4

4In most conceivable universes, Miranda, sans hints or help, stumbles endlessly around the Program for some small eternity, ending a nevertheless-valiant search in eventual defeat.In those universes, she is never truly able to ground herself in The Program; no friendly hands reach out to guide her. She becomes frustrated over the course of weeks and eventually throws the goggles in the trash. She is driven out of The Program altogether, ending her quest, cutting her off from Gwami forevermore.

Those Other Mirandas settle in to watch Big Banana distantly rise and fall, brought down in due time by either their own Caligula hubris or the general wavering of the market. Her actions are unrelated to the company’s eventual extinction. Those Mirandas live lives peppered with regret, but that regret is tempered with the eventual understanding that all their struggles, so seemingly important at the time, were ultimately insignificant, “in the grand scheme of things.” There are just so many stars in the cosmos. Those Mirandas meet conceivable and ordinary ends punctuating conceivable and ordinary lives, and hardly anybody in any universe bothers to tell their stories.

But in this world, almost entirely inconceivably and totally extra-ordinarily, two frogs in a yellow wood need help defining soup, and that makes all the difference.

Let me explain. Miranda right now stands, just like her co-dimensional compadres, in the center of an endless, snaking hotel hallway. Flanking her are these unmarked and aforementioned faded-sienna doors, another pair a few yards away, another after that and after that. Underneath her feet, a red shag carpet like from some 70’s porn-producer’s fuck den, stretches out endlessly, the dirty fibers clumped and looking damp.

No bananas, though. Nowhere in sight. Clean walls with clean, purely decorative art untouched by Big Banana’s graffiti or subliminal marketing messages. The painted fruit bowls opt instead for Rosaceae. That’s a plus. A massive plus. That means either this place or its denizens or its creators are immune to Big Banana’s dastardly charms. Good looks, Program. That’s a point on the board for the Woman with the Red Hair. That goes a long way.

Remember in Harlem, when that bulky computer’s IP address entered itself into the Program? Miranda was brought through these hallways automatically, the Program taking her directly to where the Woman with the Red Hair waited.

But when her home IP mimics its uptown sibling, those wonderful, troublesome auto-navigational properties vanish. She can move around with full autonomy, which is great! She can walk back and forth, press herself right up against the wall, spin and spin and spin with alarming speed, even jump in the air if she taps the space bar. But what’s it all worth anyways since she can’t understand how to open any of the doors in this damned, inoperable place?

All the nearby doors are protected by esoteric passwords with weird hints (“Satan’s rope is made of black licorice”) or the kind of arithmetic, blockchain lock you’d need a seriously epic mining rig to bust through. Behind these doors are people’s secrets, their secret lives. The infrastructure surely aims to keep them that way. Further down the hall, around the corner, further down that hall, it’s the same everywhere. She’s totally locked out. Figures: freedom, and not so much at all.

Each subsequent failure at another optimistically-approached door strengthens in our Miranda the same desire that eventually conquered the others: a desire to cease this stupid endeavor altogether. Those Mirandas also came unsuccessfully to the end of corridors, having taken maddeningly logical movements — turns and backtracks and loop-de-loops and diggysteps — and found the same inaccessibility at every one. They were driven mad by the myriad impasses placed before them, and by their own inability to brainstorm a successful solution. They spent all night and all the next night and all the nights after that backtracking, retracing their steps, trying to outsmart and outthink their way from a spider’s web. They never ended up going anywhere.

And that kind of successive failure really chips at someone’s spirit, no matter how inspired or intrepid it might be.

And maybe our Miranda would wind up sharing the same fate as those others if not for the loud knock on her bedroom door, so sudden and forceful it sends her jumping up out of her seat and onto her feet. In a moment of careless unthinking panic, she flings her headset down onto her keyboard. It lands with a sickening crunch. Internally a mess, certain she’s just destroyed her keyboard and goggles both, Miranda nevertheless makes an attempt at looking chill before moving to the door, smoothing her hair and, you know, relaxing her shoulders and such, trying to hide her jitters.

“Yeah?” Miranda says, opening the door slightly for her roommate, a rarely-seen version of Katie, one with under-eyes black and beautiful hair all disheveled and the faint air of stale vodka leaking from her mouth.

“Hey, uhm, so sorry to do this,” she says, her voice coarse as sand between your molars, “but your light was on, and, god, sorry I just could really use some Advil if you have any.”

“Oh, yeah, haha, sure. Come on in.”

Katie, exaggerating for effect, takes a few wobbly steps into Miranda’s room before half-falling/half-sitting down onto the bed. She lays back amongst bubble-wrap and cardboard, groaning as she does so. Praying that the rubble on her bed won’t be fodder for discussion, Miranda rummages quick as she can through some desk drawers for medicine. Katie says, “Making an unboxing video, hon?” hiccups loudly and continues on, “Are those VR goggles?”

Damn it all.

Though Miranda in that same moment finds what she’s looking for, which means she can convincingly cast Katie from her cave, her heart goes cold. “Yeah, they are,” she says, standing. “I won a contest, but they don’t seem to work. I think something broke during shipping.”

“Sucks,” Katie says, gratefully and gracefully accepting the pill bottle. “Let me just —”

“Take them all, no worries. I like never use them,” Miranda says. She knocks her knuckles against her skull and says, “They always said I was hard-headed.” The joke does not land.

“Oh, uhm, okay,” Katie says, standing, teetering, catching herself, standing, moving to the door, saying, “Are you like hiccup genetically predisposed or something — ?”, thanking Miranda, slamming her own door down the hall a bit too forcefully.

Kathy, woken by the noise, groans, “Why are you always so freakin’ loud?”

Miranda’s heartbeat only settles once she again locks her door, hides the cardboard evidence under her bed, and sits back down in front of her computer. And there, she pauses.

If she doesn’t lift the goggles to her face, never attempts to use them again or, in fact, never even removes them from her keyboard, she’ll never discover the fact that she’s broken them beyond repair. Schrodinger’s Headset will remain uncertainly operational for the rest of time. She can live the remains of her life knowing that she chose to end this endeavor, that she was not simply subject to an act of neglect she’d wish undone for all her days.

Maybe she feels herself jockeying with these same thoughts in other, adjacent universes, other universes where Miranda’s story here ends. The shame and guilt from discovering that, yes, she’s destroyed beyond repair her goggles, will prove too intense to recover from. In those universes, she never again receives strange texts or sees coded messages in billboard pixels. Therein she waits for some redux, some second chance, and waits, and waits, and waits, and eventually gives up, not only on the Woman and the Program and Gwami, but on herself.

Knowing painfully how profound the effects of a momentary slip-up can be on a whole life, well, that realization cripples the girl, making existence even more difficult. Her anxiety gets worse. Simple decisions greatly unnerve her. She’s too careful with how she crosses the street, so she’s frequently late. Her existing relationships fracture further, and new ones form with even less frequency than they do now, if you can believe that. If our Miranda is to avoid that fate, it will be by only divine intervention. Hopefully, something omniscient is looking out for her. Something wordy and earnest beyond her wildest dreams.

But Miranda’s always had a strong will, and wields it now, flexes what she’s got, putting on the goggles with gritted teeth and finding that, somehow, Oh God somehow, she hasn’t broken her keyboard or the goggles. Everything is patently, extraordinarily fine. Divinity, finally doing Miranda a favor. Still, she and they aren’t even close to being even. This she knows. This she tacitly reminds them from time to time.

While she hasn’t done any lingering damage to the technology, she finds that the weight of the goggles upon the arrow keys has directed her avatar to take a sequence of turns she never would have consciously made. None of Miranda’s rational, intentional actions would have brought her here, to this specific segment of the Program, to this stretch of hallway.

Which is pretty all-important because, well lookie here, something encouraging: a soft light puddling on the floor ahead, coming through an ingress ajar. Upon the open door hangs a sign drawn crudely in Microsoft Paint: Help Wanted ϑ. Miranda, hoping her avatar is of the friendly-looking sort, heads inside, transparently here to help.

The virtual air shimmers slightly as she steps over a doormat of toadstools into her first new world. She is one of only a handful of Mirandas to take this step. Bully for her.

Walking inside, a bright white light overtakes her vision, a sensation she’ll come to learn is a kind of universal loading screen, analogous to waking up in a sunlit room after a deep nap. Her sight returns in fashion, slowly revealing an endless mid-forest marsh around her, a woodland stretching on in every direction, this either the traversable landscape of a huge open-world or a startlingly photo-realistic wallpaper.

Immediately before her is a lazy little section of pond slowly giving itself over to the cattails and reeds growing fat and morose at its banks. Rippling lily pads on the surface roil around with an unfelt breeze.

