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siodymph · 8 years ago

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Symmrat Week Day 4

And here's day four! We're officially half-way through Symmrat week!

This is my take on their role reversal. And personally, even if their background stories are switched I still like to think they both still keep their talents with explosions and hard-light. But instead of making his stuff from scratch Junkrat had a life-time of experience and tony stark-level attention over his weapons. And then Satya is the one who makes her turrets from scrap and is completely obsessed with reverse engineering hard-light.

You can check it out under the cut or over on my AO3 Enjoy!

When he’d first joined Overwatch, Jamison wasn’t sure what to expect. He’d never really had friends, going straight from school to a fully-fledged career all through Hyde Global he’d been one of their finest chemical engineers and weapons expert. But he’d always been called a shut-in and knew embarrassingly well that most the other engineers he worked with never thought highly enough of him. Not even in their days together at the academy. The one time he’d tried approaching them on the matter they said he always made things awkward, that he was always so loud and unfiltered, also annoying, never shutting up. He never bothered trying to talk to them after that. It still made him a bit bitter. He knew he was different, but that had just made him all the more important to Hyde. He could do things, make things no one else could. His controlled light explosions had been a breakthrough in the industrial world. At least, that’s what Hyde’s suits had always said to him when he was first starting out. He’d done so much for Hyde Global, he’d given an arm and a leg for that company. Literally.

So when Overwatch came back from the dead and HG wanted a representative on the team, he was very skeptical. Why would Overwatch want Hyde Global’s weapons expert when no one in that company seemed to care much about beyond his bombs and weapon designs?

He could have never predicted just how quickly the Overwatch team would worm its way into his life. That for one he’d be a member of a team, that the people he worked with would honestly have his back, and that he’d actually enjoy working in a group instead of on his own like usual. That after a year on the team he’d be best mates with people like the gaming legend Lucio, or pop-sensation Hana Song, that one was especially surprising seeing how she’d become famous for her blatant opposition to Hyde’s presence in Busan, South Korea. And yet now they were some of his best friends.

And he would have never, ever expected Satya.

A new recruit, just like he was. That however was where any initial similarities between them had come to an abrupt halt. When she arrived at the Overwatch headquarters, she was wearing tattered clothes, hair unruly and ragged, and a thick layer of dirt clung to her skin. He’d learned a bit later that she was from the wastelands of India, and allegedly she knew deep secrets about Vishkar tech, a company that had just begun developing something called “hard-light” when the Indian Omnium blew up and along with over a third of the nation and the rest of Asia, destroyed Vishkar before it could truly lift off the ground. Satya was one of many abandoned people left to fend for themselves. She was silent as death and never took her eyes off any of them, as if expecting them all to turn on her at a moment’s notice.

And for a while that’s how things were in their team. But slowly, slower than anyone could have truly seen, things began to change. Satya began to open up to the rest of the group, put more trust in them. And Jamison was too, much to his surprise. What had started as a temporary gig for him had turned into one of the happiest times in his life. People who started out as just heroes and strangers he would work with had turned into friends and family he couldn’t imagine leaving. And Satya. Satya had turned into so much for Jamie, he could have never prepared himself for how much Satya would mean to him.

How much he would fall in love with her.

Her eyes, there was just such an energy hidden in them. A fire she held as she turned metal scraps and rubbish into beautiful weapons in the labs. The fire that seemed to explode out of her whenever they went on missions, going from silent and calculating to striking down their enemies, the ones who’d been foolish enough to underestimate her traps and her power. In quieter moments, far away from battles and payloads, that fire would crackled softly with such a warmth whenever she laughed at his jokes, whenever she got lost in thought, whenever she smiled. She was brilliant, she was amazing and it scared Jamison to think that he’d fallen so hard for someone in such a short time.

Then one night Satya pulled him aside in the workshop. Said she wanted to tell him something important, but she couldn’t tell him in the Overwatch base. That there were too many cameras hidden everywhere and they needed to get somewhere unwired.

Jamison had foolishly agreed and now seemingly for hours the two of them drove out of Gibraltar. The city became a small blip far behind them as they drove further and further inland away from the sea. Until finally they reached a safe house hidden far into the woods.

