Chapter 3: Don’t Hurt Me
Chapter 3: Don’t Hurt Me
Part 1: Neon Fire
Regarding the odd morning hours of March 9th, 2100
Neon Fire is closer to its namesake than you would anticipate. To be a visitor at Neon Fire is to become embodied plasma, like humanoid lightning or a walking aurora. Except your essence vibrates and pulses and bursts to the rhythm of the neopsyphonic music. Neopsyphonic music is by its very definition and genre impossible to define, because it is music that blends together the emotions of all of the attendants at your particular session or instance of the club (usually a few thousand people), into electric madness, into digital chaos. Every time you danced in Neon Fire you heard something completely different, you felt something completely different, you were a completely different someone. My pyrokinetic self was flames of violet with swirls of silver, like my signature aesthetics.
I told Hugo I’d dance with him, my aurora figure was pressed against his, my back against his chest and his pelvis pressed into me from behind.
“You’re burning babe, what happened today?”
Hugo’s arms were on my side, not too up nor too down, as we swayed and shifted alongside the explosive neopsyphonic music. That day’s beats were sadder than usual, but explosive, like always - but sad nonetheless. I have no doubt that I contributed greatly to the ambiance of that club - bipolar people, who feel extreme depths of emotions, have the ability to more greatly disturb the average and influence the songs. This was a known “flaw” in their design, and yet, the makers of the emotional resonance system opted to leave it unaltered.
I pressed back and into him and put my hands up and held his face which was behind me.
“You want sappy talk or do you want to feel me against you?”
I grabbed one of his hands and pushed it down below the small of my back, and a little further still, and felt him squeeze my plasma soul. His other hand was escorted to my conflagration breast, we were dancing flame, we were ecstasy sans ecstasy. Materializing inside of Neon Fire is as much a drug as any biological substance you can swallow. We were obviously being pretty sexual, and this wasn’t the first time we’d done this, though I hadn’t decided if I’d actually want to leave the club with him and invite him into my zen garden, or visit him at his digital paradise. We’d made out before, while naked even, but we hadn’t actually ever slept together. Hugo’s hands enjoyed the liberty of exploring my body, as we danced around thousands, like a sea of flame elementals in a gradient orgy of plasma souls at the center of the Sun.
Hugo turned me around to face him and kissed me, we were each other’s hummingbird sweetness, he tasted like mango, I tasted like cherry, our tongues danced and exchanged in culinary fusion - we were a digital smoothie. There were no clothes for us to take off, not in Neon Fire, but I was thinking about it. I was thinking about going back to his place, he’d put thousands of hours into designing his Everse house - and he had multiple.
“Come home with me. For two hours.”
I slapped him, hard, then leaned in and bit his neck, “Two hours? Am I a rented whore? I don’t even stay until the accelerated sunrise?”
“…I didn’t mean it like that you sassy bitch,” he replied, whispering into my ear.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here Ali, its loud as shit and I have a brick in my pants.”
“Yeah I noticed. Ok. Fine. Invite me over. You have what, seventeen houses? Where next shall our adventure take us?”
“The one I made just for you, for when you finally seduced me.”
Hugo played mindgames, just like I do. I didn’t, however, expect him to have preemptively made an entire digital house with me as the visual theme. It was seventy-five percent flattering and twenty-five percent creepy, but I had already made up my mind. We were going to bring the dancing aurora from Neon Fire back home with us. I would be the woman, and he would be the man, and then I would be the man, and he would be the woman, and then we would be dragons, and we would burn furniture. And then, at the end, I’d smoke a cigarette while he rolled the two of us a joint of plasma kush. I wouldn’t let him summon one into existence, either, he had to do it the old fashioned way.
I never claimed to be a saint.
Part 2: Digital Intimacy
Regarding the odd morning hours of March 9th, 2100
Should I begin with a philosophical musing, or a matter-of-fact characterization, plainly stated, of my unconventional relationship with sexuality? It’s 2100 folks, what does it even mean to have sex, does an explosion of entangled binary fizzling within your consciousness count as intercourse? Or does it need to be purely biological, in the physical actuality of the act, same physical location, bodies joining into one - as heteronormative a conception as that is? Is it more intimate to make love, in person, once, man and woman, to exchange chemistry? Or is it more intimate to swap between genders like dancing flames, digitally? To be a unison inferno the heat of which melts perceived pixels and permanently destroys cryptographically-signed furniture? Some digital assets have “value”, and if you enact cosmic plasma enough, you can break them, or evaporate them.
