#NYC midnight short story challenge 2018 Round 1

[matildazq]

NYC Midnight 2018 Short Story Challenge, Round 1

My heat: 112

Character: MMA fighter

Genre: Fantasy

Object: Virtual Reality

I flat out ran out of time on this. Very unhappy with the lack of coherence and, in  particular, the weak ending. I ended up not using the last 500 words of the 2500 word max. I clearly needed that space, and I kind of want to rewrite for my own purposes to give this slightly more satisfying closure, but here it is: 

Take-Only Memories

Two beings from different worlds find a kind of peace in an uneasy, symbiotic relationship.

“Think it’ll be today, Tom?” He always asks the same question. From deep in the gloomy interiora, as the bell above the workroom door tumbles sideways to jangle out of tune, he always asks.

“Today?” I answer. I always answer. “Nah. Not today, Bol.”

My name isn’t Tom. His isn’t Bol, and I’ve long since lost count of the todays since he’s been asking. Since I’ve been answering, and that’s ironic, I suppose. On my end of things, it’s ironic.

“How’m I looking?” he asks in the hale, booming voice he always puts on for the occasion, but he writhes like an impatient child as I lever the chair-back upright. He plants his fists on the cracked vinyl of the wide arms where the disused wrist straps loll like long-silent tongues. He turns his face anxiously toward me. Toward where he thinks I am, but I haven’t disabled the scenario yet.

The off-target gaze doesn’t bother me. I’m used to it with him. Reassured by the way it snaps instantly to the right spot when the last syllables of the incantation take shape in my mind. He’s back on this side. Fully on this side, and a cool trickle of relief runs through me. I’ve managed to tell him the truth.

Not today.  

“Hideous,” I say with a smile. That’s my part of our daily ritual. I touch the tips of my thumbs together. I stretch my fingers toward the ceiling and think something like silver. Something that translates, and the air between the Ls my hands make takes shape. It fills in the frame that’s lightless from my side, something else from his. “That never changes.”

“Says you.” He uncurls one fist, wincing with effort that’s nothing but force of habit. Muscle memory, he called it back when he still made jokes like that. When he still could. He spreads his fingers wide. He traces the air just above the surface of whatever it is he sees on his side. The broad, flattened diamond that used to be the bridge of his nose, maybe, or the irregular rolling hills of his brow, painted in lurid technicolor bruises as they were almost every night he can remember. Could remember. ��“She called me handsome, though.”

“She did. Laska.” I give him the name as I bring my fingertips together and the frame snaps out of existence. I don’t know what he sees when I pull up the frame for him. I only know what he saw once. What he really saw, countless todays ago. I try to show it to him now. I look him firmly in the eye. “Laska. She believed it, too.”  

We leave the shop most days. We head toward Cyno, and I hardly ever bother with any kind of cover for either of us. It’s stupid of me. It’s dangerously sentimental, but I’m tired all the time now, and I can sense it creeping up on us: The today when my answer will be a lie, and I have to believe it’s not just good for me. Walking in the real world.  Real-ish, anyway.  

“Leave only footprints,” Bol says with a grin. He tips his head back and reaches up for the sign. He bats it hard with the meat of his palms and sets it swinging. The chains that shriek in counterpoint to the muffled bell inside and he smiles wider. “Get it?”

He looks at me expectantly, and I can only hope my face is blank. I can only hope he doesn’t see how it startles me. A joke even older than the one about the gnarled hands that aren’t his any more. The ones he still expects to give him pain every time he uncurls a fist.  

“Nope,” I reply. “Never have.”

I don’t, really. That’s true enough, even though I’m the one who can still envision every detail. The flashy silver boots he favored in the cage. The livid stamp of its sole as he lifted it with a roar from his opponent’s thigh. I’m the one who’s curated every aspect of every fight. Sight, scent, and sound that I’ve repackaged a dozen times over. Repurposed for a hundred different scenarios. I’m the one who owns that memory, and every other. Almost every other. But I still don’t get it.

Bol doesn’t mind. That’s not a joke, although I guess it might have been early on. (Can’t mind, can I, Tom?) It sounds like something that might have been funny to him, and maybe even to me, but it’s no joke now, the way the moment slips so readily from his grasp, that impossible fragment of a past that isn’t his anymore. I think it must have to do with the rain. There’s nothing to see where our feet come down, of course. The substrate is perfect. Every surface is perfect, dry, and temperate, but there’s sensation this far out from the hub. Whatever the Sovereign party line is about equality for citizens and denizens alike, there’s a bit of haptic feedback this far out when it rains, and I think it must have something to do with the way impossible things from a distant past suddenly surface for him.

I don’t know how. I’ve never known how, but I inarguably know him better when it rains. When we walk and I know he’s looking for footprints, I understand some of the bits and pieces caught between the principal moments in his life. It’s then I know a little better who he was before he came here. Before he and Laska and the other couple hundred tumbled from their own loud, jagged, brown-paper world into this one. When it rains, I know get the faintest sense of what some of it means to him. Squelch, pinprick, cold-trickle, splat, slate, throb, hum. I have the faintest idea what he sees every today when I think silver into the frame.    

