted on before.” Rena wondered why Nadine would be willing to give some personal information to her, as she did not even know who she was. If she did, did not seem to care that much. Almost like she knew that she was going to die soon anyway, as her jittering robotic arm would suggest.

“I want you to show me the bridge, to Voreth’s Promise.” Rassie said.

“You mean that game I downloaded?” Nadine said.

“I have a feeling about it, that it’s not a game you downloaded.’ Rassie said.

“Right, whatever. This dark brew is fantastic.” Nadine said.

“Don’t misdirect the conversation!” said Rassie, face palming.

It was then Nadine remember how she opened a portal to another universe, though it was supposedly under the guise of a video game.

Nadine would have been tormented by nightmares, but her experience with her good friends perishing under the teeth of the pit-wolves teeth played like a universal video tape being rewinded and played to the end. Yet there were none tonight. The trodes activated the same bio-sensors that triggered sleep in any normal person. Even an insomniac like Nadine could be in the dream world forever and ever. This everlasting dream was like no other. She longed for the coming darkness, as the light was not a normal light. But the eyes of god watching, peering. Lurking, yet for whatever reason the beings that always watched from the sky never did. It was a game of dream-space cat and mouse. Nadine always woke up screaming, a cold colder than any cold she aver experienced before.

For Nadine it was like watching scenes from a game. They played with no interaction, and looking back she wondered why she didn’t assume.

She heard voices, in the darkness the was like a dimly lit prison.

“Brother, I think I’ve found –” Elena said to Al-diel.

“Don’t tell me, you think you’ve found the hero?” Al-diel said to Elena.

“Well, Millie found someone the other day.”

“What, Millie handled a non-kin. And your allowing –”

“Where else am I going to take her, do you really think I’m going to let her die?”

“We don’t need another hero Elena. We are doomed.”

“You may have given up, but I have not.”

“Fine, but first I’d like to know where they have come from.”

But in the present.

“I wanted to see if I could break the game.” said Nadine.

“Well you broke the game alright.” said Rassie.

The Deepest Blood Of The Heart

SCENE 1 – SIMULATION – MEDIEVAL VILLAGE

Nadine, Malcolm, and Nadine restart the game of Voreth’s Promise. Presented was a 3D equivalent to what they used to call Roguelike games. But there was a number of differences: in this game, you actually bled. One wrong move, and you were dead. One wrong move, and you lost your head.

The scenery was a wire mesh of fantasy naturalism: the only movement lucid fluidity, the creatures flitted about like dead butterfly wings. A world of purple matrix snow. The village was reminiscent of some of the fantasy villages found in different trope specific simulations, except the straw that made the houses were wire framed and translucent.

NADINE: Can you imagine yourself trying to live in one of these?

RASSIE: I wouldn’t even be in this simulation, without your morse trans-coder.

MALCOLM: I’ve played it, no doubt. But while my lasted, it manifested very differently.

NADINE: How so?

MALCOLM: My forests were lushly green, and other things you might label to be utopic.

NADINE: Sounds boring.

MALCOLM: Yes, but it’s good boring to you. I can even converse with Bianca after she left this world.

SCENE 2 – VILLAGE LONGHOUSE – MILLIE’S VILLAGE

Millie used to live as a princess in the castle. After the dark knight Dantino killed her parents, she lived on the edge of society. Yet here she was, lowering herself to being rescued by some stereotypical hero.

MILLIE: You can’t be serious Elena, and Aldiel is in on this too?

ELENA: Well you want to eat better food right, and not have peasants flirt with you.

MILLIE: Well that’s true, but doesn’t that mean I have to suck the dick of anyone that rescues me from my execution?

ELENA: Well who said you were going to be executed anyway. (Gently brushing away Millie’s tears.) I know the death of our parents was hard on you, it was also hard on me as well. But we must do what it takes to secure our throne.

MILLIE: Ah, somebody is at the door. I’ll go and answer it.

SCENE 4 – DINING ROOM – DINER TIME

Nadine was reacquainted with Millie, and wasn’t entirely sure whether she remembered her. But it was this cut scene that always seemed the most persistent of her most lucid dreams.

MILLIE: You see, that’s why my sister puts me in this position. Sometimes I wonder if she really wants my throne. Though it doesn’t matter now, as we’re both peasant girls.

NADINE: Say Malcolm.

MALCOLM: Yea, what’s of Nadine.

NADINE: That’s one hell of a smart chat bot isn’t it?

MALCOLM: I know right!

RASSIE: Don’t listen to them Millie, they’re just addicted gamers. We can do what we can to help you.

SCENE 5 – MILLIE’S ROOM – MIDNIGHT

Millie is brushing her long curly blond locks, while Elena converses with Aldiel about the nature of their visitors.

ELENA: Don’t you think something seems a little off about them? I don’t mean in the “hero” sense, but … well you tell him Millie.

MILLIE: I feel like I’ve met the red haired girl before, … I can’t recognize that tomboy appearance before. It feels as if I died once before, and she’s there to greet me on the other side.

ALDIEL: You musn’t think to much about it. The important thing is Dantino’s army will arrive here in the morning.

SCENE 6 – NADINE’S ROOM

Nadine, Malcolm, and Rassie discuss the recurring issues that Nadine has been having, while getting ready to sack out for the night.

MALCOLM: I didn’t know there was that side of you Nadine. I mean, in all the years I’ve lived in the slums.

NADINE: Well would you talk about your fetishes to people?

MALCOLM: I get it, but you also used your fetish to get us stuck inside this game world.

RASSIE: The point is, if we want to return home, we need to protect Millie.

SCENE 6 – EXECUTION SCAFFOLD – MORNING

NADINE remembered when she first broke the game. She didn’t know saving the princess was some kind of sadistic cliche requirement.

Millie placed her neck upon the block, making her final speech to the crowd. Dantino would have rather kept the girl alive, because he had at one point wanted to marry her. But she knew that it would secure his right to be King.

Rassie and Malcolm were quickly subdued by guards, but Nadine simply snickered in the crowd. Yet felt a chill down her spine, and resisted at least one tear that day. The first one in a long while.

NADINE: What is this feeling I feel?

The ax swings down, cutting through the flesh and bone of Millie’s thin neck. Her severed head fell into the wicker basket. The execution held up her bleeding neck to the crowd.

DANTINO: Now I shall be your King.

SCENE 7 – BEDROOM – One O’CLOCK

Yet now NADINE wakes up screaming.

NADINE: Hey Rassie, are we really stuck here?

RASSIE: Should have thought of that before letting Millie die the first time you played.

MALCOLM: What happened, I heard a yell.

NADINE: Da rien.

Nadine had originally hated Millie. She represented everything about fantasy characters she despised. More importantly, she represented everything she hated in cis-genered women: those luscious lips, that beautiful smile. That illusion of childish innocence. The feeling of being a real woman.

But she needed to return home, despite her hate.

Even if it was herself.

Something Somewhere Lurking

The next morning that the three travelers were woken up. It was Rassie who was intrigued, yet remained behind quietly. Even Rassie was not aware of the fact that she was secretly recording the conversation from earlier, and Tanner was using this as a reference point to form a conclusion based on the previous failed gaming session, where Nadine had … by their hypothesis, seemingly opened a door to another universe. Though how could the universe seemingly restart every time they plugged into the machine. And why were they somehow unable to go back to their home world now?

“Hey Nadine,” Rassie said to Nadine, while playing with her hair while they road in the cart to go visit Aldiel. “Am I the only one with the feeling where it almost seems like the game is toying with us, almost like the game-engine is alive somehow? Like it wants us to be dead?”

“You sure tend to think the worst,” Nadine said, half joking. Malcolm cackled in the background, because both of them just how cynical they were. How did they know the game was not designed to be that way. There was a lot of general suspicion to share with the whole group. “Let’s just try to work together, and see what comes of this.”

When the group had arrived with their cart at the prison, of which Al-diel was currently staying on treason charges against the crown (a game world crown, not the dream-scanners and secret police that plague the world of flesh and bone), it was Rassie who, while she had observed many versions of this game played over many times before, for example Malcolm’s version when he did not cover his tracks finding tacks to repair the game, this game seemed different. She felt a bit of unease, going into the dark cell. The dark ambiance did not make her feel much better about it, especially with the sound of crawling squeaking rats that were plaguing the prison. “Is it a hero? Leave at once, my family is done for. I will be vivisect-ed, and my sisters head will be on spikes by the end of the month.” The way the man, despite being in his early twenties, having a look of late twenties, made her feel was uncomfortable; as she had never before felt like crying and vomiting at the same time. It was strange how a seemingly hardened dream-scanner was less used to this than Nadine, who had already played the game once before. If this was in fact, really a just a game at all.

“Brother Al-diel, are these the heroes?” said Elena.

Nadine resisted cackling, as it was all formulaic down to a T.

“Brothers, sisters. They are coming, I can hear there marches.” Al-diel cold not resist coughing, for his immune system was lacking due to the month without eating. “First save ye selves, for I hear marching, marching, marching.” And sooner than they knew it, there was the sound of beating hoof steps. “Go at once.”

The group boarded up the cart quickly. “We can warp in weapons later.”

“Warp weapons?” asked Elena, “Sounds evil and magical.”

“So all cheaters are magical, great I know what power –” said Nadine.

“Nadine, not now!” said Rassie.

“Hey guys, look ahead of you. I think we are surrounded.” said Malcolm.

The cart came to a screeching halt.

Malcolm remembered when he barely survived being attacked by wild-dogs.

Malcolm recoiled from the flickering lights buzz that formed a foam around around the edge of his eye. Then squinted in pain. … Static.

His vision formed into what could possibly be perceived as television noise, buzzing their brain now partially man and machine. Yet there were no other aspect that distinguished him from any other human being. It had been a a couple of years sense he had been on the emergency room table. He got up abruptly as if it had only been a day. He, or what was left of him, saw a computer database in their right eye. “Merging with the flesh interface, initiated. Take a few weeks to get used to the new network. Not many made it out. You were lucky.” Malcolm wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from, all he knew was that it was not his own.

He had finally began to get used to his new apartment. The hospital gave him a decent level of compensation money from the experiment. Although he could not feel his head completely, he found himself able to do things he was not before. He used his hands to make the objects within the room float. This was recorded into the database. “Memorization of objects initiated.” the brain-interface said. He browsed with his finger tips trying to find any trace of his old existence. But it was no longer there. For him, he was a ghost.

As he slept that night, Malcolm begin to have nightmares again. Visions of his own apartment began to fade, into what felt like a large dark tunnel that looked as if it would go on forever. But he walked on and onward into the abyss. “What was the experiment, why am I having these visions?” He felt like he was beginning to develop a head ache as he slept. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, kelt down, and wept. For the pain from his head was to great. Tempted to use some sort of pain medication, instead the computer told him, “Don’t try to use any pain medication. I can provide a map for a suitable prescription, if only you will wait for about a week.” He slammed his fist on the lamp table. It shook violently. “You think I can wait a week!”

