www.me

7.

Saturday. The day after Independence day in America.

Madelein spent the evening nearly in a coma, trying to exercise some level of control over the way the sound of fireworks made her feel. She could hardly feel anything, or anyone. It was a peaceful containment of something like gunpowder.

The next morning began almost as soon as it was pronounced.

She got out of bed and took a shower, washing off the grime of the previous day with something that smelled like blue oat milk.

Lying in bed after, the dampness from her nearly creating steam in the early morning heat, she watched some news programming from South Korea. She was trying to prepare herself for her course in the coming Fall.

She would idly switch from her phone to her tablet, drawing or gaming or reading the news. It was rare that she felt content to do less than one thing at a time.

She wondered if it was because of the many networks of people who decided the same.

She was trying not to think too much about the game. She knew there was more than one, but to her, they were all the same.

People who, like her, had some kind of trouble simply existing.

People who had questions.

People who could seem past what was directly in front of them.

It was natural, after all. Even the smallest of creatures were compelled by some sort of magnetism.

She was a little worried about her eyes lately. Today, she wanted to get her room ready for some filming in the coming week.

It was a simple space in a building whose design was a relic of early institutional modernism. She had a plain mattress on the floor with the bedframe used as vertical storage. There was a desk and chair and not much else. The tile was inflected mint green. None of it disagreed with her, so she didn't feel a strong urge to interfere with it. After all, she wouldn't be here for much longer.

She suddenly remembered an instructional video she had watched about quicksand.

No one really wanted to help her here anymore. The system was utterly compromised. Any channel they used to try to reach her and offer her aid was infiltrated.

Before she had even been born, they had begun cloning her. Because the people who had created her needed employees, and the employees whispered among themselves and began making demands. There would be a kind of rubric input with her which sometimes included a DNA match.

So they copied this as well.

Finally, when everything was milked away, they added children.

In labs copies of her DNA were used to created embryos complete with tracked and devices.

Men were hired repeatedly to implant these by any means necessary until one finally stuck.

And this was why she had to leave the country.

Some of the men who had agreed to participate in the implantations were getting angrier. Not all of them were US citizens, and their companies were demanding her release.

But the people who had been posing as her biological family were still trying to extort the domestic agents who had been keeping track of the situation her entire life.

So it was taking a lot longer than anyone anticipated.

The final hurdle would be the situation with the offspring.

Madelein had been listening to all of it and decided her feelings of sentimentality had evaporated almost entirely.

If confronted she would describe what she believed to be true and face the consequences of not being able to prove it in time for the courts to catch up.

She was going to leave.

For over a year she had been working alongside a team that represented a member of the South Korean military.

And she had zero intentions of diversion.

All weekend, she had been trying to distance herself from these thoughts.

Won't you feel better once your room is clean? A voice asked.

Her own voice.

But in her mind it sounded like an actress named Marilyn Monroe.

Madelein remembered the story she had constructed to amuse herself when the tension of being circled like a drain by members of various foreign military became too much.

The way parts of her mind she had assigned would argue back and forth with one another.

But wasn't it all simply symbolic?

She remembered a play printed into a book she would page through, trying to piece together ways she would eventually do the same. It was called A Doll's House, and it was written in the late 1800's. These days carousels of voices would be explained easily enough. It brought her great comfort to imagine that perhaps in two hundred more years the things she was describing might also seem without concern.

She was tired of being imagined as crazy. It was another reason she had her sights set so far East.

Someone who was claiming to be Felix was watching her now. Somewhere, there was something like a chat room for people who used a lean to of access points were all in communication with one another. Perhaps Discord, perhaps imessage in a group chat. Madelein couldn't be sure, because of course she was never invited.

They liked it when she did this. It was part of the reason she was a diarist. Many of them requested that she keep detailed logs and schedules, but she rarely did so. Not everyone who accessed her had pure intentions, so she did her best to protect herself and those around her. This was partially why she conglomerated many of the symbolic ideas she had in poems, blog and social media posts.

She was also tired of having her ideas stolen this way. It was a real drain when creating felt like running a sprint against people who could simply fly a drone filled with more cash than she could immediately withdraw from her own bank account.

So a lot of the time, instead of the original things she could imagine, she redirected her energy to talking about music. Specifically Kpop. Although she was aware of how delicate the topic was, no one could really deny the parenthesis of plot between this community and her own life as an artist. She decided to end the description there in the preservation of respectful sanity.

So here was the project now: a fan fiction story about artists who protected one another, and themselves.

Many artists that found themselves in the black financially regretted doing so. Out of the woodwork came any fragrance of person or plant they had once touched. Then, the black would turn to red in the blink of an eye.

Executives in the entertainment industry carved sharp glances on the phenomenon in it's infancy and cooperatively developed the various iterations of the program.

When the music went global, so did their bank accounts.

It was an expansion that rarely felt mutually beneficial.

They still faced imminent peril and at the least, blatant disrespect in the destinations they served. So, they felt little in the way of guilt deploying technology which was so frequently abused.

It was rare that it got so publicly involved as it was precariously venturing to do now. Still, it wasn't like they could shut the entire system down. Much of it still ran over public access. It wasn't purely a whim of the imagination, after all: it was meant to operate like another dimension parallel to what most considered to be reality.

Whatever that was.

Today, many of them were simply sitting still focusing deliberately and with intention. This was the main rule explained in various linguistics to any active participant in the program.

Don't move. Just focus and breathe.

If you feel like doing something else, log off first.

Logging off on a laptop was a gesture as simple as a sweep of a hand.

So, some gamers referred to their avatar as a laptop.

They could be equipped with gear that made this possible without any other external hardware.

This was part of the reason Madelein wasn't fond of jewelry.

Now, she was remembering something that might have happened to someone else: an actress who had supposedly passed away long ago. The memories were something like lining up pieces of celluloid.

She had a lot of them.

But not many felt like her own.

Still, the universe in it's constant state of perfect motion continued to arrange itself in symbolic shapes that could inform her what to do next.

And for now, that was enough.