Tooth swings his legs in the city lights. A pixellated ad flutters across the windows. Beneath him, the roads roar by: one city, two cities—every city in the world is here, mirrored in a hundred skyscrapers.
From up here, one can see the strait that splits the downtown from the peninsula. This is Berlian—all of it, from the penthouses to the slums—as if naming it would weld its halves together. This is the city, his city, where the past becomes the future.
He slouches with a sigh—then winces as the ache of his spine yanks him back to the present. No, WebDiving is harmless. That’s what they tell him, and he repeats it to himself. None of his wounds are real. The window panes he smashed hurtling through them, the ceilings that collapsed on his head—they were all virtual. All virtual. All translucent imitations of the real thing.
But so are the streetlamps, the sadness, the light that beams the work of poets and revolutionaries across the world. It’s all real, and yet it isn’t. He’s all real, and yet he’s not. Some days, it’s hard to tell.
It was a run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency firm, a typical HEX syndicate target. The bosses have these kinds of heists down to an art: dive in, scoop up the ledgers, bring the fort down.
The recovery team did alright—snuck in and siphoned the data, clean and easy. Tooth was in charge of the “bring the fort down” part. While the team was crawling through access tunnels, he was planting dynamite under the foundations. It’s all he does, and he should have done it right.
Steel Blue likes to joke that Tooth has it easiest among the demolitionists. There‘s no delicacy in wielding explosives, they say. No artistry—you wreck the place and skedaddle. So, he skips the study for the job. What’s the point, if it’s all so cut-and-dried? This was all meant to be a getaway. He didn’t sign up to destroy lives, and he can keep pretending that’s not what he’s doing if he doesn’t know who he’s doing it to.
And that’s how Tooth brought down a fortress on the heads of eight colleagues. A misread signal—a switch pulled with sweat-slick hands—and the booming of his heart was drowned out by a crescendo of fire and concrete.
The body is remarkably adept at recovery, especially from a virtual death like that one. The pain will haunt him for a day, and then his memory will discard it to make room for tomorrow.
But it also loves to cling, cling to the vision of cinderblocks hurtling towards his head at terminal velocity.
The streets sway beneath his boots. Again, he shudders at how easy it would be to repeat today’s feat—all he has to do is climb over the rail and fling himself into the city. And what a sparkling end that would be, but this time it would be one-and-done, and there would be a mess, and people would have a real problem on their hands, and—
“You alright there, Tooth?”
Tooth jolts upright.
Only one other syndicate member knows about his hidey hole. This balcony adjoins an unused office suit, written off after a sprinkler leak caved the ceiling; he never let the danger tape stop him, though it stops his colleagues. Most of them.
“Four-Eyes?” he mutters. “What d’you want?”
Behind him, Steel Blue chuckles. “You forgot to take off your wrist sensors. White wants ’em back. She’s asking very nicely.”
He glances at his hands. The latex straps are still wrapped around his rough, scar-striped wrists, LEDs blinking red—red as the detonation signal. He groans, rips the velcro off, and flicks them over his shoulder. “There. Go collect your employee-of-the-month credits.”
“Hey, hey.” Their footsteps click towards him. Velcro scrapes the ground. “You think I’d come up here just for credits? Step inside your moldy little office and all?”
“Nah, you’d know better.”
Steel’s coattail flashes in the corner of his eye. They sink to the shoe-scuffed floor beside him, propping their back against the rails. Their hair is dyed the same as their avatar’s—a deep, solid, shoulder-length blue.
Tooth’s eyes dart back to the facing building. “You know, I died again today.”
“I heard.”
“Oh. Word sure gets around fast whenever I mess up, huh?”
“Hey, it’s protocol to log incidents. Not my fault that virtual admin chick likes to tattle.” Steel leans their head against a baluster. “You know, I think she’s into me.”
“Duh, she probably is. You give her way more time of day than you should.”
“What can I say, whoever designed her avatar did a damn good job.” Their gaze follows his. “So, what happened this time?”