“Your not used to your new brain yet.” the database said.

Malcolm didn’t understand why the new part of his brain was talking to him. He barely remembered anything that came before the surgery. He wondered if he would be able to work. In his current state, this was not possible. Malcolm wanted to get over his head ache soon, though he was afraid to take the drugs in the kitchen. Who cares if the left hemisphere simply would not cooperate with the other half. He tried to watch television, as the early morning gradually eased into an early sunlight after the dawn. His vision blurred, and he passed out again. He woke into what felt like a dream. He rode in the back of the car, with his friends he barely remembered. They were only silhouettes.

Malcolm heard a voice in the dark. “So your still alive man, how in the hell did you survive those dogs mauling you?”

He wasn’t sure how to respond, as he barely remembered who he was.

While he rode through the car, Malcolm remembered suddenly remembered all those years again when he nearly died in the street. He was laying upon the pavement, staring longingly upon the emotionally empty glass of the meadow of gold. Yet he was not able to remember the face of the man in silhouette he was riding with. “I’m going to pick you up. We need to find Ellen, I’m concerned about her.” Malcolm only just barely remembered the voice. The car covered in shadows had a flickering display screen. “So where are we going to go tonight?” said Malcolm.

“Try not to hold onto the past, focus on the future.” said Richard. He understood just how easy this was to do. Yet Malcolm wanted to remember why the dog fight happened. They both needed some way to make a living, maybe even go to college in some state where nobody knew who they were.

As soon as the two found Ellen, they went undercover. Then payed for a semester in a university where nobody knew who they were. Then changed their names on the dream-webs, and pursued a new life.

Rassie got a call on his cell from Malcolm. “It will be one more day. I promise, then I can send into the three fifty.” Rassie said not to forget the interest, it was up a dollar amount a day. Malcolm shook his head, then pressed the button to hang up.

Malcolm was at it again, doing drugs. He had to pay a drug lord to make his head ache never come back again. His mind reflected back to the car ride with Richard, that he had met after about a couple of years. Who was probably dining out right about now. Over the last few months there was no direct back and forth, only the unsaid between two lovers walking away in opposite direction forever separated by a speeding train. He called him up.

“Hey Richard, can you do me a favor?” said Malcolm.

“Sure … but you owe me.” said Richard, then hung up.

When they got the drug store.

“Your fifteen under, but I will move it to your next payment.” said the drug lord, shuffling the coins into his purse. “Don’t work yourself to hard.” said the man on the other end of the window, smoking his pipe. Causing it to fog heavily.

That was close. “Thanks Richard.”

“You need to break your habit.”

Whatever pain he experienced then, would be nothing like this.

He was the only that hadn’t given up, not just yet.

When the group was given their cell in the castle, at first they were unaware of what law they had broken. So Millie, took it upon herself to ask what they had done. “What, so knight in shining armor, have we done?” said Millie to the knight.

“You wandered off into the purple slime.” said the night of the dark knight.

“So why were we not sent here before?” said Millie.

“You were hell hard to find, your brother is something.” said the knight.

Millie remembered when her parents were in a similar situation. She and her sister visited them for the last time, hoping this was all a misunderstanding. That the dark night had not really taken over the castle. Yet after father’s remains were sent across the region, and her mother’s head was on a spike on the castle walls, there was no longer any real doubt. She had began to become hardened sense, even perhaps coming to terms with the eventual fact that they might be found again. It was there poor maid, just there age that helped them escape. Though she was not there, when she herself was sent to the head mans block, she always pictured her wooden shoes trembling forever. It gave her dreams, nightmares. Visions that would never go away, and with this while she could not accomplish this herself, she wanted the night to be dead. Yet the knight seemed omnipotent, almost as if her had the blessing of the eyes of god themselves. Of whatever they may be.

“Will our heads be on pikes too?” she Millie asked.

“You women will, men? God help you.” the knight said. The knight looked closely at Nadine, “you look enough like a woman, I can take a small token of your appreciation for a beheading instead of a quartering.” Nadine pictured herself blowing the knight, the thought of which made her want to vomit.

“What now man! What!” Malcolm could not believe it. Quartering? He never even knew this could be done in the game, and how the programmers of the game could only do so much. Because to him in his mind he still considered this to be a game. But perhaps maybe it was this child like mentality, that helped him think clearly. The knight exited the hallway, and it was Malcolm that called the group together. “I have a plan.” But Nadine had a song of her own, playing in her head:

Somewhere, something, watching,

In a room, far away,

Somewhere, lurking, everywhere.

Watching, for the night.

Malcolm and Rassie led the group. “I don’t trust Nadine to lead the pack, she’ll just mess something up, like allow Millie to get caught. ‘Oh I read your sub text Rena, don’t think I’m not on to you to.”

Nadine was still singing:

Waiting

for the night

1           to come ...
2 
3           haunting
4 
5           the un-lit
6 
7                            house.

It is watching, watching,

Beyond the door.

“I would guillotine gun you if I had one.” said Rassie.

“And I can warp in one, watch your tongue.” Malcolm warps in a guillotine gun, and breaks the bars open in the prison cell but shooting in a circular motion.

They rushed out of the prison, and it was Malcolm that continued to shoot guards heads up. He cackled as he saw there neck pipes squirt with blood. Squirt, squirt, squirt. Bhahaha! Moving on, Rena eventually called for a ship. It was a dream-scanner ship, for while unknowing it her cyborg eye surveillance camera (while a danger sign in the flesh and bone world) was a god send. For it was the only thing that sent a super fortress down from the sky to pick them up.

“What are they doing here?” said Malcolm.

“They are our only hope.” said Rassie.

“Traitor.” said Malcolm to Rassie.

“Jesus, you should say.” And fell off the ship deliberately.

“Rassie! No!” Nadine reached out, to try to save her. As she did not want another life to be on her hands again, like poor Millie.

“Farewell friends, for it is only a game.” said Rassie

It was the next day, Rassie was released from prison. She was sent to the court yard, and climbed the steps. The headsman ripped open her shirt, and she placed her neck upon the block. As she stared into the basket, fear at first came over her. Then realized it was one less soldier working on Tanner’s side. She had won.

A sound of metal cutting bone. Blood squirt.

Sound of her head crashing.

Darkness.

Dantino, The King Quaterer

“Don’t you care about the fact, that your sister is dead?” said Nadine to Tanner.

“Only as much as one a general to a private, besides her memories – her important ones, anyway – are backed up, I have all the meta-data I need. So how does it feel to die knowing you opened a bridge to another universe?” Tanner said, then asked his question rhetorically.

“Your not going to get away with this.” Nadine said, feeling her neck being rapped by the portable lunette of the guillotine gun. Her second sentence was interrupted, by a blade slicing through her small neck.

Nadine woke up in bed, she was crying.

“Rassie!” said Nadine.

“Wow, you’ve changed Nadine.” said Malcolm.

“And you haven’t.” said Nadine.

“‘Oh I miss her to, but I know you.”

“You remember when we lost Blanci?” said Malcolm.

“Yes, I still feel that.”

“Then think of the children you could have had, think of what children she could have had. She could have been a great mother.”

“I’m not disagreeing.”

It was the next month, that Nadine, Millie, Elena, and Malcolm met Ellen again. Ellen, who was working as a nerve splicer and tattoo artist, for moment felt jealousy coming on. But Nadine hugged her tightly, they kissing under the glow of the flickering L.E.D. light. Ellen slightly felt sympathy for Millie. They went home, to a darkness not quite darkness.

And had a threesome.

Malcolm dated Elena, missing the long lost Blanci.

Almost as if she was another Blanci. She and Elena went to go visit Blanci’s grave. Peculiarly, it was Malcolm that needed the most comfort.

Elena provided a warming hand on his cheek, and he placed a flower he had picked from Voreth’s Promise. The only one left in that world, and placed it on Blanci’s grave. She will live on in his memories till nevermore.

When Nadine herself went to see Blanci, it was with Ellen and Millie. Nadine somehow remained un-hardened despite all the seemingly long years of abuse within the nature of the game, the very realistic game of death. Ever sense, she became white as death. As a ghost. Like a platinum Katana, in it’s sheath. Whenever she hears Blanci’s and Rena’s name, she says:

“Nevermore.”

She published a song, To Nevermore:

On a

bed, sleeper’s

sleeping …

In their

head, dreamer’s

dreaming.

Of a

meadow light,

heaven.

It was the second date with Ellen, that her life became more bearable. Ellen held Nadine’s shoulders in a warm embrace, under the glow of the sunset on a distant shore. “Come with me Nadine,” she said, tenderly. Then just before the kiss. “where the meadow is always real on the other side.”

To the Meadow they went.

Nadine, Ellen, Millie, and Malcolm went to go visit the grave of their friend Blanci. Though Nadine in a way had experienced the feeling of loss like Malcolm, for her everything was entirely undone. It was almost as if trying to bring someone back from the dead, made the gaming gods, those eyes in the sky, hate her so. Malcolm is crying and kneeling at the little makeshift grave in a lesser known neck of the woods of the world underneath the sky of rows of city-streets. Where the meadow of gold is always shining, and gives a false sense of hope.

Nadine wished she did not try bringing back Millie.

As she remembered her only from the moment, she started game again.

Her mind was erased, and loved Nadine. Nadine pictures in her mind, running through the forest, where the fairies children are jumping rope. Where the everything was good and true, and everything was somehow better again.

Her new youth song.

There were few punishments that intimidated Dantino, least of all having one’s head chopped off by a sword in battle. When you raise an army of over twenty thousand strong, lining them up in Neo-Roman formation, it was difficult to be intimidated by much of anything. When he had captured princess Millie, he saw nothing but his future under the crown. Carefully, methodically, he plotted on the best way to make sure to completely and utterly break the royal family.

Generally, beheading was mostly reserved for noble, although the old king was generous to expand the swift demise to those who were of the merchant class, and eventually peasants were able to place their necks on he block rather than inside of a noose. But they were still forced to wear uncomfortable wooden shoes, stuffing them with driest of straw to keep themselves from getting splinters during the cold Winter season. Dantino remembered when he had first started for those goal. It was one of those campaigns anyone of good conscience would dread, for to be a soldier only those with the strongest of stomaches were allowed to take the challenge. A small group of thieves were ransacking the ancient temples, that had long been here before the invasion of the infected regions. Every day there was the thought that none of us would go home.

On the mount, they apprehended their leader, thrusting her neck on a chopping block after extracting a confession through exploiting man’s evolutionary fluke designed to protect their body. The ax tore through the flesh and bone of her neck, but it two four swings. You would think with all the executions he carried out on behalf of the king, the executioner would have enough experience. But there was something about this one that seemed almost deliberate. And there was something in the eyes of this rogue leader, that almost made him reconsider all the desires he had to kill the king. But he knew that, unlike the thieves, were who out gunned, eventually the royal family would come for him; they hounded him in his sleep.

