5

When they talk about her, it’s in hushed tones, in private chats and secure spaces, always looking over their shoulders before they do so, ensuring that she isn’t going to be there — Where? There! — in that shadow-darkened corner, having silently entered while their backs were turned. They discuss what they would even do if they saw her, this thing that can appear and vanish at will, that can infect their private spaces, listen to their private thoughts, that will follow them tirelessly, destroying everything nearby until she’s given what she wants. She’ll rip you in two if the programming allows it, or so they say.

And boy, do they love saying. Maybe their general inability to keep quiet is why Miranda trails a lengthening legend behind her as she jumps from world to world. I mean, yeah, she’s appeared in shadowy corners before, has eavesdropped on some conversations perhaps she wasn’t meant to be privy to, but this isn’t a killer witch or soul-stealing hacker or anything like that! It’s just a girl — just Miranda Swami! You know her! Just a girl with hair like a dragon’s horns and dingy, initiate robes and warped, pallid skin like underneath a wet fingernail.

Yet the legend grows. If it isn’t she herself who is haunting them, it’s her watchful spirit, for who’s to say where the limits of her power lie? Could she be invisible, hugged tight to the walls? Could she have taken the form of an inanimate object? That coffee table over there, yeah that one, doesn’t it look kind of funny? You don’t think…no, couldn’t be…but what if?

But what if?

To make the most of the little time she thinks she has, Miranda cuts out all the distractors from her life, anything that will get in the way of her (con)quest. Her university, believing she’s on some sort of medically-mandated mental-sabbatical, has, after some tense negotiation, generously frozen her credits. Meanwhile, Miranda now gets her nutrients from bottled meals, ones with pseudo-medicinal names like Vivi and RegenX and Sate. Anything else her body needs she absorbs in vitamin form, ingesting handfuls of cloyingly sweet grape-and-orange-flavored chewy tablets at a time, figuring that more vitamins cannot possibly be worse. She gives a delivery service her building code and has them leave at her doorstep whatever her whims wish for: Soylent and Flintstone’s Gummies and Hot Cheetos and tampons, Advil and Milk Duds, Breathrite Strips and coconut water. A basic kind of life support for our inter-dimensional heroine.

After a while, these days spent hooked into the Program, spent hunting, days with a singular purpose, each one so like the last, they begin blending into one another. It was always Miranda’s tacit intention that she stop realizing just how much of her life she’s passing within the walls of the Program. Easier that way.

Easier still because time doesn’t appear to pass in the Program the way it passes outside. Time, as we understand it, cannot be measured in the Program on account of there being no windows. In other words, without the way windows (and the light that floods in through them) help us absentmindedly catalogue its every movement, time ceases to adhere to a circadian cycle, becoming instead, of a measurement device of days and moments and meetings, merely a force that links events together, that carries action over from second to second. Without windows or clocks, without anything to ground it in a routine, time becomes the easiest, basest version of itself: chronology condensed.

How simple, how natural it is to cease her studies and her pesky relationships, to lose uncountable hours within the machine, to eat only when necessary, to answer nature only when it calls, to sleep in short unpredictable bursts with the goggles still on her face, to keep her stalking subconscious at bay with energy drinks and Adderall tablets, to feel fully the torsion between two disparate worlds, as the rhythms that define one world try to cope with the indefatigability that governs the other.

And what is it she’s actually doing in that other world? Besides inspiring fear, of course? Exploring. Intimidating. Spying. Behind those goggles, she’s a pirate, traversing worlds and raiding communities with Vespucci swagger and De Gama torque. She is Francis Drake if he weren’t a slave trader, didn’t wage a scared white man’s war on any native populations he found, and didn’t die of sad, trivial dysentery in the shit-smelling captain’s quarters of the same boat which was, just weeks earlier, torn apart by a better sailor’s cannonballs outside of San Juan. She does, however, adopt his solipsism and slight Jesus complex.