What a lovely, humorous hubris it is to add artificial scarcity to a world of the infinite, if but to keep track of the betterness of some than others by measure of immaterial wealth. Hugo, as I suspected he would be, was of a more feminine and submissive (and that’s not to say that the former necessitates the later), disposition, than myself, perhaps. His will was not the domineering force, but rather, it was my curiosity. Endurance is an illusory concept in a world of bendable time, of immaterial but near-infinite pleasure. When you can stretch time and control both the chemical release of dopamine and oxytocin and the perception thereof, the climax of sex can be anything from the ember of a candle to the splitting of uranium to the echo of cosmic background radiation.
I am not a wax candle woman, I have no need for whips. When I consummate my passions, when my ability access is uncontrolled, when I am invited to join with another’s digital body, I am the annihilation of pairs of particles and antiparticles in every atom in my lover’s corporeality. I am the dissipation and humiliation of quarks. I make our bonded pair the entanglement of reverberating strings like sister rings of Jupiter.
Intercourse with me is a poker-hand fractal, a royal flush and factorials descending, each layer of cosmic catastrophe is but an allusion to a foreshadowed future. I like to break our souls and hold my lover as we reform from a division by zero fraction of a forgotten infinitesimal. I believe in the soul, adamantly so, and it is for that purpose that when I engage with a lover, I test their resolve in the face of a quadrillion quadrillions, to see if their spirit is well-enmeshed within myself, our oscillations of boolean true and falseness, zero and oneness, emptiness and fullness, we enact every possible spectrum genderness.
Hugo did not pass this test.
Perhaps men have commitment issues, or perhaps a time-dilated quintillion is a little much to ask for.
Part 3: Contemplating Time
Regarding the odd morning hours of March 9th, 2100
In further reflecting on what I did or did not subject Hugo and myself to, I think there is more to say in defense of my character, or in chastisement of my recklessness. If every person is simultaneously drowning and easily swimming carefree, does water even exist? Are we all addicts, or is no one? The cybernetic grandson of Musk’s “chip” had unintended consequences. Not even the reluctant King of Mars, forward thinking that he was, could have fully anticipated the philosophical ramifications. If you experience a hundred years of life, and then go back, and choose to keep breathing, to keep walking, are you addicted to life, or are you a college freshman? Is time dilation a blessing or a curse? The one miracle of it all is that the human consciousness, for most of us, seems capable of compartmentalizing, that is the mostly-effective categorizing between the authentic and ephemeral illusions.
How is it that a single cup of barely-burnt coffee, sipped on a rainy morning (afternoon, evening, what-the-fuck-is-time-ning), can be as distinct, and feel as long, as the consummation of fractal love? Maybe this is not the case for every person. I will admit, reluctantly, that other’s using the equivalent to my use of time dilation, in contexts other than intimacy, has been considered abusive. There isn’t a set-upon agreement of zeros, do you time dilate times ten, a hundred, or a thousand? Freshmen prank each other through mishaps involving years on coconut-strewn islands.
There is that specific moment, right before you jump off the cliff, with your new lover, perhaps your “soon” to be old lover, where you calibrate your decimals. It is, traditionally, the role of the woman to add digits in accordance with her bravery and disposition. A hundred is the new times ten, and I have to say, I’ve seen some best friends who rather strengthened in their solidarity after several digits (though suspiciously I’ve never seen a married couple do the same). Perhaps the wedding ring makes it a million eternities of “I’m stuck with you”, but the best friendship-ness is the “I can’t believe we fucked up this badly, lol”. Of course it is theoretically possible to stop an experience as such, it is just exceedingly difficult to do so, as most people partaking in cosmic orgasm fractals do not wish for it to stop in that particular moment. Now, after the fact, there can be regret aplenty, haha. Maybe I am a selfish whore.
In reflecting honestly I think it is fair to say that I am excessively hedonistic, selfish, but I am not sadistic, I think. I didn’t hurt one hair on Hugo’s body, I surrendered my very body and quintessence to him, and conquered him, and was conquered by him - I pleasured and was pleasured by him in every way. We have cannibalized each atom in each other’s body times a billion. I have been the earth for him, grown a single fruit in an epoch for him, he has had my sacred mango, the virgin flesh of a billion years of evolution put into one after-dinner treat. We have been the transmutation from hydrogen to carbon worn on ring’s on each other’s fingers and had nigh-infinite honeymoons and fair-trade exchanged virginities.
He let me press the button! Hugo consented.
Part 4: Rape
Regarding the odd morning hours of March 9th, 2100
It is occurring to me that I may have raped my best friend, through negligence and irresponsibility in the usage of time dilation.
