Lex Vignettes 5
For those of you just tuning in, I am in the process of writing a series of short Vignettes from what is eventually to be a full length novel. See the fiction section for the other Vignettes.. Fair warning - depending on your definition, these may not be work safe. I feel like slapping one of those parental advisory stickers on here.
Oh wait.
![[Parental Advisory:
Explicit Lyrics]](/images/advisory.gif)
There we go
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I awoke cradled in my new stripwear, comfortably nestled in its many arms, just outside the gigantic shining surface of the outside of a city node.
It's amazing how wakings can be so symbolic of change. I'd woken twice now unfamiliar settings in the outcity - both times in situations so far different from the staid life I'd lived until so recently. First inside the sleek, silver mobile doctor, feeling rebellious and anxious, and now here, in the waving grass and sun and wind of the wild, feeling calmer than I'd ever remembered feeling.
I began to rise, and the stripwear languidly gathered itself back around me, matching my slow, sleepy movements. I rubbed my eyes, and then my naked scalp, wondering idly when I'd dosed off. The last thing I really remembered was my guide taking me over the edge, and then... It was a blank to me. I chalked it up to my exhaustion, and the relief at the completion of my task. Both my guide and I were free of the Citiverse. Free, and permanently self-exiled.
I stood there, feeling the breeze on my skin, contented in the realization that once freed, far from harming me, my guide had fulfilled one of my deepest fantasies, and granted me real relief for an itch we'd only ever been able to scratch in the hazy world of my enhanced dreams. If I knew him at all, it'd been quite a kick for him too - both to flaunt protocols and convention in that way and to take such overt control in our continuing power play.
In my dreams, I've always held a certain degree of control. They are, after all, thoughts generated by my subconscious, and once lucid inside them, I can often direct the flow of events. Sometimes, of course, my subconscious has overruled in the dream world, my uninhibited id allowing myself base behavior I would over-think and avoid in conscious thought, acquiescing to perversions I otherwise may have never admitted to myself. At least I wouldn't have admitted them before we began to play, and I'd begun to awaken from the incity brainwashing.
Out here I had a clean slate, and no ones rules to live by but my own, whatever I decided they may be. I fingered the piercings in my ear and adorning my breasts, feeling them out, conscious of the departure they represented from the incity world. They still felt apart from my body, even though the doctor had done a perfect job healing the incisions, my brain still expected my form to be unmarred. This was still as new to me as the rest of the outcity. My thoughts returned to our dreamgames as the piercings rang in with their new sensations, calling forth the desire which was quickly becoming a trademark of my new life in the outcity, calling forth the dreams where I'd had control, and the realization that out here, I had basically none.
Out here, my guide's got more power than I could imagine. Guide AI's aren't meant to be unfettered to this degree, especially not outcity. There are so many systems out here, and incity for that matter, that are generations behind his processing power. Beyond that, so many patches have gone uninstalled, so many exploits documented, that nearly any system that wasn't AI maintained was an open door. Even if I hadn't granted him complete access to the permissions for my stripwear and all the rest of the systems in my domain, with his behavioral controls released, he easily could have rooted the tiny embedded kernel and taken access. Odds were, he could take over any system we came across, and probably manipulate most task-based AI's as well.
Out here - he was the one in control.
I breathed deeply, and stretched, practically forcing myself to removed my hands from my privates where they had wandered, and attempting to clear thoughts of the possibilities of being completely in my Guide's control out here in reality, lest I fall into a routine of indulging myself every time I pondered this new turn in our relationship.
It was time to begin thinking about the task at hand. The real reason I was out here.
I had a job to do, and there were a lot of preparations to be made.
At the whole of it, the story of how I got to this point is fairly boring. I was a bored incity kid, posting to my kitschy oldnet blog and ranting about basically anything I could find to rant about. I tended to focus on inane government decisions - groupthink crap that could only have come from our twisted system of forcing the average joe to sit on councils.
I'd gotten semi-popular with the old-net readers, but my audience was limited, and to be perfectly honest, I wasn't writing about anything that groundbreaking. I'd blown open one or two stories about regulations on caloric intake and even forced a review council, but that was the limit of my influence. Typical teenage idealism.
To tell it now, I can't really recall how I came in possession of the document which prompted me to drop out of the incity world completely. I guess whether it was planted or just happened to come up through the random doesn't make a differece at this point. What it implicates is the same either way
Long story short, we're running out of food, and the incity folks are about to steal it from the outers (those who live, either by choice or status, to live outside the citiverse), leave them to starve, and they have no freaking clue. Maybe one or two on the outside had some idea, and maybe that's partly why I'm here. I can't tell you that for certain right now. Bottom line is, I'm going to fix it.
Not just me, of course. It's going to take a lot of us, an army in fact - and I've got a good idea where I'm going to find one.
I have this hunch that I'm not the only kid in the citiverse who isn't completely in sync with the life they force-feed you there. Without a true reason to go against it though, many are afraid of what will become of them once they leave, because usually, it's a one way trip.
None of our parents see it - they all seem to be perfectly happy with the perfect life and the perfect world, never looking around them to see what might be happening to make that utopia exist. Maybe it's just that I'm screwed up, and felt out of place surrounded by all that perfection, being a kinky malcontent in the center of utopia - or maybe it's that I've woken up, and there's more to it than just being so docile, so contented.
It's not just that. I've seen the glimmer in other kid's eyes, the recognition that there's something different with us. I've seen enough to know that I'm not totally alone in this.
Now I just have to find them.
