You've been living in a prison all your life.
Every breath you take is processed then filtered, a place that contains the one percent left of purity from impurity. It chokes up every fiber of your being and then it doesn't. The moon doesn't exist, the sun doesn't exist, the stars don't exist just because your father said so.
Your mother died spasming on the floor and all her hate and grief and mourning follows you everywhere you go for real.
Everyone in your family is out to get you just because you had dibs on what mattered most to them.
Though it didn't matter much to you.
You know everything about this city but no one in the city knows you. Know no one, know no one. I know no one.
Summary of Gu Yihang's life.
And when you wake up from hell, you decide to go downstairs, dive into the seafloor of the city where all those lowly people come and go, came and went.
In that place, you, no, he saw the natural process, the order of things, and what the powers that be made to be.
The city was eating itself alive, and you're gonna be its worst victim. The stuff of nightmares.
The city eats at the edges of your name until it's just me, standing here. Saying "you" so it didn't hurt as much, as if all of it happened to someone else. But there's no one else. Just me.
It was an execution, and from the crowd that surrounded the stage, it was clear to see this wasn't a fair one. Minutes later a riot started. Didn't change anything because all the people that shot their way into the stage first were killed the moment the first boy jumped on it.
Out of the five men and women, clear victims and framed criminals and all, there was a father. Researcher that worked for Gu Corp, made out to be a scapegoat for a major brainchemmy leak down south. The boy that started the riot, twenty summers young, was the researcher's son.
Shen Luo's back lay sprawled into the concrete floor, the blood from inside his body was curdling and curdling and he was choking on something spiritual. The delirium and the naturally induced brainchemmies inside his head all jumbled-up was of the highest quality. Dopamine and everything else circulated the expanses of his cranium, leftover reminders of the riot that he started some hours ago. I squeezed through the mass of police officers and servants trying to find him.
"Why take sudden interest in the boy?" said the gaunt and slick ghostly form that followed the recesses of my soul and corporeal form.
His skeletal varying frames were closed around my back to hold me inside, and I was compressed and compressed as if I was his dream and not the other way around.
"Son of a researcher from my father's circle. He worked on something that even reached me."
"So it's guilt, then. You want to wash your hands in the blood you inherited. What now, you owe the kid your condolences?"
He snickers and inhales a long, long draw of synthetic and polluted air, something less fake than the purity of the towers above. I knew he wasn't real, because no one could see him and he could only talk to me. Why would fabrication pretend to breathe at all?
I respond with four, very vague words: I want to see.
"You've been wanting to see every moment of your life, and see where that got you," he says.
"You've seen every persona in this city in your sleep, you've felt death more than any soldiering basterd out there, and you've seen echoes and echoes of your father's orders rippling towards everyone in this city that holds you in it."
"Forgive me for asking why the only person I can talk to in the world at what point is there in what they do. This is a drastic, drastic act. You get nightmares one night and you decide to leave?"
It's a temporary thing.
"All I'm saying here is, what point is there left in seeing? What's there left to see?"
Something real.
"Nothing's real in this city. Everything's a fake. You're the only real person to me and you act like you're not.'
He started the riot. He managed to wade and bleed his way through the crowd. The police will eventually catch him, but for now, he's taking his sweet, sweet time, high on what the city runs on nowadays.
"He started what your mother couldn't." How was it that my imaginary friend knows me better than I know myself.
"Both sons of the dead with their father's chains hanging on their neck."
The father's sin is inherited by the son. I hated that.
"You hear that? The tower's yelling from up above – come home…"
Glass castle, gilded cage, mannequin, puppet on the stage. I thought of too many descriptions of my everyday life from yesterday to more and more days from before. The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
"Let's go meet him. Maybe this time, when he looks into your eyes, he'll see what I've been trying to show you."
What's that?
"That you've been dead longer than your mother ever was."
The sounds from out there deepen and blend into the nothing-scape of my perception in response to his words. The creature's easy-going fearful morpheme kept following me until I reached the boy we've been talking about.