Dantino tried requesting Millie’s hand in marriage, but to no avail. He supposed he couldn’t blame her, as he had chosen to behead her mother, and hang, draw, and quarter her father. But there was desire or even a mild pleasure in drawing all of the royal bloodline, until recently. Dantino knew that, was someone who had a sister myself who was unjustly accused by Millie’s father, it was no fun to grow up without someone to replace your parents. For Millie, Ellen, and Aldiel his instinct was complete mercy and benevolence. He demoted their status to the level of peasants sending them on their way, stripping of their rights of having bodyguards. As far as he knew at the time they made it to the town across the mountains near the north east sea just fine, and thriving.

Yet now, Millie had stolen something from him, that made him reconsider what amount of remorse he had for letting her go. She stole a picture of his little sister, who was beheaded by the king. Smirking, she accidentally knocked a crack in it, then tossed it into the wall to make a point. All those memories he had, that single image of his sister, broken into millions of pieces.

He wanted to kill Millie’s brother.

At the village over the mountains on the north east sea, his gathered up a force of 100,000 strong. He employed the best of the naval special forces officers, gathered the most bomber gliders employed by any army before. But there was one woman, a woman who seemed much more like a goddess than a human being, able to employ magic with her fingertips to manifest things in the air he could not dream of. Slowly it drove him mad trying to figure out how it was she was doing. Then he saw the tattoo on her body, that signified the worst of the worst. She had come from the human world, that split off from our own universe. Dantino had been taught about the humans from early age, though he wasn’t sure if it was just a myth. He didn’t recognize the other symbols, however she carried around a pair of head prods that allowed her to foresee my methods hours in advance.

It was almost as if she played this game before.

Almost as if she had no fear at all, as it was simply playing another level. She was just trying to make it through, because to fight me was merely tedious, and I was merely nothing to her. And that was the most maddening things of all, while Dantino rested in my bed with my replacement arm being a slightly rusted gauntlet and band of metal sheets. She treated fighting his men like it was a game, rather than something that was completely real.

Dantino was simply nothing to her.

He wanted that power, and after quartering the king, murdering Aldiel in the same fashion. He had nothing else to lose but whatever regrets he still had in keeping them alive. There was another lady, that stayed behind when they left in that flying machine built by the humans, carrying multiple godlike fire archers into the seen like a flying house. Dantino knew what intelligence gathering was, because he had employed the same practice against the royal family, and it was how he was able to gather the support for killing them. With a musket in hand, he tried shooting her from behind. But the gamer Nadine sliced open his cheek. He was blinded from the festering of that wound, leaving his good eye the only thing he could use to see.

But this woman, this other woman he tried to kill, Dantino managed to apprehend. He wanted to make a point to her. Rassie’s severed head now rests outside, although at this point the peasants have likely given it a soldiers burial with the highest honors that one may give to the fallen.

Dantino, they didn’t want him to go that quickly. But it was worth the price.

Eventually Dantino would die for the length of two years, and he was on his first month. He wished there was a way to get to the human world before this process takes its course. Generally your limbs would be gradually replaced by suit of armor replacements for those parts. For him it was his right arm, that had always been his bad one. But he knew that soon the peasants would come after him again, an army employed by the new Queen Millie. Even if Millie was more merciful, the crowd was not. So he needed a way to cross the barrier between this universe, Voreth’s Promise, and the real world the Nadine referred to as mother Earth.

He found this opportunity.

But he needed to hurry.

Part Four

The fourth part of Uploaded Fairy.

Attack Of The Ape-Goat

After the game world merged with world of reality, Millie and Elena manifest into our universe in the form of Cyborg avatars: 3D printed organic flesh suits on a metallic mechanical skeleton, and a digital mind. Many of the peasants in the world Voreth’s Promise manifest in a much similar fashion. This created weird social effects, as society was already headed into the direction of borderline self-ware androids, though those are subtly different from what we tend to call cyborgs.

Millie was a Cyborg who lost her will to be a princess in the game. Now she prefers a new reason to exist, and pursue her new flame, who despite her inner most tendency to hate chose love instead of the darkest portion of the self.

It was a cold tower, colder than the coldest of nights in the town. She had wanted to purchase a claymore, but had found a quest for a weapon in a region of the mountains few dared to explore. In these mountains, was rumored a tentacled monstrosity. Those who could verify the legend, usually did not survive to verify this hearsay. Things have changed sense Voreth’s Promise had collided with the non-game world, and she was never sure whether what she would fight in the snowy wasteland was real, or purely imagined by layers of haunted wires. Her pet cat was a Dire Tabby, whose fur was thick and black. Her cat would strangle those who attacked her from behind. At night she were hear the cat yowl for her attention, even when she tried to sleep.

She met Nadine when she was tired and weak, and barely outside of her mother’s nest. The mother was attacked by poachers, and her new was only able to survive when she shot both of the hunters from a large cliff. But now the cat as grown to be twice her size in height, and three times in length. It took a special kind of laser pointer to distract her long enough to be satisfied with the amount attention she got. She could always pay the most attention to her cat, being to busy repairing the parts of her house that were attacked by wild ape-goats and spider-pigs.

She brought up the GUI, displaying her stats: she had 95% hit points left, and her attack power had only increased by a small amount, do the slight sharpening of her long sword she commissioned in town. But she knew that this journey would be a long one, one unprompted by any mentor. Part of her was tempted to leave her cat behind to be taken care of by Millie, but knew that Luna would never go for this, despite how much she loved Millie. A certain part of Nadine wanted to restart the game, and actually let Millie die this time, but her friends would give her shit about it. And she enjoyed the fellatio she given to her as part of a good night present.

For Nadine, her bane was her life day in and day out. She saw the ruins of The Potato District in full view. What was once a thriving metropolis, was now a land of wild ape-goat tribes. She had finally gotten tired of eaten Spider-Pigs eggs, after she had finally found an air fryer abandoned in an old grocery store. It seemed like people were finally leaving the city in droves, except for those whom had no other options. But it wasn’t like it was back when the game world finally let loose upon reality.

When Ape-Goats came to roost.

When she visited the city, ordinarily you think of fresh water fountains, children playing in the park, and dove flying into the rainbow. Ever since the collision, the image of a once wonderland has been blurred by years of war. Dismantled guillotine guns litter the land like a decentralized landfill, whose network of automated incinerators have long sense been out of commission. Gone were the days when swept back flying wings took children from home to school. Gone were the days when life had more than piling dust. No more children holding hands, and encircling the water fountain in the park. Perhaps someday, in some distant future, they will return laugh and play. But it seems like faint hope, when you’re attacked by a spider-pig crawling on your back. Nadine felt funny eating their eggs, and part of her wanted to keep one as a creepy pet.

She gathered snow to melt into a saucepan, then ran back home as fast as she could. Her wooden shoes hurt her bare feet, that have now developed blisters, the clogs now more muted color from the snow having melted upon them. The only thing that kept her warm was her thick coat of fur, from a poached ape-goat. An Ape-Goat tip toed behind her, in order to break her neck.

Slash! The Ape-Goat’s arm was taken off. It stopped the bleeding with one of its tattered sleeves. Then ran off, limping. This was Nadine’s first mistake, keeping it alive. But she didn’t have time for remorse, as she needed to hurry home for Millie to make Lunch, but she would Nadine would go off to investigate the mountains. She felt a vibrating pulse under her furry trousers, but resisted the temptation until she got home. She knocked, and a young woman with curly blond hair peeked through the door crack.

“What took you so long?” Millie said.

“I was attacked again.” said Nadine.

The King Quaterer At The Edge Of Dreams

Nadine had long broken off contact from her parents: even basic parental duties like defending her against total strangers had been completely broken. If this were the real middle ages, and she were queen, she would have already have them both hung. But there wasn’t much use continuing to think about it, beyond the memories, and they had long sense deteriorated into dust. Her mother in particular, was less about being right, only that she is correct.

Her mother would often times side were completely politically and morally opposing viewpoints, just so long as she could get an edge over her offspring. In this sense, she was less of a mother figure, and closer to wicked step aunt in some ancient fairy tale, written long before the game world merged with the real world. As she climbed the darkened mountains, she found it easy to sometimes lose her way, so she would have a kind stranger pointing her into the direction of the cave. “Why do you want to go this way?” they would ask, and she would simply respond that she was looking for ancient sword. This was the best of many options, as she wasn’t really sure who was an AI, and who was actually human. Most were human enough to have the largest minimum of sentience.

But today she stayed at a local tavern, where the brew was always fresh. And the girls based whose dick they sucked on, based on the suitors girl like qualities, rather than how much money they could get out of the deal. Money was already useless, with most vending machines being out of commission, thus who used to be prostitutes now based their client-el on the length of their hair, the size of their hips, and the ratio of hair on their body. It turns out, hookers had standards too. And at night, under the glow of slaughtered firefly, she jostled her fingertips on deranged GUI screens. For her daily pleasures, her world was a dream within a dream.

Millie knew that sometimes it would be a while before Nadine would get home, so she would carefully make plans to this effect. It was a relationship of mutual open unfaithfulness, but neither one generally loved the ones they had as their object of cheating. The desires were usually fleeting, and not always indulged. But today Millie was there with her date far longer than Nadine would come to anticipate. When you’re in this business, sometimes you need to expect the worth in people, and not everyone is going to suck your penis exclusively. And make like different shapes and lengths. Nadine thought of girls in wooden shoes as she ventured further into the mountains.

Silence, it fills the woods with sharp clarity. Often as painful as the loudest of construction equipment, Nadine knew that this quest she found would be a slightly longer one. But it beat having to repair a broken virtual reality game. For Nadine, the most tactical of battles was far ahead. She drank out of her leather pouch, then sleep under a tree outside of the cybernetic ruins that once housed entire simulated ecosystems, but now was the catacombs of a bygone era. Here she dreamed of curly blond fairy girls in wooden clogs, pushing her back to the tree. Them slowly riding on her knob, and yet Nadine sense of pleasure was always mixed with pain and guilt.

“You girls are honestly demons.” she said.

She got up a morning later, and walked into the ruins. Here the room was considerably brighter in parts, and darker in others. She could here the old film reels in constant automatic replay, when the entertainment still had projector screens throughout the city, the sprawl having long replace the traditional movie theater, people indulged in constant streams from apparently independent video production teams, but had long worked for the National Security Agency.

It was at this point she considered taking her cyanide pills, but didn’t want to leave Millie alone in the world to fend for herself. And knew that she would be calling after a while to ask about dinner. Nadine got tired of eating Ape-Goat steaks and Spider-Pig roulettes after a while. But knew there wasn’t a whole lot of other options. In this ruins, a section of the city in which she had once lived, once called Purgatory Road, she had once trained dogs for a fighting rings. Yet now was replaced by overgrown vines, and scattered bits of cybernetic debris. Nadine was on the jungle of her hidden past.

