Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 69

I've so nearly got it working, I can feel it, just at that moment when I'm almost crying with frustration, those last few error messages before the problem surrenders to me, but you never quite know if you're just gonna have to give up, because you know Dad is going to start shouting about people coming to the table for dinner. And I can smell the lime and the cilantro from here. Dad cares more about Mexican food than mom does. Even though he's Irish.

The twins are low key fighting over their Legos, sitting in my room amongst upturned buckets of bricks. A little ocean of it they seem to be swimming in, and yet somehow still finding pieces to fight over. But they're keeping half an eye on me, they can sense when I'm about to do something cool and they're the perfect audience really. They gasp and wow and shriek and giggle when my projects work.

I'm working on my home made cyberdeck, trying to write the scripts that'll build the bridge between my deck and the house server. Trying to get control of the smart apartment. There's a whole ton of automations available, but the one I want to crack first is the smart speakers embedded all over the place.

This deck doesn't have a screen, it has a headset just like in the old movies. It's one of my finest pieces of hardware hacking. One of the few projects that I actually managed to finish. And just in the nick of time, Dad is calling us, and I'm in. I call out COMING.

But I also signal to the girls to go to my bedroom door and peek out through into the large kitchen diner where dad is plating up steaming piles of marinated lab proteins and homemade tortillas. "Poets have too much time on their hands", says my mom. As always. "Amanda, the food is ready." Mom's in trouble again. Now's the time.

I execute a little script and an enormous fart sound comes out of the speaker's nearest dad's head. And the twins are laughing so hard their little faces turn purple. Dad takes a moment to realise what is going on. We burst out of the room together, me wearing my cyberdeck strapped on like a guitar.

"Look mom! It's working!"

"Amanda! Did you give the girls the security codes for the home hub?"

She's not even here really, jacked in. Sat in her home office fully jacked in as usual. So, I turn up the chaos, start making all the apartment lights flash through a rainbow. All the speakers calling out, "Earth to Amanda!" in a million different simulated accents. Dad's face scrunches up.

"Too much Ursula. I've got a headache."

Finally, mom comes out of her office. She sweeps us all up together in a cuddle. She's speaking Spanish, like the teachers told her to. Can't have us missing out on growing up bilingual. Still feels weird though. She only uses it with us and her mother.

"Qué orgullo!"

She's fussing over the cyberdeck, showering me with praise. Asking me all the right questions about how I wrote the new script. But when she starts talking to dad, she mentions a conference that she has to go to in the morning. And there's an alarm bell in my head.

That conference was two years ago.

"Mom, I thought you said that conference stopped running after the last time?"

Minute changes, a hiccup in the flow, and she's talking about another conference now. But it's too late. This is a sim. No, no, no, no ,no.

My heart starts to sink. Please don't let this be a sim.

But it is.

And suddenly everything they say sounds like simulated dialogue. And I can't focus on the banal details. That's the trick. If it is real then you should be able to focus on how much dust is on the lamp shades or where the grains of rice are on the kitchen floor. You should be able to turn away from the main narrative of the scene. It's not there. The AI fills in a lot a gaps, but not enough.

I know exactly how these sims work; I've studied them at school. They use them on people with severe trauma. It's a cocoon sim. Keeping me stable. Keeping me wrapped up in a cosy drug induced coma. Quietly dying as my rhizome rots inside me.

But it's the first time I have felt happy in a long time. I sit and eat, savouring the food, listening to the conversation.

"You've gone quiet."

"Ay, mi hija. Moody little tween she is."

Dad invites me over for a big cuddle on his lap.

"You're so big!"

And then I get up and go and cuddle mom, and I stay there for a long time, crying quietly.

"Do you think there's something happening at school?" Mom whispers to Dad.

"No", says Adrianna. "She's just realised she has to go away."

And I walk away from mom towards the twins and keep walking as the twins turn to smoke.

And I'm calling shivers to me, binding them, summoning them and binding them to my will. They are dissolvers, they will run into the data around me and pick it apart, pixel by pixel, byte by byte, turning it all to meaningless random noise, and I turn to Dad and let the shivers loose on him, and he turns to void, and I turn and look mom in the eye and she holds my gaze and whispers again 'Qué orgullo!' and I turn her to smoke and make her null, undefined.

And the apartment too, becomes an error not found. And the simulation is broken, and there is nothing left to do but wake up.

The shivers take control of my motor neurons, they use my arm to rip the drip feed out of my body, and ever so slowly the drugs recede from my consciousness, and long before I can move, I can hear, smell, see again. It feels like sleep paralysis. I see my coven sisters asleep on the floor of this filthy underground chop shop, amongst the spare parts and medical waste. And the 'doctor' is asleep in the chair next to me.

Then he cracks an eye, and his breathing pattern changes.

"That you in there kid?"

"Yeah, it's me." My voice comes out as a hoarse whisper.

And this time I'm pretty damn sure it is me.

At least 80%