Dies Irae
Disclaimer: This is a short fictional story originally published in 2009, in Portuguese. It has been re-published and incorporated to the novel REQU13M. This is a translation.
Bad trip. The watch’s beep-beep woke her up with a high-pitched, hoarse, irritating scream. How lovely would it be to have, right in front of her, something big enough to kick and release all the sudden, inexplicable hatred. But she was lying on the pavement, with her head leaning on mist-wet plastic. One of the sides of the trash container served as a pillow for this fainting-nap.
She rolled her belly against the floor, now feeling her ribs and pelvis touching the porous ground. Her shirt was lifted to the level of her small breasts and her crossed arms pressed her eyes in a way that was only worsening the pain she felt in her temples. The pressure against
her eyelids made thousands of lights explode in the darkness.
Her head, more than anywhere else in her body, ached as a side-effect. Again, some supplier had ripped her off. After fifteen minutes of reflection, she hurt her naked knees trying to stand up. She felt a bitter taste in her tongue. Like a ghost, a vomiting belch visited her each time her muscles decided to move.
Tottering, she searched for the nearest wall. First, she leaned her head, walking with the roots of her hair pressing against bricks covered by graffiti, her skull collapsing against the old concrete. Her feet entangled one through the other, her legs confused with reluctant knees. Her
saliva would soon join the falling tears.
Her eyelids were trembling in convulsion. Her irises rose to find a sky colored like skin and blood against the light pole. She had never felt that her life was under such threat as she did now. Suddenly, all those cliché advices (those “take care of yourself” or “get a grip of your life”) made sense.
But when she saw the fixed car lights turninginto shining lines, and heard human voices distorting into monstrous screams… it was all too exciting. Keeping herself in constant hallucination seemed to be the best option. She was not much older than 20, but her body was as damaged as if she were 200. She tried to survive, but at the same time she also begged to
be killed once and for all.
When the wall ended, she was forced to find balance on her own. She crossed her arms, feeling them naked, cold and harshened from bruises. She realized that she had lost her favorite coat alongside some chips and components she could exchange for drugs or food. Finally, her electronic cigarette was almost expiring too.
Maybe the worst of it all was the inability to remember faces. Or even voices, colors, smells. Everything was like a blurred dream, the most messed up and distorted one. The only vestiges of reality she had were her own presence in the lower part of the city, a thread of blood
running down her forehead and, well, the absence of her yellow latex coat. Clearly not much.
By that time, there were not many cars on the streets. With luck, she would not be run over by any fool who would be having a drag race. At least, if she had a car… but the only experience she had driving involved joysticks in game cafés or in virtual reality. In any case, everyone preferred self-driving vehicles. She crossed the street and took herself into a gas station where clubbers drank in front of the convenience store.
That mix of neon colors irritated her eyes. She squinted under her skinny arms. She invaded the place like a frightened animal with its bony knees, elbows and cheekbones: she was no more than that and some blue hair. She opened the fridge and ripped the ice bag with her bitten nails. Infuriated, the clerk came closer with his fists ready for action.
“You motherfucking crackhead. You know well what will happen if you don’t pay for that,” he threatened.
“You piece of shit,” she replied with a hoarse voice spat from the inside of her sore throat. “Nothing you can do to me will be a surprise.”
“Get out of here,” he shouted as he pushed her outside with a kick on her thigh.
She didn’t reply. She only had time to pick some ice cubes and get out, paying back the clerk with the middle finger. The man continued to swear, but, outside the store, she could hear nothing anyway. The clubbers gave her the same suspicious and disdainful look, which she had first offered them. As she put the ice against her bruised forehead, one of the clubber girls came closer.
The girl had modified eyes with heart-shaped pupils. She took the hacker by the hand and smiled while pressing her palm with her thumb. A code. She got closer, in a way that she could transfer with her tongue a pill with neurostimulant nanorobots. The clubber knew the disoriented junkie was Lynx, someone better known for her self-destructive behavior in the physical world, and someone who was responsible for the invasion and destruction of the rivethead’s databases online.
Although people divided themselves in groups and subgroups according to their interests, an obsessive-compulsive behavior was something predominant among the metropolis dwellers. Some were addicted to implants or plastic surgery, some played games for days in a row and competed online. But there were still some politized pacifists, the salarymen, the bodybuilders, the Web celebrities and many others that, in any case, kept the same addictions.