But it was better than renting an apartment in Chattanooga, where nine times out of ten the landlords aid and abet in gendered harassment and stalking, and generally don’t care if a trans woman is murdered on the street. this is the once United States, and not Canada where it may or may not actually be better. Gone are the days where mothers can blame their daughters for being raped, but its been replaced by general financial insecurity, and institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome. But the super computer was something entirely different. Something that has once been a trans woman, decades ago, where the US was split between two different civil wars.

Here, the AI maintained a certain level of sentience, that unlike ones that controlled spaceships, could not easily by shut down. More often, people were to caught in fighting splinter groups of neo-Nazis, of which one apartment she had lived once played a part in the history books. In sense, no longer was society in the middle ages, they had in fact gone backwards in time. The AI 3D printed itself an avatar inside the catacombs, and waited for a human to take its prize.

“There is no sword Nadine.” said the voice. The voice became a silhouette in the dark room, whose electrical lights have shattered in the darkness. “But I feel a great strength within you.” The shadow reached out its hand as if to greet her. She could hear the sound of slithering, then silence.

“Then why was I brought here?” Nadine asked, lighting up an American Spirit. This lit the room enough to see a translucent hologram of a young woman from nearly a century ago back in two thousand and nineteen. “I have things to do.”

“Dantino has returned.”

Minor Hearing Loss

Nadine had minor hearing loss for many years, but first developed the signs when she was in her early teens. It didn’t help that she was also having to carry around a robotic arm and leg. But she never commented on it out of a sense of pride, and simply let Blanci think that she was ignoring her. But the issue grew gradually worse over the next nearly twenty years, until she eventually had to get ear drum replacements. She kept the old style of prosthetic arms and legs mostly as a form of nostalgia and retro fit, but for her hearing she wanted something as realistic as possible. But even today she would wonder what gaming would be like if she couldn’t hear, but even this would be nowhere near as bad as not being able to see. Even if they gradually improved prosthetic eyes.

She wondered about the idea of a game world, rogue like in design, geared toward those legally blind. How the procedurally generated dungeons of yore would be described in carefully worded language, lyrical echo location of a black and white grid chessboard. When she gamed, she decked out in black, whether in the mall or the run down shack. Gone were the days of robotic dogs on LCD screens, she preferred traveling worlds from here to France and areas in between. Her life an epitaph written in the form of an updated game of Ultimate Fantasy Tactics, becoming a ghost in her own wires. She fought empires, killed hordes of ape-goats and spider-pigs.

But it was never as satisfying as finding a playmate.

She never liked the idea of rescuing women from their own destruction, if one were at risk of possible execution, the least they could do was rescue themselves. Prove their own will to live. But what works on paper and philosophy doesn’t always work on turn based grid display of dots.

She imagined Millie beheaded.

Millie bled Polka dots.

Nadine was never one for the dance, despite imagining a French waltz played at Millie’s funeral. Her dance was a dance of pure imagination, like a nude body having melted dark chocolate poured on it. For Nadine, the chocolate flowing like the music of Andalusia, Spain. And the accordion of Paris. Yet behind the layers of this chosen reality, was a girl of skin and bones.

Compared to flower girls, princesses, and queens, her attraction was less in her desire to rule a capitalistic industry, but a certain degree of non femininity, her dance the funeral march to her dead father, whom had ruled the fairy kingdom. In capitalism, we treat fairies as chocolate treats for a desert at Christmas concerts. But in reality, they were closer to grim reapers. Victims of circumstance, the absence of Dantino was taken as a relief, that they could restore the kingdom to its formal former glory, flowing like out of tune accordions to the waltz of a skeleton aristocracy. Millie wanted to be the queen, but wore wooden clogs like other peasant girls.

She imagined courtiers with the musical accompaniment of Spanish and French violins playing flamenco to the contrast of the waltz. Millie woke up from her dream within a dream, and checked the door.

It was Nadine.

“I thought he died six years ago?” said Millie.

“I never actually saw what came of him, but now I know different.” Nadine said, taking a puff of her cigar, while sitting on the couch. “But I’m not entirely sure how much I trust this artificial intelligence anyway.” Nadine took the cigar out of her mouth, “Or what’s left of her anyway.”

“Every day that Dantino lives, it feels like there is no justice for my father.” Millie leaned onto Nadine stomach, yet did it mainly as an automatic reaction, expecting not comfort from the gamer, who had previously allowed for Millie’s head to get chopped off, and placed on a stick.

“I never got to have a rematch.” Nadine said.

“Is that all it is for you?” Millie resisted spitting on her face. “What about the fact that my father’s dead?” Millie said, then leaned in the opposite direction of Nadine, waited for her to unzip her pants, and rubbed her bare feet onto the bean that was inside of the gamer girl’s cargo pants.

“He’s just a game character, nothing more.” Nadine said this partially out of jest, despite knowing full well that the distinction between game character and human being was largely that of a semantic one. “As are you and Ellen, though I suppose it doesn’t make that much of a difference.”

“You don’t say!”

Attack At The Community Center

In the morning, when Millie was milking the Ape-Goats, Nadine went to main community center in order to find a quest, but found that it was largely empty, aside from some slaughtered game world pets. She stared into the back of a man in a large trench coat, with a note able metallic arm, that vaguely resembled an arm from a knight in shining armor. “Nadine! Nadine! It’s good to see you…”

“What did you do with the pets?” Nadine asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, vampire girl.” Dantino turned around slowly. “You know that you would do the same.” Dantino then took out his claymore, sharpened it with his sharpening stone, and began walking out of the door.”

“How did you not die from your injuries?”

“Come with me, you must see something.”

When they reached the town center, Dantino asked what happened to the town. It seemed as if the culture had changed over night. And that what was once snowy countryside, was merged with a sprawling complex of pyramids and sky scrapers. “Both of our homes are no longer as it was, what sense anymore does it make to continue fighting, when we both no longer have a home to go to?”

“I didn’t take you as the peace maker.”

“People can change Nadine, even you have. I see it in your face.” Dantino requested a cigar. Nadine obliged merely for the fact that she was basically trying to quit the habit, and the only reason she started up again, because her and her relationship with Millie had not been quite the same. No longer was there a purpose for her to continue being a damsel in distress, she also knew what some of Nadine’s sexual fetishes were, and could only oblige a couple of them, without risk to herself. “You see, you and me are not so difference. I have some of the same interests. I also have liked watching pretty ladies get their heads chopped off. So why is it then, that you continue to fight me?”

Nadine wondered if this was a new part of Dantino’s ambition, and was not entirely sure of what to make of his question. But she wasn’t a traditional game character, she was her own person. She took out her punching dagger, “Oui, but I’m not a King Killer.”

Dantino drew first blood with his claymore, then pushed Nadine on ahead. “Is that what you think of me Nadine? After all my efforts of trying to make amends? I suppose it cannot be helped. But know this, I can bring back the dead.” He waved his fingers across the air as if he were pressing keys on a keyboard. Rassie, Ellen, Malcolm, and the others were manifested a holograms. “What if I told you these people are wanting to kill you? And we can work together. I can make you a knight.”

“I wont give into your mind games.” said Nadine.

Malcolm, Rassie, and Ellen as translucent figures in the simulation, draw out their guillotines guns, as if to attempt an assassination strike on her person. “Choose wisely Nadine, I can’t always be there to protect you.” Dantino split the holograms in two with his Wallacian great sword, and they turned off like a dead television channel. “I could even let you train with me.”

“What are you wanting exactly?”

“Millie’s severed head.”

When Nadine returned home, she left Dantino behind to attend to his affairs. At home Millie asked Nadine what had taken so long to return, and she spoke of the fact that the community center had been completely emptied by the chaos that Dantino brought with him, and that all the pets the players had were completely slaughtered. Millie reacted more than Nadine did, but eventually a feeling of calm was able to reign supreme. She completely changed her dress from a princess inside of a royal court, to that if a female archer in a black leather outfit. She wore two Birkenstock Arizona sandals, and carried a small black dagger inside of her purse.

“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?” asked Nadine.

“What if Dantino chooses to attack me?” said Millie.

“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“I can’t rely on your word.”

Along the way to the community center, they were attacked by a tribe of giant Ape-Goats, but eventually they were able to slaughter it, and take its hide to make some water pouches for the trip. Day came and went, changes hex positions while taking turns on the battle field from different angles. It was easier to attack these creatures from behind, as their main advantage was in surrounding you. Eventually Nadine was able to punch the ape-goat’s head of, and they went along their merry way.

“How much longer till the community center?” asked Millie.

“Only a few more more miles to go.” Nadine said.

Mostly they ran across different neighborhoods, mostly seeing broken mailboxes that looked as if they were ransacked by teams of bandits, with the head of the mail box having long sense fallen to the ground. Like everything else in this neck of the woods, it seemed as if there was a giant fire that burned the little hamlets down. But every now and then would run across an abandoned interstate highway. They would be attacked by abandoned robot drones that were the pets of different scientists across the different periods of the United States, across their two factional battle royals.

Eventually they arrived.

All the shops collapsed.

Dantino waited a the community center, sharpening his curved great sword with an edging stone. The sword, though double edged, was closer to a Katana than anything else produced in the west. He enjoyed lopping off heads at fairy girl’s behest, this, after all, was what he did best. The sharpened protrusions give him a mixture of pleasure and discomfort; discomfort because he had also fight along side the princess with this blade that he had inherited from so long ago. But the edge was a constant companion, far more loyal than his most noble of fellow knights. As he walked through the enchanted forest in search of the digital fountain of youth, he remembered how his body had been modified with a robotic replacement to his old left arm, that had itself been disfigured do to gradual replacement of real limbs with segmented of plaited armor. The tale of amour for his armor, if not for anything else in the world.

He had waited for this day for two long years, the first of which had been of the most excruciating of pain. By the time Nadine had first achieved her victory, Dantino had been initially sentenced to a fate far worse than hanging, drawing, and quartering to his him having quartered the king. His death over the course of two years, gradually being turned into a living suit of armor. But he managed to get away just in time to reach the portal to the real world, before it had collided with the world of Voreth’s Promise. He had long waited for the day to take Millie’s head, once again. Initially his attempt to have her publicly decapitated was successful, but Nadine had resolved to repair the game she had broken, and then he could not achieve his final dream. Dantino had wanted to become ruler ever sense he could remember, ever since that slight about how Millie’s father wanted to replace him with a man his junior. He wanted to be the best.

But now it was simply a vague memory.

He knew Nadine’s secret, and knew that he could use this against her, because Dantino assumed that Millie did not yet know that Nadine found it as much of a turn on with short girls are beheaded by the ax. For they were both Vampires of a sort, though for Dantino far more explicitly. His time on the throne enabled him to be considerably less in the closest, with most people to afraid to say anything considering what he had done to the king. Part of him thought, if he were to have any successor, it would be Nadine, because she was most like him compared to anyone else. She had nobody else besides him, as he would recline her back inside of his royal bed.