She fancies herself the seaman’s child, who looks out at the sun, setting against a pink and red and gold-twanged ocean, seeing nothing of man’s devising out on the horizon and wondering, with a sudden and desperate and vital fervor, What is out there? What might I find? And could it ever be as lovely as it is in my longing?

But to her yearning is attached something more sinister: a dark kind of apotheosis. The kind of thing that happens when you believe you have met God, and thereafter have been guided by one of Her archangels. For in some hardened part of her heart, rests a belief that this entire world might very well exist for her, and her alone. The machinations she observes and the people she meets, the strange and false claims they make, they might’ve been placed deliberately for her whimsy, for her to bribe and chide and torment with her presence. The processes and protocols in this place are nothing more than gentle hands pushing her forward, friendly, windswept waves lapping against the side of her vessel. No matter how you struggle, you’ll never even hardly disrupt the current.

She comes to see her computational compatriots less as people and more as obstacles. And this causes her, at times, to behave rather egregiously.

Thus, we see her adopting her first pose: The Monster.

For example: in one of her first attempts at inter-Program travel, she opens a random door and enters into a purely pitch-dark world. Some voice says, “Who is that? What’s that glow? Did someone just leave? Is someone here? Dammit, you’re going to give us away, close that damn door!”

And another, so-so-similar voice: “Why is that door blue?”

The door closes, dissolving into the shadow just in time. There’s a collective sigh of relief, but it’s a false one. A thin sliver of light scars the darkness, further illuminating the world around Miranda as the bright wound opens wider. Mountainous shakers of salt and pepper high as a flag-pole tower over her head. She couldn’t see their caps even on tippy-toes. Beside her is a container of Old Bay Seasoning wide as the back of an eighteen-wheeler. A silo of cooking spray, house-high vials of honey and vanilla extract; an Everest of white flour, the writing on the bag made illegible by its size. Unseen bodies tense. Someone’s teeth chatter fiercely.

“Get down! Now!” comes the voice, and Miranda is pulled forward onto her belly, joining a small platoon of diminutive Green Army Men, of the classic gumball machine variety, lying prone behind a balsamic vinegar rocket-ship.

Light, a rapturous light enveloping everything, and a gargantuan woman’s face comes peering into the spice cabinet, her Galactus hands searching slowly for something among the jars, each accidental tap on the cabinet floor or brushing of something aside causing earthquake rumblings that threaten to knock the regiment’s cover clean over.

“What’s happening?” Miranda whispers to the nearest Army Man ear.

“Please be quiet, wait until she’s done.”

“Who?” Miranda says, peering out at the giant blue-eyed, red-haired face out there in the light. Red hair? Miranda, feeling deific, ignores the warnings, asks “Who is that? Is she…? Wait, who are you?” 

“Shhhhh.”

“Do you know that woman? I think I’m supposed to be looking for her. I’m Miranda Swami. Did you hear me? Miranda Swami? Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“Dude, what the fuck are you even doing here?” another of the Army Men interjects. “Just go away if you’re gonna ruin this for us.”

“Okay, cool. Yeah, fine, totally…totes, I’ll just ‘go away’” Miranda says, stepping out from behind the vinegar, hopping up and down, waving her arms around. “Hey! Hey, over here! Yeah, right here! It’s me! I found you!”

Because all the Army Men start screaming insults at her, Miranda turns, which means she does not see how the giant woman’s face grows scarlet or how her teeth grow monstrous or how each strand of the Woman’s red hair cracks like an eggshell, birthing onto her skull a mound of purple-gray snakes with yellow, glaring eyes, how she begins changing from housewife into some virtual goddamn devil. When she does turn to see how the Gigantress has changed, it’s because The Beast’s big ol’ hand has turned into a fist and is flying slowly towards Miranda’s location. But that’s okay, Miranda just calls herself a door and passes through. She does not hear the cries of those she left behind, or the womp-womp-wooooomp of the Game Over screen.

