The walls of this modern city cease to breathe. The air's shimmering halts, and the world takes on a different, familiar color, like her vision is a television that her father has just twisted the contrast knob and the world settles back into an understandable, visible mess of the aftermath of the industrial revolution. Her father's eyes twist in her vision, turning themselves around like the television controls until they display all white and within the white, remorseless static.
She lets her breath out easily, the trip melding into memory while she finds reality, Godsford street waiting to be explored. No, not tonight, no exploration, there was a meeting, a purpose, a cause behind the acid trip and a will driving her to rest in motion, walking for over forty minutes on Godsford street, nothing but an alley. No cars now, or ever in the last two months. This was Town, Their Town and They didn't drive cars here. Laughter falls from her throat and touches the ground, white snow melts with the sun's fierce and undying heat.
'Success' she thinks in her head, her conciousness meditates on what it means to succeed in something that cannot be measured by if it can be done or not, but if an individual person will respond to a test in the right way. She passed. She knew it because she hadn't run away after the trip and
hadn't lost her mind while the universe exploded in color and motion, obscuring her selfish ideas that the world was white and black and filled with nothing but death traps. Ideas had sparkled to her soul inside the snow particles which fed into her eye, her all-seeing human eye.
"I'm human" she says aloud. They are not around. They are inside, transcending a different barrier then the one she crossed. Her barrier existed in her mind before she took the test. The barrier They cross existed only after the test was created: "Can you pass through cyberspace?". She doubted she could and never wanted to. Cyberspace could be nothing compared to the beauty she had found in the world today.
"Beauty is what compels me" she remembers another soldier explain to her. "The world and the people in it are beautiful, and that's what compels me to destroy their hideous machinations".
Her heart raises its beats per minute to 92, and she feels soft and sharp, visualizing herself as a beautiful destroyer. Inside the walls of Godsford street are her victims, hanging over airspace and screenspace like pathetic children lay outside the hospital, dying from HIV. Smiling and laughing she runs forward to the metal door housing Them. The Army promised her it would be disabled at the hour and only for seconds. Reading her watch gives her one hundred and thirty one seconds left. She breathes them by. The door clicks. She opens.
They are inside, not breathing and not living. Corpses strung over monitors shaped like futuristic televisions except with no static instead their crystal clear displays pronounce with no assumption "Connected: 1 year, 4 months. 3 D 22 H 57 M 44 S". She is too stunned to gasp. One minute later she reaches for the telephone sitting on a desk beside one of Their corpses, just like the Army said there would be. She dialed the Army.
"Operation They Understand Us Now, Operative Reporting 04K" she hestiated for an insignificant 110 milliseconds, shaky with the information she transmitted. "559B. They are dead. Every operator in this room has been dead for months, maybe a year." She remembers the nose plugs she has installed as a nasal anti-virus. Their smell doesn't reach her yet the sight remains vividly terrifying.
"Dead? The Town Operators are all Dead?"
"Yes sir. For a long time. Looks like a connection overdose.. they're still plugged in, I don't see any life support or monitoring systems anywhere on their bodies. Sir.. I.." a tear is flung sweeping over her face. "They've been dead and we've been their slaves sir."
From the telephone came the silence of inaudible static.
She wills herself to speak again when the voice speaks again, strained with guilt. "Then.. their systems have been running without them. The police, the fabricated politicians, the corporations.. we have been run by machines, not by men. The men have died and their machines lived on.. and we did not know.." he gulps. "Operative. Destroy the machines."
"Yes sir."
She turned upon the Town's corpses, their gigantic machines piled beneath the desks. Labels, professionally written on each of them. "Gas. Law Enforcement. Detention. Farms. Public Safety Affirmation."
From her waist pocket she removes a gun, Army issued and People owned.She aims at each of the machines, remembers her father's static eyes as he died from bacteria They created, the hospital unable to provide assistance because They ran that too, and with a smile and vengeance she fires at each machine, destroying The Town and all that They stood for.
The Town dies and she grasps the telephone grip. There is the static of a faulty connection. Communications machine smokes to her left. She smiles, and she is free.