"He's still alive. How inconvenient," said the shadow from behind, spitting on the concrete blue floor.
I watch the kid from the recesses of the ghost's form, beneath my father's towers hanging over me in an impossible curve that encompassed every inch of half the sky.
He noticed me approaching him from the floor, and I squatted down to meet him.
"You started the riot," I said.
"That's what they're calling it? I thought I just screamed too loud."
"We both know you're lying."
He gingerly got up and set his back against a lightpost, and a pause overcame us two, the silent, all too silent whir of fluorescent things.
I did the same, and offered him a case of Gundric liquor, out upstate.
"Your father worked for Gu Corp."
"Worked for and died because of. Are you one of them?" I didn't like his tone at all.
"Used to." Lies through my teeth.
"Used to is still guilty."
The ghost, I've nearly forgotten, went around the lightpost and climbed it in a second. From its top, he set himself hanging with his hand in its peak and foot to its side, as if a sail to meet the winds.
He hummed in appreciation of new things, new sights.
"Listen to him," he starts again, "same disease you have. What's the diagnosis? Righteous decay… Prognosis? Eventually silent, silent blackout death."
"Shut up." I said, out loud. What a rookie mistake.
"Who're you talking to, lunatic?" said the twenty-year old in front of me. Same age, same ailments, same chains around our necks.
"No one. Remind me which one of us started a riot?" I snapped back.
"Liaar~" said the ghost up above.
I looked at him– trembling hands and discordant muscle spasms. His psychosplice was working 100percent to clear away the dopamines and endorphins and all those feel-good chemicals but he didn't want that at all. He wasn't there to stop his father's execution. He was there to die with him.
He and I took a sip of the liquor I brought, same second, same topping up motion.
He smiled faintly at the bottle then me.
"You should've died." I said trying to fill the pause and distance between both of our souls.
"I should be. My body just doesn't want to get the message."
He tries to stand, and stumbles upward through the air in a spasming motion, jarring and discordant.
Careful. That one's soul is still burning. Touch him too long, and you'll remember what warmth and friendship and virtue and companionship and all those good or fake things feel like.
"That's the point?"
"You're strange. You talk like someone's in your head."
"Might as well be." Above them, a siren howls. The ghost recedes, muttering in the background.
What a miracle. Two dead boys pretending to be human meet and escape from the cyber-police.
"Come with me. Before they get you."
"Go where?"
"Someplace the dead should be."
They or we ventured out into the back alleys. I only knew this place through the maps and the trips through others' eyes in my sleep. It was too dark to see anything but the glaring neon at the end of the tunnel. I opened a trapdoor and he jumped in first.
The noisant nausea-inducing smells and aromas from the curdling byproducts of a system of tunnels attacked and pricked our noses.
I paved the way to an abandoned warehouse that was once used for biomass repurposing. I was supposed to inherit the place after my mother's death but the city repossessed it.
We climbed the fringes of the warehouse, out the roof, watching the sun go down and the clouds darken up. We watched the police questioning around and dispatching manpower around the place from the top of the warehouse and it entertained us. The bottles of Gundric we had ran out eventually.
The ghost hovered about me near my shoulders and my arms. All this light and you still stumble like a blind man, he said.
We dropped down a collection of pipes under the night sky and took turns trying to scale a wall we could've just made our way around. We eventually got over it but by the end of the laughing mess we made, we were hungry.
We walked leisurely to the lower city market, alight with neon and city blood. A man on the next street was advertising synthetic meat, "grown straight from virtue cells, no sin, no suffering!"
A girl with silver pupils sold memory drafts for the price of a smile.
A vending unit screamed REDEEM YOUR CREDITS, REDEEM YOURSELF in thirty languages.
Yihang and Luo stand before a food stall. Steam rises from metal trays full of sizzling skewers and fluorescent noodles.
"You're holding the money like it's radioactive." Every wall that caved in around us had a heart that used to be someone's graffiti.