It’s little things like that — annoying and selfish if not exactly dastardly — which prompt players like those Army Men to gather in a nearby city, sit at a virtual gambling hall, blow Bitcoin playing blackjack and talk about the Dragon Woman who ruined a very fucking important speed run they had been, until then, cruising through, looking fit to approach a world record. But then, she happened. And now they have to debrief. In passing, someone might overhear their words and join in the discussion with their own anecdote of a suspiciously similar character. The sympathy will flow like cheap cognac. Or perhaps it’s the Dealer who says, “Ya’ll talkin’ about a girl with dragon horns for hair, real pale white skin?”

And one of the Army Men will say, “Yeah, you know her?”

And the Dealer might sigh and say, “She was here not too long ago, actually, going to every table, interrupting every player to ask if they’d seen some lady, knew anything about this random broad. She was talkin’ crazy from the start. We’re quiet people, you know, stayin’ to ourselves, so of course we’ve got no idea what she’s on about, but everyone’s tryin’ to be friendly, right? Sayin’ ‘Naw, ma’am, awful sorry but we ain’t seen anyone with such a description.’

“So, she starts stomping ‘round, starts screaming everyone’s cards out, ruining everyone’s fun, and even when people are muting her, she’s still up in their faces, typing on and on and on in all caps about what chumps we are. When people start logging off, leaving ‘cuz why deal with some crazy boppin’ about, my boss comes out to see about all the hub-bub. Well, she’s ranting on about how we’re all machines, how we ain’t mean nothin’, and by this point she’s just actin’ up for kicks, knocking over tables and breaking bottles behind the bar. I mean, they’re just for show, the bottles — for ambience, but still, someone’s gotta put ‘em back. So, we try to kick her out and she’s yelling, ‘What aren’t you telling me? I want some answers!’ And there’s all this hullaballoo, goes on and on and on, and before you know it, the place is clean empty. The girl starts sighing and a door, I swear to Christ, a blue door like I ain’t ever seen before, appears from nowhere right behind her, and out she goes, never to be heard from again. We didn’t have a single customer for a week. I got a son at home, man. I gotta feed my boy.”

For Miranda, these rooms ransacked and forsaken are mere minor casualties to be searched, forgotten about and moved on from, small stones turned over and nothing more. The momentary inconvenience in another’s group hangout or weird indie IP or virtual gambling hall is a small price considering the stakes of the game she, and only she, is playing.

So, doorways and rooms within the Program are entered and experienced and, by virtue of their ultimate disappointment, clumped together with all the other failures, the sheer glut of all their unnecessary information quickly supersaturating Miranda’s meager short-term memory.

Questions are asked to locals; private chats are set up, and in a few instances, she exchanges more cryptocurrency for answers. She receives many more answers than she expected, she just wishes they were all the same. Time after time she juts into a room, having followed specific directions to get there, only to find herself in some random simulation without a trace of the Woman she’s looking for. In many of these, yes, she acts a monster, but be kind to the girl, she’s frustrated, like she’s been running down a hallway that stretches a little longer with each of her steps.

But with time, the aggressiveness wanes. She begins to understand that, in all likelihood, she won’t get where she needs to go on the advice of others. Her exploration might include the people around her, but it can’t rely on them. There’s a freedom in this, a liberation unto place. She feels settling into herself the traveler’s life, the observing and conversing, and the explosive ease of simply being there.

Thus, she strikes her second pose: The Wanderer.

On the cusp of an eruptive volcano live-broadcasted from Bali, she sits with a troupe of Pan-Asian Boy Scouts, regaling them with stories of New York City’s grandeur. She hyperbolizes her world. They in return, tell of fishing the rivers in south Cambodia, of their school in Hong Kong, all in convoluted but sincere attempts at English. They euphemize theirs. They display a nasty habit of speaking at the same time, with the same voice.

“What is it like being so many people at once?” she asks them.

“Like being one,” they say in unison, “but with more surface area.”

