The Perplexity Series ▸ Inside

From The Inside

What gives a person the ability to say that they're a person? Now, I'm only eighteen. But I'm allowed to ask these types of questions.

When I'm on the Inside.

The Inside is my virtual reality, the reality in which my former reality centers around. The Machines created a demise. A demise of regular society, a demise of smoothness, a demise of fashion and human contact.

When I was six and caught myself in a bad condition of having a bloody nose, so an ANA ( Automotive Nursing Android ), came to my aid while I was under a tree. The ANA's name was Lauren the fourth and she looked all too similar to my grade school ATA ( Automotive Teaching Android ). Maybe that was because nearly every ATA or ANA were made with the same facial structures and complexion, the only things that could tell them all apart were their uniform colors or their names.

So only a handful of people could truly know what it means to be human, even the people I've been wandering around with for weeks are not truly human. The Inside is of my creation and of my image. You can reach out and touch human flesh, you can talk and hear a human's voice speak from a human mouth. They all behave like humans, because as far as they know they are humans.

But they're truly and purely codes, flawed codes for that matter. And that's what makes a human, flaw. You are allowed to go about this world and say that you are a human because you have a flaw, maybe even twenty.

On the Inside I'm a nobody. I have placed myself inside my warm world and I have a new life. My name is Maxine Padavich, eighteen, Gemini. On the Inside people dress different, all white underneath-whatever they choose to wear over, or their bodysuits. I wear a purple suit that is sewn up to my fingertips, you're only supposed to wear the suits outside. The suits light the night sky if people happen to be strolling in the late hours.

They wear these clothes because these flawed codes are easily scarred and manipulated, in the case that the clothes protect their outer mechanisms. And the funny thing was, I learned all of that by accident.

Today it's Friday, it's cold and it might rain today if I wanted to speed up the natural causes of my programming. The rain can wait till twelve. If I look up at the sky the curves of the old screen in my first reality outline the blue mass that's melting into a cool gray hue, my hidden computer is now turning thirty-one on this day.

I reach over to the space on my strange bench and grab this morning's newspaper. Friday, November 19th, ----. The year is infinite, it's like first reality's leap years. I gaze over every pages, the paper limping out in the breeze each time I gently jolt in the frosty climate. Nothing except for a young girl being put in the G.E.N.I.U.S Program yesterday. And the crossword puzzle feels too shabby for a Friday morning.

I toss the paper into the recycling bin nearby and stand to being my venture out further on my gloomy day of solitude. The Inside is built like a dome because of how my own computer is curved and bulky, but in my experience of running into the ending lines of the world-it merely feels like cold desert on your skin. But it becomes unbearably hot when the summertime creeps in.

An old maid from my first reality once told my friend " Dancer " about a place she grew up in called Los Angeles. She told the story as if she was in paradise until July came forth and charred the population with it's sick midnight sun. Dancer then told me the story and now I feel like I can fully understand what the maid was trying to explain. The walls would hiss and prey effortlessly on the code's frail selves.

The little shops and homes were the main suburbia of the Inside, but my home was down the line and over the Summertime Bridge. But first I must explain something...

Three months ago I received a letter from a boy who signed his letter Atlantis, he wanted me to call him, All I had to do was pick up the phone and press my ear against it. He told me that he knew who I was and said he felt like he was meeting God, he commemorated me for three whole minutes and then said he would like to send me a few of his special belongings.