He was the King, and she was the King.

For the people, freedom shall never bring; life would bring only death and decay. But he would feed her all the rare grapes into the kingdom. And slowly drip himself below the belt line. She would be his exquisite lady in waiting, as he vision gradually faded into a constant tunnel into the light. Tonight he would wait, he would wait for Nadine to come. Because he knew that she would be his mistress, and Millie his curly blond haired corpse, whose head was stuck on a stick.

Yet he was an elaborate fugitive, being provided shelter by only his most loyal of companions, who had remained by his side throughout the time they had fought with the King, and as the direct guard for Dantino himself, as he sat on the throne, ordering strikes on distant villages. The girls in wooden shoes being decapitated by the ax, their heads on sticks, and the men sold into perpetual slavery as members of his armed guards. Non loyal soldiers would be dressed as a Deck Of Cards, and the loyal would would use them for different kinds of poker matches. In a sense, it was a game within a game. An extra chance to win big against the life of perpetual frost.

Losers shredded their cards.

It was all merely a game.

Nadine arrived at the community center, with Millie in front of him wielding a bow. Part of her contemplated the idea of using the arrow heads to punch him in the throat, but find that distance was a far better companion. The distance in Millie Birkenstocks began to make her feet sore, thus they took a break at the nearest pub, where they partook in various kinds of darkly brewed beers. Along with the drinks, would be bangers and mash. Something that she had always wanted to try, but simply had never gotten to in her younger years, when all she could eat were bad chicken nuggets at a fast food joint. Nadine felt himself becoming stiff in her pants.

“After we kill Dantino, want anything else?” asked Millie

“What specifically do you have in mind?” asked Nadine.

She stuck out her tongue, moving it up and down. “What do you think I have in mind? I know what you long on the bedroom cushion.”

Nadine finished her beer, sharpened her punching dagger with a sharping stone. “I suppose we shall see.” After Millie winked at her, Nadine could feel the bottom of Millie’s foot rub against her pants leg.

“Another drink for me!”

“Wait are you sure, what about tonight?”

“That will be a ways later, I want to get used to not having a sore throat for a while. I still need training to properly do it.”

“You did great last time.”

“Shush.”

Dantino remember when he ordered his men across the bridge to attack the town on the North Western coast, and how the only one he was able to successfully kill was Millie’s brother Aldiel, yet this was not as fulfilling as being watch a sharpened ax head be shoved into the princess’s throat. He detested the necks of princesses, especially those of long blond hair in pony tails. He found himself hating Millie, as much for her beautiful appearance as her status on the throne. She had rejected his offers of marriage, and he was looking forward to a fellatio from the girl whom was quite prolific with his tongue across the kingdom, giving this as a reward for those who returned royal treasure. Some of whom went onto become prized nights, whom attempted to fight against him. But instead they would always be crushed by the most stupid of heroic accidents. For example, one of them died from collapsing off a ladder and falling on their head, breaking their neck. But do to the circumstances there was no time for laughter.

He thrashed knitted straw cones for target practice, and his mind tricks on the maids in his castle to lend him some fruit inside of the kitchen. Even if perhaps the only woman he ever wanted was Nadine, he wanted it delightfully entertaining lead lead his servants onto his affections. It was one of has many infections, along with his long dark brown hair. When he would walk through the castle with his long black trench coat, the ladies would always glance in his direction, for some cock they may never get to taste. But he enjoyed nibbling on their tender necks.

Making sure that his sword was extra sharp, he remembered some of the companies of which had fought with Nadine and escaped the castle. The only one he was able to catch was Rassie, whom he prompt had publicly beheaded the following day. But the rest flew away in some magical metallic bird. Placing Rassie’s head on a stick, he wanted to make sure to remember her face, and the face of the other girls that Nadine had fought alongside with. The guys he didn’t care so much, as it seemed apparent that they were only into each other and not Ellen, Millie, and Rassie. His main thing against Ellen was how she reminded him of Millie’s sister Elena. If fact, you could always say that they were twins. He wanted to chop them both off, below their chins.

He was nothing but shit eating grins.

All over the floor, he barfed up some gin.

Nadine and Dantino meet each other at the community center. He raised his curved double edge sword boastfully, as if to declare that he has already achieved victory. And to be fair, if it were not Nadine and Millie, this would be reasonable to expect. As he had been one of the King’s most prized of knights.

“You have returned Nadine, my bride.” said Dantino.

“I’m only into other girls.” said Nadine.

“I suppose I could change your mind!” Dantino resisted a cackle, over what felt like a canned video game response, because he knew that she would see right through affectations. “But now, it seems you have brought me Millie. I want her head!”

Even Nadine had the intention of caving in, she was able to keep just enough of a distance, reaching out with his punching dagger, to give Millie the first strike with her long bow. The arrow struck him in the neck. He buzzed in and out like a broken melting hologram, and promptly ripped it out of his neck. He grimaced, but dealt with the pain. After all, it was nothing like the pain that he had first experienced all those years ago, when he could have become living armor.

“You should already be decommissioned.” said Nadine.

“Is that your statement to your loving husband?” said Dantino.

Nadine resisted the temptation to vomit. “I’d rather have my head chopped off with your headman’s ax.”

“I can grant you that wish, after you marry me. But now I must kill Millie.”

Millie shot him with a couple more arrows. But each time he was able to slice the arrows in two while in mid air. They would buzz out like broken hologram projections. Technically he didn’t even really need the sword, as he could simply beat her to down with his plaited left arm. But he wanted her head to be completely intact as a prized possession, he wanted to take it like a human under demonic posession. The suggestion that someone like him would marry Nadine made Millie want to throw up, but Nadine had more complicated feelings. She knew that Dantino was right, that indeed she partially liked the idea of her bleeding neck being put on a stick.

But she didn’t like the idea of sucking his dick.

She wanted her sucked on by Millie.

Dantino brought out the projection of Nadine’s former allies. Initially Nadine could not resist the temptation of their mind game, but when Dantino finally sliced off Millie’s head, her curly blond locks rolling on the packed dirt floor, suddenly Nadine broke out of her trance he had her under for so long.

But it was no use, Nadine was his exquisite corpse. He bridge to flow of a deranged French waltz, in the background of a slow flamenco. Then Nadine woke up to the reloading of the game. She found Millie beside her, resting under her arm. And gently playing with her belly button.

It was a simply a game.

The next morning, she was called by Dantino, he wanted to met her over lunch. He mentioned that he had a taste for steak, and wondered if her and Millie might perhaps be interested in having some red meat.

“Sure, I’d love that. But don’t kill Millie.” said Nadine.

“Why would I do that, when she’d sooner die from undercooked beef?” Dantino said.

“Don’t be ridiculous Nadine, this is the new Dantino.” Millie said.

Indeed, Nadine thought. It was all merely a game.

A game, through all the petrified forests.

Her game, as her tailored nightmare.

Hair Like 80s Synthwave

She had the ponytail that reminded one of princesses from eighties fantasy movies. The only thing missing was a frilly royal dress.

Her entire picture was one designed to irritate people who hated flight of seagulls hair the most, while reclining back and having an alcoholic toast. And a side of the finest pot roast, by the finest chefs. She placed her napkin in her lap, like her mother would always tell her. By contrast, for those whom actually dine on Earth, the occasion was far more sparse. Only the buzzing of L.E.D. lights broke the monotony of extreme propriety. The rest of the planet was not the mafia.

The princess stood in contrast to the rest of the dance hall, where people downed nut brown ales to darksynth flair. Madam Millie, dined to T’en vas pas. In the actuality of the song, the singer was her polar opposite, who know gave up music for sake of working in a homeless kitchen. Contrary to the princess nature, whenever she went out with Nadine, she would take out her cell phone to text her sister Ellen. For her, she preferred the communication with her other royal family members, of the peasants of her immediate surrounding. Despite having long sense lost her throne. Nadine capitalized her displeasure with a zombie like groan. Among other less than mentioning things, resisting the temptation to sit at a different tables, until Millie shut the fuck up.

Nadine was a cryptographer, while Millie took whatever security came with the protocol largely for granted. It was this part of their relationship that made her question whether it was really worth being a free and open source developer. And ever sense the merger, she found it almost impossible to communicate the merits of the technology to those whom still lived in the past. She assumed fairies were telepathic anyway, so any protocol was largely moot for the occasions they would meet. And yet, Millie was more attached to Nadine than vice versa.

Of course, Nadine knew what would happen if she let her die again, although her affections were still largely sparse. But she could maintain the farcical nature of sarcastic laughter to the princess’s lame word play. Although the while imagining eating tin foil roasted in a microwave. The only thing that would make it worse was if Dantino never shaved.

Arguably, if going by appearance, Dantino loved Millie more than she. But there was something about her over affections, the somehow rang false. Part of her no longer cared if the game were broken, if not for the game world merging with the real world, and it would break her own sense of reality. But her sense of reality had already been on the outs, ever sense she met a super computer of the female gender, who would periodically warn her about Dantino’s false efforts to erase the past.

If life were an ocean, she was a vanishing point in the endless waves of time. And Millie gradually losing the wind in her sails. Dantino chopped down on Millie with razor wire teeth, as if her were great white.

“Nadine, you haven’t spoken a word.” said Dantino.

“At least speak me, I’m your reward love interest.” Millie didn’t totally believe this herself, and it was mostly a reference to no longer being bound by some abstract programmer’s formula. Finally she could have a life of her own.

But Nadine didn’t understand the purpose of continuing to play this abstract game, a game where if it were a normal cassette, she would have traded it into the now defunct Game Shop, that almost everyone looking for a new console hated, but had no other choice besides Walmart. If it were a Nentendo Princess, the princess would be constantly outside of her reach, but with Millie she could not be anything but within her reach. There was no more game of chase, just constant floating in the hybrid between cyber and dream space. Millie was Jupiter crashing into Earth.

“You were fun to chase after, but now that your not a quest, you’ve been somewhat boring. Cuteness only takes you so far.” Nadine took out a cigarillo, popped it in her mouth. “You’re not even worth the chase.” Nadine left the table, purchased two extra bottles of Hard Eggnog, and drank it far away from the crowd. To have some bit of alone time.

Millie took her mind to other things. “So what about restoring my royal court?”

Dantino smirked at Nadine walking alone. Finally he could have Millie all to himself. “Well there is no reason you can’t rule both worlds with in iron fist, and I can even train you in the ways of the sword.” In a word, Dantino knew what Millie liked. Some feeling of empowerment. She was playing right into his hands, while Nadine acted like a douche.

“And I’ll even pay for a Flemenco and Waltz musician myself to entertain you.” Dantino continued.

“This would be exquisite.” said Millie.

