SLIDE // RELEASE

It'd been a long day.

I was just commuting home from my workplace. It was mind-numbingly boring, but it kept some people alive and made sure the city kept chugging — so I'd dealt with it for the past year or so. Just a simple desk job. One of the few remaining, but a critically important job.

Things were better now, though. I mean, generally speaking. Around ten years ago, the Earth'd been on the brink of total ecological collapse. And the last two generations turned it around, even making leaps and bounds in science as well. So: Hooray humanity!

Still. I looked up at the top of the subway. My job kind of blew. I'd do it, of course, but it'd almost be better to full-time live at work or not work at all — it was draining coming out of work because I had to pay attention. Or else, I dunno. It depended on the paper, but nuclear fuel rods could end up not being at a power plant in time. Either that or I accidentally register a lived-in house as empty and ready for tenants. Useful, necessary, mind-numbingly dull.

The subway beeped. Two more stops until I was home.

Home was a funny concept, I thought absently. I had a roommate, and we... our relationship was confusing. Not necessarily in a bad way. But it made coming home a thoughtful action, one that made me want to think more than normal. Nothing good came of thinking more. It'd always led to anxiety attacks for me.

Another beep. One stop. Anxiety bubbled somewhere deep inside me, but it wasn't much more than the standard. The normal, for me. The sun was shining in the sky, though, and the sky was blue, and I did like the color blue. There was something! A thing I liked.

There was a beep in my pocket, this time. Not a subway beep, a beep from the instant messaging/social networking app I'd been using for the past few years. Someone'd pinged me. Or DMed me. 

I grabbed my phone and pulled it out of my pocket, checking to see who the message was from. Ah — it was from Lavie, one of my closer friends! We'd met up twice, I think. In real life. But I'd known her for... two and a half years, give or take? What was she asking me about?

[[hey hey hey hey hey]], she'd already typed. [[collie can we talk?]]

She did this occasionally. I fully expected to get jumpscared by some kind of shit meme in the next few seconds, but I'd bite. Swiping the keyboard on my phone, I typed back [[sure, whats up?]]

Lavie paused for a second, the typing indicator showing and disappearing a few times. [[okay so hear me out on this- i might be swinging by ie city soon. do you wanna meet up or something?]]

[[hell yeah!]] I typed, enthusiastically. [[when's your swinging by?]]

[[hear me out one more time okay collie]]

Uh oh. This boded poorly. Usually when Lavie was all smoke and mirrors like this, she had some kind of horseshit dumbass plan. Like that one time we "accidentally" set one of the holdover billionaire golf fields on fire. It was fun, don't get me wrong, but. Daunting.

[[i'm actually already in the city]]

Oh, was that all? I'd dealt with shorter-order meetups before. Hell, Lavie only gave me three days warning last time.[[that's fine, meet me at avalanche station when you can]], I responded, then pocketed my phone again. The subway had let out a beep, and that meant home! Home, where my, er, friend was, and where I'd be able to let them know someone was coming over.

I walked off the subway humming a chipper tune, in spite of the churning anxiety deep deep down in my gut. Valor always told me it was unhealthy for me to be stifling my feelings like this, but I saw how she got when I was breaking down. And right now, it was low enough that I could probably even do my whole banter routine and make her smile instead!

Yeah. That'd be nice!

The air outside was dry, but not too hot. Perfect weather for a walk. I hummed a little more on my way home, stopping whenever someone walked by. Didn't want to bother anyone, of course, and it was a bit rude to inflict my singing voice on everyone around me like that. Still, I felt strangely happy today. Like a bit of weight was lifted off my chest.

Oh well. I'd just revel in it while it lasted. Our apartment building was relatively short, and I decided to take the stairs rather than the elevator. May as well do the manly thing and get some exercise, right?

My mood soured the further up the stairs I got. Yeah, no. Exercise wasn't for me. But it was only three flights, and I pushed through anyways. The endorphins rushing to my brain as I wheezed up the final steps sort of made it better, but ultimately... that was probably just the placebo effect. Ha. Another thing to enjoy while it lasts.

As I made it to the front door, I fumbled for the keycard our apartment had. Before I could get it out, though, Valor opened the door.