“Mei and I set this place up during our heists.” Satya explained as she got out of the driver’s seat.

It certainly looked like the type of building quickly rebuilt while on the run. Once it might have been an old cottage but now high-security devices outlined every window and the door. As they stepped in Satya directed Jamie how to step over all the traps that lay hidden all around the front entrance. Until finally they were both sitting on the floor of the living room as the only furniture was a musty matress in one corner of the room.

After rechecking the entire safe house one last time, she sat down next to Jamison. “Nothing leaves this room.” She said steely.

“Of course.” Jamison said, unsure exactly what he had been dragged into.

“You swear?”

“I swear, Satya.” He wasn’t sure what Satya was about to reveal, but not matter what it was Jamison rationalized that nearly nothing her secret could be would make him leave this room.

“Ok...” Satya took a deep breath, looking quickly to the door before locking eyes again with Jamison. “You wondered how I know so much about Vishkar’s hard-light? Well… this is my secret.”

She then began taking apart her mechanical arm.

But instead of removing it from its detachable joint on what was left of her upper arm, she began ripping off bits and parts. The arm she’d held so much pride in, she always bragged about how she made her arm completely on her own from metal scraps and wiring she could find in the Indian ruins. It had been her pride and joy. She’d refused everyone’s help, even Jamison’s, when they offered to upgrade her arm. And now she was tearing it apart like it was nothing to her.

Jamison was about to protest when he saw a flash of white emerge as the she slowly took apart the arm. It couldn’t be… It was impossible…

But slowly Satya took off all the scraped pieces, Jamison realized that the arm had just been a shell. Made only to hide a beautiful, pristine, sleek arm. And when the palm began glowing with a brilliant blue light Jamison couldn’t deny it any further.

It was a Viskar prosthetic gauntlet. Possibly one of the last in existence.

Jamison felt speechless, Vishkar was a tall tale, an Arthurian legend. So many people he knew at Hyde had said “hard-light” couldn’t even theoretically exist. And yet here it was. Beams of light were being bent into prisms effortlessly in Satya’s control. “H-How?”

“One time when I was younger and foolish I attempted to scavenge the Vishkar ruins. It cost me my left arm but in turn I discovered something much more valuble…”

“Oh my god Satya… It’s amazing.”

She smiled and brought the gauntlet closer. “Try it, pinch the light to make a shape…”

Jamison was tentative to touch the light. He felt like he was about to touch the holy grail of engineering. He watched as his hand was illuminated by the light and he attempted to pinch the light as Satya had instructed. It took him a few times to try gripping the light but the fourth time he tried something seemed to suddenly connect and the hard-light followed his hand, fanning out in into triangles. He grinned up at Satya who smiled back.

“If anything happens to me. I want you to have my arm.”

Jamison looked up at her surprised. The way she said it, she sounded so certain.

She continued before he could say anything. “It’d be a pity if it ended up left in a museum, collecting dust and going unused. Something like this deserves to be used. To its complete potential. That’s why I want you to have it, Jamison.”

“Satya, you don’t have to

“Ok… but just in case.” Satya pressed moving closer, closing her gantlet around Jamison’s hand. “Please, promise me you’ll keep it safe?”

“I swear I’ll never let anything happen to your arm, darl.” He murmured, kissing Satya’s beautiful hand. And he raised his head to look Satya directly in the eyes. “But I’ll be a dead man before I let anything happen to you either.”

Satya frowned at that, looking away from him and down at her arm. “Thank you Jamison, but I’m not as important.”

“You are to me. And much more precious too.” Jamison said gently taking hold of her chin and looking back into her eyes. Ad before he could think against it he leaned in and pressed his lips warmly against hers.

That night he learned an invaluable secret, one that could destroy corporations, entire nations if wielded wrongly. But most importantly to Jamison, he realized just how much Satya loved and trusted him. And in that night he finally placed his whole heart and trust in her too.

#symmrat week 2017 #symmrat #junkmetra #symmrat week #day 4

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marymosley · 4 years ago

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The UK Supreme Court’s Re-interpretation of FRAND in Unwired Planet v. Huawei

Guest post by University of Utah College of Law Professor Jorge L. Contreras.

