The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.3 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 4)

"GO AWAY!" Fhá screamed.

"NO!" Hvang roared, stunning her.

For a moment they both stared at each other. Fhá glared down the intruder, nothing short of murder blazing behind her eyes. Hvang, glasses in hand, eyes twitching as he struggled to focus, met her gaze as best he could. Being as myopic as a cave bat, he, nevertheless, was looking more into the toilet bowl still full of vomit, the automatic flusher having never been fixed from Ngèza's last baked bean disastertastrophe three lunes ago. He slowly returned his glasses to his face, then immediately lurched forward, covering his mouth with a hand.

"Oh fuck...oh that's...by the Emperor, Fhá, that's disgusting," Hvang groaned, reaching for the manual flush button.

Fhá turned her head slowly, maintaining a laser focus as Hvang's finger slowly approached, and then pushed the button.

"What is going on, Fhá?" Hvang asked, as he retreated his hand. The toilet roared as it whisked Fhá's offerings to the great god of the sewer—praise be—away. "You're in a terrible way?"

"I-I-the-it," Fhá stuttered, her eyes darting back and forth, looking for a way out.

"What? Talk to me? What's going on?"

"The thing! That-it..." Fhá sputtered, burying her face in her hands, "it...I can't! I can't do it! I can't! I can't! I just can't! Fuck fuck fuck!"

The tears came back and Fhá curled up even tighter, sobbing uncontrollably, a montage of fear and death and apocalyptic wastelands playing relentlessly in her mind.

Survival sandbox games were her boyfriend's favourite, something they'd both found endless hours of fun in. VirtuSpace explorers, fighting off hordes of hostile mutants, zombies, and other monsters. Those worlds, those experiences, they'd joked about how if the zombie apocalypse ever came to town, they'd be more than prepped for it.

As if watered down VR Experiences could ever have done anything of the sort.

There wasn't anything real to any of it. It was a game. They were all games. Just games! The stakes were nothing. Death could only wipe your save, force a hard restart, hours of progress and gameplay wasted. Pain was limited, at most a dulled discomfort, a lightweight alert system, enough to elicit a response but not to ruin the fun nor the fantasy. And that was all it ever was, ever could be, a fantasy. Fiction and lies whose extraneous components existed only in service to the player's ambitions and the suspension of disbelief.

Experiencing a real, bona fide hellscape, as a real human being trapped in a real life or death situation, having to grapple with it, real people dying in front of her, she wasn't prepared for that. She couldn't have been. A videofeed, a CineCast, even a Spectacle she could have handled, but not this, never this.

She'd experienced everything Hvórþ had as he had. She hadn't just watched Kàng, Nobuo, and Lìngbi die, but had lived it. Once she'd jacked in, Hvórþ's experience became hers. She'd witnessed, first-hand, their deaths, felt every emotion, every sensation as Hvórþ had, as if, for that half-hour, she had become him. The VirtuCast spared nothing. No intimate detail was lost, all of it now imprinted onto her memory, into her mind. Hvórþ's memories were hers now, as if she had been there in the flesh, and it was unbearable.

Fhá felt herself tearing up again. She buried her head back into her knees. Hvórþ's imprint ravaged her with pain, grief, and anguish, the lines between the two of them irreparably broken.

"It's okay," Hvang said, draping something over her. "Whatever it is, you're going to be fine. You're safe. I'm here. I've got your back."

Fhá heard him as he wedged himself into the narrow gap on the other side of the toilet, before feeling his hand drape over her shoulders, pulling the fabric of his suit jacket up over her. In that moment, it didn't matter that Hvang was in the ladies' room, or that he'd walked in on her buck naked in the middle of a crisis. She was just grateful he was there. That he cared. Her boyfriend would be furious, though...