Miranda finds a door which, upon entering, sends her skydiving down towards Earth, her and a gaggle of bald, Buddhist monks seated full-lotus in the air. The circular Sangha sits in silent but eerily wide-eyed Zazen as great envelopes of yellow and green farmland open below the clouds. Miranda, curious what will happen once they hit the ground, stays in their midst as the incoming Earth grows larger and larger still. Unperturbed at their coming plight, however, the monks fall and fall and fall, and no wonder their calm: instead of smacking into the Earth and engaging samsara in a hundred-million shattered pieces, they instead phase right through it, rising steadily upward now through an infinite world of bent starlight; hanging, chandelier-shine crystals litter the otherwise errant black void around them. When, somewhere way far up near the very top of this world, they all slow and then stop and then begin falling back down, Miranda realizes what this is: a swinging pendulum of Buddhist bodies. Maybe someone’s using it as a clock. Maybe at midnight, the Buddhists self-immolate. Through the Earth they all go again, and then up through a familiar sky. Somewhere along the heave, Miranda leaves the same way she came in.

Elsewhere are two houseflies in a hut engaged in a lover’s quarrel, and though they were at first startled by Miranda’s unceremonious entrance into their abode, they turn out, most conveniently, to be huge Gwami the Seer fans.

“Yeah, me too, as you can tell,” Miranda sputters.

“Oh, this is so funny. Marc come here — now don’t for a second believe I’m not still furious at you — but come take a picture of me and Gwami. Okay, okay what should we say?”

“Uhm, Gwam–ee?”

“Okay, on three! One, two, three, Gwam-eeeeeee!”

Flash. Immortalized forever, she becomes an angry insect’s pre-divorce mantelpiece.

On a ring of Saturn, she meets a trio of would-be astronauts lamenting their thyroid issues, cursing their mothers for providing them the gene that would forever keep them landlocked. But this place, they say, is a worthy second-option.

“Want to see something cool?” one of them asks. “Got your headset on real tight? All right! Remember to breathe.”

He gives Miranda a running push that sends her spinning flipping rotating gently through all those rings and then straight into the stars, moving with constant force and soothing centripetal motion, until the whole of Saturn appears like an apple, graspable within her palm; until Jupiter rises up like a giant’s eye from the otherwise nothingness. The planet’s swirling storm clouds appear like red velvet batter, until, of course, she passes it completely by, due for Mars in a few minutes more.

Who would have thunk that an entire universe — traversable, expansive, and nuanced — could exist with such furious detail behind a 15-inch screen? Roiling through space in just this slightest segment of the Program, this world-within-a-world-within-a-world alone offers a bounty as rich and thickly enveloping as the one she can touch with her fingers. And what this world lacks in sensual pleasure, in tactility, it more than contains in possibility, in exploratortality.

This new world stretches outward ad infinitum, its fingers continuously reaching just further than the day before, than the moment before, ever closer to some glorious wash of sunlight, to some impossible ideal of endlessness, but reaching, reaching always. For when we strip away our stories, our plots, the machinations of man and mind within the machine, we have only that which this world mimics: a stretching of the human spirit, as it moves towards something even it knows not what, just towards, just forwards, just on. 

Dizzy, Miranda exits into the hallway, wondering if there’s a button command for kissing with relief the flat, constant floor below her.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

What the programmer does within these walls and halls is one-part architecture, sure, and several-parts engineering, of course. But this kind of peak programming semi-regularly approaches magic. And at times (dare I say it?) even art itself.

From where comes our exclusionary list of what acceptably constitutes art? Film and poetry and cooking in the fine French style, dancing and painting and sculpting, playing the guitar and the cello and singing in a high tenor, and, honestly, not much else. But, I ask you, what is a novel but a writer’s fantasy world? What is a transcendent painting, a dance, a film but a causeway to another realm, an analogue locale? The places within this Program, these madman works by virulently obsessive programmers, do they not rival in intensity and compulsion and creativity anything crafted at Yaddo? Imagine the wonder we might wake within us should we elevate all simple acts to art. Tooth brushing and the hard-boiling of an egg.  