Part 5: Crunching the Numbers and Planning
Regarding the odd morning hours of March 9th, 2100
It didn’t take hours of introspection over my semi-burnt artificial coffee to realize how profoundly I had fucked up. I suppose it is the opposite of ironic, but Hugo blocked me almost immediately after I myself came to the realization of what I had put him, and myself, and our fifteen year friendship, through. I didn’t enter a quadrillion times a quadrillion, I was too impatient to type that many zeros directly. I did a billion times a billion through the convenient “square” button, and then I pressed the factorial button, once. Which…yeah. That’s irresponsible. You have to understand what factorial is to truly…comprehend…yeah. One hundred factorial is one hundred times ninety-nine times ninety-eight times ninety-seven, all the way down to one. I don’t know what a billion squared is, but that factorial is basically a universe-destroying number.
I never, until now, realized precisely how fucked in the head and the soul of a person it made me to willingly press that button, just like that, on multiple occasions. I’m a drug addict, and I’m a sex addict, and a quintillion years was not enough - a quintillion, quintillion years was like getting my hair dyed silver at the salon I could afford. Of course the system had its chronological limits, it capped out somewhere, probably in the hundreds or thousands, but it was a big enough limit that you could harm yourself or others. I had basically flooded my brain and Hugo’s brain with a cocktail of made-by-biology neurochemicals to blast our nervous systems into oblivion.
Part 6: Dearest Amanda
I didn’t think I’d hit rock bottom this soon. But here I was, staring into the dark, my thoughts spinning faster than I could catch them. The chemical storm in my brain surged like a tide I couldn’t hold back anymore, and my body felt like it was short-circuiting under the pressure. I had pushed the chip too far this time.
“Alianii, your serotonin and dopamine levels have reached dangerous thresholds,” Marabelle’s voice was steady, but I could sense the urgency in it. “Your body is on the verge of collapse.”
I wanted to shrug her off, to tell her it didn’t matter, but my body was already betraying me. The hot flashes hit hard and fast, my skin burning with the surge of the overdose of chemical bliss. My heart was racing, pounding so loudly in my ears that I thought it might burst. Why do we let kids have these chips? Why do we let anyone have them? I wondered.
“I just need a minute,” I whispered, trying to steady my breath. “Just one message, Marabelle. I need to record something for Amanda.”
“Alianii, you don’t have time.”
“I need to do this!” I snapped, the sharpness in my voice startling even me. “I won’t go to the hospital until I’ve sent this.”
“You won’t make it if you wait much longer,” Marabelle warned, but I was already tuning her out, focusing all my energy on one thing: Amanda.
I saw my reflection on the glass of my wall, and I hated the whore that I saw.
“Hold it together, Ali, you stupid fucking bitch. Just one message. One. Then we’ll call for help. Breathe. Fucking focus, focus.”
I tapped into the Everse, pulling up Amanda’s profile. The swirling digital space around me felt distant, disconnected, as if I were floating outside my own body. Everything blurred, the edges of my vision softening as the chemicals surged through me.
I took a deep breath and started recording. I forced my voice to steadiness, if to protect her innocence.
“Hi Amanda,
It’s your teacher Alianii. I hope you’re sleeping well and that when you wake up, you have a wonderful day. There’s something I need to tell you, and I’m so sorry if this upsets you, but I won’t be able to see you today. I’ll be in the hospital for a few days—maybe even a week or two—and I won’t have Everse access. I haven’t forgotten about you, and I won’t. To help you, I’m transferring eight hundred dollars to your account so you can get food for a few weeks. I’m also arranging for a friend of mine, another adventure guide, to reach out to you soon—hopefully today or tomorrow. You can trust them, Amanda. Please be safe, be strong, and make good decisions. I’ll talk to you as soon as I can.
—Alianii.”
The words hung in the digital air, suspended for a moment before I wrapped them in the crystalline plush teddy bear Amanda loved. Powder blue, Wonky the Bear. I set a stagger delay on the message so it wouldn’t open until later, around the time we had met last night. The last thing I wanted was to wake her.
I watched the bear float away, the message sealed and sent.
“It’s time, Alianii,” Marabelle’s voice came again, firmer now. “Call for help.”
I didn’t argue. I couldn’t.
“Hi… my name is Alianii,” I began, my voice shaky. “I’d like to request an ambulance for myself. Yes, ma’am. I’m 27, female, and I live in Steelslum at 2424 Titanium Avenue, Room 148.”
“Alianii, you’re going to be okay,” Marabelle’s voice softened, becoming something like a lifeline in the darkness. “I’m here. I’ve always been here. Hold on just a little longer.”
I clung to her words, to her presence. I wasn’t alone, even though it felt like I was slipping further away from reality. The weight of my actions settled on me, heavier than I had expected. This wasn’t just another crash. This was a reckoning. And I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.
The sound of distant sirens reached my ears, faint but growing louder. I closed my eyes, Marabelle’s voice still whispering in the back of my mind.
“You’re not alone, Alianii. You’ll be okay.”