In its Judgment of 26 August 2020, [2020] UKSC 37, the UK Supreme Court affirms the lower court decisions ([2017] EWHC 711 (Pat) and [2019] EWCA Civ 38) in the related cases Unwired Planet v. Huawei and ZTE v. Conversant [I discuss the High Court’s 2017 decision here]. The judgment largely favors the patent holders, and holds that a UK court may enjoin the sale of infringing products that incorporate an industry standard if the parties do not enter into a global license for patents covering that standard. The court covers a lot of important ground, including the parties’ compliance with EU competition law under Huawei v. ZTE (CJEU, C-170/13, 2015) (¶¶ 128-158) and the appropriateness of injunctive remedies under UK law (¶¶ 159-169). But in this post, I will focus on what I consider to be the most significant aspect of the court’s judgment – its interpretation of the patent policy of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an interpretation that largely determines the outcome of the case and could have far-reaching ramifications for the technology sector.

Background

The case began in 2014 when Unwired Planet, a U.S.-based patent assertion entity (PAE), sued Huawei and other smartphone manufacturers for infringing UK patents that it acquired from Ericsson (other suits were brought elsewhere). The patents were declared essential to the 2G, 3G and 4G wireless telecommunications standards developed under the auspices of ETSI, an international standards-setting organization (SSO). A companion case was brought by another PAE, Conversant, with respect to similar patents that it acquired from Nokia.

Because Ericsson and Nokia participated in standards-development through ETSI, they were bound by ETSI’s various policies, including its patent policy. Accordingly, when the patents were acquired by Unwired Planet and Conversant, these policies continued to apply. The ETSI patent policy requires that ETSI participants that hold patents that are essential to the implementation of ETSI standards (standards-essential patents or SEPs) must license them to implementers of the standards (e.g., smartphone manufacturers) on terms that are “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND).

Huawei and ZTE are China-based smartphone manufacturers with operations in the UK. Unwired Planet and Conversant offered to license the patents to them on a worldwide basis, but the manufacturers objected to their proposed royalty rates, claiming that they were not FRAND. Among other things, Huawei argued that any license entered to settle the UK litigation should cover only UK patents. After numerous preliminary proceedings, in 2017 the UK High Court (Patents) held that a FRAND license between large multinational companies is necessarily a worldwide license. Moreover, if Huawei did not agree to such a worldwide license incorporating FRAND royalty rates determined by the court, the court would enter an injunction against Huawei’s sale of infringing products in the UK. The Court of Appeal largely affirmed the High Court’s ruling.

The UK Supreme Court Embraces SSO Policy Interpretation

In its judgment, the UK Supreme Court gives significant weight to the language and intent of the ETSI patent policy – far more than either the High Court of the Court of Appeal. This approach contrasts starkly with that of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which decided another FRAND case, FTC v. Qualcomm (9th Cir., Aug. 11, 2020), just a fortnight earlier. The Ninth Circuit explicitly dodged any interpretation of the SSO policies at issue in that case (those of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS)), focusing solely on the antitrust issues raised by the parties. The UK Supreme Court, in contrast, appears to have embraced the exercise of SSO policy interpretation, focusing intently on the language and drafting history of the ETSI policy, as well as its own conclusions about the intent of that language. This judicial interpretive exercise leads to three key holdings in the case:

ETSI’s Policy Compels a Worldwide License

In determining that a FRAND license between Unwired Planet and Huawei should be global in scope, rather than limited to the UK, Mr Justice Birss of the UK High Court looked to industry practice and custom. He first noted that “the vast majority” of SEP licenses in the industry, including all of the comparable licenses introduced at trial, were granted on a worldwide basis, and both Unwired Planet and Huawei are global companies. He then reasoned that “a licensor and licensee acting reasonably and on a willing basis would agree on a worldwide licence” (¶543). In contrast, he regarded the prospect of two large multinational companies licensing SEPs on a country-by-country basis to be “madness” (¶543). Accordingly, the High Court held that a FRAND license, under these circumstances, must be a worldwide license.