In other words, the urban fauna was diversified but predictable, with intersections between species. Most of them were young, somewhere between 20 and 30 years old. The others, 30 and 40-year-olds, would often realize it was all a waste of time and that their chips and ideologies were less important than paying the rent of a capsule apartment in the outskirts
of a conurbation. And there was still the drugstore bill, the senolytics, and the genetic therapies for life extension. Such methods were searched both by those who wanted to be immortal and those who used cryonics and induced sleep as a hopeful bet for a different, better future.
Lynx, in her peak on cyberspace, was hired by someone with the username Nirvana. Apparently, it was someone very rich, since there was a lot of perks for employees. One of them was a penthouse and a new console even more powerful than the one she was building for the past years. At 19, healthier and more amateurish than today, Lynx could stay connected for
more than fifty hours nonstop. To break the rivethead’s database security, she would need to dedicate herself until her brain got fried. The consequence was a headache so constant and intense that she would convulse and hallucinate.
Even so, she would face all challenges as a minor sacrifice against the gravity of the content she found in the rivethead’s databases. Hundreds of violent and abusive videos that, at a first look, seemed to be fictional, although everybody knew for quite some time that people really practiced cinematographic torture. They were real people, both unknown or famous:
everyone was a potential victim for videos of induced suicide, rape, mutilation, or shooting. Those responsible were true directors and screenplayers. They dedicated themselves to edit the content and make all efforts to turn it into a format closer enough to the entertainment industry standard. They even added soundtracks that became both hits and jokes online.
Lynx checked all the material before sending it to her employer. Between some sips of absinthe, she watched decapitations, teeth torn with pliers, self-hanging and self-harming, and other physical, psychological, and sexual modalities of violence. But after so many videos, so much information about what was inflicted to those people — both men and women –, she could no longer feel empathy for the victims. Everyone was just names, statistics, registers, data. Simulations in virtual reality and in 2D were as real to her as true murders — if not more.
The surprise was that Nirvana leaked all the content gathered by Lynx and spread it in small videos and images online, on an immersive portal supported by mass media. Nirvana also hacked the billboards attached to skyscrapers of the main metropolises around the world. On certain dates published online, he leaked collections of 5-minute torture videos, each played on screens placed at select tourist attractions. On the streets, people observed under their umbrellas the killing of many celebrities happening altogether with the murder of unknown citizens.
Under public and mental pressure, political leaders put the police on the streets to investigate and hunt the culprits. Armed with robots capable of scanning traces left on the Web, States fell into a frenzy of repulsion and excitement. Nirvana was nicknamed “Truth Keeper,” although no one really knew their true identity.
While her employer enjoyed their fame in silence, Lynx was certain that, alongside the rivetheads, she would also be hunted. Not by the police, but by the group itself. Her fear made her delete each and every piece of information she kept stored in her console. She released a virus on the web that would track and delete all data that could lead to her online persona. But nothing is really lost in cyberspace. Besides the rivetheads, many other people found out that the person who got all the videos was, in fact, a hacker hired by the “Truth Keeper.” In fansites and hateful pages dedicated to Lynx, users discussed how to find her.
Yet, even before finishing her job, the hacker’s apartment was already blown up by someone. When she arrived to her 31st floor flat and found instead a black hole, Lynx understood that the hunt had begun. That meant the streets and raves would be her new home. Her temporary bedrooms were cheap motels where she was taken after the parties she went toto take substances capable of making her forget hunger and fear. Everything she experienced through electric impulses synthesized by a computer was now lived night after night covered by dirty snow and mist. Her companions could be men or women, cyborgs or machines, even androids.
With a remnant of vanity and credits, she kept painting her hair blue and finished the procedure to lighten her irises. Since she had replaced her meals for injectable stimulants, she had lost 22 pounds. In less than 24 hours, she threw up more than six times. In less than 60 days, she was admitted to the hospital four times. And everytime she went back there, she would introduce herself with different names and fabricate IDs with the help of an implanted software.
She ran away as much as she could, but the lack of support from the few friends she had made it even harder. The last time she had visited Camille, the girl ended up admitted to the hospital for heroine substitute abuse. That was the end of it all, since Camille decided to forget their friendship and other caresses she had exchanged with the hacker. There was no one, not even salarymen: nobody wanted anything to do with someone so messed up like her. And, even so, Lynx reacted with a big and loud “fuck you” to the world.