She was, uh, really pretty. Now and always, she joked. I'd been rooming with her since just before she figured herself out, and the change in mental health was noticeable — her smile got bigger, eyes got brighter. It made her look ten times better.

The HRT helped, but... yeah, not the focus of right now. We'd already talked a few times, and she made sure to explicitly remind me that she was a lesbian.

Which made all the advances she'd made on me confusing as shit. She backed off whenever I was uncomfortable, but I couldn't tell if it was just casual flirting between friends or something more. Agh, wait. I was just staring off into space again — she'd greeted me, and I hadn't even noticed!

"Sorry, hi. Been a little scatterbrained." We walked in, and she sat on the couch. I had nothing better to do, so I kind of... plopped myself down on the couch's opposite side.

"How was work?" Valor asks, not a hint of awkwardness in her voice. Thank fuck, because I had a poor track record of keeping up small talk and not sounding like a total dolt.

I shrugged, though. "Nothing. Same paperwork. Same amount of dumb garbage. It went okay, I guess, uh... you?"

"Eugh." Valor sighs. "Commissions are pretty easy to come by right now! Unfortunately, I've had at least two pretty-bad creeps. So... Cool. Love that." 

"Ah. That's rough, I'm sorry." I'm suddenly left wishing that I'd picked up a drink, or something. It'd make this a little less awkward if I had something to nurse while we were both thinking about what to say next. "Normal creeps or creepy creeps?"

The girl scrunched up on the opposite side of the couch to me leans back and rolls her eyes. "Just the normal kind. Misogynists who didn't get the court order to fuck off to Mars and die due to their own idiocy. I figure I'll just let em' off easy, not give them their art."

"While taking their money?"

"While taking their money," she said, grinning that stupid smile of hers.

I snorted. It was totally legal for her to do it, but most people gave the bad commissioners they got a right talking-to rather than simply scruffing them for change. Valor, being Valor, tended to just take the credits. She'd act super helpful and then just ghost the commissioners.

In her defense, they were usually genuinely shitty people. And since nobody was hurting for housing or necessities anymore, it was only a matter of their entertainment money getting taken. She also made it a strict policy that she would take your commission and run if you were truly being a bitch, so... they kinda had it coming. Most people were totally fine.

The comedy lightened the tension a little. Valor chuckled a little more, but she got up after that. "Dinner?"

Hmm. I scrunched up my face a little, making a whole show of thinking. "Pasta? With alfredo sauce, if we have any."

"Gotcha." She started walking to the kitchen, and I decided to spend my time browsing just a little more of the internet.

It'd been ten years since the Great Revolution. Or, as most of the media outlets liked to call it, the Second Enlightenment. It was quiet, starting with public figureheads dying of old age and then moving to coordinated worldwide arguments on climate change, economics, and morality. By the time the armies would have gotten involved, they were starved of resources from unionized power plants, mines, and practically every farm around the world — and any resources they DID have were silently taken from them with the effort of particularly talented thieves, hackers, and engineers. It was a time of upheaval, but the best soon picked up on the new systems put in play.

Money wasn't gone entirely, but we'd all agreed that it was kind of stupid, anyways. Most store owners and corporations now ran off of credits, which was locked down as much as was possible to prevent runaway inflation and the previous capitalist hell coming back. People began offering work, food, sales, and information for free — they'd wanted to just do things and become regarded for their work — and the market tanked in credit prices as a result. The government in most places was quick to capitalize on this, subsidizing housing and necessities for everyone. Then, a breakthrough was made in automation which would allow for even a single human to oversee an entire factory — and whereas before this would be used to drive up the amount of work any one person had been doing, this was now used to massively expand the amount of things each person could do with their lives.

The geniuses were able to work faster, the engineers and architects built faster, and the farmers were now able to grow large plantations without effectively slave-labor if they wanted. Practically speaking, we were now a utopia.

Of course, this was all simply the result of one joining of minds and banding together. There were still assholes, there was still the threat of things returning to the way they were before — but we'd been through that before, and humanity prevailed. So the assholes were simply re-educated or given space to kill themselves over the ideals of the old world. Scientists had already disassembled all the nukes we had, anyways. There really wasn't much they could do on a large scale.

