Read “Unity Undone,” an Original Short Story in the Cyberpunk World of Ren Warom’s Escapology

They stare for a moment, wild eyes sizing her up. Their smiles, a moment ago so wide and bright, slowly fade. Unity’s office fauna, a lowest common denominator piece of shit, but the Streeks see straight through her bland office garb, perfect up-do and within-guidelines make-up, all nudes, creams and neutrals––god forbid she frighten the upper management with colour––to what’s underneath. An XT. A dangerous human animal living life on wire finer than anything the Streeks care to walk upon.
How she got there is one hell of a free drinks guarantor in certain circles. Not that she’d tell the tale that easily. It’s too private, too painful. Still too close to bear thinking about. Thing is, Unity was destined for more than the office floor. Top ten percent Tech skills sent her to the best Tech in the Gung, on a one-way path to Corp privileges. Failing her Pyschs ruined that future. But what guaranteed her universal derision was choosing the unrighteous path, the alternative to employment exile.
She’s a Psych Fail who chose to walk the line. Or the plank. Given the nature of the life she’s subjected herself to, that would be the more appropriate analogy. Fellow fauna from the low tracks, whose bland, easy-listening Psych Passes brand and condemn them as cheap-rate WAMOS—so-called Well-Adjusted Members of Society—hate her guts because she could, no should, have been more. Screwed up as it is, they look down their noses at her. They earned this. She defaulted to it.
The J-Hacks hate her because she could, no should, have lifted those middle fingers at the system and come to hang with them. But Unity’s not a drop out. She was raised to conform, to behave, which used to mean you took what the system gave you and thanked them kindly for it and now means… nothing much. Her skill score promised her parents a daughter in Corp, something they could boast about. Instead they got an inferiority complex. She tries not to hate them for blaming her for thinking for herself. Part of her still thinks it’s a disease—walking the line should have cleared her infection, but it only made her sicker.
Upper management and Corps hate her because of her unruly mind. That’s why she Failed. That’s why they all Fail. Thoughts outside of acceptable parameters. See, by the time you take Psychs, you’ve been through Cad or Tech, whichever route your skill-set evaluations led you down, been put through the blender until you’re mouldable and then lovingly re-shaped by the hands of your chosen Upper Ed institution to be WAMOS—or wackos, as some anarchos like to call them. In other words, you’re meant to have thrown out the individual self and taken on the bland, smiling visage of a corporate team player. The royal “we”.
Those who Fail have two options: employment exile, which is a fancy term for unemployed homelessness, or permanent life on the seabed. Thing is, no one tells you the only time you’ll be offered the alternative to exile is in those stomach-creasing moments after the red FAIL flashes on the screen—and no one tells you that failure to accept that offer results in immediate activation of the alternative. Truth is the offer is nothing more than a concession to minimal human rights requirements, and “no” indicates to the system that you’re not capable of being WAMOS no matter how minor your anarcho breach might be. So society is done with you.
Unity said yes.
Partly that good upbringing, partly the memory, imprinted on her conscience, of her parents hopeful faces when she went off for her Psych tests. Having raised her to conform as well as achieve, they were as devastated by her failure as she was. Her acceptance of the alternative to ejection, and her unfailing dedication to her work, allowed them to attempt forgiveness, and so they go along imagining all is well in the Jo-Charbonneau family, apart from the nagging shame of their daughter’s mindset. However, if they knew the secret she’s been keeping, her true mindset, they’d be more than ashamed, they’d be devastated.
Unity is suicidal. Or at least she was. For a long time. She hid it behind a mask of cheerful acceptance, but every work night without fail she’d leave at five P.M. on the dot and head to the lower end of Plaza to drink herself insensible. She did this for months, starting barely a week after she began her job and carrying on for almost two years until the day, four months ago, when she got caught drunk and disorderly by Fulcrum’s sec-drones. She could’ve lost everything: job, apartment, family, you name it, but it being her first offence she copped a four-week sentence in public service instead.
Found herself cleaning streets and mopping out monos every weekday evening between five and ten P.M. and every weekend from seven A.M. until nine P.M. Within a few days, without a crutch to lean on, she was planning to join the sad army of mono-jumpers whose splattered remains she’d been forced to clean up on more than one occasion; gagging and crying over pieces of intestine, gobbets of skull trailing blood-soaked hair, and piles of puzzled bone in flesh that might have been arms or legs before the drop.
What saved her was the arrival of Gigi-E.
Gigi’s an accountant. Low end. Not Corp. She’s also an XT, and earned a six-week stint of public service punishment for being caught BASE jumping. BASE-J is no big deal, the Gung boasts a wide X-Sport community; BASE-jumpers, free-runners, body-gliders, ’scraper free-climbers and crazy folk into anything involving wheels and high/awkward places, but X-Sports are no XTs. XTs are Extreme Trouble, they’re different animals altogether, after more than just a thrill. Gigi got caught jumping from halfway up the Heights, the tallest of some seriously fucking eye-watering ’scrapers in the Gung’s sweating centre. That’s no mean feat, and also illegal as hell. Only top Corps live in the Heights and they tend to take personal affront to some nobody climbing the exterior of their home and throwing herself off for the hell of it.
