Xeno yearns to have access to The Nth Dimension like The White Boys, famed telepaths who suffered brain damage when they made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Out of work as a bartender since the Shoki Pao dance club mysteriously burned d...
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Trianne followed the familiar neon letters, suspended in the night haze. Just a few city blocks away, the Lady of Metropa rose in the form of an angelic concrete woman, several stories high, holding the neon slogan ALL CLEAR, high above her head with her concrete fingers.
Getting closer along the sidewalk, she ignored the animated telepanes on each side of the boulevard, focusing dead ahead on the Saturday night foot traffic, roaming in and out of the alcoves at the base of the monument, woolen figures converging in shadow and street steam, blurred faces that might be Xeno.
It was comforting to be told that everything was all clear, that everything was going to be okay, until it occurred to her why ALL CLEAR was all so clear in her field of vision. ALL CLEAR always faced Avatar Avenue around 11:30 p.m., after the upper torso of the Lady had rotated full circle in a twenty four hour period, so that the neon sign faced the entire circumference of the city at some point during the day. What faced her now, was the memory of getting blitzed on booze and designer drugs, and ending up with an avatar in a club below the telepanes. For her, that's all it was. A one-nighter, goodbye, no replay, game over. For him, however, each level saved to memory was an obsession written in code.
She picked up the pace, wincing through the past, hurrying down the boulevard, passing through the valley of telepane action sequences with space marines blasting apart bio-mech aliens in deep space. Another block gone by, in the home stretch, ALL CLEAR getting closer, she just had to get through the street fighter stuff, the same repetitive punch and kick thing over and over.
It was hard for him to catch a break in Kick City on Saturday night. All the outdoor gamers kept selecting code-cloned variations of his avatar for the next street fighting tournament, when their former avatar didn't mimic their moves the way they commanded. No one knew the name of his human programmer, or cared—a footnote in a code farm moratorium. If their hero were flesh and blood, they would have pulled him apart like a rotisserie chicken, and sucked the soft flesh from his bones. She thought she might get lucky, but the booming voice in broken English caught her in the back of the neck, like a spinning loaf of bread.
"Trianne! Oh, my darling!" Fayke Tan, Kick City's premiere full tilt street fighting avatar, splashed back into Trianne's salmon-struggle existence with all the HiDef resolution he could divert from the servers. His tactile electrons had sensed her from the coded side of the telepane, and massed towards her presence. Each magnified Asian eye followed Trianne down the sidewalk, hopping from telepane to telepane, throbbing with phosphorescent desire.
Trianne mashed her hand into her cheek, hiding her face in shame under her bangs. She searched between her fingers for a crowd to get lost in, a taxi to dive into, but it was all open space for yards on the sidewalk, mobless just when she needed it the least. If she ducked into the bars below, he would download himself on the indoor telepanes, including the ones in the ladies room. All she could do was keep walking, hoping he would go away, but he didn't. . .