Miranda turns back to the doorway, not fully expecting it to be standing upright and tawny right where she left it, like a glitch in the universe, a piece of erect trash left out in the wilderness. The swampland world stretches on behind it, disregarding that the door contains within it an entire, somehow larger, universe. Ah gather and observe, ye physicists: a truly Whovian object larger on the inside than the out.

Turning back to the pond, Miranda is touched by a poetic sight: three young lotus flowers, pink as cartoon bubblegum, floating languidly at the pond’s edge, their glitzy leaves unbothered by the pond muck. Then there’s a ribbit, and from out behind the flowers hop two stately male bullfrogs of yellow and green, their necks puffing and receding rancorously. Uncertain of her literal and metaphoric next steps, Miranda wades further into the water.

“Hello?” she types, wondering if this world has a host, and if so, whether they’ll arrive with any prudence. She wipes her IRL forehead and finds her IRL palms have become quite IRL sweaty. Fortunately for her, it’s easier to seem calm when you can type, edit, and revise all your responses, when your bumbling heart-beat and strained eyes and leaking hands don’t immediately give away your anxiety.

The strained hum of her computer, nearing its technological limitation, emulates well the buzzing of the blowflies which hang about in the air.

But it appears her hosts are already here. The first of the two bullfrogs, Heavier than its companion, hops forward, saying “Well well well, welcome, welcome! We’re so happy to have you!”

“Yes, yes, a great pleasure,” the other frog, Grassier in color, notes.

“So, you noticed the sign on our door, I presume, and have come to help?” Heavier asks.

In her head, Miranda hears some of Father’s old advice: Act like you’ve been here before. Act like you’ve been here before. Talk to the frogs, it’s cool (that last bit was a paraphrase). Methodically, careful of typos and colloquialisms, she types “Yes, hello! What is it you need help with? I’m not much of a programmer, but —”

“Oh, my dear, you need have nothing but a functioning brain and a discerning ear to lend us assistance. You see, we are — How should I put this? — old friends engaged once more in a theoretical argument that has plagued us for years. Like a carousel, our conversations go forever on, circling and circling this one basic question, one that, having dogged us one time too many, we’ve thought to open up to the inquisitive outside perspectives of this strange Program’s denizens.”

“I’m sorry,” Miranda interrupts, “but just for, you know, posterity’s sake, this doesn’t have anything to do with bananas, right?”

There’s an empty moment. An internet silence. And then:

“Oh, ho ho ho, my dear, worry not. Our ponderance peddles in a far more philosophical food. We trifle not with that banana drivel. Nay, we are at yet another impasse, you see, in defining the concept of ‘soup.’ Now, now. I know how trivial that must sound, but please, don’t be dulled, and do not run off just yet. Listen. It will be worth your while.”

“Okay.”

“All my colleague and I can ever agree upon is that soup’s most crucial characteristic is its being perceived to be soup, for otherwise any definition would run rampant with coulis and salsas, dashi and other simple broths. Beyond that, we find ourselves at dead-end after dead-end. Think for a moment, for this we truly believe: our question is one of the great philosophical dilemmas of our time.”

“To be earnest, we are running out of great philosophical dilemmas.” 

“I’m not so sure about that,” Miranda starts saying, but trails off.

“Many years ago, after a dinner party at a mutual friend’s, I posed the question to Sartre, just as we’re posing it to you now. After a few minutes of intense thinking, he said, ‘I don’t believe I’ll be able to enjoy this next course,’ and excused himself for a cigarette. He never did come back into the party, and in fact, was dead within the year. Suffice to say, this particular question has quite an illustrious history.”

“What do you two do for a living?” Miranda asks. “I’m sorry if that’s quite forward.”

“Oh nonsense, you doll. Isn’t she a doll? Please, we are all friends here. I’m a Professor of Economic Theory at Yale. My esteemed colleague here is the Regional Director of Operations for all Southwest flights operating out of O’Hare.”

“And you two are just hanging out here? Discussing soup? Pardon me, but don’t you have, like, actual work to be doing?”

“Let’s not quarrel over details, dearest. Not to sound rude, but we won’t question the circumstances of your life if you allow us the same courtesy.”

“Uhm, okay,” Miranda says, wondering if she’s blowing this, feeling the sudden bubble of self-hate rising up from her gall-bladder, threatening to pop in her throat. She pushes it back down and asks “So, uhm, why don’t we start at the beginning?”

“At the very beginning. Good idea. Deconstruct to then reconstruct. Perhaps a Google search is in order.”

And off they go, googling and talking over each other and bickering, cursing themselves and cursing the brains in their heads that have led them to this immovable object. Miranda, soon intrigued by the subject herself, plays with them, engages in their little game for how long she cannot say.

“Well, what if it has to come from a larger container?” Miranda posits, “A large receptacle of soup is the norm, yeah? Like if you order chowder in a restaurant, it comes from a big pot of it.”

“Then you are damning Andy Warhol’s dearest and giving new life to Aramark’s Middle School Cafeteria Nacho Cheese, when served in its drippiest, ooziet form.”

The Swami body behind the goggles is made more and more exhausted as it is kept up later and later, its hold on language and its ability to follow long logical labyrinths becoming compromised. It gets snippy and uncooperative.

“No! Of course not!” Heavier says. “Salad dressing cannot be soup! Under no pretense, no matter how it is served, thickened, thinned, or perceived. I will not hear it.”

“But you’re coming at this from a point of privilege!” Miranda hits back. “You don’t have the right to litigate foods that others might consider soup!”

“I simply will not hear it!” retorts Heavier. “We are missing that ineffable soupiness which evades our dear dressing but is imbued within our bisques. Damn it. Damn it all.”

“Uhm…I…well…soup has a certain thickness, right? As you mentioned, bisques and such. That seems like a good place to — But, no, God damn it! That discounts —”

At once, all concerned parties voice the same correction:

“Hot Broth!”

“Hot Broth!”

“Hot Broth!”

The Frogs, as if sensing weakness, confound her poor brain with ethical parameters and obscure philosophical frameworks they apply in their further responses. As the conversation spikes further up over her head, Miranda gets ornery. Still, they don’t make it any easier on her.

“Not falling asleep on us, are you dearest? Are we boring you?”

“I just don’t understand what Hume or Spinoza have to do with this.”

“It’s important, you understand, that we have ethical and moral structures underneath any attempt at definition. Otherwise this would never hold up under any scrutiny!”

“Why do you need it to hold up to scrutiny? What kind of cynical person is going to pick apart your definition of soup?”

The Frogs involve each other in some new turn of the discussion as a kind of baby realization impresses itself upon Miranda’s mental uterus.

“You’re looking at this too cynically,” she interrupts. 

“What?”“How dare you!”

“No, no, listen! You had it all along. At the beginning. We had it. We’re getting further away from the answer. Occam’s razor. The only definition of soup is something that’s perceived to be soup, because —”

“Darling, we’ve been through this…what about Caesar dress —” “— because everything is only what it is perceived to be.”

“Hmm?”

“Listen. You want a framework for the world, here it is. Soup is soup because we as a society, as a collection of individuals, have decided that only certain things can be identified as such. Ditto anything. Men and women, economic structures, plant species, personality traits. They’re only accepted as what they are because we agree on our perception of them. Sartre said ‘Essence preceded Existence,” at least as it relates to objects, right? But the collective we control that essence. We imbue the thing with itself! I’m not sure if he said that somewhere, but but but that doesn’t necessarily matter. ‘First man exists: he materializes into the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself.’ I’m pretty sure that’s a direct quote.

“But soup is different. We define soup before it exists, and then we encounter something. But that thing doesn’t exist as soup, unless it materializes into the world matching that essence! We don’t collectively agree that salad dressing is soup, and so it isn’t. We haven’t made that a part of its essence. We look at it, but soup it never becomes. We we we we collectively agree that pizza is a certain subspecies of dough with sauce and cheese, but if we slather tomato sauce and shredded cheddar on a cracker, that isn’t the same, even if the dictionary “definition” might say so. The essence is ineffable but easy, as ineffable as the human soul, yet we all know what it feels like to be alive, what having a soul entails. Here’s what I posit. Definitions are capricious, they must be! As capricious as human whim. Soup is what we accept to be soup. Soup requires humanity as much as humanity requires itself. All things require an imbuer. The unimbued imbuer…

“Or maybe I’m rambling, I don’t know.”

Only a prolonged silence offers itself in the place Miranda expected cheers and celebration to be. She waits awkwardly, kind of surprised at her own ingenuity, hoping the frogs don’t chide her for the unintentionally-pilfered philosophy.

