The phone’s thick case creaks in my grip as I sit huddled up and frozen on the toilet seat. The AI managing to get out another question before I can think to mute it. My heart continues its pounding, now fuelled by panic in place of rage. All while I chew my lip and try to convince myself this is just a more advanced version of the classic scam. That the program hasn’t given up after a few seconds without a response is pushing me rapidly in the other direction.

  ‘Fuck!’

  I hold in the shout as I jump off the seat and throw open the stall door. Feet sliding on the wet floor as I rush around the corner out of the toilet before I start sprinting down the corridor. Barely noticing the group of boys who jump out of my way with shouts of shock and surprise. The laughter and catcalls that follow me just a distraction as I try desperately to come up with a solution other than the one I’m now racing towards.

  This shouldn’t be happening, couldn’t be, according to the laws of the city but clearly whoever has gotten hold of my number doesn’t give a shit about those. There’s a chance, a small one, that I’m overreacting. Panicking without any need to and about to take risks that can only harm me for no gain. The urge to just leave the phone on mute until it runs out of charge, or just turn it off directly, and trust this really is just a scam is near overwhelming. To let myself trust that everything will work out. It’s the sort of thing I would’ve done before.

  ‘If I didn’t just call dad and ask for help.’

  I near snarl as I race onto the skybridge at the end of the corridor, ignoring the stairway entirely as I head towards the only way I can be certain that I’m safe. Anger at myself matched only by shame as I pull out my own phone and navigate to a name that I, in my more selfish and cowardly moments, had hoped to never text again. So much easier to just keep putting off a painful conversation than to finally have it.

  Unfortunately, there’s only one person I know who is both tech savvy enough to help me and also unlikely to immediately turn me in or use this to drag me in to their gang. My finger still hovers over Amelia’s name for a few seconds longer as I get to the end of the walkway. Breath coming heavy as with every heaving gasp I feel more certain that my ribs are about to carve their way free of my chest.

  I slam a hand into the spot that hurst the most, gritting my teeth hard to hold in a scream as I feel the two fractured bones sliding back into position with a squelch. It’s through tear filled eyes that I stare down at Amelia’s contact, caught between the embarrassment of reaching out only now that I want something and the certain knowledge that I’m fucked if I don’t.

  A final shuddering breath, as quiet as I can make it, gives me the presence of mind to remember that having a conversation where my tapped phone will pick it up is a terrible idea. So, it’s with an embarrassing amount of relief that I open up a text window instead of calling. My fingers breezing over the keys while I stuff my work phone into my hoodie and slip out my student ID.

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry for not calling. I’m a terrible friend and I know you have every right to hate me but I fucked up and now I think someone is trying to track my phone. Can you help? Please.’

  I regret hitting send the moment I do so. Cursing at myself for not reaching out at any point in the last month and already knowing how I’d answer if the roles were reversed. I write off Amelia’s help at once, wondering how quickly I might be able to contract a freelancer and if they’ll accept an IOU. Possibly if I show some images of the jewellery but I’ve still got to actually find someone who can work on such short notice. I’m not exactly familiar with the ins-and-outs of hiring mercs.

  I’ve just swiped my ID against the pad on the wall and shouldered halfway through the door when the phone buzzes in my hand. The sensation having me freeze in shock as I blink down at the message, only remembering to move when the door tries to slam closed on my side and sends another wave of pain straight through me.

  ‘You’re in school? Put a visor on. Connect it to the tracked phone and let me in through an email. Hurry.’

  I don’t need any more prompting as the door lock clicks back into place behind me. Setting off at a jog down the corridor with my free hand still pressed into my side. The click of the lock seems startlingly loud in the sudden silence of the schools newest building.

  Unlike every other building on campus, which are made from thin sheet metal and plaster, the IT block is a solid hunk of concrete and chrome panelled ceilings. The doors all slabs of brushed steel that seal shut with a rush of air which locks out the noise from outside.

  A ‘gift’ from Tenjin along with a suite of visors all meant to help the mega-Corp recruit its next crop of tech savvy drones. Maybe even a few middle managers from those who can really dream. The whole building is done in the Shinto-brutalist style that is the Corps trademark. Walls of concrete decorated with raised swirls or faux-cut depressions that mimic the wood print of their homeland. The colour of the stone itself altered when poured to avoid the need for paint that might chip over time.