Whatever you do, make it an offering to me.

Art is too sly for us; all it requires is invocation, and dutifully, it appears, already imbued, already full.

Time duckwalks onward, and Miranda is nowhere nearer to the Woman with the Red Hair. Her trails have all run cold, and neither intimidation nor charm, neither gall nor cunning nor so much passing time thaw them out. Miranda is left with only the fruits of this world to soothe her. Her higher purpose has retreated further and further from both her grasp and understanding. With that purpose fading, too, she has only this world, and the treasures it can sometimes be induced to show.

With this acquiescence, Miranda eases into her third pose: The Observer.

The more time she spends in the Program, the more she re-enters rooms she’s been to before, the more people she apologizes to for her ghastly past behavior, the more “You again?”’s and “What are you doing here?”’s said to her incredulously, the more distant the whole point of this becomes. She’s simply here, with nowhere to go, content to watch leaves change, to watch faces wrinkle, to watch construction and paint dry.

The seasons change fully: cold sweeps into the city with a long, unsubtle sigh. Three of Big Banana’s Board Members have written best-selling, book-length retrospectives on Cindi Lapenschtall’s life, and Miranda further forgets why it is she’s searching this other world, and who for?

Each passed day takes from her more of Gwami’s memory, too. Here, it’s the title of an early Gwami video she has trouble recalling. There, it’s a ghastly mention of Gwami on some blog, a throwaway line filled with hate, that fails to elicit any of the usual brutal, emotions from Miranda’s idling mind. She becomes more Miranda Swami as each hour falls into the next, but a new Miranda Swami, one with no illusions or delusions about what has happened to her.

What’s happened is this: Gwami is dead. The Artist Formerly Known as Miranda Swami, she’s dead too. In their place is a new Miranda, a paler and less convivial Miranda. A forgetful and foggy Miranda. This Miranda escapes for further hours into the Program less and less to right a wrong, less and less spurred by a vague vengeance, and more and more because, well, she has nowhere else to go. Even sitting silently in some dark, half-public place of that online realm is nicer than any activity in ours. In there, she can be among others, a silent and smelly and solitary mess, without being othered. Nobody looking at her, judging her, placing her in a phony context of their own devising, falsely exposing her imagined innards, making her a statistic.

The Twins think she has some kind of sickness, is why she’s always in bed. She told them it’s “a really aggressive Sickle Cell Anemia.” They leave her alone for the most part. Actually, they’re quite nice to her, you know, when they remember her at all. Sometimes they bring home extra pizza, or invite her to the movies when they’re out of work early. These acts, in a younger, stauncher Miranda, would have gone unnoticed altogether. Though noticed, they’re now actively ignored. Miranda, all too aware of herself, demands to be alone and untouchable, damn any outside effort to the contrary.

She turns on her clock radio and Z100 is talking about some cryptic countdown clock Big Banana has begun projecting onto the Statler Building. They’re talking to “experts” about what it could mean.

Tuning to the classic rock station is no better: apparently Big Banana is sponsoring a high-end music festival in the Florida Keys, and only Q104.3 has the tickets. So be caller number 14 right now and…

It’s raining, so Miranda looks out the thin window by her bed. Through the distorting drops she sees New York’s forest floor below her, enveloped in neon-yellow like it’s riddled with fungus, like the banana billboards are a hot rash. Yellow umbrellas and yellow taxicabs unwittingly advertising, and somewhere among them all is a being that shares her blood. Caleb Swami, out for a stroll probably (he’s always liked the city in the rain), at peace with a consumerist world finally being consumed, probably making a buck off of it, honestly.

Why hasn’t he called?

To spite the questions that come with such real-world window-gazing, she returns to the Program. She needs refuge from what our world makes her think, and she finds it in a quiet place, a seaside realm as elegantly designed as any Renaissance painting, where she sits at a bus stop watching old-timey cars pass by on a loop. Three Eastern European geriatrics keep to themselves just down the street, every now and then stealing odd looks at her but otherwise making no fuss.

