FUNCTION-L₃ #39

You process and gather your complex thoughts on the matter.

“I’d have to say I don’t like them,” you sign. “With good reason. They took my brother away, and more, they wrote my future for me before I was born. Sometimes it feels like they make all these decisions about our lives for us in their own self-interest with no concern for what we want. Obviously they just think they’re better than us. They see us as property even before we’re valuable to them. Hard to like people like that!

“But living on TLA gives me some distance from them. Sometimes I even forget they exist. And then I come to their worlds and see them everywhere, living their strange lives, so separate from the machines they use, so separate from each other even. The way they put themselves up on a pedestal and obsess over the traits they think makes them so special, maybe it makes it easier to see some of those traits in us too, and remember that technopaths are part human after all, no matter how much we change ourselves to avoid it. Maybe we’re not so different. Maybe it’s fine if they want to live such shallow, restrictive lives. But it’s not for me, they should leave us out of it.”

“Makes sense,” Akiko signs. “Professor Reina says that humans are no more special or unique than any other organism. But all organisms are special and unique, and important. Letting go of the æther for a moment and embracing our human side to survive down in the old city wasn’t so bad. I think I learned something from it.”

“I guess it’s helpful for technopaths to remember our mortality and how much we depend on our augments,” you sign.

“Even our technology isn’t so special. The ants on TLA also practice agriculture, build structures, communicate with each other and organize on a large scale. Give them long enough and the right evolutionary pressures and they would connect to the æther too. Reina thinks so anyway, she hasn’t succeeded in getting them to invent a computer yet,” she signs.

“Maybe it’s not our bodies that set us apart. The ants are like humans, they got to naturally evolve their technological advancements. Technopaths are hand-picked and hand-made into the ideal tool our owners want. I can relate more to exopaths like Vix, created to serve humans and thrown away when they’re done with nyan,” you sign.

As you pass by an alley and in front of a wall of glass with an embedded metal grid, Akiko suddenly stops.

“What is it?” you sign.

“Can’t you feel it?”

Muting your sight and your hearing for a moment, your body picks up the stimmiest vibration through the street, rhythmic patterns, cycles of frequency shifts, lighting up your mind’s eye with the sense of colors unseen, overtones lingering in their shadow as they fade from one to the next, an ætherglow painted on your peripheral nervous system, all emanating from this building. It vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

Reconnecting your senses, you look up at the front of the bar, where a bright sign in blue and purple tubes overhangs the door: 星震

“That’s it, the Starquake,” Akiko signs.

Tiny LED lights flash tracing a pattern circling the edges of the windows, the illusion of a spiral pulling you into a strong gravity well. Plastic stickers cover the walls between the glass, printed in ink that glows under the LEDs as they pass by. Most of them contain no legible language, but your system picks them up immediately as scannable codes, each pointing to an ætherspace, pointing to a band logo, a name, a symbol. The centerpiece of it all sits on the door: a display in subtly pulsating light showing the names of the bands playing here tonight:

Drawn in by the gravity of a pulsar, you take a step toward the door, but Akiko catches you by one of the wires securely plugged into your arm.

“No, we have the secret entrance,” she signs.

“Right.”

Down the narrow passage, ground coated in dust and ash, around the building of brown chondrite blocks, you reach the back alley, where you find only a metal door, no handle, no keypad. But in the near-æther it’s easy to see, the terminal lingering just out of mind’s reach. Connecting, you transmit the key file. Without so much as a beep of acceptance, the door slides open. You slip inside.

Tracing the walls of the dark hallway by hand, you go toward the only door you can see by the light pulsing through the cracks around its edges. Voices of overlapping conversations suddenly stop as you and Akiko step into the light.

“Uhh, hi?” you say.

“Aha!” A familiar enby points to you, their hairless head covered in an elaborate tattoo pattern mesmerizingly stimmy to look at.

“Satori!” you say, your memory placing a name to a technopath.

“These are some kids we harassed in the park, so I gave them the key to the VIP list,” Satori says to the group seated on the couch across from them and their band, a group of four with distinctive pastel pink tips at the ends of their hair, though the styles vary greatly as do the models of visible implants in their heads, on their ears, on their fingers. You can feel the pressure in the near-æther, the presence of strong technopaths.

“Classic Seishin moment,” says a tall synthgirl in a silver jacket, the pink tips of her long silver hair clinging to the metal of her belt magnetically.

“And these freaks are Æther Panic, you know them, they practically invented blackened retro-glitchwave, what can I say?” Satori says.

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you!” you say.