“You know.” Tooth hunches his shoulders as the wind whips past. “I started panicking on the job…saw orange on the HUD, thought it was red, blew up the fort. With everyone still inside.”
“Oof. Maybe they need to redesign the HUD. I always say the colours are too close.”
He smells rust as his head drops against the bars. “Do you ever feel like you’re not sure what’s real anymore? WebDiving is cool and all, but it’s,” he shuffles through adjectives in his head—horrifying, disturbing— “confusing. What’s the point of doing virtual heists if virtual dying feels the same as dying in real life?”
Steel snorts. “You sure it feels the same?”
“Guess not. ‘Cause you get to carry on with your actual life afterwards. And meet the people you just ‘killed’ in the hallway. And that’s just messed up. I don’t get why they added death to VR.”
His companion shrugs. “Accountability. You do a dangerous crime, you cop the consequences. Or else virtual reality becomes some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“Why can’t HEX just design a safe version of WebDive?”
“You know what web protocols are, right?”
“I don’t read, Four-Eyes.”
“Well, there’s rules. And if we don’t follow the rules, corporate server gateways wouldn’t accept our connection requests.”
“Bla-bla-de-bla. Sounds like the devs need to hack better.”
Heaving a sigh, Steel Blue drapes one arm through a gap in the railing. He turns at the sound, and sees his face mirrored back in their rectangular glasses—ringed eyes, streaked hair, washed out by the glow of that blacklight sky.
Behind him, a wave of white and cyan pixels flurries across a thousand glass facades.
“Tooth.” There’s a storminess in Steel Blue’s glare that makes him swallow his next quip. “You know who’s gained the most from the world going online? Corporations. Once people started hanging out online instead of in person, it was over. Corpos got their grubby hands on everything. The places where we meet. The places where we live. And you know who owns the WebDive standard? AeroMatic. AeroMatic’s gonna make sure it stays safe and marketable so the investor dollars keep pouring in.”
“How is dying realistically safer?”
“It means fewer people try to do things that could get them virtual-killed. Like rob a crypto firm.” They gesture at him. “Hm? Would you try and get killed again?”
For all of three seconds, Tooth has nothing to say.
His gaze sinks away. “I—don’t know.” He wraps his fingers around the crumbling baluster. “I mean, obviously it was an awful time. But…there was something kinda…freeing about it too, y’know? That I could just vanish for a second, and come back feeling like I’d atoned, for…I don’t know. For not being good enough for my family. The syndicate. This piece-of-shit city. Like dying for it means none of it matters. Even for just one second.”
“Calm down, messiah,” Steel murmurs. “See, this is why you’re the syndicate’s problem child. You say in plain words what they try to dress up in all that flash and pizzazz. You’re not gonna dodge around the problem, because you’re neck-deep in it. No—you are the problem.”
“Gee, thanks, Steel.”
“No, I mean—you are what this city does to its people. Everyone from top to bottom has failed you. Your family. Your school. Your neighbourhood. And it’s because the city failed them. It’s one big cycle of shit, and you’re the one who takes the fall for it. You don’t have anyone to punch down at, so—well? You end up here. A troubled teen working for the biggest crime syndicate in the—”
“Okay, stop. You’re getting too real.” He swipes a knuckle over his wet eyes, and he smiles though his jaw aches. “I don’t think as hard as you, Four-Eyes. I don’t know how things got like this, or why I wound up here. I just know that—yeah, there really is nowhere else, and I don’t know if anyone cares that I exist, or even wants me to exist, and I—”
He’s out of breath. The golden pinnacles beyond the balcony come into focus. It’s one city, two cities, every city in the world. Neon lances through the ragged clouds. A kaleidoscope of windows shatters the sky.
It would be so easy to leap and fall—he’s done it over and over, in those seventeen-million-colour dreams. But who is that person who dies each time?
“—I don’t know if I want to exist, either.”
A hand drops onto his shoulder, tenuous, then firm. Steel Blue’s gaze is a lifeline, tethering him to the ground. “I don’t blame you one bit. But, right now, you do exist. And I’m glad you do. So…we’ll do our best with that, yeah?”
He clings.
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