Medical engineering was massively improved, too. Some people, like Valor, decided to stay on semi-traditional hormone regiments (simply with the addition of a bracelet to osmose the HRT into the bloodstream rather than patches or something), but others were able to use total cellular reconstruction to reform their body into their ideal one immediately. It went without saying that all physical disease was practically eradicated with the advent of stimpacks. 

Science had been improved with the improvement of automation and we'd finally cracked quantum computing. All while discovering space-folding technology, which allowed for supercomputers to be built and take advantage of hundreds of square meters of CPUs, GPUs, and heatsinks. It was another great leap, allowing for even more impressive things to be built and more complex engines to be made — and the creative minds of this generation kept plodding along, turning stones and having eureka moments every step of the way. There'd even been talk of manipulating strings to see if we could take advantage of 4th-dimension computing, just to get our compute power up that much more.

Engineering and construction? Well, we'd almost made our first Dyson swarm. But the things we had on Earth were breathtaking. Full-dive VR was becoming a reality, as was advanced AR. We'd been getting steadily taller, cheaper buildings, and even figured out how to take advantage of bits of dark-matter we'd gleaned on our way through the universe to create cities in the sky. Flying cars were now a reality — but they'd been phased out by the advent of long-range lightspeed transporters, as well as robust public infrastructure built on the dregs our forefathers set.

We were steadily progressing towards a tier-two civilization, but that goalpost had been moved several times since the Enlightenment. First, it was just the power of the Solar System... but then they discovered folded-space and portals, which immediately jumped our energy from "Maybe 1.3 x 10^44 Joules, if we're lucky" to "Literally Infinite". And that threw a spanner into the works on our civilization theory, because how the FUCK did anyone make it past tier one if this is what we learned? The philosophers had a field day with that one.

But life went on, for the most part. See, like today — today'd been boring, dull, uneventful, and dull. As I mindlessly scrolled through social media, something then caught my eye.

"10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF GREAT REVOLUTION TOMORROW! Communes plan celebration and a voluntary break from work."

Ah, I see, universe. You wanted to prove me wrong at every turn.

Ugh. This'd probably mean fireworks. They were a little loud, but it was mostly the distraction I was worried about. Also, people got social during festivities! Despite how I looked online, I preferred to stay social only with my friends. Or like, somewhere in between extrovert and introvert. Ambivert?

Whatever the -vert I was, I was gonna be tired come tomorrow night. That wasn't a bad thing, per se. Just... man, I had to watch out for that. People around here got pretty crazy with their festivities.

A bell sounded from the kitchen. Valor had set it as the alarm for her clocks — she said that the normal beeping was "too insincere", and I was pretty sure she was only 50% joking — and that meant that dinner was close to completion. I got up and stretched out a bit, thinking about what I'd make for the drinks.

Maybe tea with milk and hot chocolate mix? That'd work pretty well, I thought, and so I walked into the kitchen to start production. Valor was there too, but she just nodded and left me to my work. We were both weird like that. So it cancelled out and became socially acceptable.

I put the kettle on to boil, and jumped up on our cramped countertop (not the chopping area, the designated "sitting area") to wait for it to fully get done with heating. Tea with milk and hot chocolate mix was simple, but I hoped it'd turn out well. I only remembered my mom making it for me, a long time ago... but hey, it was pretty good then!

Ah, the water was finished boiling. I made the combination tea for me and Valor — she'd asked me for some of what I was making — and took it out to our living room, setting it on the table in our places. She brought out the pasta relatively quickly, and we ate in comfortable silence.

I thought about asking Valor about the upcoming celebrations (which I'd completely forgot), but I figured it would be a little awkward. So we finished our meals and bid each other goodnight.

Somehow, I stayed up for a few hours after that — just lying in bed thinking. The same happened when I woke up, I just... sat there. Well, I also browsed the internet when I woke up. Still. 10 years was a long time. I didn't think I'd be alive by now, honestly! That thought kept me up at night, as did the never-ending passage of time...

Ah, well. I got up when I could and went to make breakfast for myself — just some cereal — then checked in on my online friends. Apparently that was a good idea, because everyone was online at the same time (a rarity, as we'd all got jobs and hobbies that required our attention at different times.) I checked in and said hi before asking what was up.

[[morning collie!]], Lavie typed, just as Marian — another one of my closer friends — bid me a [[Good morning!]].