  The result is a floor of smooth black stone with walls the shade of old wood that have vibrant images of many fanged lion-dogs and leaping deer all rushing to reach the gleaming mirror of the ceiling. The chrome panels reflecting back anything beneath them with a low fluorescent light seeping from between the slats. A good representation of the corporation’s ethos and beliefs.

  I pull my eyes away from the dancing reflections on the ceiling, ignoring as I do the doors that lead off to rooms filled with computer consoles and monitors. These too are open to anyone on the honour rolls to use at lunchtime and, unlike everything else here, are almost top of the line.

  Not that it matters when even the worst visor on the market offers more than a keyboard and monitor ever could. To say nothing of the MIU’s or actual cyber- or Net-decks that corporate schools will be training Throne’s future elites on. Another decade or so and they might just stop making keyboards or monitor only consoles altogether. Not like any serious Corp is still using them in the places that matter.

  Pain fading as my hand does its job pushing my ribs back into place, I pick up the pace as I get closer to the corridors end. Not having to worry about people seeing me in here as Osterholt’s wisely decided that lunch and electronics shouldn’t mix. My own access only allowed by my honour roll ID. Supposedly, this act of trust on the school’s part is to let us get some more studying in on our own initiative but everyone knows it’s just to give Tenjin a chance to harvest more data on how we use their shiny toys.

  ‘Not that it stops anyone from doing so.’

  I dismiss the burst of worry at the thought of the Corp seeing whatever Amelia has planned. I just have to trust that she can handle whatever bargain oversight system they’ve left running on the school’s host. The idea that she might be planning to fuck me over is barely a flicker, dismissed before it can do more than have me pause before the chilled steel door of the ‘lecture hall’ at the corridor’s end. If Amelia wanted to fuck me over, something she has every right to really, there’d be far easier ways than this.

  ‘One quick email to the police, or worse my dad, is all she’d need.’

  The metal slab of a door slides open with a whoosh of cold air at the touch of my ID to the pad beside it. A shiver running up my legs as I stride onto the top floor of the three-tiered room filled with semi-comatose kids. Built in the same distinctive Tenjin style as the rest of the building. The room lacks any lighting besides that offered by the visors of its occupants where they beam images directly into the retinas of the kids beneath them. The hundred, mostly senior, students showing no reaction as I stride along the rows in search of an empty seat to slip into.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The perfectly square room holds ten rows of the high-backed chairs, split down the middle with five on each side and with the slight distortion to the rooms perfect angles fixed by the stairs at the rooms front. I spare only a glance for the stairs that I hope not to take, eyes going back to searching for a seat and trying not to get distracted by the flickering shadows that play across the wall.

  The corridor to get here might be nicely decorated, for a Corpo style at least, but in this room, Tenjin wants its future workers to get used to the conditions they can expect to spend most of their life in. A cold, dark space with only the seats heated and even then, only just enough to keep blood flowing. A cold room means more efficient hardware after all.

  The walls are bevelled with bumps and indentations that create variable shadow art on the plain concrete above them. The flickering light of the room full of visors painting the walls with images of men becoming koi and then stranger things. All the shadows stretching higher towards the ceiling where a single sheet of reflective chrome occasionally catches enough of the light to wipe the walls clean of the grasping shades.

  The yearly re-inauguration, when the school gives thanks to its sponsor for the site and inducts the new freshmen into its use, had involved an explanation for the art choices. An alumnus from the school who’d managed to get a floor manager position at the Corps local HQ, explaining how we were all koi seeking to leap the dragon gate and that Tenjin could give us the means to do so.

  ‘And all we had to do was sit in a cold, dark room and stare at whatever the Corp tells us to for the rest of our lives.’

  My already pursed lips twist into a frown as I find no empty seats on the top floor. Pausing by the stairs for a final look back to make sure that I haven’t missed one hidden amongst the rows. Only a sea of slack heads covered by eyeless bars of metal look back at me, the only sign I’m not at the scene of a mass murder being the slight twitches from the less experienced and the low sound of breathing.