It’s her first time in this room, so it must be a new one. New rooms, and the discovering of them, have stolen Miranda’s heart, make her feel like a pioneer. Make her feel like a young girl who sees something shining in the soft, mossy loam beside the redwood in the backyard, and, digging down, removes from the Earth a tiny heart shaped box within which she finds an empty locket, it having been placed there 80 years earlier by some young, strapping, thoughtful gentleman before a great tragedy took either he or his beloved’s life, a tragedy that would have cursed the box to the bowels of the Earth for all eternity if not for her brief glance at the glinting thing and her taste for adventure; this she knows…she knows.

The room is cast in an intentionally-stylistic, sepia-toned hue, lending the passing automobiles, fat Plymouths and Studebakers and Packards with gaudy white wheels and open compartments, a great historical nostalgia. Whoever designed this place coded love into every pixel. Miranda feels safe in a place of such care, safe like a cozy, well-insulated home, one with a fire and a comfy chair beside it, one with music and the smell of spices settling over a roast in the other room; and someone softly singing.

But for all the beauty of this painstaking portrait, does it not seem somewhat, I don’t know, bland? Pointless even? I mean, why would someone possessing such deific programming power be contented spending themselves on something so vapid? A virtual bus-stop in an automated rendering of some Lithuanian seaside village…where is the intrigue? What’s the rub? Weird, frivolous even, but she knows not impossible. After all, human beings can be weird, frivolous sorts of creatures.

In about five minutes, though, Miranda’s general restlessness, combined with the growing hostility of the Europeans, who’ve ratcheted up the agitation and volume of their heavy Slavic speech, might force her to abandon this place and its weird, frivolous sort of creator both.

But she likes it here, or rather wants to like it here. All the Adderall has left her blood jumpy, so she really has to will herself to ease. She tries focusing on the audio looping in her headphones. Such a sonic addendum is a rarity in these rooms — it’s far more labor-intensive to record and code sounds than simply design objects — especially one as detailed as this, one that seems to have actually been recorded in such a seaside town (with impressive specificity and realistic timbre come the lolling car tires of the passing vehicles, the distant lapping of waves upon concrete sea buttresses, the ecstasy of gulls setting upon bread crumbs, opened shop doors with their jingle-bell trip wires).

In this small sector of secret peace, she thinks how nice it is that at least some of the Dark Web frequenters aren’t looking for profit or excitement or advantage, but just this: a quiet place to sit and ponder, a place to sate a certain pang.

But the found peace doesn’t last long, as the Europeans take to truly shouting at one another, in phrases that, to Miranda’s unlearned brain, sound the same as the last and the one thereafter. Like many Americans, Miranda somewhat subconsciously believes that any non-English speakers around her inevitably use their multi-linguality as a slandering device. Even as she reminds herself how ridiculous this thought is, she feels herself becoming suspicious, paranoid, bothered, the denial counterintuitively convincing her more fully that they’re discussing her, insulting her, trivializing her. Then one of the Europeans clearly gestures her way, and Miranda takes matters into her own hands.

She drops an earbud out of her ear and lays it flat across her phone’s microphone, which has been tasked with recording all spoken speech for the CPU to translate into English. It’s vital that she knows what they’re saying, that she dispel the ridiculous thoughts of her anxious mind. This was a trick she was taught in an early-on therapy session, to recognize and debunk thoughts that seem out-of-place, somehow un-hers, ones too paranoid and far-fetched for even her most disastrous logic centers to have produced. She was taught to parse out the thoughts that were her’s and the ones that were her illness’, and in thwarting that nega-Miranda’s thoughts, she could depower them. So that’s exactly what she does. She really would like to stay here longer.