I’m working through it the way I have a thousand times before. Wondering idly how any of it actually works when the kid sees us.

“I don’t know her.” Bol’s distress is palpable. Haptic feedback I should have picked up on long before she got this close. He clutches my arm with vice-grip fingers and I hear the roar tumbling sideways inside my skull. I feel the livid red–blue rising beneath my skin. “I don’t, Tom.”

“You don’t,” I mutter. I try to put myself—my body—between him and her, but it’s laughable. “She doesn’t.”

I’m hissing. Practically spitting in her face, and it’s not helping. It’s setting off some kind of chain reaction. A ripple running through the real world that shouldn’t be possible, but here we are. Here they all are. A sudden crowd of my kind slowing to a crawl. Slowing to a stop with a two-finger swipe disengaging each and every one of them from whatever reality they’d just been walking in.

“I do,” she insists. She’s one of my kind. Transparently not Bol’s, despite the mods. Some of them have started to bother with that. Young ones, I suppose, though who can tell any more what that means. But they’ve started up a new black market in skin disruptions and colored fluid beneath the surface. In what they think of as scars, and the fact of Bol—the reality of him—can only burst her bubble, but she insists. “It’s him. I know it’s him.”

“Inside.” I hold up one hand. I open a frame in desperation. Lightless from my side. A void, like always, but Bol nods. He strides through, and I have a decision to make. A split-second call I’m ill-equipped for, but my fingers close around her wrist. “Inside,” I say again as I tumble through. As I tug her with us.  

“Coffee, Tom!” Bol calls out. He drops on to something that thrusts up out of the ground. A flat-topped thing that seems to spin. He makes one rotation. Two and a half, then pounds on the flat surface in front of him. “There’s coffee here.”

And there is. It’s stinking and unpleasant. Scalding, but he enjoys it. Always enjoyed it and will enjoy it while I try to figure this out.

“Pyt.” She pushes past me toward Bol. She rolls her shoulders and the way she sees herself falls into place. It’s interesting. It would have interested me back when I started out. The flaws her mind rubs out. The irritating little bumps of personality it plays up. “I’ve trekked every one of your scenarios. A ton of times. Not just the fights.”  She slides on to the flat-topped thing next to him. She spreads her elbows on the flat surface. “I did the prison consec and the blue-collar run. All of them, a dozen times at least. Even the romance stand-alones.”

She wrinkles her nose at that. The designer bruise beneath one eye pulses mauve, then green and a heavy silence falls.  

“She’s pretty?” Bol breaks it. He hunkers down, vaguely miserable, though there’s no chance he knows. No chance he understands she’s talking about Laska. Him and Laska. He slouches with it, and still, he’s looking over the top of her head, right at me. “She’s kind of pretty.”

“Background, Bol.” I try to sound reassuring. Try to distract him so I can think. “She might be good for the crowd scenes. Or the ones with the placards between rounds. What’d they call those?”

“Ring girls.” He steals a peek at her, then shakes his head. He withdraws into his coffee. “Nah. Not her, Tom”

It’s funny. It should be funny the way he dismisses it, as though he’s still the expert on a world my kind think they know far better than his now. Kids like this think they know, and that’s down to me.  It should be funny, but she’s caught the name this time.

“Tom? Is that some kind of joke?” She whirls toward me, and the stool sings a tune beneath her. A bright metallic string of notes that Bol remembers. “The Ace?” She looks me up and down in frank disbelief and I wonder. For the first time in who knows how many todays I wonder what I’d see if the frame weren’t lightless on my side. “This is you?”

She gestures broadly at what I’ve manufactured on the fly. It’s mostly blank and white. It’s long ago, and Bol’s real name pushes at the edges of the frame. What the world called him before the roar and the silver boots. Before the flattened diamond that used to be the bridge of his nose. It’s nondescript and sub-ideal and mine.

“This is me.”

“Tom,” Bol says flatly as I wrestle open the door.

“Yeah?” I answer, but he’s looking up at the sign. He’s wincing at the out-of-tune jangle of the bell.

“Take-Only Memories,” he reads the faded letters aloud. “It’s a joke, isn’t it?

“It was, Bol.” I manage to tell him the truth one more time

“I don’t get it.” He shakes his head sadly

He moves into the room as I button things down for the night. He drops into the cracked vinyl chair with a sigh, and I know it’s slipped away from him. I know he’s over the injury already. He pulls the lever and the back drops. It brings him face to face with the familiar ceiling.

“Laska.” He says. It’s the last thing he says, every night. “She died.”

“She died, Bol.” It’s the last thing I say. Every night. “You hold on to that.”

“I’ll try.” His eyes skim past me. They find a point just past where I am as the last syllables of the incantation take shape in my mind and the scenario takes him to the other side. “But it might be tomorrow, Tom.”

“Might be,” I tell him.