Heavier clears his throat. “Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry dear. I didn’t realize you were so very new here.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s just that’s pretty presumptuous. How would you possibly know I’m new here?” She snaps back.

The Frogs puff and retract their throats as if in laughter. “Well, my dear, you don’t even have headphones in.”

“And how could you possibly know that?”

“Because we brought this up earlier, and when you didn’t respond, we thought, well, we thought you weren’t going to dignify such an absurd point of view with a response.”

“But now, of course, we recognize that you just didn’t hear us.”

And in an East Village apartment, much past her bedtime, a girl’s cheeks glow bright red. To be embarrassed in so many worlds, in one day, what a unique gift, a unique humiliation.

Mortified, and with her guard down, Miranda spills the off-topic truth in long, unbroken fashion: that she doesn’t know where she is, that she’s scared and in over her head, that she’s looking for a person whose face she’s never seen, that she’s metaphorically adrift in a faraway sea, and that she fears no number of friendly buoys or lucky life rafts will likely lead her where she needs to go.

“See, she is completely lost,” the Heavier frog says. “I was right.” The self-satisfied, smug little Salientia sits smiling stupidly. Miranda’s semi-miffed at the sentiment.

“Sweetheart, look,” Grassier interjects. “Forget this silly conversation and listen to me. This Program is a dark and majestic place, full of contradictions. Forget the effect of our silly conversation, or any silly conversations you may encounter, and just enjoy the being here. Whether you find your mate or not, just enjoy the being here. It’s a special honor. My advice to you is to assume that everything you see is normal. And maybe be a bit more selective with who you speak to and what you decide to hear. A pair of headphones is vital. You don’t ever want to appear very out of your wits. Besides, some knowledge can only be safely transmitted in audio. Never know who’s reading along and such.”

“Thank you, really,” Miranda says. “You’re too kind. Why are you being so kind?”

“Well, darling, you helped us without goading, simply because you cared enough to care. Shouldn’t we afford you the same courtesy?”

Stupid solitary tears, just a few, fall off Miranda’s face and hang off the edge of her eyelashes, collecting in a little pool within her goggles. “I’m sorry for burdening you with all this. This isn’t at all what I came here to do. So embarrassing. But well, uhm, do you have any idea where I should go next? I haven’t seen any other door open like yours was. I have no other ideas.”

The Frogs, during a brief pause, might be conversing, figuring the consequences of what they’re about to divulge. Heavier says “Well, frankly, I’m not surprised. Not many in this program are as welcoming as we are. In fact, a great number of those you meet will likely be some shade of paranoid, aggressive, gruff. Not their fault, this is a place designed for only two kinds of people: the ridiculous and the secretive.”

“You know what she needs? If she can find one, a skeleton key,” Grassier posits to his froggy friend. 

“Well yes, old chap, of course that would help her, and certainly we would all love a skeleton key, go traipsing from here to there without a care in the world, but where the hell is she going to get one?” 

“Is a ‘skeleton key’ what I think it is?” Miranda asks.

“Well it’s not an actual key hanging around someone’s neck — well perhaps it is in somebody’s strange world — but for your purposes, it’s just a password, a string of numbers that’ll get you through most any one of those doors out there. Those who have one are pretty keen on keeping it to themselves, however. Or else they command a high price. I’m regretfully not sure what more help we can be. Perhaps you will meet a generous soul who empathizes with your plight. There are so many intertwisting plots in this place, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re involved in one or more yourself. Unwittingly, of course. But those are the best kinds of stories, the ones you don’t even know you’re in.”

“Or a drunkard in a gutter might spill suspicious integers from his mug onto the pavement below him, hoping subversively you’ll take note. And, indeed I implore you, take note of such things.”

“We can at least point you towards a more populated place. Perhaps someone there can help you continue your search. After all, we two are relatively stationary creatures. We don’t much get along with the others who frequent these rooms, nor do we know many of them at all.”

“What is it? Four doors down?” Heavier tries to remember.

“Four, indeed,” Grassier confirms.

“Four doors down, then, and on this side of the hallway. 7-digit-password, it’s Ferengi, you know, because we’re all real nerds of a feather here, and maybe someone within can help you. All the best. And please, you’ve been such a good sport, sweat-pea. Don’t be a stranger.”

“Unless it’s demanded of you.”

Our Miranda thanks the Frogs and leaves the swamp, the door left open a smidge behind her. Maybe the next passerby will be of more assistance.

Smiling for no good reason other than she’s a part of something, even if she knows not what it is, just a character in a story with a real plot, a plot just chugging right along, Miranda goes searching for this so-called “next world,” wondering just how many such worlds she’ll see after all is done, and whether she’ll seem new and unaware in each one.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

Millennials are, like, concerningly on board with getting an addiction, and to anything. We got hardcore addicted to fucking Farmville, for Christ’s sake. And not just like oh, maybe I’ll log on and tend the crops everyday addicted, I’m talking, oh, I’m going to pump an astonishing amount of real human dollars into the growth and care of this, my virtual farm, think about ways to increase my crop yield and constantly patrol the property looking for coyotes and treasure, watching this little farmer o’mine hoe new plots for sweet potato seeds, mindlessly invite all my 1600 other friends to “Join Me” because if they use my referral code I’ll get six extra bottles of milk or some shit for the merino sheep I paid $25 of actual, interpersonal currency for. Farmville, Candy Crush, World of Warcraft, Fortnite, Instagram…it’s easier than ever to cultivate an addiction. And sexier. All the cool kids are doing it. I bet you have a pretty sizeable collection yourself. Do you like to take ‘em out and show your friends?

Now here’s Miranda Swami exploring a computer program more sprawling than the grandest MMO, using as immersive a technology as anything in existence, walking along the bleeding edge, spurred on by a quest so personal, yes, but oh so grandiose in its origins and in its potential outcomes that the sheer totality of it has infected all parts of her thinking and all parts of her life. Now, tell me truly: if you were in that position, or one with far lesser stakes even, wouldn’t you get addicted, too?

Hell, I’m jonesing just describing it.

She follows the Frogs’ instructions and heads down the hallway to the fourth door on her left, carefully inputs the password, and lets the fresh light from the opened door wash over her skin, effectively sealing her fate. Nobody but nobody, I say, could resist the promise of what she finds within.

What she finds is this: a lavishly-details, and very VERY LOUD, and surprisingly well-populated city set atop a helicraft’s sextet of enormous, continuously-whirring propellers. You can see them, big as kraken’s eyes, from your peripherals as soon as you step through the door. If you close it behind you and turn around to face your surroundings, you might justify your entire quest on the merits of the landscape alone: an entire Earth sprawls below, a geographically breathtaking array of high-mountain peaks and endless, wide-open seas, of ancient fissures splitting the soil, and mammoth poplar forests so tall their bristles threaten to brush the underside of the airship city.

Being that every on-boarder into this world starts in this very spot, it makes sense that, when turning to the city proper, Miranda finds herself amidst the virtual bazaar designed to accost the freshly arrived, to take advantage of their infant excitement. All manner of cosmic creatures, hocking slapdash items tagged with cryptocurrency price demands, are gathered here opposite others of their ilk across the way, forming a kind of main street for newcomers to pass through and peruse should they have business further into the city.

“I got all seven seasons of The Sopranos here! All seven seasons of your favorite hit-crime show, for just 36 XRP. That’s right, Sir or Madame or whatever you are with the tentacles there, you heard me correctly! 36 XRP is all you need to own the show that kickstarted the Golden Age of Television! You, sir! Yes you! Have you seen the inimitable work of the late, great James Gandolfini? Don’t miss your best and cheapest chance! What about you, Miss? 30 XRP, a great discount for such a lovely creature!”

“High-pitched frequencies to make a mosquito gag! Cast them out of any nearby device, cast them out of your dad’s new TV! Do it all for the low-low price of three Litecoin. Prank your friends! Freak out your boss! Punish anyone still using those horrible Bluetooth headsets! Eight intensities range from ‘bothersome’ to ‘histrionic.’ Don’t miss out on the hot new technology all your friends are going to hate you for!”

Miranda stumbles through the market, ignoring the merchants’ cries and the small, tan-faced children who surround her with cupped hands, hoping for just a slim shard of Iota, if she has any, or some DogeCoin will even do for supper tonight. Pushing them away with not so little guilt, Miranda must remember that they are not real children, that they will not starve, that they are pixels and algorithms and, quite possibly straight, white men looking for workless income, a last legal gasp before tax evasion proper. But then she stops. Stops moving, stops pushing. She lets the hands swarm around her, lets their fingers enter her pockets (empty anyways) because she’s suddenly distracted by something very, very important in the world around her, or, I suppose, the lack of something.