  Presumably, the visors would also switch off if someone died as the system would no longer be receiving any input from their retina and through it the brain behind. The reveal that the visors still interfaced with the brain, even indirectly, had made me more than a little nervous to use them in the last two years.

  Even with the access my ID grants me, I’ve limited myself to only using them in class and then only for studying on the sites the school deems safe. Glancing at a few of the students nearest to me, and at the speed with which the light spilling across their face is changing colour, it doesn’t look like everyone else shares my fear of leaving the reservation.

  I give up looking for an empty chair on the top floor with a click of the tongue, dismissing a boy whose face is painted in shades of red and pink. I’d thought he was about to get up given the way his whole body had tensed. Instead, from the way his hips are moving, it looks like he’s just started a simulation that the school definitely wouldn’t approve of.

  I head down to the next level with a scowl, hands rubbing against the two phones in my hoodies pouch and debating if I should just stuff the tracked phone into my Pocket. I already know that no signal can reach it there but all I’d be doing is delaying my problem. Perhaps, if Amelia hadn’t replied or I didn’t think I could trust her… but, for whatever reason, she did and I do. Really, after everything she’s gone through because of me, I’d be a total bitch if I didn’t.

  I move as quickly as I dare down the minimal steps, each one a separate slat of reinforced concrete shot through with tiny holes that are meant to break up the sound of stomping feet to something much quieter. I make no attempt to stop the shiver that goes through me as I walk far enough down them for the second level to come into view. It’s not much colder down here but the smaller number of students means the light filling the room is far, far less.

  I lick my lips as I hesitate on the final step, barely able to make out the forms of a dozen or so of my fellow students all off on their own in this darker layer. I find a seat as close to the stairs as I can. Doing my best to ignore the boy behind me who I’m almost positive is also in a porn Virch. I pull the jack cable off the visor and slot it into the work phone, taking a moment to try and hang up again just in case I can avoid this after all. No luck.

  The visor slides over my head with only a slight adjustment, the sides tightening themselves as it registers my small head and then closing like a padded vice around my skull. Little cups covering my ears for a moment before they suction themselves into the canal with a rush of vacuumed air that sends a shiver of discomfort down my spine. The bulky headwear itself balances over my eyes as I feel the weight trying to pull down my neck. Then the magnets engage in its sides and I stop feeling it at all as the screen of rapidly shifting light lowers to rest just above the bridge of my nose.

  I feel as every muscle in my body tenses at the approaching glow that whispers to something deep in my brain to relax. Eyelids desperate to blink until the first eyedrop lands from the pipettes inside and they go suddenly numb. The light now unblocked as it shifts rapidly between a stream of colours both too vibrant and too dull to describe. Working to align its emitters and receptors with my own retina’s. The boot-up sequence working quickly to try and identify me so that it can load me directly into my school account’s Virch. All while also helping to relax the muscles so the body doesn’t spasm or lock up while the mind is elsewhere.

  I could fight it. Do fight it in fact, for a second or so before reminding myself that I need to relax and let the visor do its job if I don’t want to have pins and needles the whole time that I’m using it. A good part of orientation had been spent learning not to resist the visor’s boot-up process. The point where the light being streamed into the eye starts tricking the brain into thinking it’s somewhere else. The rest had been learning how to direct your avatar to move without actually moving yourself by ensuring that intention never followed through into action. Also, a lot of pro-Tenjin stuff.

  The stream of colours too strange for my brain to name fades away in chunks to become the view of an expansive office high up the side of Tenjin’s skyscraper HQ. The local one, obviously. While the Corp might want us outer circle kids to dream, they can’t be having those dreams be too big for them to manage.

  I ignore the radically different surroundings and the still slightly odd feeling of my slack body where it’s slumped into the chair. Not bothering to move my default avatar around the room like I would have needed to in first year and instead flicking open my school email account and selecting Amelia’s message before I can hesitate any further.

