From: "laia" <laia@familiasalla-es.ro>

Subject: Jeanine Salla is not used to being crossed...

Date: Tuesday, June 19, 2142 9:18 AM

 

..but the stutter that hit so much of the sphere along the East Coast last week played merry hell with our movie ticket plans.  We think everything is under control now, and the list of theaters is complete. 

 

Meanwhile...

                                                                        *

I am walking around these days with a part missing, and the strange thing is, nobody can tell.  An invisible cripple among the rest of you, standing in line with you at the theater.  Waving up to the brothers on the deck of the Lucky Junk as if I were like the rest of you.  It's like being two months pregnant, your world changed utterly but nobody knows to gives you their seat on the ferry.  Only of course in reverse, because I'm not adding to life; I've had a part of my life ripped away.

 

The fact is, I wasn't trapped inside my own skull like most humans are.  Regular humans have to use language as a clumsy translation of how they feel, or what they think:  but I was different.  Part of me had access to a universal platform, a common mind shared by everything running Earthnet 35 and up.   I could reach out to the sphere, to other people, to vast stores of information:  I could extend.  Connect.

 

Only connect.

 

But every strength is a weakness too:  and the cost of that extension was that someone else found a way to get inside me.  He got in my head and he planted terrible flowers there.   He made me do horrible things.  Terrible, terrible things.

                                                                        *

 

My name is Venus.

                                                                        *

 

Not really, of course. But I have been thinking about her for days.  A few weeks ago I would have cheered to see her flawless face melted down to slag.  Yeah, so, she was reprogrammed.  Whatever.  I would have wiped her in a heartbeat.

 

Now...

 

I find myself wondering where she is.  What she's doing.  Is she happy that she can't remember killing Evan?  Or does she feel the emptiness where those memories should be like I feel the absence of Mephista?  A hollow clack, like a wooden leg tapping against the pavement.  A part of you numb, your balance off, and the world strange somehow.  Threatening.

 

I wonder if Venus ever thinks about me.  I wonder if Evan mentioned my name, and the idea humiliates me; but I still wonder if I mattered enough for him to talk about.

 

I wonder where she sleeps - well, stays - at night.  Does she have friends yet, or only allies?  Can she tell the difference between freedom and loneliness?  Does she ever wish that she was still a sleeping princess, still living with Basta in his fine house, without a question in her beautiful head about her place, about the meaning of her life?

                                                                        *

 

I'm sitting on the balcony of my apartment, drinking a glass of wine.  I swirl it around, watching the red waves race and jump.  Then I drop the glass, and watch it shatter on the patio.  Clumsily, still bad at working my eyes without Mephista, I replay the crash, slower and slower.  Trying to catch the exact moment the glass lost its shape, (which is the same as meaning.) 

 

The sudden phase change

Broken from signal to noise

Something to garbage.

 

How's that, Evan?

 

Droplets of wine bounce and spatter, pool and run.  In a while there is only broken light glittering there, and a red stain.  These are the only facts now.  The rest is only memories, and dreams.

 

L