Look around, y’all: this place is pristine. Ignore the dusty street sign posts, the grime and cobwebs hung up like decorations in the musty corners of the sellers’ stalls. Disregard the ugly, uneven weeds emerging into open air from between the mud-caked metal panels underfoot. Yes, the tattered tarp tents over some of the merchants are wispy from overuse, turned colorless from all the sunshine. Yes, this is an ugly, lowborn market full of swindlers and scoundrels certainly, but to Miranda Swami, it’s the most beautiful thing she’s seen.

No bananas.

Nowhere.

None at all.

Weird, passing lifeforms dress in awkward, odd ways, but there are no bananas adorning their hats or ass-less chaps or jingling jester-wear. The alley walls are plastered in graffiti, sure, but it’s all clan tags and Twitter handles, just normal people looking for attention through virtual spray-paint. No half-ironic, pandering street art of bananas here. No bananas doing kung-fu, bananas holding tiny humans to their ears like telephones, bananas driving cars or dressed in military regalia with their fingers hesitating over a big, red, missile-launching button, bananas painted into the Yellow Submarine album cover (as the Beatles and the Meanies), bananas as the cast of Seinfeld. None of it. Just normal, innocuous, maybe half-threatening but still generally familiar, graffiti…you know, like from the time before.

Miranda grins widely, exploring with her eyes the fruitless facets of this fresh place. It doesn’t take any more conversation or contact for her to know she’s among friends. Even the attempted pickpocketers she, removing their fingers in defeat, seem newly sincere. Whether the responsibility lies with whoever designed the place or whoever populates it, at least one party agrees: Bananas are Bad, and will not be represented in this wholly pure place.

Our Miranda, we can say now with confidence, is all in on the Program! It has already, even this early, captured part of her soul.

Further on and past some stagnant cirrus clouds hanging about head-high, Miranda is a moth, attracted forward by a neon beer-stein sign, fluttering through a red curtain into an old-timey steampunk saloon.

The inside attempts to unsettle her. Sudden stares are tossed her way by the shadow-bathed patrons in their booths and dim corners, and even those playing pool in the far room take time from the game to unwelcome the fresh meat. Steeling herself, she sidles up to the bar, meeting the glares of the other bar guests — three racially-insensitive African pygmies and an anthropomorphic mushroom — with kind words, offering to buy them drinks, attempting to start this local life off with a laugh.

“You can’t actually buy anything here,” the Bartender, a bumbling Easter Island Head, says to her in monotone.

“I know,” she says back, “I was just being funny.” “There’s no being funny in here either.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll suppress my natural hilarity.” She turns to the Pygmies beside her and deadpans, “It literally explodes out of me.”

Rising after a pointless and silent few minutes at the bar, Miranda walks into the center of the room, looking around in ashamed boredom before locking eyes with a creature in a corner booth. The thing, a blindfolded beetle with thirty boat-shoe bedecked arms, waves her over with a dozen limbs at once.

“New here, huh?” 

“Everyone’s been saying that.” 

“No wonder why.”

“What do you want?” Miranda asks, already fed up.

A message pops up on her screen, a little red speech bubble asking her to join a private voice channel. No way this could go wrong, right? Anyways, what the Hell? Still feeling the high of a banana-less life, she figures nothing can much hurt her in here. Not while she feels like this. Miranda accepts the invite. Her ears fill with the ambient sound from someone’s faraway room.

Expecting a deep, unsettling robot voice, like of some anonymous interviewee on 60 Minutes, Miranda is pleased to find her conversational companion has a bouncing British lilt, a voice like a Rudyard Kipling book come to pretty, flitty life.

“So, you’re rather new here, and you’re trying to orient yourself, yes? I dared imagine this was the case. Something rather…uninformed about you. Well, fortunately, you have stumbled into the most fortuitous of bar rooms. Like those rogues out in the alley, I too am a salesman of sorts. But where they peddle torrents and jailbroken apps, I deal in information. In fact, I was one of the first occupants of this Program, back when the developer kits were invite-only. Now that they’re open-source, it’s altogether too easy to wander endlessly here, lost among so many competing imaginations. As it happens, I meet a great many adventurous souls like you: so brazen, so naïve, walking into a bar like this expecting open arms and easy answers. Am I correct?”

“Keep talking,” Miranda says into her microphone, bringing her lips close, hoping the spittle and friction obscure her voice.

“My trade is information. And, for many items, I am the sole merchant. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the worlds, you walked into mine, so play it Sam…take advantage of your good fortune. You tell me what you want to know, and I will charge you modestly per answer.”

“Charge me what?”

“Well, that’s entirely up to you, Madame: what’s in your wallet?”

Miranda, like so many of her contemporaries, had experimented with cryptocurrency speculation during the brief Bitcoin boom, buying a quarter-token when the getting was good, just before it got great, and not long before it got godawful. While she wasn’t as vocal in her crypto-support as those rich tech guys I’m sure you’ve had the misfortune of overhearing — the ones who spouted off about their really exciting, totally cutting-edge new investments at every BBQ, work party or bar-room they afflicted with their personage — she was nonetheless excited by the prospect of centralized, post-national currency, of gains on gains on gains ad infinitum.

Then, as you know, the boom busted and Bitcoin bottomed, but Miranda preferred to hang on to her investment rather than purge herself of it for a loss. Convinced bullishly all this time that the “currency of The Dark Web” will any-day-now become the currency of the world (owing to either global unity, or outright apocalypse), she’s nevertheless been hopeful about finding a consistent outlet that’ll accept her made-up money. Enter the Beetle.

When she’s done linking her wallet and the creature says, “Okay, my new friend, ask away,” Miranda goes right for it. She asks him directly about the Woman with the Red Hair (as if tempting fate’s architect to intervene), and he proceeds to rant on, like he’s been waiting ages for a question like this, blathering about the shadowy syndicate that designed this Program’s infrastructure, about how this virtual world, while heavily populated for such an off-beat experiment, arose out of literal nothingness some nine months earlier, with a coding schema that allowed incredible innovation in no-time if you had that kind of know-how, that it was confoundingly fully-functional and completely debugged by the time most settlers laid eyes on the land, that any concrete information about this syndicate was obviously hearsay, hearsay even to one as experienced as he, but yes, he had heard vague whispers about a Woman with fiery Red Hair, a developer with unlimited terraforming access to every room in the Program, who could build worlds out of nowhere and destroy them outright should it fit her fancy, this Woman perpetually traversing the realms like a bounty hunter or protective deity, how nevertheless he had never actually encountered such a Woman in all his time here and couldn’t imagine that such a someone could exist, how he’s heard her sometimes referred to as Cypher, other times Athene, and once or twice, Abaddon. Most importantly, while he’s met a handful of travelers who’ve supposedly met the Woman themselves, he tells her that there’s been no obvious connecting-tissue between them, but ain’t that the rub? It’s a universe built for discovery and disorientation, he tells her, so go out, discover, and be disoriented.

She says she wants to do that, only she doesn’t know how. She says she’s heard that some people here have skeleton keys, that those keys are the only way she’ll be able to get from place to place quick enough to track her target in even the most liberal of timelines.

And the Blind Beetle says, in essence, well little girl, I think our chat here is over. You seem to be out of funds.

And son of a gun, he’s right. Freewheeling cretin he is. That’s something like $4000 he’s drained from her, silently, in the span of no more than a half-hour.

“Wait, what? Dude, are you kidding me?! That was a ton of money.”

“Answers are expensive. Consider yourself lucky I’m leaving only with this meagre sum.”

If Miranda could jump through the computer and strangle to death the faceless thief on the other side, oh God would she. Her brain rummages through itself looking for any way to extract vengeance on this thing that’s just robbed her, to justify her quixotism around such a treasonous creature. She’ll find neither.

“But I’ll leave you with this,” the Beetle says standing. “Take a long walk outside. Maybe visit the plaza down the way. You never know what people are peddling out there, and what they will ask for in return. Here, because I’m not such a bad guy. Go buy yourself a cheeseburger, kid.”

Ten dollars he deposits back into her wallet, and the Beetle, without another word, logs out of the chat, then out of the program altogether apparently, dissolving into the very air, leaving Miranda alone in the seedy, virtual bar, penniless for all intents and purposes, with answers she’ll never get to capitalize on and an appetite for destruction.

