This is Part 10 of a Serial called Disconnection.
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Dreams were remembered by Autorun, catalogued for viewing the next day, but most people couldn’t follow the shifting tide of input while awake. Nothing made sense, and it was much shorter — less a movie, more like a series of disconnected absurdist trailers.
She always watched hers, anyway.
When she dreamed while the digital thing rewrote her flesh, she imagined she could taste blue fire, and that she was back at her first sync point, in the chair, connected, waiting, and that Prime had never come — that she had imagined it all. That her protocols were refused, and she never felt that first, giddy rush of sensation, of full-body communication.
Waking from that nightmare was a relief, even if she was still laying pinned beneath the dead bodies of her compatriots.
She woke to an overlay in impossible blue. She blinked her left eye a few times, heard servos and a few clicks, but felt no pain.
A cursor blinked in her field of vision, pulsing in time to the beat of her heart.
Then, words:
AR>? You're awake.
“Oh, fuck me,” she whispered.
AR>? You do not need to speak aloud.
Really? she thought, frowning enough that she finally felt the faint pull where the implant had embedded itself.
AR>? Really.
Oh. Fuck.
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