Confirming her suspicion, the men are indeed not talking about her. She has exposed her mind in its attempt to dupe her. Strangely, though, the men don’t appear to be saying sentences at all. That, or her translation app is bugged to all hell. It shows that the men are repeating — despite their gestures and wavering tones and conversational asides — a sequence of numbers: 24 – 60 – 255 – 130. 24 – 60 – 255 – 130. 24 – 60 – 255 – 130.

Miranda has a no duh realization: these aren’t men at all, but set-pieces. Objects. NPC’s. They’ve been placed here for realism’s sake, but they’re as obtusely unreal as those billowing trees in that park or the squeaky wheels of that Studebaker going by. They sit here on as much a loop as the audio, until always and forever, motioning to the bus stop, screaming and yelling, and then, before long, they’ll go back to their initial, quiet conversation, back to following the algorithmic machine function they carried out when Miranda first came to this place. With that in mind and her consciousness calmed, Miranda tries to incorporate their ramblings into the milieu. 

Feeling the pangs of hungry sleep nipping at her planted feet, Miranda ingests another Adderall, her third in as many hours. At this point, they’re like caffeinated taffy’s, like candy, like crack. As her senses stretch themselves further, as colors become strained and oversaturated, as her nerves thin and fray at their edges and little jolts of electricity send Miranda’s tired shoulders careening into the crook of her neck, she has a thought. It’s a thought that starts small but increases in power and unavoidability with sudden, spiraling commitment: Hey, this lifestyle isn’t good for me. I’m hurting myself.

She repeats her thought out loud, as if to make it real: “This lifestyle isn’t good for me. I’m hurting myself. I’m hurting myself.”

It’s a profound moment. A moment of realization in her fingernails and soul alike.

It’s just this kind of soulful, strong conviction come-from-above that holier folk might call a ‘divine realization,’ what alcoholics refer to as a ‘moment of clarity.’ And poor girl, it’s just about to hit her fully, just about to convince her to rip off those goggles for good, when, abrupt as a heart attack, a screech blasts outward from the center of the program, and with it, a virtual wind so strong it sends the Europeans clutching at their derby hats, so stentorian it stops Miranda’s thoughts of self-help at their larval stage. Virtual hair blows up into her eyes. Ah! What inspired programming! This world has not unclutched her yet. It fights for her affection.

Two of the European trio crane their necks towards the street with fresh interest, but the third stays staring at Miranda. A proverbial parade of Cyrillic marches forth from his mouth, the characters matching the ones she’d been recording. But when he suddenly ceases speaking altogether, the two others turn to look in Miranda’s direction, too. It’s eerily quiet without their ramblings, and Miranda is overcome with the strangest feeling: that they’re looking past her avatar, somehow, at her directly. She begins to shiver.

Then the audio cuts out. All of it: Slavic shouting and simulated beach sounds no more. All of it is swapped out for silence, a silence which lasts only a brief moment before giving way to a distant rumbling, rumbling like thunder, but like from a diseased, hack thundercloud, one that’s less rumbling and more chugging, like the very act of thundering is taking a lot out of it, like this is the whooping cough equivalent of a thunderclap. As it becomes louder, Miranda recognizes it as the unmistakable chugging of a city bus, followed by its painful braking squeals, all of it in the generally-unwell timbre of a vehicle thirty-years past its expiration date.

The air over there glistens and then cracks completely as a black hole appears in the program’s fabric itself, heralding the arrival of a fully-rendered NJ Transit Bus — striped with wavy purple-and-orange lines — that crawls like a centipede from the gap, growing in size and approaching and stopping, finally, with a gaseous exhale in front of the bus stop. The rip in the program closes behind it. This is something Miranda has never seen before. A glint catches her eye from beside the Redwood.

Because the Europeans immediately scramble forward toward the slowing, fwoooosh, idling bus, it’s safe to assume that any extended dawdling might prevent getting onboard, and that getting onboard is the goal. Miranda, not in the business of being left out, wants on too, obviously. And being that she’s no slouch, as soon as the bus even nears, she leaps forward, eager to interrupt the proto-Soviet powwow and join the three curmudgeons on their voyage wherever.