The UK Supreme Court acknowledges the industry practices referenced by the High Court, but bases its reasoning much more heavily on ETSI’s patent policy. First the Supreme Court recognizes the inherent territorial limitations on the jurisdiction of national courts (¶58). However, it is the ETSI patent policy, adopted by the SSO and accepted by its participants, that opens the door both to the consideration of industry practices (¶61) and the extension of national court jurisdiction to the determination of global royalty rates. The Court concludes, “[i]t is the contractual arrangement which ETSI has created in its patent policy which gives the [English] court jurisdiction to determine a FRAND licence” for a multi-national patent portfolio (¶58). Thus, the Supreme Court affirms the decisions of the lower courts, but grounds its decision more firmly in the ETSI patent policy.

ETSI’s Policy Contemplates Injunctions

The Supreme Court also relies on the ETSI patent policy to support its conclusion that SEP holders may seek injunctions against standards implementers who do not enter into FRAND license agreements. The availability of injunctions in FRAND cases has been the subject of considerable debate in jurisdictions around the world. The UK court comes down in favor of allowing such injunctions, not on the ground that patent holders can do whatever they like, but because “[t]he possibility of the grant of an injunction by a national court is a necessary component of the balance which the [patent] policy seeks to strike, in that it is this which ensures that an implementer has a strong incentive to negotiate and accept FRAND terms for use of the owner’s SEP portfolio” (¶61).

This conclusion is striking in two regards. First, it largely omits the analysis of EU competition law that typically accompanies the consideration of injunctive relief in EU FRAND cases. While the Court later discusses Huawei v. ZTE at length (¶¶ 128-158), it does so while analyzing whether the parties violated applicable competition law, not whether competition law itself establishes a basis for seeking injunctive relief.

Second, and more surprisingly, the Court imputes to the ETSI patent policy an affirmative authorization to seek injunctive relief that is found nowhere in the policy itself. From the fact that the patent policy includes provisions that are favorable to both implementers and SEP holders, the Court finds that the policy intended to establish a “balance” between these two groups, and that a “necessary component” of that balance is the ability of the SEP holder to seek an injunction against the implementer.

This is a surprising result that was not forecast in either of the decisions below. It is particularly significant because it may influence other courts’ interpretations of the ETSI patent policy. It may also encourage other SSOs, if not ETSI itself, to adopt policy language expressly prohibiting participants from seeking injunctive relief against adopters of their standards (as IEEE has already done).

Non-Discrimination is Not a Stand-Alone Commitment

The third significant aspect of the judgment relates to the non-discrimination (-ND) prong of the ETSI FRAND commitment. At the High Court, Mr Justice Birss held that the -ND part of a FRAND commitment does not have a “hard edge”, which would mandate that every FRAND license must be priced at exactly the same rate. Instead, based on EU competition law, he found that differences in pricing should not be objectionable unless they distort competition. As such, he did not fault Unwired Planet for pricing some FRAND licenses below the rates that it offered to Huawei.

I disagreed with Justice Birss’s reasoning on this point in 2017, arguing that it “conflate[s] two issues: the competition law effects of violating a FRAND commitment, and the private “contractual” meaning of the FRAND commitment itself.” I was thus pleased to see that the UK Supreme Court looks not to competition law, but to the content of the ETSI patent policy, to define the scope of the SEP holders’ non-discrimination obligation.

This being said, the Court’s interpretation of “non-discrimination” is novel and somewhat radical. Rather than considering the -ND prong of FRAND to be an independent commitment of the SEP holder – that the licenses it grants not discriminate (however that is defined) — the Court blends the -ND prong together with the “fair and reasonable” (FRA-) prong to form a “general” obligation. It explains,

Licence terms should be made available which are ‘fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory’, reading that phrase as a composite whole. There are not two distinct obligations, that the licence terms should be fair and reasonable and also, separately, that they should be non-discriminatory. Still less are there three distinct obligations, that the licence terms should be fair and, separately, reasonable and, separately, non-discriminatory” (¶113 (emphasis added)).

As evidence for its interpretation, the Court points to ETSI’s rejection, in 1993, of a ‘most-favored license’ clause in its patent policy. Interpreting the policy’s non-discrimination commitment as a ‘hard edged’ commitment would, in the Court’s view, re-introduce most-favored treatment “by the back door” (¶116). As a result, the Court concludes that the non-discrimination prong of ETSI’s FRAND commitment merely “gives colour to the whole and provides significant guidance as to its meaning. It provides focus and narrows down the scope for argument about what might count as ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’ for these purposes in a given context” (¶114).