"It *is* radioactive. Have you seen the market rate for Gu credits??"
"Then stop buying in bulk, rich boy. We're eating cheap tonight." He said that with a face the opposite of a conman.
Luo pulled on the inside of his coat and handed his palms over to me, as if asking for my contribution.
"Two bowls, half-synth, half-protein please."
We took our bowls and found a clean surface near a drain vent. A thin hologram ad buzzed above us: "GU CORP _ BUILDING THE FUTURE" I found myself looking away.
My companion had his mouth full before he said the first word.
He looked up at it, then at me. "Your family built that tomorrow, didn't they?"
"Used to."
"Used to," he echoed. "That's the saddest tense in the language."
"You think I'm proud of it?"
"I think pride's what they inject you with before guilt sets in."
The ghost muttered something like a laugh. I ignored him.
"You eat like someone who's never been hungry."
"I haven't, I'm very thankful for it, but I've been starving for other things."
His face reeled in. "Like what?"
"A reason."
He nodded as if he knew what was happening. The road to self-actualization became a tangled mess after the advent of brain chemistry sciences.
Luo kept eating, smiling between bites, humming a broken tune that the old radios used to play — "We were born to burn and build again."
"Hey," he said, "you ever wonder how many cameras watch us eat?"
I stopped chewing. He sets them down like landmines.
I said, "Enough to make sure we don't choke without permission."
He smiled that sideways, too-white grin. "Nah. They don't care if we choke. They just wanna make sure it's on tape. 'Tragic incident at 6th Avenue Food Hub.' Probably get a million views by breakfast."
"You'd think they'd censor it, but it's undeniable. They get off of sincerity." I said.
He sipped his drink. The Gundric bottle I offered him was wasted a few days ago. I forgot what time was without indicators of it, and how I loved not knowing the time. "See that one? That's a private feed. Not corp. Somebody's watching us for fun."
"Or fear."
"Or love. Same thing where I'm from."
"You really don't belong up there, do you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You look the part, don't act the part."
"I thought I did. Things end there."
"Welcome to the other side of things then. We've got skewers, plastic noodles and debt on demand."
We clinked our beer bottles like glasses. Maybe it was just the alcohol easing the seams of my synthetic calm, but I envied his relaxed mode of thinking. Then again, with a psychosplice, you can choose what to feel anytime.
"To better things." I raised my glass.
"To better things." We laughed and everything became breathable, airy and consumable unlike the apparent attributes of the things around us, deadly and disagreeable to our systems.
The ghost lingered around, murmuring about the market.
He jumped to us through the shadowy rough road. A faint whisper left his orifice. He reminds you of her. The way she tried.
Not now, I huffed under my breath, running out of it from filling my mouth with unhealthier objects.
"What?"
"Nothing. Thanks."
He took out a small, half-cracked capsule from his coat and rolled it between his fingers.
"Ever heard of Prometheus?"
"I've read the files."
"This isn't a file thing. It's a fire thing." He smiled. "He gave fire to humans, right? But nobody remembers what happened after."
"They chained him to a rock."
"Exactly. Because gods don't forgive generosity."
He slid the capsule across the table to me.
"Wanna steal fire?"
I looked at it. Small thing Ordinary. But it pulsed faintly, like sparks about to set a wildfyre.
"What's the catch?"
"You light it, you burn something. You just don't get to pick what."
His face warped into the city's evil.
"You can burn the city. Or you can burn yourself. But the fire doesn't care. That's the fun part."
He said it like he meant it. Like he already knew which one he was going to choose.
Outside, a siren passed. Somewhere the ghost hummed an old tune from before the world went synthetic.
The air shimmered between us two reflections, same fracture. I know this because he knows this because the ghost knows this. At some point I lost track of who lied to who the right way.
I asked, "Why me?"
He smiled faintly, eyes steady.
"Because you still think you're the good guy."
And we sat there, two liars pretending to eat, pretending to live, pretending not to understand that we'd already started the fire.
The city didn't care but we did.