Xander. I hear someone whisper, fierce yet low. Only I hear that name, because it is meant for me. Xander, the voice says into the quiet darkness, the sound echoing, bouncing off the nonexistent walls in this inky conundrum I'm lost in.
I know that voice.
"Xander," the voice repeats. I wait, unable to move, unable to watch out for where the voice is coming from. I know that voice. I know it. My impossibly numb mind just cannot figure it out, every moment spent fearsomely quick. I feel as if time is sand spilling out of my fingers- I find myself unable to stop it from spilling away.
"You left me."
I turn, and the dark seems to carry a weight, pulling me under, making it harder and harder to breathe. Still, I turn, my blood running cold, every inch of me becoming numb by the minute, my heart beating violently against my ribs. The sound of water dripping echoes from somewhere afar.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"Xander."
I jump as my heart slams into my throat. I can feel a phantom breath hitting the back of my neck- cold, so cold.
Hands shaking, I force myself to slowly turn around, force myself to listen. To watch.
A boy appears in front of me. His brown hair is tangled, standing every which way, his even darker eyes watching me, unblinking, the spark lost from them. His plaid shirt hangs limply off his bony shoulders, his trousers held up by a single length of yarn, fraying all around his waist. He is barefoot.
His lips are pouting, cracked and bleeding as he stands there watching me. "You left me," he repeats, a sad smile tilting his lips.
I want to reach out, I want to hold him to me, I want to never let him go.
And yet, I can only watch, stuck in the thrall of this ebony world. The dark around us seems to have leeched out any sort of life right out of me.
The boy nods, his large eyes never blinking, not even once. He smiles again, that same soulless twitch at the corner of his mouth, until his teeth show, large gaps between his forefront teeth.
It used to whistle, I remember. A shiver runs up my spine.
I close my eyes, unable to watch anymore. My eyes hurt, my entire existence hurts.
"You left me."
Yes, yes I did.
"Open your eyes, Xander."
Breathing hard, I do. I open my eyes to find the boy inches from me.
The next moment, I watch as the skin below his eyes starts to split open on its own, slowly, precisely around the curve, until it looks like he's bleeding out tears. Despite it, his eyes remain unblinking, staring at me emotionless. The split moves until its rounded all around the boy's left eye. The blood flows out in a steady stream down his cheek.
There's a pause. I feel like all the oxygen has been sucked out of my lungs. The boy stands still as stone as his brown eye falls out of the socket, rolling down until it stops inches from my own bare feet.
"You killed me," he says. The blood is freely flowing down his chin onto his shirt, down, down until it begins dripping down the floor too.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The boy grins at me, the empty socket of his eye gushing with dark liquid. And I scream.
I jolt awake with myears ringing, breathing hard. It takes everything in me not to pass out as I gulp down the air greedily. My temples drum against my skull in a frantic beat, enough so that I groan against my pillow in frustration. I hug it closer, one arm beneath it, one arm over it. The movement causes the pale nondescript sheets beneath me to sigh.
My hands are shaking and I tighten my grip on the pillow. My head is screaming at me. It should too. It has a right to do so.
"Mojo," I whisper his name, my eyes wound shut.
Another wave of agony.
I groan again. It takes me a while to calm down, as reality forces the dream off my mind. And another moment too long to realize what actually woke me up. It's the door to my wretched little hovel that I call home. Someone's banging their fist on it- hard, as if unsure. Yes, no fancy movement sensing doormats here at my home.
There wouldn't be any, even if I were able to afford them; I find them overrated. Though for now, I cannot actually afford a decent doorbell. Some thought should be spared to that, I realize as I stare up at the wall on my side, my erratic heartbeat calming with time.
I close my eyes again. Some other day perhaps.
The person keeps jamming away at the door, making the whole flat rattle. What little peace that remained inside these despairing walls has been disrupted. I want to kill him. Her. Whoever the hell it is who suddenly decided to show up.
I lift my head from the pillow, my arms still wound around it and open my eyes. My room is filled with weak bluish daylight, and my ears catch the sound of drizzle pattering outside. The rain will be back in a few hours. I rub my face once and wait for the incessant banging to halt. I wait one whole minute. It doesn't stop.
This is some way to punish me, dear mind. Is this a hallucination?
My brain doesn't bother to answer.
I get off the mattress and grab a t-shirt from the chair filled with clothes and wear it on as I pad barefoot across the room to the door, the floorboards creaking beneath my feet.
I yank the door open. "What is your problem, man?"
A guy dressed in a green cotton shirt with a brown ugly jacket stares at me, dumbly, standing in the corridor. His protruding belly proudly evades my personal space, since it seems he has been standing flush against the door.
Although I can barely open my eyes, I know for sure I've never seen him in my life.
"What?" I snap again in irritation. If he is going to continue to stay that dumb in front of me for more than twenty-six seconds, I'll lose it and give in to the urge of becoming a murderer.
He closes his mouth and opens it again, his look of unease increasing in depth by the minute.
"You-" he stops and clears his throat, "you are Mr. Edison?"
I stare at him. "Yes."
"Well, Mr. Edison, it seems- apparently, your name came up when we were looking for a rider. For the Marshall Ueva, that is." He peers at my face with wide eyes as if to make sure I am indeed listening. "We decided to see if you were still up for the job..."
My dear friend, it seems, is worried about my financial state.
But I want to punch the guy, right in the big protruding belly of his and by the way he takes a hesitant step back, he figures as much. "Just- get outta here."
I slam the door to his face before he can add anything to that and head back to bed.