As far as I am aware, the elimination of non-discrimination as a separate pillar of the FRAND obligation is at odds with both U.S. case law and the academic literature that address this issue (an overview can be found here). The Court’s reasoning also contradicts the explicit concerns of the European Commission, which emphasized the importance of non-discrimination during debates over the ETSI patent policy in 1992:

Terms and conditions applied to participants and non-participants should not significantly discriminate against the latter. A fortiori where the standard-making body acts in an official or quasi-official standard-making capacity and where its standards are recognized and even made compulsory by virtue of legislation, access to the standard must be available to all without a precondition of membership of any organization (Communication from the Comm’n, Intellectual Property Rights and Standardization at p. 19, 27 Oct. 1992).

Clearly, the Commission did not view non-discrimination simply as giving color to the meaning of ‘fair and reasonable’. On the contrary, non-discrimination, standing alone, is among the most important features of the FRAND commitment. The UK Supreme Court’s interpretation to the contrary is thus highly problematic.

Conclusions

While I applaud the UK Supreme Court’s shift from a focus on competition law to the language and intent of the ETSI patent policy, I am concerned about its conclusions regarding the authority of one country’s courts to determine global FRAND rates, the availability of injunctive relief against standards implementers and the demotion of non-discrimination as an independent prong of the FRAND analysis.

One silver lining in this cloud, perhaps, is that the Court’s judgment, which relies so heavily on the particulars of the ETSI policy, is thus limited to the ETSI policy. It is unclear how much weight its findings would have for a court, whether in the UK or elsewhere, assessing participants’ obligations under FRAND policies adopted by different SSOs such as TIA and ATIS (as in FTC v. Qualcomm), not to mention SSOs such as IEEE that have adopted language expressly contravening some of the interpretations that the Court makes with respect to ETSI.

In fact, the Court seems to invite SSOs to re-evaluate their patent policies. Huawei objected to the UK court’s determination of global FRAND rates because, among other things, permitting a national court to resolve a global dispute could promote “forum shopping, conflicting judgments and applications for anti-suit injunctions” (¶90). The Court tacitly agrees, but then pushes back, seeming to blame SSOs for allowing this to happen:

“In so far as that is so, it is the result of the policies of the SSOs which various industries have established, which limit the national rights of a SEP owner if an implementer agrees to take a FRAND licence. Those policies … do not provide for any international tribunal or forum to determine the terms of such licences. Absent such a tribunal it falls to national courts, before which the infringement of a national patent is asserted, to determine the terms of a FRAND licence. The participants in the relevant industry … can devise methods by which the terms of a FRAND licence may be settled, either by amending the terms of the policies of the relevant SSOs to provide for an international tribunal or by identifying respected national IP courts or tribunals to which they agree to refer such a determination” (¶90).

In this regard, I wholeheartedly agree with the Court. I have long advocated the creation of an international rate-setting tribunal for the determination of FRAND royalty rates. I continue to believe that such a tribunal, if supported by leading SSOs, would eliminate much of the inter-jurisdictional competition and duplicative litigation that currently burdens the market. If the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in Unwired Planet encourages ETSI and other SSOs to endorse such an approach, then this could be the most significant outcome of the case.

The UK Supreme Court’s Re-interpretation of FRAND in Unwired Planet v. Huawei published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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throwbacknotup · 8 years ago

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//UnWired//

Esme wasn't always the girl who seemed a little unwired. She was a girl with darkness resting upon her pale shoulders with satire etched upon her skin. Her eyes electrocuted another with a fear of fear itself, but the girl wasn't dangerous. The girl was just scared. Light was what she craved. Yet, bad blood wired itself around her heart. A heart that was still beating.

Present

His nails were gnawed down to stubs. His mat of hair obscured his bloodshot eyes from his mother's harsh stare. This was his fault.

"Noah...," his mother desperately tried to wake him, "Noah! Get UP! Get out of bed! You need to start to get ready for today." She screamed at his desolate frame of meat and bones. Her frustration was turning to anger, and that anger was turning into her son's self-loathing. This wasn't his fault.

