The Tale So Far

One

We ride slipstreams in sleek silver lines, zooming through a future city, cyborg statues and neon lights in a blur, me in the driver's seat with sexy brunette riding shotgun, breakneck speeds through smooth contours, airborne food stations pulsating blue, robot cleaners with shiny metallic smiles, sending out waves to one another in secret.

Split second navigation, take the right turn, inches from the wall we skim along the surface, creating a ripple in the metal, a city where everything is covered in solar and everything ripples.  En route to deliver a package, danger not specified but always possible, I arrive on time and speak the code word into the wall mic, entry granted and door glides open, inside lights line the edges creating a cube effect, no one around... yet.

Apartment 405, nice number, ring the buzzer and wait for anything.  Five seconds, ten seconds, nothing, ring again, twenty seconds, nothing.  I try the door - it's open.  I go in, it smells of sulfur and something else, something familiar I can't quite wrap my head around, pristine apartment, everything's in order, I snoop around.  The bed is made, there's some barely audible ambient electronica playing somewhere, I inspect the closet and a gleaming face is staring at me, soulless eyes and a pointy open mouth.

'Hello sir, may I be of assistance?'  The robotic butler smiles a blank grin.  'Perhaps you'd like some hot soup, I find that always cheers me up when the temperature is, ten degrees, outside.  Now that my heartbeat has started to return to normal I ignore the robot and resume my snooping.  I find two hundred dollars in cash, a gold pendant with a strange and unfamiliar design on it, an array of passports of different names, some of them the same face, others different, and a control with a single red button.

Something doesn't feel right.  The vibrations in the room have changed.  I realise the electronica playing has gotten louder and developed into a beat, but it's in seven eight, and the cyborg's eyes are glowing red, so I stuff the items in my jacket pocket and run out the door.  I slam the door behind me as I bolt down the corridor, and three seconds later I hear it open again but I don't even want to look back.  As I round a corner I hear a bullet whizz past my head and bounce off the wall.  I keep running full pelt, and in the glass ahead of me I catch a glimpse of my pursuer - it's the butler cyborg and he's perfect-sprinting toward me, eyes glowing red and face transparent like a skeleton.

I get to the garage and as I near my car the door auto opens and I vault in, engaging the engines and directing all power to maximum acceleration.  Just as the door shuts a bullet hits it and bounces off, cyborg charging at us glowing red, and we glide out of there just in time, but I hear something strike the car on the way out, and Aleish glances at me.

Gliding home through the night sky, up high surrounded by stars and skyscrapers, the city pulses, everything's connected, the veins are wireless, the brains are ultra compact and the heart is a complex electromagnetic generator.  Back at my pad, liquid music flows out of strategic points, sleek lines make up the room and the view overlooks the chaos amongst the order.  There was a time when it was the other way around.

Two

The silver blue hue of the alarm clock woke her before the buzzer.  She always woke up exactly one minute before it went off - that terrifyingly shrill siren that pierces dreams into an unpleasantly sudden climax.  As she readied her finger on the off button, her dream began to fade rapidly.  It was something about a Chinese lady dressed in old fashioned attire, standing amongst the falling red leaves of autumn, and as she concentrated more intently on the leaves, they began to turn grey and morph into hundreds of tiny dancing robots.  Then what happened?  The Chinese lady began to speak about something.  But already thoughts of waking life began to flood her thoughts and push out that other world, that seems so real and vivid.  It's like another universe parallel to the one we occupy upon waking.

She pulls herself up out of bed and gracefully floats over to the corner of the room, where there sits a glowing red sphere on top a small wooden table.  Manipulating it with her fingers, it starts to gently throb and rotate, and hums in a pleasant neutral chord, syncing itself with her, healing any broken links.  It feels as if someone is gently massaging her temples to a steady rhythm.  Five minutes have passed and she is finished with her morning meditation.

Outside the window, mechanical birds chirp in 1s and 0s, communicating to one another and all through the whole city, all in rhythm - a very complex never ending rhythm necessary to the proper flow of the city.  Giant hollow poles tower in the sky, and hum in deep monotones from the reverberation of electrical discharge that is constantly being emitted.

Time for her morning run.  A perfect figure, she currently scores 9s and 10s in all the various categories of physical grading.  Her brunette hair is medium length; it hangs perfectly down and bounces  in rhythm, on her smooth olive skin.  She runs from her apartment, first through the industrial district neighbouring hers, and through the factories constantly manufacturing millions of different sized metal cylinders, the robotic arms pulsing with red LED's, like a sea of cyborg eyes, all blinking, in rhythm.

She runs past the vast water farms glistening with heavenly golden light.  She approaches the water and it parts, revealing a path dotted with more golden lighting.  The surrounding walls of water give off a faint mist of water which made the spot popular with local runners.

She exits the water path out the other side, and she sees something; she thinks she sees something, that makes her slow to a jog and then completely stop.  Up ahead, by the large red Asian style temple, stands a figure.  From her viewpoint, it looks remarkably like the Chinese woman from her dream.  A closeup of her flashes in her minds eye for a split second and she violently flinches.