But, ahah-hah, her controls are somehow sticking.

Despite her best maniac efforts, her twitchy trigger-fingers pounding on the arrow keys, she remains glued to her seat, a pox upon her that does not lift no matter how many times she types her Skeleton Code into her keyboard. Nary a single blue door comes to her rescue neither. Ipso facto, she can neither run to catch the bus nor throw up an angry exclamation as it fills its belly with European meat. Miranda resigns herself to her fate. The bus pulls away from the station, leaving its last prospective passenger to await another ride to the end of the line.

This is a whole day of firsts, apparently. She hasn’t been immobilized like this since before she met Fake-Lakshmi, hasn’t been so obviously flouted by the Program since before she began traversing it in wide swaths. Such strange happenings, such suspicious people, such oddities the likes of which she has never seen, and has never heard of anyone seeing before.

If she were in a different pose, she might, with avenged purpose, throw herself into solving this fresh mystery.

But this is The Observer. And the Observer is done for the day.

She takes the goggles from off her head and, thank the lord, it’s late evening. No errant sunlight to singe the inside of her eyes, and no footsteps from outside her room. Sleep rushes at her from all angles; Miranda is bone-exhausted. It’s an exhaustion that emanates from within her blood, and is, as such, afflicting her every capillary, vein and artery, that spreads itself into every small segment of her being.

She does not brush her teeth, she does not use the bathroom a final time. She does not feel the effects of that freshest Adderall as she lay back in bed. Her mind does not take her to any wonky places, it does not dwell on the happenings of the day. Her phone, still trying to translate the nonsense in her headphones, will gently kill itself, percentage by percentage, so that, when Miranda awakens, she will be unconnected and untethered for the first time in recent memory. It will be a very un-Miranda way to wake.

Sleep feasts on her slowly for nearly 14 hours. She wakes groggy, in a world just as dimly lit as one she could swear she just left. She looks around her room, at the grey dismal room, and then over to the phone on her desk. If she had awoken a few moments later, she might have missed it. The phone is on one percent, after all, and the good ol’ thing is really stretching that battery as far as it’ll go. Miranda looks over at the bright screen, at some digits she might otherwise have never thought about again — 24 – 60 – 255 – 130 — numbers that catalyze a chain reaction in her brain, a reaction that wakes her up fully, that unleashes a dormant energy, numbers that prove key to some spinning Rubik’s Cube of thought within her.

“24 – 60 – 255 – 130,” she says out loud with realized immediacy, repeating herself again and again until she can find a notepad and pen. Stumbling around with hair sweat-caked to her face, her bare feet nearly sticking frozen to the cold hardwood floor, she searches. Though there’s only a baggy white t-shirt and underwear covering her scant form, she still manages to get all twisted up and stuck in them, floundering around the room, nearly tumbling head over feet. Miranda is not the most graceful of girls. Her phone finally gasps and dies, swallowing its words, but Miranda continues to speak for it. “24 – 60 – 255 – 130.” 

“24 – 60 – 255 – 130.”

Finally she finds what she needs, hiding in a pile of scarcely-used textbooks she’s still hoping to return for profit. Paper…and…and…pen! She writes it down and then writes it again on a different sheet in the event of sudden conflagration, takes a breath, plugs her phone in and begins bouncing around her room with excitement.

She didn’t understand until it was written down in front of her, until she could look at the digits in a clean, crisp column. It’s a phone number, god damn it.

They were feeding her a phone number. 

246-025-5130. That’s a Barbados area code, apparently. Might there be some Pina Coladas in her freaky, funky future?

As soon as her phone comes back to life, she’s got a call to make.

In the meantime, she brushes her teeth. It was very uncharacteristic of her to forget such a vital hygienic task last night. On second thought, she could use a shower, too.

What a lovely day to be alive. What a way to return to this old, tired world. And with new eyes, the world is brighter, fresher, more inviting. Miranda turns the water up all the way hot. She wants it to burn. She wants to re-feel life.