Rewind One Week

Noah Thomas never really discovered what it was like to be risky. He never understood the point of his friends going out on the weekend to drink, when those drinks could potentially make them sick or even kill them. He never understood the need for speed, as he read about disgusting car crashes involving adrenaline junkies befriending the accelerator. He never understood what he was missing beyond his five foot eleven walls of caution. But one day, those walls had a chance of being shattered.

Friday. Early Autumn. The New York air was brisk. A torn piece of copybook paper was shoved between his lunch and his Psychology textbook in his locker with a message reading, “Meet me in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk." Start living or keep surviving? Hours of intense pacing later, he stood in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge at approximately 7 o’clock waiting for his nameless host. Rumors and stories about this notorious bridge flooded his memory. Fear wrapped her icy fingers around his wrists trying to pull him from the grasp of another girl.

Present

Noah stepped into the steaming shower. The water hit the back of his neck and crawled down his spine. No amount of soap was going to wash away what happened, but nevertheless, he lathered, rinsed and repeated. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

"Wait, wait. Wait. Repeat, please? Sorry, I'm having a hard time focusing today... A lot on my mind," Noah's mom, Steph Thomas, said to her own mother, Margaret Thomas.

"I said, 'You should think about gettin’ Noah checked out.' Like, by a psychiatrist or someone, Stephanie. Honey, listen. Listen, you can't try to straighten him out all by yaself. Ya need help. He needs help." Ms. Thomas sighed and said goodbye to her mother. She didn't want to admit her son's brain might've gone unwired into a catatonic state. She had too much pride to give up. She had raised him by herself all these years, and she wasn't going to let anyone barge in now.

Rewind

“Huh, so you showed up,” her voice was cool and slightly surprised.

Noah fidgeted away from the voice that came out of the dead air. He caught sight of dark flowing hair, gaunt features, and ashen skin coming out of the shadows. It was that girl, Esme. He never spoke to her in the past four years of high school. There were only whispers he knew about her. Her eyes daunted him. All he could see through the dark were two gray rings that had a look of hysterical panic and desperation. It was like she was trying to convince him of something, even though she hadn't said anything yet.

She ignored the lack of conversation, “I invited you out to this splendid e-ve-ning to tell you My life story. The crazy tale about a screwed up girl. Almost was a spin-off series from those books about unfortunate events... and the old guy or whatever.”

“I...um.. Uh, I don't understand,” he replied slowly as he scratched the back of his neck. He didn't want to admit it, but she was scaring him. “Why me?”

“You don't know me. I need an audience. That audience needs to watch and listen without knowing who I am...or who they think I am. It just ruins any plot twists. Standard protocol,” she paused, “What do you think when you think about this bridge?"

Was this a trick question? He felt uneasy, but answered anyway, "I think of cars. Like, transportation across a body of water. Heights? I dunno.. It's a bridge."

“See. There it is. The first difference between you and me. You are black and white. Conventional. You see this bridge used for only it's initial purposes. To me? This bridge? This bridge is an adrenaline goldmine,” she smirked. No drumroll, she hoisted herself up onto the diagonal bars using the steel suspension crosspieces. Trying to keep her balance, she motioned for Noah to repeat her actions. He got a firm grip on the frigid bars and used his limited upper body strength to pull himself up onto the ultimate balancing beam. He gaped up at Esme seven bars up from the ground. His breath split once his brain caught up to his body, but he felt it. The rush. Was this what it felt like to be alive?

Present

He felt dead. He slowly buttoned up the freshly pressed, starched white shirt, and tied and untied his tie seven times. Noah couldn't focus. He kept fumbling around trying to dress. A look in the mirror made him cringe back. Noah pitied him. When did this coward start looking back at him through the looking glass?

Ms. Thomas was in the other room deliberating what to do about her current predicament. Should she take her mother's advice, or should she not give up on herself and Noah? How could she admit to herself that her pride and joy has a problem?