After receiving the pill from the clubber in the gas station, Lynx however decided to find another hideout — a shed five minutes from there. A little less dizzy than before and with the ice melted over her face, Lynx arrived to that place often used as a hideout for shoplifters. The rivethead hunt was already ceasing, since they had dissolved as a group and people were calmer. However, anyone who used the Web the right way knew that the end was not so close as it would seem on the news.
The shed used to be a factory in the past. Machines were left there, but since the place started to be occupied by homeless burglars, all junk was reorganized for more space. The center was used by the dwellers so they could chill, chat, and free themselves from their own existence. The night was the most popular time, since it was the only time when darkness prevailed, so discretion could be given to those who sighed for their injectable and penetrable joys. Sex and violence blurred in the absence of light.
In that place, Lynx was a prey as much as anyone else. Under the effect of the pill, she dragged herself to a corner where, only after a while, she realized it was already occupied by two or three girls. High pitched shouts gave the clue. She sat among thighs without knowing if she was in between the legs of someone or separating two. Greasy from sweat, the bodies were naked up to the hips covered with a thin fabric similar to satin.
From the right side, a voice asked for permission. The consent came from Lynx with a long and tired moan. She closed her eyes and let herself settle in between the female bodies hidden in darkness. Thin fingers and long nails walked over her naked shoulders, two hands ran through her arms, three hands touched her breasts, her belly, and waist. Four hands slipped
over her legs, six hands put her on the floor and scanned her body, from nape to the feet. She felt much colder now that the freezing floor collided with her skinny body. It’s been a while since she had last taken her faux leather clothes off.
Although there were moments when she felt inebriated by the peace brought by the drug, Lynx could still follow the movement of the three girls by using her senses. Some time or the other, her fingers would explore more parts of her hostesses’ bodies, but they weren’t naked like their guest. Long hair tickled her chin and waist and, for a brief moment, she was afraid she could actually get hurt.
When the first rays of daylight invaded the shed, human silhouettes started to move. A slight despair made people grab their belongings and leave the place the most frantic way they could. It took a while until the hacker realized the dawn of the day, but when she finally separated her sticky lashes, she noticed there was only one girl left beside her. They were
holding hands.
Her green hair shone when one door was opened by someone. Lynx dropped her hands slowly, so she wouldn’t wake the girl. Still naked, she crawled closer to her face and waited for someone to open the door again. When light came back, all the hacker could see were the frozen eyes swallowed by dilated pupils. Her lips were dry and blue.
Before the corpse, Lynx had no other option than run. The overdosed girl’s clothes were still there, so the hacker could put the fur coat and leave the shed in a hurry, with no shoes. Afraid of being caught, she ran as fast as she could, trying not to step on the broken glass spread on the sidewalk, though the dirty puddles were inevitable. There was no time to feel disgust and she could no longer smell anything to really experience the acrid smell of the
neighborhood.
The hot fumes rising from manholes suggested there was a metro station nearby. She went down the escalator, disturbing some salarymen that were going to work on the weekend, 5:40 am. She dodged the turnstile and felt beaten from behind, but the hit was not strong enough to stop her. Her cadaveric legs were able to take her inside a wagon and, after slipping
on the vomited floor, she could finally find grip on the handle. The train door closed after the alert, meaning that the guards could no longer reach her.
She saw there were free seats — how lucky — and as soon as she realized that, her back started to hurt. She shrinked her body as much as she could so she wouldn’t reveal her disgusting, naked parts to the commuters. She left the station after six stops, since, in that region lived Eichi T-EmyElle, a friend who would nonetheless prefer to see her dead than get a visit at six in the morning. In any case, it wouldn’t take much time until she became food for worms.
A little bit calmer, she walked as straight as she could on the renewed pavement. That was a good neighborhood. Eichi was making good money out of his whitehat jobs. She envied him, but at the same time Eichi seemed like such a pussy for choosing this life. She rang the bell with a drop of optimism. It took three minutes until someone replied. A woman asked “who’s this” with no joy just before she coughed as severely as a tuberculous.