Outside in the bazaar, our furious Miranda looks at all the things she could’ve bought instead of shitty information from an exploitative salesman. Every Kevin James movie, with director’s commentary. Practically giving it away. Six-month subscription to Tidal, which they actually are giving away. A small drone shaped like a bird with “talons that really grab” could have been delivered to her nearest Amazon Locker for a fraction of the cost.

Pointless garbage all of it, but Miranda takes another few trips up and down the lane, hoping to catch a glimpse of some wizened old merchant she missed the first few times, someone reluctantly selling the Dark Web equivalent of a Mogwai.

Finding nothing of note but needing to walk off her rage, Miranda passes through the market further into the city, the lane eventually opening up into a town square of sorts, a sterile, metal-plated plaza surrounded by faceless office buildings, but empty except for a few souls gathered around a folding table. 

It’s time to find her way to a new world, she decides. This place has given all it’s going to give, and taken all it’s going to take. And it’s taken so much already (not that a loss of $4000 is going to leave her destitute, but whatever confidence she had gained in this place was sucked away in the transaction, sucked away along with $4000. Losing either one by itself? Not so bad. But both together: yikes).

Her attention soon turns to the flimsy table across the square, around which a small group of Wild-Wild-West-types hang around, like they’re setting up for a bake sale. A sign on the stand reads, “Step right up, and test your mettle. Win a fortune, live like an outlaw.”

Miranda approaches the cowboys, none of whom notice her except the one manning the table, a stick-thin man with a bandana covering most of his face, whose eyes jump wildly around the square, as if on the lookout for something silently hunting him.

“What’s this then?” Miranda asks.

“Accepting applications for a game, little lady. Of gunslinger and murder and outlawis extremis. Fancy yourself a five-shooter?”

“Don’t think I have anything better to do at the moment,” Miranda says, recognizing an opportunity to get off-world. And isn’t that what this is about? Hopping from place to place until picked-up pieces fit themselves together? She’ll invent her own skeleton key. She has her wits. “What’s your pitch?”

“Look here: me and some others are putting together a team, going to join a little game of Search-and-Destroy some E-sports folks are playing a few rooms over. Last team standing gets 20k, and, well, we’re going to be the last team standing. The others won’t even see us coming.”

“And you’re just accepting random applications?”

“Warm bodies are good bodies. Either you’ll hold your own, or you’ll be a serviceable bullet sponge. No real risk on our part.”

“This doesn’t seem so couth.” 

“Then don’t ask any questions.”

“How do you plan on getting me or anyone else into a locked room?”

“Well, let’s just say our fearless leader has a way of getting around. One she’s happy to share with her friends and followers. Very lucrative possibilities for those looking to head into harm’s way.”

“A way of getting around?” 

“Yes’m. She’s one a kind.” 

Light bulb.

“I’d like to meet her.”

“You can sign right here, then.”

A pop-up appears on her screen, requesting her signature and initials on an electronic form riddled with x’s and long, empty underscores.

Ah, these Swami siblings. Can’t resist the temptation of the dotted line.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

“God it’s bright. Can you, like, dim the brightness or is that just going to be part of it?”

“Shut up, new meat.”“Really with that shit? Fuck you, dude.” 

“Everyone quiet. You’ll give us away.”

Quashing this confrontation between Miranda and a facsimile David Hasselhoff is the Bandana Man from the table, who made it seem as if he was taking everyone into his confidence when he requested they call him “Druid.”

David Hasselhoff continues saying something quietly disparaging into his mic, drawing Druid’s ire, who stops to scold him privately, four red macaroni squiggles of anime anger launched from his forehead.

They, the Druid and Hasselhoff and Miranda, are accompanied through this Wild West ghost town by a green-haired Pixie floating a few inches off the ground, and four slender, silent Medieval Doctors, like with the creepy bird beak masks and the black, ankle length robes. They’re all keeping quite still, the lot of them, hiding in a thin back-alley, one sandwiched between two rows of red and brown and sandalwood boarding-houses. Though the plan was to move through this town as quickly as possible and get to their outlaw camp in the boonies without drawing any attention, Druid has demanded they stop, thinking perhaps they’re being surveilled. A dust devil down the lane whips itself up into a playtime tornado, threatening to grow angrier, but only ever threatening.

Right about then, there are eight too-audible footsteps from a ledge above, and Miranda turns just in time to see a figure running into a door on the second-floor of that barrio over there.  She starts saying “Did you guys see —” but her words are cut off by the slow-moving bullet smashing into her cranium, sending her screen to black and darker black and darker black still. Though there’s no more to see other than the black of unforeseen death, wartime sounds of panic still bounce around inside her stunned ears: the gunshots and bootsteps, the screams and Hasselhoff cursing himself and cursing God and cursing his mother and cursing “this fucking bitch to the right of me,” and finally this “whole bitch of an MMO.” Some confounding soul says, very clearly, the words “Don’t be a rage-quitting proto-twink,” and then everything goes quiet.

And Miranda takes off her goggles.

And the early morning daylight stings her eyes so bad they feel like eggs popping on a hot skillet.

And she falls back on her bed, defeated and exhausted and absolutely clueless as to what she’s going to do next. This isn’t the first time she’s died this month, but you know what they say: it never gets any easier.

She’s had it for the night. Or what remains of the night. It’s objectively turned morning.

And oh, shit. She completely forgot. She has a paper due today. Isn’t that sweet? Miranda, for the moment, still at least pretends to care about school. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Better get working, Miranda! Gotta get that A+ if you want a good job with a good salary aaaaaaand ben-e-fits! Sleep, we now helpfully remind her, will be provided for her in plenty quantity after her proper, perhaps approaching, death.

But, honestly, how can she even pretend to be interested in the drivel of her Art History professors? Once vaunted, their ideas fall from mouth to ground, words without wings but with plenty of weight, gathering like attic clutter around her feet. And the other students drink it in. Pens go to notebook. Thoughts go to whiteboard scribbling. Once, Miranda was like them. Once, she was more them than they themselves are now.But to Miranda, all these theories seem suddenly so hypothetical, the assertions so far-flung and philosophical, the assignments utterly unnecessary and, mind you, impractical. She can see that the professorial words, if taken to heart, will not help the aspiring artist, but instead entrap them in pedagogical sludge. All of this information, the criticism and hyper-examination, why it’ll scare off all but the most dauntless among their rank. Here is what art is truly about, they seem to say, and it should hardly keep you awake.

Yet it is here Miranda sits, feigning attention, a 3200-word run-on sentence in her lap chronicling Botticelli’s influence on Marc Chagall, amongst perhaps the most qualified group of pre-museum-curators in the Western Hemisphere.

The unruly pointlessness of it all, to a girl fresh from a gunfight. To a girl who’d just died. Again. So how could anyone expect her to pop over with any real pizzazz from her 10am to the dining hall, to the vegan station where they’re serving crusty tempeh again, and from there to the school-mandated therapist, whom she won’t say anything of value to anyways (this her way of protesting against the idea that an institution of higher learning should have any say over the decisions a student makes with their own body, or lack thereof) (the withered, fully-grey therapist likes to ask questions such as “Are we having those hmmmmm feelings again?” and “Don’t you want to hmmmm expand on the subject?”) and from there, right to her 2pm, an exploration of astronomical principles via Van Gogh, and from there right to her 3:30, a Photoshop crash course? Everyone in that last class was asked to come in today with a full-length picture of themselves on a USB drive, which they would then be editing freehand over the first half of the semester, a completely ridiculous request Miranda protests by producing a picture of a howling baboon, rather condescendingly telling the professor through a yawn that she’d make it look like Princess Jasmine by the end of the term. Or the end of class…whichever he’d prefer.

And from there thankfully, mercifully, back home. Where, right on her bed as she left them, the goggles sit somehow fully operational, the yellow-and-blue images — images of life — on their screens distorted by nothing other than distance, begging the girl-arrived to come take a peek at what they’ve done in her absence.

Now, this is a development worthy of melodrama.

With great recklessness, she throws her bookbag to the floor, at once forgetting its contents and the life it symbolizes. The girl moves in a trance towards the goggles, led by her head and her eyes and a crushing desire to again leave this old, blasted world of hers that has, through the course of the day, confirmed its commitment to remaining soul-crushingly dull.

“She’s moving,” says a voice through her headphones, and as Miranda comes to in that other world, it’s with a pair of faces up close to hers, as if inspecting her for tooth decay.

“I ain’t understand how this is even possible,” says the first face. 

“Shit. Johnny, you sure you really up’n shot her?” asks the second.

“Shot was clear as day. Checked the entry wound and everything. Girl just didn’t blink out, what can I say?”

“Annnd, now she’s moving. No problem, right? ‘Shot was clear as day’ my ass. ‘Checked the entry wound?’ I reckon.”