Unity and Gigi clicked like wheels on a roller-disco. Under the barrage of stories rolling from Gigi’s unstoppable gob, Unity’s desire to spread the pavement began to melt away, replaced by a hunger to try this shit. To get herself that cold sweat, that thundering heart, that “oh-my-shit-I’m-gonna-fucking-die-right-now” wide-eyed, full-on, stomach-rolling terror. Okay, so swopping suicide for playing with death isn’t exactly quitting suicide, but to Unity and every other XT out there, it’s not about wanting to die, it’s about wanting to feel alive.
XTs are mostly from the bottom ten percent of graduates from Tech or Cad, who somehow in facing their day in day out of mediocrity and derision, learn to be anarchos, regardless of their once perfect Psych scores. The rest of the XTs are Fails like Unity who chose to be forced into mediocrity, looking for a way to feel like they can breathe again. Finding somewhere she fits, being seen as human again, has revolutionized Unity’s existence. She finds she can tolerate her job now, mind-numbing though it is to someone with her smarts, tolerate herself, because she gets to do this.
It’s not perfect, but it’s enough.
Running with Gigi’s crew has given her not only reason to keep living, but a new toughness, a carapace of crazy, and that’s why the Streeks won’t touch her. She, and XTs like her, are the only thing out there more insane than them. Streeks who survive the Techs become WAMOS, suited up and conformed to the accepted mould, those bright smiles dimmed to unified pleasantry. Soon they’ll have to let go of that wildness, and they know it, too. They also know Unity won’t. She’ll keep pushing her limits until they break—or she does. But that’s not the only thing that stops the Streeks.
Unity once thought Streeks weren’t afraid of anything, but XTs have a habit of dealing some sober retribution, XT style. And apparently Streeks don’t much like hurting once whatever buzz they’re riding melts away. Kills the fun. So they avoid her kind as if they’re packing plague like a throbbing bubo enclosed in a sweating armpit.
XTs are top of the heap in the crazy community, which means Unity is too. Funny how life works out. First she was crazy one way, now she’s crazy another. She likes this way best. She laughs as the Streeks throw up a few half-hearted middle fingers in response and run off, howling, into the neon-smeared darkness of Plaza.
“Hooooo, check you out, bitch.” Gigi’s arm flops around Unity’s shoulders as she rolls around into her sights, beaming, her teeth sodium-white in the blue-black gleam of her face.
Unity smiles back. “Used to be I’d go out of my way to avoid them. Not anymore. Arseholes.”
Gigi sighs. “Knew me some Streeks during my time at Cad,” she says, her dark eyes watching as the howling fades away into Plaza. “They ain’t so bad until they flip. They’re just fodder hon, spare them a sprinkling of compassion, if you have it.”
“I know what they are and I don’t care. I was fair fucking game—such a good girl I never once thought to step up and fight back, I just lived in absolute terror, gave them every opportunity to mess with me, and they took them. These days I’m not so helpless. I feel like relieving them of the burden of breathing with my bare hands.”
The arm around her shoulder tightens to a full-on hug and Gigi looks at Unity, dark eyes holding her in stasis, eyes that’ve seen much the same.
“Sugah, you surely have reason and a half, but why waste your time when there’s buildings to climb and chances to take? Chances to feel alive in ways they never will? Living well, hon, that’s the best revenge. Oldie but goody.”
Unity shrugs. “Bad day at the office, I guess.”
Gigi tips her head to one side, neon turning the close-shaven expanse of her skull into fairyland.
“Havin’ a good day at the office is about as likely as stepping on some magical goddam elevator to Corp-land. That’s why you got us. That’s why we got each other. Now what say you we take that angry ass up a big ole building and throw it off?”
Grinning, Unity catches the compact ’chute Gigi swings at her and says with feeling, “Oh hell yes.”
 
//
Commanding a salary that’s no less than a personal affront means Unity lives a considerable distance from her place of servitude. Home is a nameless block in the run-down neo-European trash-heap known as Cash Corner—not an amusing play on poverty but the name of the man who built it: Andre Cash. Cash Corner comprises seventeen grey monstrosities parked precariously on the western cliff edge of the Gung. An indiscriminate mass of rundown architecture, their oceanward sides riddled with nests built from all manner of trash by clamourous colonies of seabirds, and shellacked in shit to a pearly hue.
Her parents wanted her to live with them, in Norii, but she’s never had the heart, or the nerve, to reveal the exact details of her pay. Tells them that she prefers this outpost, enjoys living in an area of almost wanton deprivation, with the ever-present dangers of corrosion and the often violent storms. That she likes being this close to the coast, despite these blocks lacking basic amenities and no crime lords to control the violence. Even they don’t care about this shithole.