“I wanna speak to Eichi,” she replied with no emotion, though now she felt a slight need to smoke.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Is this Eichi’s fucking house or not?,” she asked right before the phone was off and with a click, the gate was open. Discreetly, she celebrated it.
She climbed the stairs to find two doors, but she didn’t need to pick any of them since one was already open and framing the feminine vision of her friend modified by surgeries and hormone treatment. Between her platinum teeth, two cigarettes were lit.
“I knew it was trouble. I knew it.”
“Wait,” Lynx needed to hold the door before the woman closed it. “Eichi, is that you?”
What had once looked like a 6-feet tall Asian guy, was now a redhead woman with shaved temples, green eyes and lips filled with botox. Her breasts were bandaged, but one could tell the volume that would soon fill a size L bra when the swelling went down. Her shoulders were still large, as much as the hips were kept narrow and the legs, barely hidden by the skirt, were thicker and also shaven.
“Of course, it’s me,” she said after puffing two cigarettes now resting between her long false nails painted in violet. “You never gave a shit about that when I wanted to talk.”
“What the hell? You look hot,” said Lynx while biting her lips amused by the surprise. In response, her friend pulled her with her robot-manicured hands, so the hacker could come in.
Plastic flowers and tropical curtains made the apartment quite comfortable — if one ignored the large amount of cocaine substitute resting on a mirrored tray. Eichi had become Lohanna, a synthpop singer. She wasn’t famous, but she had some MP3 files available online. She made no profit from that, just like any other underground artist, but her music was also free for download and there was no sponsor interested in supporting her gigs or producing merchandising. What disturbed her the most, however, was not being unknown, but the several scars left by the cheap surgeries she had undergone. She was unsatisfied and ashamed of herself.
“What do you want? I’m out. Don’t even try to sell me components. I sold everything I had and I don’t wanna have anything to do with it anymore,” said the almost 2 meters tall woman, for Lohanna was wearing high heels. She was leaning on one of the pillars of her apartment, this one covered with plastic Hawaiian necklaces. Although certainty was blatant in
her voice, the singer still needed to give a quick check in the photography of a 20th century Caribbean beach hanging on the wall so she was sure enough.
“I don’t even need to tell you how fucked up I am, so long story short, can I stay here for a while?”
Step 1: ask what is most impossible to be agreed.
“No.”
“Can you lend me some cash?”
Step 2: ask something a little bit more plausible, since lending means giving back.
“No.”
“I swear I’ll pay you back.”
Step 2,5: insist and have faith.
“Goddamnit, no. You can’t pay no shit.”
Step 3, last one: begging.
“Food, clothes, cigarettes?”
“I don’t have food, you’ll only find some weight loss pills. But I have cigarettes and some clothes inside that golden chest. They’re from the time when I was leaner. Not as much like you, or I could say I was already dead,” she said while she touched her own belly, unconsciously.
As a way to celebrate it, Lynx left the fur coat behind and ran, naked, to the chest. There she found a latex jumpsuit with a zipper strategically placed in the genital area.
“You only have kinky shit here. Are you getting money out of it?”
“Fuck you, Lynx. Look at the walls, look at those posters. I’m Lohanna, an underground synthpop star,” she said while trying to control herself from imitating the poses from the photographs.
“So underground I never heard of.”
“Not everyone is famous, right?,” she replied with a sigh, now putting out her cigarettes in an apple-shaped glass ashtray. “But I’m trying. How about you?”
“Running away, still.” Lynx was wearing black leather pants and a jumper Lohanna kept from the time before the transition.
“You didn’t get rid of those rivetheads yet? Fuck, what a nightmare.” Lohanna got two more cigarettes out of the pack, but this time one was for herself and the other for Lynx. She lit both with a cheap lighter. “I won’t let you stay here, at least not for free.”
“But you know I’m starving and broke.”
“Right, but you still know how to use the Web. You could do something about my songs, spread it online, stuff like that. Make it a virus, anything.”
“I don’t even have my console anymore. Same goes for you.”
“What the fuck?! Why are you always so fucked up?” And after a long time since the last, Lohanna was laughing.
Lynx shrugged. Lying on the couch with the feet hanging in the air, she put out the ashes from her cigarette in the ashtray. The old friends, now girlfriends, talked until they felt like taking a nap — the hacker on the sofa, the singer on the armchair. They woke up almost three in the afternoon, and Lohanna decided to fry some lab-grown burgers and open mini bottles of vodka.