“Ey, little girl: you can hear us, yeah?”

“What are you talking about?” Miranda says quietly, very disoriented and trying to gain her bearings. Trying, trying to see straight, but beyond the immediate faces — which, though finely-featured, blur together into a strand of thin, mustachioed visages and clumps of brown hair — the world she sees is a blur. Vague tannish hues and a dirty, auburn-tinged yellow light cast down upon everything. The spot over there where that bright white is shining through, that must be a window, and the movement back by it must be from other people.

Her inspection of the landscape is interrupted when the first voice barks, “Why ain’t you dead, girl? Where you come from?” It’s a voice that rustles under a mustache; a keen, high-pitched voice like a lascivious whistle, a certain twang of Ye Olde West inherent in its slight rasp, a kind of atmospheric gruffness belaying a violent side below the exterior. It’s a strained voice that shouts again with less patience, “Where you come from, huh? Why you here?!”

“I’m sorry! I don’t have any answers for you. I was roped into this whole thing, I swear. I have literally no idea what’s happening.”

“Well, shit,” Mustache says, throwing his cowboy hat down onto the floor. Her vision appears to clear some, and as it does, Miranda makes out the rest of the room’s details: two women in hoop dresses sitting wistfully by the window, through which a pair of horses drink out of a trough, a man sitting at an old-timey piano by the far wall, an overweight and monocled gentleman in a suit and paisley tie pacing around the room, and a toddler with a single big tooth dismantling a gun over on the floor by the stairs. Some party.

The Piano Man, tapping his foot, begins to play some Randy Newman jingle.

“So how do you all know each other?” Miranda says coyly.

“Do you know how much trouble you’re in, Missy?” the man with the Paisley tie says suddenly, enraged, he being the Second Face from before, it’s clear. “And you’re here making jokes. The nerve. The blasted nerve!”

“Calm down, Josephine,” one of the girls calls out mockingly, “you ain’t scaring her, nor none of us.”

Paisley checks his watch. “We have to go,” he says. “They’re going to come after us if we stay here too long.”

“Hey girl, look at me,” Mustache calls from the barstool he’s slouched down in, his legs out and crossed in front of him, revealing the intricately hexagonal underside of his boot. “Watchu know about all them folk you come here with? You know their names? Who they working for? Things like that? Anything?”

“And why should I tell you what I may or may not know?”

“Well, you’re here for the prize money I imagine, and for that, you gotta be alive. But if we keep you locked up good and nice, like you are now, and have that little Baby on the floor o’er yonder spend an hour or two exploring your source code, we could get all the answers we need and have you out on your ass in no time. Right, Baby? We can do that, yeah?”

The Baby calls back, in a baritone deep as the movement of tectonic plates, “You bet, Johnny.”

“Yeah, we can do that.” 

“But you haven’t yet.”

“But we haven’t yet. That’s true.” 

“Why?”

“Hmmm. Because I’m a gentleman —” 

“Or a blasted fool!” Paisley interrupts.

Ignoring him, Mustache Johnny continues, “or cuz you might be useful yet. We just want answers, girl, assistance, nothing more. And in return for your assistance, we’ll keep you alive long enough to get a share of the cut, if you don’t screw us something fierce.”

“How do I know you aren’t going to kill me? Why would you even keep me alive?”

“Good questions, Miss. Weeeeeellllll, Johnny? How does she know you aren’t going to off her? Why are you keeping her alive?” Paisley seems legitimately curious.

“Gotta trust me. Come now, look at me. This is a face you can trust. As for the latter question? Well, put it plainly, we’re all gon’ die unless we get some answers and get ‘em quick. A bit less money’s better’n no money.”

“Well, uhm, what do you want to know?” Miranda says, feeling herself jerk suddenly into survival mode. It becomes vitally important she does not get booted from this world. She’ll jump ship to a new one as soon as she can, but if she gets kicked out, killed, or otherwise cancelled, who knows where she’d end up? Who knows if she’d be able to find her way back? And to where?

“I told you she doesn’t know anything,” the girl by the window cries out, obviously bored. “We really should go.” Panic, uncovered, stains her sentiment.

“Baby, how’s that project coming?”

Mustache Johnny, ignoring Window Lady, turns to Baby on the floor, who’s assembling the disparate metal parts around him into a gun bigger than he is, with a barrel that could eat an orange and a long, blunderbussian tail behind it. Baby says, “Yeah, one sec, Boss. Just a minute more.”

“He is not your boss. I am your boss,” Paisley shouts at him. “This man,” he says, pointing a long, grubby finger at Mustache Johnny, “is on my payroll. You can do what he says only if I allow it.” 

“Please, Mayor, no need for such fighting.”

“Then listen to me, God damn it! We have to go. They are going to come for us, and regardless what it is he’s building on the floor over there, we ain’t got the men, and we ain’t got the firepower. Now, I’m paying you all, so we do what I say, is that clear?”

“Sure thing, Mayor, sir.” Mustache Johnny says this with such sweeping servitude, it’d be foolish not to believe him. “But if you’re in charge…” he starts saying over his shoulder, crouching down in front of Miranda. A moment staring at this full frontal of his yellow, morbidly corroded teeth reveals holes big as bullets and caked dirt black as burnt oven trimmings. “…you gotta decide what we do with the girl.”

And that’s how Miranda ends up, still tied and immobile, in a saferoom underneath the saloon, a location assumedly more secure from an ambush, which seems to be everyone’s main fear right about now: a sudden onslaught from a group of outlaws, retaliation for a previous skirmish.

Well, Miranda’s here, in the cramp and dim light, while the Mayor slouches over in a corner biting his lip. They all continue their quiet conversation amongst themselves; Mustache Johnny paces back in forth in front of Miranda, and Gun Baby is back to his construction work.

“So, you going to give us some answers, girl? Or we gonna haveta keep you here some time longer? You have places to be, don’t’cha? You don’t wanna stay here with us so long, now do ya?” 

“How do you know I’m not currently coding my way out of here?”

“Go right ahead missy, if you can, it won’t hurt us much. We’re bored as sin besides; we ain’t got nothing else to do but watch.”

“Who are you even hiding from? The people I was with? Why not just go out and face them? You all seem prepared. They didn’t look that scary to me.”

“Well, seeing as you have some questions of your own, how about we go answer for answer? Or, you know, you can just keep on askin’ into the oblivion…your choice.” 

“Not much of a choice.”

“Ain’t that a stinker?” Mustache lights a match, brings it real close to his eyes, like he’s looking for something in the flame.

“Fine. I’ll tell you whatever I know. Fuck those guys anyways, leaving me here with you clowns.” 

“Well, I’ll start then,” Mustache Johnny says. “Where you come from?”

“Like where I was born? Or where I met up with that lot? Because I sure as shit am not telling you anything about anything outside of this stupid computer game.” 

“How ‘bout the latter then?”

“I don’t know what it’s called, but it was a city on a giant helipad. Does that narrow things down for you at all? Signed up to come here because this guy with a bandana told me his ‘leader’ might have something I’m looking for.”

“And what’s that you’re looking for?”

“Nah, man. My turn to ask. Why are you hiding from those people I came in with?”

“Cuz they ain’t supposed to be here,” Mustache says, sitting up, putting his elbows on his knees, looking mean. “Not supposed to be here, sabotaging everything, we have no idea what kinds of rules they’re playing by. We’s lucky we got out as we did.  The other team, not so lucky. Decimated, each and every one of them. Don’t you know that? Or were you already blown to bits by then? Wanna know why we’re hiding? We’re scared, and we don’t want to lose 20k acting like dipshits if we can do it being smart-like. Happy? Now, whatchu looking for with that lot?”

“You’re going to think I’m stupid.”

“But?”

“But, uhm, I think they have this, uhm, this skeleton key. At least, that’s what I heard, you know? I’m an, ahem, traveler of sorts, but finding it rather difficult to travel the way I need through these rooms. So, if I can get what their leader got, well, that’d make my life a lot easier.”

“Ah, yeah. That actually makes some sense. We was wondering how ya’ll could get in here. You know, we randomize our locks when we host games like this, so you gotta be hella crafty or hella mean or hella hooked up to be getting in here unannounced, and I’m judging she’s the latter, otherwise the money’d’ve just been stolen from right under us. It’s happened before. But your leader’s playing for some reason, which means they either can’t take the money, or are here for something else. Odd.”

“What do you want with me?” Miranda asks suddenly. “And I know I’m out of turn, but that’s a most important question, seeing as I have some pretty important business to attend to. Elsewhere. Now-ish. I expect a full answer, by the way.”