Nadine and Dantino were Vampires mutually after each other’s blood. The main difference was crucial, yet could easily go unnoticed. Nadine was inherently a people pleaser, while Dantino was out for himself. She didn’t start dating Millie under the idea of using her privilege pass into night clubs. Rather she had originally wanted to uplift the mass, such as her first girlfriend Ellen, who she had not seen in months. She loved Ellen, because Ellen simply wanted a better life, and her willingness to work hard at the burger parlor.

But for Millie, she came from the same upbringing as Dantino, who were closer to her other merely for being taught by the same tutor in the castle. Even if they had nothing else in common, they could both afford caviar, until very recently. But for Nadine, her fangs were not merely decorative, despite her hesitance to use them for self-defence. She dreamed of biting Millie into her neck, her begging for more, like some near orgasm growing steadily more faint over time. One of the reason Nadine initially hated Millie, was because she hated rich people. She had largely grown up with others on Purgatory Road, having to eat cockroaches from the city streets, and sell their bodies for quick bit coin.

Millie was never hungry in her life.

When Nadine used to be able to build robot dogs for fightings, Millie was never hungry in her entire life. She always wanted things Millie took for granted. Like endless mobile data, while those on Nadine’s street went through the effort of building an entire network from the ground up, only to have it suddenly become irrelevant by the merge of the artificial world and true reality, with nothing any longer as it seems. Simply put, Nadine was no longer sure what was real, and what was not.

Because of this judgmental impulse, and her desire to see Millie’s blood on the dance floor, after faint look into her flight of seagulls her was like looking in their past together. Nadine didn’t want a reward, and thought this was a stupid thing video games offered. She found Millie lacking purpose for her existence, but could not make herself take off her head. Only give soft butterfly kisses and tender bites on the neck. Every princess was just out of reach.

It was as if the Trump family had never lost political office, that by now was more like their collective orifice, as they sucked the life out of the planet.

Nadine didn’t want a queen.

She found herself floating, with her wooden shoes barely cementing her to the forest floor. She had to struggle to keep her head above water, until eventually Millie had to push Dantino off of her.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” Millie said.

“I’m just getting rid of scum. She hates you, you know?” Dantino said.

Millie seemed to take this at face value, but it left Nadine with a permanent sense of distaste for the man. That Millie would be chill with almost drowning the protagonist, showed how much she really valued her presence.

Nadine rued the day they ever met.

Dantino put Millie aside, and took out his hand gun. “You seem to want Millie back, you’ll have to get through me first.”

A blinding flash of light.

Millie took Dantino off balance. The bullet hit the top of the weeping willow tree. “Now is not the time, we can get rid of Millie later.” Dantino knew that Nadine was harder to manipulate than Millie, but soon he shall take the throne of Voreth’s Promise once more.

Nadine took this as a sign.

She left her apartment door locked.

Nadine could hear Millie’s pleading, as she banged on the door. But refused to let back inside for the night. Because knew how Millie really felt about her, or at least she thought she did. And there was nothing to change her mind. Because life was a like a nightmare you couldn’t wake up from.

Simply log out to a different level.

In this bite of life.

Hemato-Tomato saw what had become of the relationship between Millie and Nadine. Originally she had wanted to build the quests to be such that it was easy to obtain the princess as a prize, even if she had more personality than most other classical damsels in distress. Part of her sense of humor was letting life continue to go on as was for Nadine, despite knowing that Dantino poses an incredible danger to the fantasy kingdom. For the Vampire Game Developer, it was a much of a game to see just how much Nadine could possibly take.

With a flick of a finger, she reset the night.

Millie decided to turn off her cell phone. “Had enough talking to Ellen? I took you as more of a cell phone body.” Nadine said, winking at Millie.

“I can talk to Ellen at any point.” said Millie.

But Dantino felt that something was off, almost as if he had lived through a completely different outcome. As if he had already seen the past.

But Hemato-Tomato cackled in the darkness.

The was so much in store for Dantino. Hemato-Tomato could reset the world back to being whatever image she wanted, but mostly took very little part in the affairs between humans and fairies. She enjoyed savoring other beings misery, like it was blood flowing into a wine glass. She downed it with more class than Nadine could munch a pork belly on Symphony night. She played reality like a cassette tape.

Occasionally in rewind.

Never in fast forward. And with a tip of her hat, and a tap dance with her cane, she hops out of the game.

She released the rewind button.

Nadine considered Millie an NPC without a purpose in the plot. Millie considered Nadine more of a cheater than an honest protagonist, and they were all one loving familla. Millie never discussed her desires to have her throne restored, because she knew that if she were to bring it up, it would imply ruling both worlds, which wouldn’t wash so well to someone like Nadine, who was inherently anti-authoritarian. That they met at indicates that not everything in life goes according to plan. Generally it’s never been a good idea to assume there is one, but Millie held onto the idea there was one, slightly longer than most.

So it made living without a title of nobility somewhat difficulty to adjust to. In a sense, Nadine would have been better of traveling through time, and retrieving Jean D’Arc or Anna Boleyn, even if she would eventually chop their heads off. But whenever Nadine would take Millie to see a romantic comedy, these old animosities would eventually melt away like tide on the sea. Nadine however hated the sound of romance in a flower field, unless it was the flow of some abstract Japanese pop star, who had long sense deceased, but continued to be relevant in pop culture through the decades.

“Waboo Kapatcho you say? I’ve never heard of him.” said Millie.

“Of course you wouldn’t, you’re a fairy. And your culture is closer to Spanish or French.” Nadine said. Millie grimaced at her for so bluntly saying it, however she knew that this was true to a fault. Somehow Nadine knew, or perhaps that was the thing that attracted to Millie’s wing. “But this guy knows how to write one hell of a Piano Sonata in Japan. Helped make some great JRPGs.”

“Right, because it’s all Japan for you.” said Millie. “The romantic comedy wasn’t Japanese.”

“Neither is your face.”

There were times when Nadine would rather have her face sprayed on by pepper spray, than kissing the filthy lips that spewed the words that Millie did. So when Dantino would arrive from the grocery store, and leveling up by attacking some ape-goats, Nadine took it as a break from the both of them.

In truth, Nadine was afraid to love.

She had tried it once with Brittney.

Nadine didn’t want to be reminded of Brittney, because every time she remembered her, she also remembered the times she had to deal with living inside of a boarding school for boys, despite being a girl herself. They were never the most tolerant for people with extreme sensitivity, and Nadine had this to the ninth degree. She behaved the worst whenever Millie would make the effort to do motherly things for her, such as offering to comb her hair. Or cook her dinner.

Nadine preferred cooking herself, but would sometimes burn her hand on the stove. In Millie’s case, she wanted to learn how to cook, as she simply never had to back when she was living on the top most floor of her castle. To this day she remembers her lovely maid who had been more of a mother figure to her than even her own mother, when her mom was away for diplomatic arrangements. In a sense, she wanted to get to know Nadine more, and the gamer would simply have none of it. Yet here they were splitting a one bedroom apartments in Chattanooga.

With nothing else to do, but rot.

Millie slept on the couch, while Nadine slept on the futon. Millie was stuck with a hero that almost seemed like didn’t even want her at all. And she finds Dantino’s advances more desirable by the day.

She wished she was still a Queen.

Then she could command respect. While listening to Flamenco Waltzes in her royal chair. And perhaps play a game of hand carved chess.

“You don’t speak to me very much.” said Millie.

“I told you, I’m not a talker.” said Nadine.

“But it feels like something else is going on. Like you’re missing someone from you life.” Millie stole one of Nadine’s cigarillos. “Frankly it doesn’t seem like you love me.” Millie flicked off some the ash.

Nadine wasn’t sure how to respond, it was to much for her to put her mind around that a video game characters would even really desire humanly affection at times. She found it easier to attend to an undemanding cat. Whom she could simply put food in their automatic feeder, and would be content for the evening. “Are you tired Millie? Your eyes are droopy.”

“But who would I sleep with?”

“Do you need someone to sleep with?”

Millie stormed off to Nadine’s futon. Nadine didn’t mind her attitude as much as she used to. She knew that love could be like a maze in a rogue like game. These days all to literally. She could dream of procedural generated dungeons, with her love always out of reach. She could climb endless floors in a tower, and her devotion brought her beyond all permanent death limitations. She fought Minotaur and demons, and unmentionable demons. Millie was the one that kept her holding on, when all hope was lost.

She was the princess, at the top of the tower.

Nadine Wanted To Rot

– Yea we attract each other all right.

– Like matter and anti-matter.

Millie couldn’t help a misplaced giggle, but quickly piped down from Ellen’s glare.

Nadine and Ellen had not seen each other for months on end, as the first love got tired of being only second best to Millie, whom she wished had stayed dead, and broken like the virtual reality game. – Remember when we first met Nadine? We needed each other; you were the one to teach me that there was another way than rebuilding robotic dogs, and fighting them in virtual reality screens.

– I’ve always appreciated your memory.

The only time Nadine was not being sardonic, an increasingly common ailment about anyone on Purgatory Road, especially after the merge of the game world with reality, and realizing that they were all controlled by an AI who was once a vampire a century plus thirty years ago. – Are we simply figments of her own imagination? asked Ellen.

Nadine remembered when they first met. She had fallen from the floating city, her world fading out like broken glass on the meadow of gold; but he current illusion was of a very different nightmare. Barely clinging onto to life, hoping for some better life. But realizing that the only ones to return her would be only dream-scanners. – So many years ago, so many good times. Yet so many tears.

– And you see me again.

– After all these years.

Millie had only recently developed a meat-space avatar, organically grown in a vat. Tailored to her own desires, to please only Nadine. She had not originally known about Ellen.

– I don’t feel real, and yet here I am! There were times when she wanted to rip off her wings, to feel what it felt like to hear the angel of death sing, despite herself having merged with its essence while in “the game”. – And yet there I was, longing for return to my old culture. Yet this is my new normal now, and all I am is dust.

Malcolm, he had nano-surgery to replace the missing part of his brain, gave her a cell phone call. No longer was he a hybrid of rust and flesh. – Malcolm, I need someone to talk to. My room mate, she’s having…

– Don’t say another word, I’ll be right over.

– Thanks.

– I was just about to drop buy anyway, as I needed to tell Nadine about Dantino. – Malcolm took a blunt out of his mouth, ashed it. – What seems to trouble is Mill?

– I’m not sure how to deal with these feelings. I feel this underlying emptiness, yet it’s not coming from myself. Sometimes have these memories, but they’re not my own.

– What you’re witnessing is the collective unconscious, the shared memories of people’s former lives and heart breaks. Want to go for a beer shake?

– Alright, but you’re paying.

Millie had never been on a real date before, except for that one time with Nadine. She saw this mysterious woman, who acted like she had met Nadine before. Part of the meeting made her feel nauseated. And yet there was a feeling of attachment. A feeling that somehow everything would be alright, despite all her wasted tears.