Rewind

“I have a problem,” she stated. Finally, the adrenaline was running its last laps through his body. Esme continued, “I hunger for these unseen 180°s in life...Ya know what it's like..like when your life gives you like a little dose of turmoil to remind what it’s like to be alive. I’ve been waiting for a disaster to strike me so I could feel something, anything again.” She waited for his answer, but he didn’t have one, so she went on. “I am tired of not feeling.."

“ Uh, um," he interrupted, “Can I ask… what happened to you?" She sat up abruptly turning away facing the dim lamps. The golden-toned light silhouetted her body revealing there was something tense about how she held herself.

“It was September. Perfect weather. Still warm outside, but a lil bit of chill, ya know? I was four… Still had to sleep with my blankie at that time.. My parents already had left for work that day. Mom was the secretary for dad’s office… Family business, ya know. But, that day had a very important meeting scheduled on it, so they, like, had left me in the care of my neighbor to get me to school..."She exhaled and laughed. "I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on my neighbor’s face, when she picked me up early that day,” she took a deep breath and continued, “If you’ve ever seen any footage or documentary of 9/11, you’d know of the people, who jumped while holding hands. I don’t know whether my parents were those people, but I like to dream they were.”

Noah could hear silence. It cut into his ears. She looked up to the sky, "I haven't had a family for over 14 years of my life. My foster homes took out more of my soul than my parents leaving initially did. I've learned to just not feel. You sort of get used to the numbness. It's like a drug."

He was confused. What was he going to do with this information? Noah sighed and shook his head, "I….I don’t know what to say. I want to say sorry, but a thousand sorries could never replace your parents. But, well... I just don't understand why I’m here, Esme. You need an audience. I get that. But I just don't get what I’m supposed to do as an audience member."

Esme snickered, "You're trying to skip to the ending when what you seek was really in the beginning."

"What? You don't know me I get it but-"

"Not there. I didn't bring you here to help myself. I brought you here because there is a lesson you can learn from me too. Bridges have another meaning, as well." She grabbed his hand, "you'll understand sooner than you expect. Goodbye, Noah." And with that, she disappeared into the shadows. He wondered if Esme, herself, was a shadow.

Present

There was a slight chill in the air as strangers processed from the burial site at St. Paul's Cemetery. Noah stood staring blank-faced at the roses scattered on top of the casket. Words, words, words. Unspoken words. He should've known this was going to happen. This was not the ending that he expected. A hand softly pulled back his shoulder, and a voice asked, "Are you, Noah? Hello, hi. I was.. I am. Esme's foster-mom, sorry... Sorry, She left this for you on her bedside table, here." The woman handed him a letter that read:

Noah,

Don’t hold this little thing like death over your head. Please. It's something that needed to happen, and it's happening had nothing to do with you. I’m assuming you’re probably still confused on why you were even there that night. I need my story to be told. I trust a stranger more than someone I know. Knew… I’m not really sure what tense to write this in to be honest. That aside, Noah, you were affected (whether you like to admit it or not) by not having a father. (Yes, I did research on the stranger I was going to tell my story.) You aren't able to trust, to risk, to do anything at all... I want you to tell my story, because it's the right thing to do, but live your life, because you have to. You have seen first hand what not feeling does to a person. It caused me to do life-threatening risky things. It caused me to do one final risk to risk to try to help you. You went to the bridge that night. You climbed the bars. You listened to an insane girl. You have it in you to live a life worth living. Stop surviving. Stop going from day to day. Unwire yourself, because I know you have it in you to rewire. Create your 180°...for me.

-Esme

"Noah. Noah, I need to talk to you," Ms. Thomas shook her son for his attention, "I've thought a lot about it. Everything. I think it's best to get you some help. You need to work out some issues about what has happened, and I hate to admit it, but I just don't think I'm enough."

He ignored her comment, "I need a pen and a piece of paper."

Esme wasn't always the girl who seemed a little unwired. Loose ends must’ve given her the rush that she craved, but she wasn’t heartless. She wanted the loose ends to be tied up for those she cared about. She just couldn’t do it herself. Life had wired her to have a completely normal life, but life made an 180° turn. She had been cutting her wires ever since trying to create that next disaster to put her back on track. The last wire she had to cut was telling someone her story before she ended it.

Author: Noah Thomas

#mine #writing #writer #story #stories #unwired #words #word #angst #teen angst

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