Lying on my back, I watch the old-fashioned ceiling fan creaking as it slowly rotates, giving necessary air to cool my head. I cannot fall back to sleep now with the anvil's strikes on my brain. I get up and throw the t-shirt off me once again. I take a shower, and it calms my head to a degree. I take two killers without water and go to the window to watch the bleak world outside. The sky is a sickly blue, something akin to a bruise- a dying thing with its life draining out of it, one drop at a time, a million times over.
I think about how long until they create artificial sunlight. It's not far away. I scowl at the cracked window, at the white paint along its border chipping off.
I push a hand through my hair, the water slipping out and down my wrist, then trailing a path down my back, and survey the flat. The floorboards creak with every breath I take, the walls have rainwater seeped in, the paint over them bubbling over, threatening to fall any moment off, the bed a sad little wooden snare - with a mattress that is perhaps much less depressing than the rest of my flat because of the recent mattress formula they created a few years back. It's the cheapest yet most satisfying thing.
The only thing interesting in this hovel other than my spectacular mattress and the Autosic- the electric board that hovers half a feet above ground- is my AirN3. The notebook, sitting in all its shining glory at a desk I brought in as soon as I bought this hovel.
Wiping my wet palm against the denim hanging loosely on my waist, I walk forward and grab the notebook off the table. I open the program holding the last of my huntings- the last I tried to look for it anymore. I bring up a page that displays the specifically crafted cyberbounty page. My eyes scan the page quickly, stopping at the latest entry, an offering prize of 2349 notes. I do a quick calculation and find that the dollar equivalent is exactly 160000.
This is by far the biggest bounty they have put up. Ever.
A bubble of excitement begins to rise up inside my chest, lifting my gloomy mood a bit as I look deeper into the page for the document. 2349 notes. I could win this. Easy peasy, I could finally get to paint the walls a bit. Or perhaps I could leave this city. The flashback of Scotland Highlands hits me abruptly. I press a hand to my mouth as I try to stop it; the swirling black mass of desire for freedom to a place untouched by the destruction that is humanity.
I close my eyes and force myself to let go of the eerily realistic memory of the Highlands.
Somewhere deep in the crevices of my mind, I am aware that the bounty comes across as something too good to be true, but I discard that thought- because this is as official as it gets. A password is daily replaced, one all the bounty hunters have to crack through to gain access to the site. The Government does not want the unwarranted attention of all the guileless people of the country to land on the problems they might look too deep into. The cracks through the perfect facade. Which is brilliant, because often bounty hunters don't spare a thought that would distract them from the ultimate goal; the bounty prize. The money is all that matters.
I do a mental wipe of anything unnecessary that would shift my attention before focusing on the screen of the notebook once again. That's when I finally get the visuals to fade. All my attention is now held by this little screen of my AirN3.
I keep staring. The incredulousness of the situation hits me after a couple of blinks.
"What the...?" I mutter disbelievingly as my eyes roam the illuminated screen, unblinking. I keep trying to scroll- a futile attempt, though unable to stop. There must be something, there should be something but... nothing.
There is no data.
No input.
No likeable places to search for it, no websites to help us look for the file. In the page, under the bounty, only one description is given.
Document name: TRESDQ.jv.
Beyond that- a clean blank slate.
I curse under my breath. This is... this is sick. 2349 notes. Of course, the government wouldn't just hand over a sum like that without a purpose. Whatever this document is, it is important. Of course, every goddamn document or piece of paper they put on as the bounty is important, all of it impossible to decode and break into. The government keeps track of us while we keep track of all those after the bounty. As soon as one finds the package, the government officials are there to have it. Before that, they keep a close eye to the person who holds it. Shields of all sorts are applied to the documents before they are in their possession, so no one can access them.
I tried once. Aware of their tactics, I kept quiet. I am supremely good at disappearing. The lunatics put in Shields after Shields- the time it took me to break through one, another was already waiting. The female who accepted the file though seemed thoroughly enlightened after I let her find me finally, because they had given me an ultimatum; surrender government property or suffer six months in jail. That bounty was the second most important document. The bounty was 1500 notes. I won it two years back.
Since then, I haven't tried retrieving any other bounties. Even if I keep tracking them, even if it's good money, I cannot seem to move forward and claim that bounty reward. I don't know, maybe it's the insecurity of where the government might put me if I decided to be defiant, so yeah, that's probably what's stopping me from wreaking a havoc around their artificial world.
Though today, I want to go after a package, because again- 2349 notes: irresistible.
But this. I keep staring at the one lined bounty detail. As if staring at the eight alphabets would somehow magically change it. Add more description to it.
I feel furious at the government. I am gritting my teeth so hard I think my jaw will come unhinged, not that I really care.
This is a joke. It has to be.
I slam my fist against the mahogany desk in frustration. My thoughts calm slightly as the familiar sensation of pain roams over my knuckles. In my life, there's only the government, and there's me. It is always my unending irritation with them and them tracking my every move. I have Shields all around my own database, but this little act of rebellion appears flimsy against the government. Expert hackers are employed from all over the world and I am one self-taught hacker. The Shields I put on myself are reliable though. The government would not enter what I don't want to share.
And I have too much that I'd rather not share.
As the pounding in my hand slowly abates, I continue to watch the eight lettered detail. The empty paleness around the twenty-one lettered bounty is making me want to break something. It doesn't let me think, it just continues to mock me.
You cannot crack this you cannot crack this you cannot crack this you cannot cra-
I get up, dress, sling the Autosic over the back and exit the stuffy flat.