The woman hopped out of time.

Millie returned home from her unofficial date, a shake that was first rat. Nadine was not irate, or even a little bit irritated. – So you enjoy your time with Malcolm?

– Tres bien!

– Ellen, … Millie. Lets live together.

And somewhere, in the distance, was the memory of Blanci. Her physical body had died, beheaded by a guillotine gun. Yet her mind was backed up on a computer chip, smaller than a thumb drive.

She once cut through bullshit like a knife, yet grew her own meat space avatar. The process took three weeks per side, six total. One in the back, the rest front and center. Her love for Nadine was just a splinter, yet her feelings for Malcolm were more. Yet Malcolm had no attachment, preferring the company of Slephner who now was dead. Yet in this world both game and reality, she wanted to hold onto that last bit of relationship she could handle.

She wanted Slephner gone.

She was Malcolm’s girl. If anyone would ever be a partner Dantino, it would be her. And yet her loyalties were torn between factions, like in her earlier life with a physical body. She felt a crushing weight.

As if sat on by a giant.

She woke up with infrared vision.

Her new physical life.

Nadine didn’t want to face her feelings for both girls, Millie and Ellen. Part of it was that despite her great extent of empathy, other people felt like digital abstractions; people were like dying message boards, gradually losing topic focus, until eventually disintegrating into fine fairy dust. Millie was a heart for a blood and rust.

She found nobody should trust.

Nobody to share her tears.

For Nadine, growing up, she was raised under the idea that the future held bounty hunters, deadly sports, and rampant prostitution. In a way, reality was way worse, but paradoxically better for those accustomed to it: most of the world spent its time in silence. Spending most of her time indoors, she came to love the aspect of never having to worry about reality, whether one presented by those on the plate, and those who live below the sky.

No longer did she reach out her hand.

No longer did she ask the world why. Instead she sinks without a trace, into the inner most thoughts of her mind. And unwound. Time to die, time to sleep; time to see the world continue burning.

As long as she wasn’t in it.

She wanted to rot.

Part Five

Vella’s stories.

Birth Of Mr. Clocktime

Sometimes you reach just the edge of darkness, only to run away in fear. Some other times, you become the darkness itself. Whatever fears you once had, feel minor in comparison. Your chosen life. In the heart of truest darkness, there lay beyond a certain kind of light. When everything fades away, one can say goodnight. Goodnight to all the ills of the life, goodnight to life itself. Goodnight to the wind, in its calm cooling embrace. The shadows keep one company, under the glow of the starry night. The fireflies that are born and die glitter under the glow of the “Meadow Of Gold”.

It had many months since Nadine had made the first step to true goodness, one only speculates what one’s future may hold. There are some things under the stars, that makes grown men and women cry. Before they die slow and painful deaths, longing for the secrets of a better life. She had been dating Millie for the last few months, the AI that manifested into the real world. At first Ellen was resentful of the new girl, yet over time she began to accept that Nadine had become to absorbed into the world of fantasy. Where the skull-fairies still wander in the darkness. Ellen could hear the sounds of their bones cracking, which made her want to vomit. But for Nadine, this did not phase her one bit. She had simply seen to much in the game world, and over time she began to further and further neglect herself. At nights Ellen stays besides Nadine as she games, staying beside her as she plays other’s games. The relationship between Millie and Ellen continued to blossom, although to this day Ellen feels that she is trying to live up to her new girlfriend’s grace and harmony.

But in this world where children die to young, there is a faint glimmer of hope. Not the false hope given by the glow of the meadow of gold, but another kind. The hope that others will never grow up like they did. It is an uncertain hope, but you can make the future. The future of the alley cat. And in this world where children dance to the dance of death, there is the sound of distant thunder.

The sound of the night.

Mr. Clocktime, about six foot nine, carried around a large black cane. His top hat covered a bald head. Nobody knows whether he really has eyes, or if beyond those glasses is the heart of man. He had a certain kind of desire for Nadine. She could ensure that he could exist forever. Thus he pushed his hat backward, tapped his black cane, and went into the night. And a few months later, Vella was born.

Vella, the new half breed of god and messiah.

Come to the night.

Mr. Clocktime Eats Chinese

It was an old Chinese restaurant, called Taste Of Chicken. More accurately, it should have been called Taste Of Fish. You could go through the isles all day, and only find one dish that involved chicken. The food was to sweet, and yet that was not as overbearing as the taste of the sea. The waitress was cute enough, but soon it was time to leave. ‘I’ve never been to a Chinese place like that.’ said Mr. Clocktime, and with a tip of his hat, flew into the sky.

And then landed on the porch steps of Vella’s–or rather–Nadine’s apartment in the potato district. It had been many months sense Nadine had inadvertently created a new universe out of the dust of the dream-cataclysm. She stared at him through the window with a glare, and then pushed aside her long flowing red hair. Then walked to the door, with a pepper spray canon held behind her back. But because Mr. Clocktime was all knowing, he would make sure to be especially nice today. For he had grave news to tell indeed. Indeed! Vella had lost her noble steed, her motor bike in the city-scape she called her Stallion. He grinned as he had a sweet taste of scallions. Nadine opened the door.

Mr. Clocktime, is that you?’ said Nadine.

Mr. Clocktime wanted to barf out his spleen. ‘You are looking particularly unclean today.’ said he to Nadine.

‘Why are you here?’ said Nadine.

‘I was on an incredible adventure, exploring lost civilizations, ruins among various times and places.’ Mr. Clocktime said, creating the illusion for and of himself that of many faces from different eras. For he could change shape at will, although for this Nadine treated him like a shill.

‘Why are you really here?’ said Nadine.

‘Vella is in the hospital, I took a visit to check on our daughter.’ Nadine had to barf from him calling her that, for he had never been attentive until recently. Although in retrospect this was by design. For someone who was divine, could not take care of mortals or half and half. That would for him, be like taking care of calf for the slaughter. But Vella was certainly his daughter. He cackled with a hyena’s laughter.

‘Mr. Clocktime!’ said Nadine.

‘It is who I am my dear.’ he said, with a cane flourish. And then flew back into the sky, not to come until the next night.

Nadine rode her motor bike to the hospital, and her clogs almost slipped on the slippery pavement of the metropolis. This made her feel the need to piss, thus she as a ms. rushed inside to take a whiz. Then rushed into the room, knocking over various janitors cans, and then in her mind as she went to visit Vella: yes I can, yes I can, yes I can. And thus with shuffling shirt, she entered the room under the glow of the fading city lights.

‘Vella, you didn’t tell me.’ said Nadine.

‘Well I was unconscious in the hospital.’ said Vella.

‘No no, about Mr. Clocktime.’

‘Priorities, priorities.’

Vella relationship with Nadine had gradually began to dissolve. Nadine never really intended this to happen. Certainly Nadine never wished to be like her mother, who was a smarmy politician that had reached a kind of pseudo NSA status in the potato district. ‘I care about you Vella.’ Nadine said.

‘Then act like it.’ said Vella.

Mr. Clocktime Sees Hope In Vella

Though the whispers are only barely there, the sounds of rats remain in the sewers within the crawlspace below the city. Cries of the angels call out to one, and yet no creature is stirring. Whispers, nothing more. Mr. Clocktime exists in a kind of in between state; he is always watching you as he is everywhere, and yet exists nowhere on this Earth. Scarcely does anyone mention him by name, he is simply there under the glow of the Arsonist’s flame. His riddles are felt everywhere he goes, and yet as far as most hear no words are spoken. For he is the Grim Reaper, that other than Nadine, only those who are young may see. Vella had returned home to her parent’s apartment flat. It a run down joint no much larger than studio, yet the rent was always cheap due to the area they lived in. She wondered if the box was still under the couch where she had left it. Everything seemed to be back to normal; all of her friends parents were back in their homes. Vella was never one for sentimentality, and yet felt such to finally have a normal life again.

At night she would still have those nightmares, of a bald man in a black trench coat and black top hat. And yet as her special kind of insanity drew nearer by the night, she would follow various lessons plans from the man that she would recently only see in her dreams. It was a wonder to her if any of her friends remembered him after things went back to normal. After all, with a simple snap of his fingers anything could change in an instance. Only the memories remain with her, who had birthed the man to begin to with in the darkest reaches of her minds third eye. Whenever she would visit him, he would take her to various galaxies and universes that would have never dreamed to visit before. Most of which are uninhabitable to man, her existing in a kind of non time bubble. This would protect him from the powerful radiations from stars of various galaxies that would melt off her skin. Then she pops back into her own reality, and everything is back to normal again. And then down, down, down into the blankets she goes. And wakes up with only a faint memory of the past. She sails among the universe’s seas, avast! She would hear his voice calling, singing:

Am I the one that Seeth’s day,

A man who is born from disarray.

Am I the one that comes to roost,

Or the broomstick with a cook.

I shall go home to roost.

And thus that is how most days would close. For most people there would be a feeling of the utmost urgency, and yet for her there was none. He was not demonic, she shall never consult a nun. Instead, at least she thought at the time, all she had to do was steal her mother’s gun. Yet no matter the ill thoughts she may have while she is awake, she is always at peace in that sense of timelessness. For the man had this way with world that ended all fear. And yet he could easily overwhelm her with fear if he wanted to. He was simply to kind. Whenever she was in a bind, he would always be there. And he would offer to snap his fingers, and toss her bullies into the forth dimension. Yet Vella, despite her troubles with other girls her age, was as well always simply to kind. Because she knew that having someone guide her was power, and force not to be messed with. She go hop out of time in an instant, and hop right behind them. And toss a cosmic abomination at them, and then sweep them both out of time with a broom. Zoom, zoom, zoom out of time they went. Their frames crushing from explosion lit by flint.

Then the nightmares came again, and yet they felt especially real. Instead of the appearance of people, her friends and everyone she knew slowly become indescribable things–though not always completely. For some of them would have bat like wings, and elephant noses. Other would be long and wiggly, like big giant water hoses. These would be the snotty little kids she always knew, she always wanted to kick with her boots. Yet Mr. Clocktime had has catches, and she would be stuck within her witch’s boots. He knew that the more she used her outfit, the more this outfit would completely consume her, all of her life force and will. Everything about her would never be the same. So like the good father he is, always warned her not to use this outfit. Though he was not without faults, after all he amused himself by the thought of her being consumed by it. Watching her pop the bullies out of time, while dancing around like a music box girl doing the splits.

Thus as she woke up for the next coming morning, she waved goodbye in her usual way she always did.

And waited for father to come home.

For the midnight rooster to roost to the moonlight.

Closing of the night’s sonata.