Mustache turns back to the Paisley Mayor, who’s engaged with the ladies in some kind of heated conversation, all animated and such but totally silent to Miranda’s ear, so they must be in a private chat, a fact that alternately relieves and scares the heck outta her. Well, Johnny is looking over at him for some kind of sign he’s listening to their conversation, or perhaps he just needs input, but Paisley isn’t paying any attention at all, so Johnny turns back to Miranda, all suddenly relaxed-like.

“To tell you the God’s-honest truth, kid, I’m not totally sure. Never was a real agreement on all that. I mean we definitely want some specifics, you know, like how many o’them there are, what’re their names if they have ‘em, where they hail from and what they want, but from there we can’t agree. I think we should use you as bait and lure them into a trap. Some of them want to keep you here indefinitely, and some want to keep testing out this power of yours.”

“What power?”

“‘What power,’ she says. What power? What power!? Kid, you should be dead right now. What I mean is that, well, I shot you in the head, watched you die. Most times that happens — correction: every time — body disappears, Program deems the player a loser and kicks ‘em from the game. But you stayed solid. Outlaws out there left you to die, of course: they ain’t know the rules of the game ‘well as we do. But we knew that was weird. Picked you up, brought you here thinking you might come on back to us, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what you did. You’re a survivor, my friend. And as far as I’m concerned, that makes you real valuable to all parties involved. You got a wallet hooked up to this here Program?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re worth a pretty penny, too. If you’re the last one standing, you’re worth 20k. A powerful bargaining chip you are.”

“Yeah, but I’m worthless to you,” Miranda shouts. “The only way I get that money is if all of you and all of them go down before me, and being that I’m unarmed, that seems unlikely, huh?”

“Go on.”

“Why don’t we make a deal? We both want something from our friends out there. I want that key, you want them all dead. And I can’t die. So, let’s say I walk in there and start shooting, take out everyone but the one I want. You all come in on my tail, clean up the bastards, and we both get what we want. I get that key from that outlaw’s cold, dead hands, and you get to split up 20,000.”

“You’re making a deal with her?” The Mayor shouts suddenly, coming up behind Mustache. “You’re going to get us all killed! I will not allow it.”

But despite Paisley’s urging, it’s clear who the real boss of these here parts is.

And that’s how Miranda ends up on the back of a horse at the edge of the city, looking out into the wild wild country, a small army of fortune fighters ready to pick up her trail, tracking her heavy footsteps from a great, great distance.

Her gaze facing outward onto the playa, she waits, and waits, and she waits for a sign of something. But here’s the thing about going looking for trouble…eventually, you’re bound to find it.

Looking nonchalant, a silhouetted figure appears up on that crest over yonder and lifts something to its eyes before sidewinding back over the ridge. While unseen crows caw and hidden desert crickets continue their maniac chirping, Miranda hops from her horse, sets it running in the opposite direction as a sign to the others, and after a short wait, treks up to the ridge’s scalp, hot on the trail of the trouble she saw waiting for her.

From up top, she can see the figure some distance off. It’s the only thing with any height in the otherwise flat, listless distance. Other than it walking, there’s only sand, only dust-devils, only the passing black of flying insects appearing, by way of their speed, to be glitched pixels against so many otherwise uniform.

There’s following and there’s speeding up and of course there’s slowing down, but when our faraway figure dashes into a rocky outcropping, and though Miranda runs violently after it, the trail goes cold. It takes quite a while for her to emerge on the other side of the red stone maze within the rock, but when she does, when she looks out over this fresh, new patch of wasteland, there’s nothing out of place. A few Saguaros with carved faces stand singly stolid a ways away, their green hides the only welcome change from the orange and sandstone and beige rest of the world.

Miranda treks out to the Saguaro shade, where she decides to wait for the rest of the raiding party to catch up with her.

Off in the distance, she sees flat movement on the sand. If she squints her eyes, she can see the flitty forms of two lizards crawling all over and around each other. She watches the bearded dragons with interest, wondering if their movements have been coded with real David Attenborough accuracy. They stop, one mounts the other, and Miranda averts her eyes, not wanting any eavesdropping eyes to think she’s some kind of creep.

“You’re in the wrong place,” comes a voice from above. Miranda looks up, and the tall Cactus looks back down at her.

“Pardon?”

“He never came out the way you did. I would’ve seen.”

“Well, thanks a lot. That’s very helpful. How did you know I was looking for someone, though?”

The Cactus shrugs its prickled shoulders. “We all are connected by the same root system. Consider us watchful observers. Friends.”

Miranda thanks the cactus and trudges back to the canyon, seeing from this new angle, in the final antechamber of the crag, a small, human-sized crack in the rock that’s just large enough for her to shimmy through.

Like watching a character in a movie suffocate or drown on screen, when Miranda squeezes into the virtual crack in the canyon, she finds herself short of breath. It’s hard to distance your body from what your senses are experiencing. In Miranda’s claustrophobic momentary delirium, she can almost feel her own hot breath coagulating back around her face, as if there really were red stone just inches from her nose.

Shortly, mercifully, she comes to a clearing at the end of the fissure. After her last boot is pulled through, she turns to look upon a campsite not far off, dotted with tents and smoldering fires, the only thing standing in this open bowl carved from the rock.

“You’ll forgive me for this, I suspect,” says Druid, the figure, sly as a bobcat and quick as a lynx and already pressed close behind her. She can’t turn to face him and in fact sees only the slightest glint of his knife before the screen goes black. He offers neither grunt nor grimace in the way of being affected by this murder.

Miranda resists the urge to give up on the game entirely this time, using this moment of inactivity to use the restroom, get a snack, check Big Banana’s stock ticker and become furious at yet another day of big gains. Somewhere, Jim Cramer goes crazy with the buy button. The Twins aren’t home, she sees, and also, it’s just after midnight. She’ll have to decide soon about further ignoring the real world. But not yet. In the kitchen, she wolfs down a hard-boiled egg. In the bathroom, she pops a pimple on her chin. In the living room, she’s drawn towards the window. She leans her forehead against it, until the hot air from her nose fogs up the glass below her eyes.

In her room, she finds the brief death has ended, the story continues to plow ahead.

“Told you ma’am,” she hears reentering the Program, “Girl can’t be killed.”

The room she awakes into is a luscious octagon encircled by furs of all kinds — Kodiak and jaguar, fur seal and orangutan — lit by lava lamps. Some splintered sunlight shines in through the open tent flap, too. An oaky, big-important-oh-look-at-me-and-all-my-money-business-man-type table stretches the length of the space over there, and all sorts of obsolete explorer Gewgaw plaster the walls and shelves like this is Francisco De Gama’s fuck dungeon or something. Talk about a sextant, huh?

In the center of the room, practicing her mini-golf swing with a ball and a club and a red solo cup, is a Japanese Woman in a very-appropriative Native American headdress.

“You really shouldn’t be wearing that,” Miranda says.

“My grandfather was a quarter-Cherokee,” the woman responds in an androgynous, authoritative voice.

“Okay, well…Not really sure the politics of that but, you know, I shouldn’t really be —”

“Leave us,” the Woman says to Druid, who’d been standing silent in that corner, wrapped in tiger fur, this whole time.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he responds, this pathetic thing, slinking out of the tent. Miranda is unsure whether that sound she just heard was general machine static or Druid hissing at her. Men, man.

After sinking another putt in the red cup, the Woman turns to Miranda. “So, how did you find out who I was?”

“What do you mean?” Miranda asks. “Who are you?”

“Don’t play dumb,” the Woman says, looking at her now. “What with that obvious getup of yours, you’re clearly here to fuck with me. How’d you find out?”

“What getup? What are you talking about?” Miranda says, suddenly aware, strangely aware, that she was no idea what she looks like. It’s never mattered, never been a point of question. She’s never imagined her appearance because there’s been so little of her own imagination needed in this already so expansive place.

“The face-paint, the horns, the ridiculous robe…it’s a great imitation, I’ll give you that, but you’re no Gwami the Seer.”

“I’m Gwami the Seer?” Miranda asks, dumb-sounding and slow.“I don’t know, you tell me? It’s your avatar.” The Woman is getting impatient, obviously perturbed by Miranda’s ignorance, which she must believe is a feigned one. “Well, I don’t know what you want, but since you found your way to me here, you’re obviously looking for me, and, well, you found me. What do you want? An autograph? A personal AMA? You want to know who the real Gwami the Seer is? You and everyone else. Keep moving, dude, this is me obviously not wanting to be bothered.”