“Now, seriously. What do you expect for your life, Lynx?”
“I have no idea, Eichi. Nobody can think of her future when she has no idea if she’ll be alive until noon.” With her stomach full, she felt for a brief moment the way she used to before doing drugs and taking jobs as a hacker. She only realized the mistake she made after a while, but it was still hard for her to call her friend Lohanna.
The singer spent some time staring at the roof, following the movement of the metallic fan spinning slowly. Dirt grew like hair falling dawn from the helix. A deep sigh made the redhead’s bangs fly.
“How shitty it is to be friends with fucked up people.”
Lynx chose not to reply.
“I want to help you, but I don’t know how.”
“I know. It’s no good to stay here either. I would destroy this place you got for yourself. I’m only paying for my sins, I guess. Dies Irae.”
When she looked back to Lohanna though, Lynx also heard the sound of broken glass from the distance. Suddenly, there was a hole in the window, as much as in the curtain. In Lohanna’s forehead, a gap opened dark and fuming. Filled with horror and agony, Lynx jumped from the couch and threw herself on the floor as the windows shattered with machine gun rounds. Everything in the room was being destroyed: from the decor to the images of Lohanna, hanging on the wall.
Screaming, Lynx crawled to the front door. In complete despair, she wasn’t able to open the electronic lock. While she tried, three hooded men invaded the place, kicking all the gadgets Lohanna have accumulated throughout the years. They kept shooting with no target, as if they only wanted to destroy the place and scare the hacker rather than hitting her head for real.
After opening the door, she tried to find balance on the handrail as she skipped some steps before reaching the street. The slippers, bigger than her feet, were left behind in the entrance of the three-story building. As she ran on sidewalk, she ended up destroying a whole miniature city that was being built by two girls for the past half an hour. Children cries, adult
cries. Female despair, male shouts. The chase did not end even after Lynx threw herself over the hood of a modified car in movement.
Bullets breaking glass. Bullets hitting trash cans. Bullets piercing wheels. Bullets reaching the sky. She begged, though to no one in particular, that she could be rescued, be sent to some empty no-place where peace was almost unbearable. Sharpened stones spread on the sidewalk hurt her feet, to the point she left bloody traces for her hunters to spot the hurt prey.
People on the streets made it even harder to avoid collision between her fragile, painful body against their bodies covered in proper clothes for the summer’s end. Skyscrapers protected her from the sun and made her figure seem even more colorless and shady in an already colorless, shady city.
She hid under a bridge, where she found the remnants of a hobo’s cardboard bed to sit and wait. Her hands moved from her eyes to her ears as an attempt to protect herself from what she saw and heard, what was still stuck in her recent memory. She felt the need to scream so she could interrupt the communication between her mind and the world. She wished she could cry, so her dry lips would hydrate. The food her friend cooked was thrown back to the outside ofher body in a few minutes. Between her feet, the paste that once was vodka and hamburger spilled.
In-between gasps of complete desolation, she tried to shrink herself by holding her knees against her chest. Pressing her eyes closed, she abdicated her vision to concentrate on the sound of the shooting that still echoed inside her ears, but not on the streets anymore. She saw again Lohanna’s neck lose its strength as her body fell heavy on the armchair. Despite its modifications, that face was still Eichi’s and she could still assimilate recent memories to the old, the ones that were still stored in her corrupted neural backup.
Contaminated by a virus, the biological hardware dislocated pieces of remembrance and disconnected them from the timestamp. Like a migraine, the crash made her frown. Internally, a high-pitched sound was growing louder. She stood up immediately, as if she had an insight. The
cars drove fast by the streets illuminated in yellow. She raised her arm in hope for a lift and, luckily, a man in a neon blue convertible car liked her. She jumped over the door and sat on the black leather passenger seat. Like a teenager, she felt herself once again rebellious as she raised the volume of the music and stole the cigarette hanging from the man’s lips.
“You’re kinda crazy, aren’t you?,” he said with a smile.
She waited a few seconds, with a blank stare, before replying.
“Now listen to me fucker / I got nothing to lose / (…) Damnation is at the door and I brought the booze!,” she suddenly sang, overlapping the song playing on the sound system.¹”
[1] A quote from the song “Kickstart the Fight”, by Combichrist.