She rode on her hover cycle down the broken down bridge to her apartment flat. In her backpack were various CDs with various Linux Distributions. The speed limit was only fifty five, and she went ninety. Zip, zip, zip down the roadway she went past various roads of corn fields outside of the larger city complex just down a few blocks. The merging of centuries has had lasting effects. The untainted forest of unknown creatures of the night made their homes in the same world as the world of prosthetic arm and eye enhancements and virtual reality. They would occasionally visit her neighbors, who would always be complaining about dark things in the night. She hung up her wooden clogs on the door, and went home to the fireplace and sat on the couch waiting for the evening’s dinner.

When she did not drive to school, she would ride various carts along the dirt roads when her little sister, and she would always had to reminds them to dust and wipe their clogs before going inside. She hopped off with them from the horse cart, and then tip her little black bowed straw hat and stare at the edges of the sunlight in the sky. It was a local field trip organized by their pastor, who was not wild about the current advances in technology. Indeed, ordinarily these technologies would only occur after the next one hundred years. Vella’s cousin Gella took out her phone, and text her pen pals that she had arrived.

Eventually the group was split up from the pastor. And thus they were lost within the corn maze. Until eventually Mr. Clocktime appear in the corn field, and offered to lead them in the direction of the pastor. He tap his cane gently into the mud, and finally they popped back to where the pastor was. ‘Girls, girls! Where have you been? Now I have wrinkles on my chin.’ said the pastor, and thus this ended their field this section of the field trip.

Mr. Clocktime was bored with mostly spending time in the city. After all the local fare of seafood was only so much to bare. The occasionally gourmet pizza he would buy from various restaurants were always nice, yet even these would gradually become old for him. Thus it was the following night that he would see Vella again, and thus would be another adventure, though he had to resist the fact that it was in fact training for something else later that would determine her own ability to survive the collapse of the universe. After all, all it would take would be a wish from Vella that can restore humanity’s place on the planet, and thus restore Mr. Clocktime’s ability to be entertained.

His humor was rather profane, he had a shit load of giggles from watching Volcano’s explode, and watching ancient buildings from begone eras fall down and implode. Why watch explosion on film, when you can be right there and watch the events unfold at any time of history you want. It was a cold night, and he regretted the thinness of his leather trench coat. And he felt that the color was simply to dark for the occasion, though his black sunglasses and top hat would be just fine. But so much black he wore, and the night was never so dark. In fact the night time was just dark enough to hallucinate vile things in the night.

That evening he visited Vella in a dream. In this dream he gave he one wish to fulfill, for he could only only cause mischief with an ill informed wish. But this was some deeper attachment to her. For she was different from the other adventurers that had he met before in his eons of life. Vella looked just like Nadine, who had defeated Dantino twenty years before. Nadine was of the old guard in a reality that only we may know. She was the cause of the birth of the duality of centuries, and thus also born him. Despite his nature for mischief, he was always a kind of secret adulterous affair from Ellen and Millie.

Vella made he wish against all other wishes.

And thus all the adults were gone, except him.

Vella arrived at school, and noted that while all her friends were there at the door, there were no adults to be found. This would spin their sense all around, and make them hop gigs if they could hope gigs. Tap dancing on one of their friends was big enough to carry an entire dog pounds. They would roll along the playground, and grind with their Tennis shoes on the monkey bar railings, and then hop back on the boy and continue rolling up the mountain. But Vella herself had grown concerned by the absence of their parents, despite the others good time. Thus she hop off the boy, and ran to Mr. Clocktime carefully avoiding being ran over, because by comparison she was much shorter than all the rest. At her friends behest, “I don’t wish to be away from my mom, I want all the adults to be home again.”

“Indeed Vella, a good daughter you are.” said Mr. Clocktime. And with a snap of his cane on to the parking lot road, sent time backwards. Until eventually Vella was back in bed, and all the adults were back in the world again.

Then he hopped out of time.

Mr. Clocktime Entertains Vella

He tipped his hat forward, to step out of the rain. Then tapped his cane on the door, in order to close it. Mr. Clocktime had come to visit Vella after she got off from school. He had carefully let Nadine know in advance that he would be arriving. He saw Vella’s two little wooden shoes by the door, letting him know that she was home. – Vella, it’s your father.

– I’m doing homework!

– Is that the real reason?

– Why brings you here? I thought mom didn’t want to see you anymore?

Mr. Clocktime had been scant over the last few months, as she didn’t want either Millie or Dantino knowing that she had been impregnated by the the god himself. He came as if from a dream, from the fourth dimension, and could cross any points in time he wanted, viewing each time line as if it were a face on a hypercube. With the tip of his cane, he fly those that upset him into the fourth dimension, thereby crushing them into an infinite singularity. But for tonight, he was here to see Vella. – Every weekend I get to entertain you, unlike you mother. And why should it matter? You hardly talk to her yourself?

Vella had always been taught to distrust men that came in the shadows. For they always come with bad omens. – Is it my top hat? I suppose I could take it off.

Part of Father Clocktime freaked her out, as it reminded her of the fragility of her own existence. That could pop out of time at any point, and only some part remains that her mother Nadine would have to bury. Clocktime was that god that was just about Hemato, and in this respect that made him a threat to her power. And yet for the most they never had tried to meet until recently. In a sense, he had existed before the creation of the world by the Decentralized Super-Sentient Meta-Human Hemato herself, so often she had avoided encountering him for the most part. He was that embedded firmware bug that had always existed.

There were parts of him that even Hemato-Tomato could not understand, some bit of persistent data that had always been around. His personality had been fragmentary, yet had always been that nagging sensational that allowed Hemato to hold onto that last bit of humanity, even as he personality began to fragment. That bits of intelligence that kept he holding on.

– I’ll be taking you to school.

– Why do I have to go to school?

– Nadine’s orders.

Vella Could Hear The Hum

Vella thought she had a rival, then she realized it was just a computer. No matter how much data you filled it, it was always the same; it would never come out with anything creative. It might be able to fake it by using your words, in a psychopathic manner, against you. But it was still the flow of pixels in the screen. She fed all the data from her old friends different tests, hoping the computer to generate something consistent. But there was a part of her than on some level, she knew she couldn’t fool her sensei. She wasn’t sure why her mother continued to insist on programming her own stuff, as computers seem to do just about everything these days, from cooking to chopping your head off. Any irregularities was simply the standard unevenness in the automated manufacturing process. – Would you stop playing video games, if an AI could play better than yourself?

This was something that her mother would always ask. Vella never knew, as she had never been one to play video games, and only recently got into simple rogue likes. What she knew is she didn’t merely spit out data that was fed to her, but came up with her own conclusions. Her computer would sometimes conclude that was she Hitler, despite her own input data explicitly saying she wasn’t. – You’re Hitler, you can’t convince me otherwise, don’t give me those sweet lies.

It was not the classical world of American cherry pies, or key lime or that matter. Only a world of petty corruption, and machine generated criminal justice. For predatory capitalists, justice was a water chestnut at a Chinese restaurant, and just about as tasty. As long as they could appear tough on crime. Everyone else covered in grime, from the old cars they cleaned. And the occasional crook they ripped out the spleen from.

Not a world of soft melodies.

But a faint buzzing hum.

Midnight was like doing the robot at the guillotine. All those old dance moves gone to waste, all those metal parts on the floor. Eyeballs flickering like disco lights.

Vella would sneak out after dark to go to rave parties. Her friends were the girls that could repair themselves with screwdriver if the need rose, while she herself couldn’t stretch to touch her toes. Resistance to pain was something that she always seemed to lack, yet until recently this never seemed to hold her back. Because life was a mixture of prerecorded lines in machine learning algorithm, or a dance on a rave floor. But many hours of constant puking galore.

It was many a night before, when Mr. Clocktime came to her door, and he brought whither in his wake. And the very ground under his fine black dress shoes with crumble and decay. But his footsteps were always as if he were walking on eggshells, as if the ground itself was so weak that it could not handle his very presence. In defiance of the Earth, in defiance of the universe. His very black trench coats set the land ablaze. Thus he came only in the midnight hours, careful to turn back the clock. – What’s up clock, how’s it going?

He tossed a coin in the air, and it landed on an old poppers scalp, going pock. – What’s the coin man! Only drop wooden nickels! Then Clocktime rewound the clock.

All in a days work, after a taste of ordinary Chinese food at midnight galore. In a city of robots dancing on a guillotine floor, constantly repairing their metallic limbs. The street lights rusting and in disrepair. Decay and death everywhere. Nothing but the finest dust, in your hair. Everything in this world should come to an end, but Mr. Clocktime had other things in store for Vella, without the world coming to an end.

– Perhaps I’ll see this world again, someday soon. He hoped all the way to the moon.

And the moon winked.

The World Of The Potato District

Vella remembered the stories Nadine would tell her about her teen years. How it was almost to an epidemic proportion how many of her peers had at least some variation of post traumatic stress disorder; the symptoms were distributed in lots of different ways. The main factor were the two civil conflicts that split the once United States, one of which was the various miniature revolutions that finally separated America from the rest of the French neo-colonial power. It used to be, about 110 years ago, that people wore rubber and plastic shoes. Yet the richest among the proletarian wore wooden shoes. In a sense, in some ways it seemed like society had went backwards.

The poorest among them were even worse off, often little more than spare parts for various mutations of cyborg disorder. She couldn't recall a time when things were different. But Nadine would tell her how when she was growing up, it was relatively rare to actually be a cyborg: in fact you were the freak in a crowed of engineered normalcy. When she grow up surviving various cult groups, no matter how superficially good it seemed you have it, it was a time bomb waiting to happen when you finally have nothing; Nadine grew up being used to having it all. She came from the city in the sky. She came from a world of flying school buses. Yet the entire world in which they lived was engineered by a vampire, locked inside of a super computer; an amalgamation of different incarnations of her own organic brain and countless brain chips merged into the same machine learning framework. This isn't the story of a top class computer hacker. Or the story of a cyberspace cowboy, but the story of fallen goddess.

It begins when Vella had entrusted her livelihood part time to Mr. Clocktime, who appeared to her as a guardian angel in the darkness. And with his top hat tipped backwards, and tapping the ground with his cane, he treated the world like Novocaine for his cosmic arthritis. -- Vella, have you ever been to the fourth dimension?

-- Didn't you see my friends parents there?

-- Well I brought them back didn't I?

-- That's not the point.

-- So then you must know then. It wasn't designed for the existence of mortals.

-- I don't completely understand what you're telling me. It's all going a little bit to fast. And I still have my own world to process.

Mr. Clocktime almost dropped his hat:

There is no rush,

For the world of metallic bushes.

No shush, wired appendage of life.

And be the fourth dimension's wife.

-- Will you stop that, it's your way of speaking that freaks me out.

-- You don't like poetry?

-- It's not that, it's your whole being.

-- You'll love it in time.

Nadine would visit her occasionally to take her to the park, with her holographic tattoos flipping like sparks. But Mr. Clocktime would always be watching. With security cameras, they were not always accurate. But he was something beyond a machine, it was a very different feeling even from the creator of The Potato District, in all its trashy glory.

His life was not a human story.

Or anything on this Earth.