[[gm to you all too]], I responded. [[so whats going on w/ you all, we all seem to be on pretty late in the day?]]

[[We were discussing Lavie's despair-inducing planning habits]], said Marian, [[but on a more serious note it was pretty much just talking about what we were going to do for the anniversary today. You got anything?]]

Lavie fumed comedically, responding in kind with [[shut the FUCK up mari!!]].

The two started to banter again. Did I have any plans? Not... really? I shook my head. Better to leave the two to their banter for now. I checked in on a few other friends, exchanging hellos and good mornings and I-hope-you're-doing-wells, but then it was just me and my thoughts. And I guess Valor in the other room drawing, but I didn't want to bother her.

A lot of my online presence was kind of like this. Check in, say hello, help if I can, quietly see myself out as others interacted. I did better in one-on-one environments, what can I say?

Ah, who was I kidding. I was only marginally better one-on-one. Most of my friends I'd gotten purely through luck, through random chance talks in servers or forums that they'd liked me for. Which I guess was normal, but it wasn't very fun to think about? Whatever.

What did I want to do for the celebration? I'd not done much initially, but life had improved so much over the past ten years that I'd honestly really like to do something quietly fun. Maybe I could hang out on the roof of our apartment building and stargaze to the best of my ability? The smog that'd been created ten years ago was beginning to clear, and it was just starting to get good again.

That sounded fun. And it was only a few hours away from right now.

I sighed, then got up to do my chores — cleaning my bed, pretty much — and dressed for the day. I'd go on a short walk first, just to get some fresh air, then it was going to be a night on the roof with a warm blanket.

Should I invite Valor?

The question was... compelling, if nothing else. I didn't know whether she was in for stargazing, we'd never talked about it — and maybe she was doing her own thing? Plus, I didn't want to leave my online friends out. She probably had plans anyways, and a brief check revealed that Marian and Lavie had already coordinated to do... something. I think it was a movie night? They were still fucking bantering. Which made it hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Sue me, I'm not a perfect reader of social situations.

Ah, well. I guess I'd just go up to the roof on my own.

The day seemed to pass fairly quickly. There were couples and friendgroups all over the streets where I walked, laughing and in a mostly-cheery mood — holding hands or ribbing on each other or simply listening to the others in their group talk. Even the ones walking alone seemed to have a warm, settled mood. We'd fought for this, after all. Everyone here had done at least something to help, even if it wasn't a lot.

I dunno. I didn't really feel the same. All that I'd done was made sure my friends were all safe, and anyone could have done that — did do that, since I knew a lot of my friends already had partners or other close friends beyond just me. The few more-downcast people I saw on the streets seemed to just be introspective, thinking about what'd happened and how they fit in.

Shit, I was spiralling or something. It'd be fine, I reminded myself, while I walked to a nearby park bench and surrounded myself in the sounds of joyous, low-key celebration. It was just... people. Being people. Did I fit in?

Not really, if I had to be honest. But I'd worry about that later. The ratcheting in my chest slowed, as I forced myself to pause. It wasn't about my actions. It was about the outcome. Things turned out well. Worry about this later. 

Emotions thoroughly shoved down, I finished up my walk as the sun was setting. The climb up to the roof (around thirty floors) would be far too much for me to walk, so I decided to take the elevator. Before I stepped into the metal box, I shot a quick text to Valor saying that I would be on the roof for the night.

I got to the top just as the sun had fully set over the horizon. Bangs in the distance and bright sparks meant fireworks were already going off, and the stars were already visible through the clouds. It was beautiful. Just like I expected. The Milky Way, laid bare before human eyes again — after society'd done so much to prevent this image from being visible, too. A blimp soared its lazy way across the stars, blocking them out for a second, but it was alright — just one of our science brigantines, or something.

The sound of whistling echoed a second before everything blurred into a stunning display of white, yellow, and blue, just as the blimp's windows flashed a bright blue-pink-white. The stars seemed to streak out into my field of view, and a sudden burning sensation erupted across my entire body.

And then I was falling — falling, from the sky I'd just been looking at, crashing through airship walls and vats of liquid and mechanical labs; tumbling down onto the earth like a meteor.

I hit the ground, and then I passed out.