“Wait,” Miranda hears herself saying. The gears in her brain turn and make an awful grinding sound, like they can’t figure out how to spin in unison. And then they unclick and the gears go, and up through the pully they engender comes a word she never would’ve thought she’d need to utter in here.

“Lakshmi?”

Lakshmi.

Plot twist! (Oh, god, really? A plot twist? Millennials always semi-expect a cliffhanger, a startling revelation at a crucial moment. Blame all the post-credit scenes. We’re tired of twists, spent by surprises. So is Miranda. Or, well, she would be, if it weren’t she the plot were twisting.)

“What are you doing here?” Miranda says, half-stupefied.

“Well, I’m kind of in the middle of a game. How did you track me down? This place is supposed to be all-the-way encrypted?”

“Lakshmi…it’s me…it’s Miranda. Miranda Swami!” She knew that was a bad idea before she typed it, knew putting this information into written existence could be trouble, but she didn’t and doesn’t care. “Where have you been? Why haven’t you called?”

“Miranda?” 

“Yes!”

“Miranda…Swami?” 

“Yes, dude, yes!”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t! This is a ridiculous ridiculous coincidence I think.”

“No no. This doesn’t make sense.” Lakshmi says this and begins pacing, dropping the golf club and moving around to the other side of the table, sitting himself atop it. “I was brought here. I got these texts and on the busses, there were —”

“Me too. Are you saying…”

And there it is. Confirmation: this is a larger plot, and everyone’s in on it. Her and Lakshmi, someone has been watching them both, has brought them both in on some crazy quest, has tested their forces of will and brought them together.

“I met with this Woman —”

“— with Red Hair?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Holy shit.” 

“My brain hurts.”

“Well, what are you doing here?” Miranda says. “How did you end up leading these people?”

Lakshmi shrugs. “I’ve been, for lack of anything else to do, just accumulating wealth, you know? Seemed like a safe plan. I’ve been waiting for something to happen, had a feeling something would, and, well, now it’s happened.”

“I’m so happy you’re here,” Miranda says. And it’s true, Miranda is frantically overjoyed. It’s that kind of happiness that floods up and out of you, that puddles around your eyes, that makes your face hot and your toes start tapping, too. Lakshmi! Lakshmi is here! Everything is going to be okay because Lakshmi is here! Finally, she’s anchored in place, after so long spent adrift.

“You too,” he says.

There’s a long, awkward silence. Miranda searches her mind for something to say, but comes up short.

“So, I hear you can jump from room to room,” she says finally. “That’s actually why I came here. I’m looking for the Woman obviously. She told me all these insane things and — well, I don’t know if she told you, too, but I’ve got to find her. It’s very important. And then I heard about this skeleton key thing, and that you — well I didn’t know it was you you — but that you had one, and so I came looking.” 

“I hear you can’t die.”

“It seems that way. You’re going to give me your password thing, right? You’re going to share it with me and we’re going to go on this quest together, huh?” 

“Don’t you have schoolwork to get to?” 

“Shut up, dude.”

“Yeah, I’ll help you.”

Miranda stands up from her chair, stands up and begins shaking her limbs out, like she really can’t believe what’s happening, and a part of her really can’t.

“So, you give me the code, and then you fly out to the City — you can stay with me of course — and we’ll get together and do this whole thing together, and we’ll find the Woman and get Gwami back, oh oh oh, and we’ll fucking destroy Big Banana. We’ll be heroes, Lakshmi. Absolute heroes. This is so big, so much bigger than us. That’s what she told me. We can have a real effect, make real change. That’s what you wanted, right? To matter?”

Some rocks fall in the distance, someone shouts, and Lakshmi stands up from the table, bending over to look inside a drawer. Within it, after some rummaging, he produces a silver key, oversized like a fist, with a skull carved in its head. “Wow, that’s like really really on the nose,” Miranda says.

“You need to get going,” he says. There’s some more vague shouting from outside, and Lakshmi brings the key to Miranda. “But yeah, I know. Not very subtle.”

She takes the key from him and, at once, a transparent blue door, shimmering and wavy like the Mexican coastline, appears beside her. It tells her to hit the F1 key to exit the room. Miranda motions towards it. “Is this going to follow me around now?”

“Good luck, Miranda Swami, my friend. Keep going.” he says. A white light emerges from the door and begins enveloping the world.

As it spreads, so does all this maniac screaming, the boulders falling faster and harder and the shouts, the gunshots, the boulders which are really hoofbeats trodding upon hard rock and then the tent is coming down, coming apart at its seams as a horse without a rider flies through the structure (though God knows how they fit a whole-ass horse through the canyon), and the light gets larger and brighter and she feels her skin get actually hotter and then it’s all gone.

She’s back in the hallway.

Burnt doors and the key still in her hand. There’s a little text box just nearly faded sitting in the center of her vision. “Don’t lose that,” it reads, “some people would kill for it.”

Then poof, it disappears, the signpost gone from her world for good. There’s no sound, no desert sky, no texts and no Lakshmi. All remnants of that little life are gone. Everything but the key in her hand. Briefly, she walks down the hallway, stopping at the next door on her left, which she approaches and, following another easy-peasy button command, opens.

Without stepping through, she sees inside a grand ballroom filled with turning, twisting couples — the men in tailcoats, the women in hoop dresses — all of them performing a synchronized waltz. A pair of gentlemen wearing gold top hats sit and watch it all from a high dais. One looks towards the door, locks eyes with Miranda, and appears mightily disturbed. He nudges his partner, who looks that way too, but by then Miranda has closed the door, retreated back into solitude.

Being all-powerful, she thinks, is a feeling she must get used to. 

She must get used to that, and also, she must call Lakshmi.

But tomorrow, maybe.

She sends him a text. Thanks for all your help, tonight. I’ll call you in the morning.

He doesn’t immediately respond. That’s probably for the best; they could both use a break from their new, shared reality. She shakes the other world out of her eyes, sets the goggles down on her desk, and realizes that she’s tired as sin.

Which makes sense; being two people again after so much time spent being one, well that’s liable to sap the life right outchea.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

Miranda, I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.

Imagine waking up to a text like that. You’ve collapsed finally into bed, shed the Atlas weight upon your shoulders for just a moment, and slept a deep, dreamless sleep. But when you awake, instead of finding a message of camaraderie and brotherly understanding upon your phone, you find one of confusion, a denial, a distance.

But…but the plot twist?

She reads the text over and over again, thinking maybe this is like what Lakshmi said weeks ago, not wanting to put anything down on paper that could be incriminating. She wishes she thought of that before. She knows calling him would put this confusion to rest but can’t quite bring herself to do it. Can’t quite bring herself to make any words at all.

Instead she writes, Last night? You don’t remember us, uhm, chatting yesterday? Exchanging things *wink wink*?

Three little dots appear on her screen, and then they sink back down. Like a sine wave she can only see the crest of, the dots rise and fall, remaining invisible under the x-axis of her screen, rising and falling again.

Finally, she gets a response. Idk dude (sic). Hope you’re okay, you’re making me nervous lol.

Three dots that just can’t make up their minds. Up and down, up and down, and then:

Want me to call someone for you?

Almost against her wishes, the events of the previous night replay themselves. She met Lakshmi in the desert, and though it said it was Lakshmi, it doesn’t seem like it was Lakshmi, and she told it she was Miranda Swami, she was baited in by it and told it who she was. She admitted to being Miranda and admitted to being Gwami the Seer, to some unknown entity that sucked her in with the promise of friendship, someone who knew exactly the kind of weakness best exploited. Someone in that Program knows who she is, knows that Miranda Swami and Gwami the Seer are the same entity. That brings the total count in-the-know to four: Caleb, Real Lakshmi, Fake Lakshmi, and presumably the Woman with the Red Hair. She has no idea in whose clutches that knowledge is the most dangerous.

Finding the Woman with the Red Hair is now mandatory. Not that the task didn’t have urgency under it before, but now, with some lunatic running around knowing who she is, spewing that knowledge to the rest of the world potentially, a need to clear her name and retcon her image is more important than ever. She needs subscribers, she needs advertisers, she needs the security that comes with presence.

Wiping the tired from her eyes, she trudges into the kitchen, left amok apparently after the Twins came home last night, though she heard them not. She finds someone’s energy drink in the fridge and gulps it down quick, feeling her heart beating strong against her chest, a reminder of what world she truly exists in.

But that uncomfortable heartbeat and a quick curbside cigarette are going to be enough of the real world for the day. She goes back into her room, hits the lights and locks the door, ready to go back into that place for the final sequence, ready to destroy anything that stands in her path, ready to become death, if need be, before death can motherfuckin’ become her.