  I barely catch a glimpse of the nonsense string of characters, numbers and symbols before the window collapses in on itself. The email that had been projected in front of my virtual eyes now scrunching itself into a warped ball of shifting space that partially obscures the wall side window. I just have time to spot Osterholt’s campus off in the distance before Amelia’s backdoor finishes tunnelling through the hosts shitty defences and builds itself in front of me.

  A three-metre-tall gateway formed entirely of tiny sticks, bird bones and dawn’s first light pull’s itself from the warped distortion to bracket a pane of vertical water. It’s surface the inky blackness of a llyn that promises only deeper depths and a cold that the sun will never reach.

  Then Amelia steps through and all thought of my mum’s stories about home are forgotten in the face of the towering behemoth in front of me. Even knowing that it’s all just a Virch, I can’t help the instinctive rush to back up and make distance from the monster. Nor the urge to start pulling weapons out of a Pocket my virtual self doesn’t have.

  The top half of Amelia’s custom Fae Enchantress avatar rises high above me. The form familiar where it sits as an idealised and aged up version of her own relatively plain features given an elfin cast. The voluptuous curves loosely draped in shimmering silver fabric and looping coils of golden chains from which hangs a trembling constellation of caged suns.

  Of all my four friends, Amelia is the only one who ever really got into the New-Net and the Virch worlds it offers. Her interest flowing naturally from her competing in various E-sports which is also how we’d met though, not directly. One of her matches happened to be taking place in the same convention centre as one of my gymnastics competitions. Jason had used my backstage access to get to meet his favourite player after pretending to finally show an interest in my own sport.

  I’d been pretty pissed until she’d shown me the avatar she was building. The custom design the work of years and something of a rite of passage for anyone serious about being a part of the New-Net. It was an avatar designed to show off her skill and let her demonstrate what she wanted to be once she had the credits to afford it. An avatar we’d spent hours talking about together while she tried to convince me to get deeper into the New-Net as well. My fears over giving a computer a mainline into my brain meaning our conversations had always been through more old-fashioned means. Although, I think she’d taken it as a lack of trust.

  Those are the thoughts which rush through my head as the star filled blackness of her eyes stares down at me from the still rising bulk of the monstrously twisted centipede that has replaced her lower half. My eyes losing track of the many clicking legs that are unfolding from her sides as the black plates of her girth grind against each other. It takes a great deal of my self-control, and more than one reminder that this is all a Virch, to convince myself not to rip off the visor and take my chances with the dump-shock.

  I take a steadying breath, both in Virch and reality, as I feel my heartbeat skyrocket when the centaur centipede (Centaur-pede?) skitters forward to exit fully into the now broken office space around me.

  “Amelia, I’m so sor-”

  Her eyes flick to something beside me in the same instant that the sound of the AI’s muffled voice starts to echo through the window behind her. Her body rearing higher while her legs fan out into a halo of talons that drip lines of corrosive code across the space. My eyes wide as I stumble away from the sight of the Virch dissolving back into base code around her. The movement draws her attention again, eyes like an endless night’s sky flicking up to meet mine and root me in place.

  I stand frozen as her centipede half swells in size and skitters up to cover the ceiling and walls. Growing in crackling bursts even as the Virch around me becomes more and more indistinct. The AI’s voice doing the opposite. It’s words now almost clear enough to be made out as its volume increases. Still, I don’t move. Uncertain if Amelia’s locked me out of moving or if this is just the result of the heady mix of guilt and terror that has filled me ever since our eyes first met.

  “Amelia. I-”

  The Virch shudders and cracks around me, the warping space sending a spike of pain through my head as I struggle to understand it. The office now run through with lime green lines that hang in the air and only grow more numerous as I watch. Fighting the urge to tear off the visor as the pain continues to grow and I feel a wave of nausea rising up from my chest.

  It reaches a height just as Amelia finally acts. Her legs, and the attack code upon them, stabbing into the walls around me and leaving her own spreading lines of silvered black. They begin overlaying the green just before her bulk charges towards my avatar. Her speed enough that I don’t get my hands, my real ones, on the visor before she reaches me and the last thing I see is her own clawed hand punching straight through my forehead.

  might be delayed by a day but we'll see will be delayed by two days but is written now and just needing to be edited and checked over.

  thanks for reading!