It’s no real lie. She hates poverty—who doesn’t? Poverty is a sinkhole, there are no ways out. No one wants that reality. Most people like to pretend it doesn’t exist, as if that ever stopped anything from being real. But this is her reality and she’s grown to like it. She discovered that home is where you make it, and you can make home anywhere you want if you’ve half a mind to. Since she got her mind back she’s learning to appreciate small things like that.
The view from her block window, on a clear day, is a distant panorama of frozen ridges of land, risen like spears above an often furious ocean, and on storm nights lightning plays the points like drums, sending up explosions and flares of light. Money can’t buy that. Only poverty can. She cherishes that view. Before, when she wanted nothing more than to end, she’d go to the top of her block and sit on the edge during storms, watching those strikes of lightning and wishing she stood beneath them. She doesn’t wish that anymore. These days she goes to the top of her block to witness nature unleashed and recognizes it within herself. Nature’s an XT. She can dig that.
However much she’s adjusted though, commuting’s still a bitch, involving a morning so early the only sound is the whine of monos and the low hum of lights still casting luminance over streets drenched in shadow. Barely 5:20 A.M. and Unity stands shivering on the mono platform, next to dozens of equally unlucky lowlifes waiting to be carried to ill-paid positions in or near the centre of Foon Gung. There’s very little chatter at this time of morning, not even the gulls and cormorants are talking; they’re waiting for the warmth of the sun, still over an hour from rising.
The mono arrives, as ever, in a swirl of freezing wind and errant leaves, scraping her cheeks as they whirl about the platform, delirious as Streeks on a Monday night. Unity squeezes her way through to a space by the doors and tries to look as if she doesn’t give a shit about the lack of seats. There’s a particular facial expression, a cross between resignation and superiority. She’s got it nailed. So much so that on the odd occasion someone will give up a seat for her out of sheer guilt, thinking she’s more than a nobody. But not today.
Settling her hip against the hard edge of the door, Unity braces for two hours cramped and cramping. She finally gets a seat about ten minutes from her stop and leaves it for someone else out of sheer bloodymindedness. Fuck, ten minutes is ten minutes, nothing in the scheme of things. She can suffer. She’s attuned to suffering.
The exit onto the main thoroughfare is as chaotic as ever, coinciding as it always does with inner-city rush hour. She keeps her head in and arms down, allowing herself to be carried along. It’s the only safe way.
Oblax headquarters are on the outskirts of the centre, and still a bus-ride away. Smaller than monos, they’re even more cramped, and stink of the bio-fuel grown in vats in factories on the edges of the Gung, a few of them not too far from her home block, belching foul odours when the wind hits the wrong direction. She gets a seat this time but, invariably, finds herself squashed yet again. Left with no choice but to sit in the back near the window, she has to elbow and apologize her way to the front before her stop, same as she does every morning.
“One day I’ll get up in time to catch the earlier mono and miss this crap,” she promises herself as she jumps to the sidewalk and strides off, walking fast, knowing she’s minutes from a third reprimand this month. Not her fault the damn bus was late again, nor that she won’t ever catch the earlier mono. Some things are outside of your control, and waking before 4:30 A.M. is way outside of hers.
Oblax’s three buildings range in arrogant splendour around a mini courtyard, their sheer lines of steel and orange glass rising up until they’re swallowed by fat, white clouds. In the centre of the courtyard is the obligatory fountain pool and company logo sculpture in ugly, aged bronze; in this case an O with shooting stars zipping through and around the hole at the top. The fountain’s ever-evolving patterns of splash and fall are said to represent brainwaves under various stimuli. Unity walks the edge as usual, enjoying the tap of her feet on ceramic mixed with the music of the water. It’s a sound to get lost in.
She uses these few moments to change gear for the day. It’s no easy task. Her brain likes the gear it was meant to be in, but when she walks through those doors everything she does will be ninety-five percent less demanding than that gear requires, meaning her brain races ahead, has to be yanked back about a million times in every working day. It’s slow torture and, by the end of it, only hanging with Gigi and crew can take the stress and throw it all away. Even with that outlet, the thought that this is it for the rest of her life occasionally brings back a sharp urge to end herself––stabbing through heart, gut and head with pain pure as hot needles. But she fights it off. She has things to live for now. That has to be enough. It is enough.
Reaching the monstrous entrance of Building Three, office fauna central, Unity waves her hand at the door––and smashes headlong into unmoving glass. She reels away, clutching her nose, too stunned and hurt for a moment to register what just happened. When she does, fury and disbelief override the face full of pain.
“Fuck. Fucking hell!”
She strides back to the door, real close, and waves her hand again a few times.
Nothing happens.
Unity lets out a shout of frustration and bangs on the glass with both fists.
“Someone let me in,” she yells. “Stupid thing’s not working! What are you all doing in there? This isn’t fucking funny, you know, I’m about to cop a third late. Have a heart, dammit.”
It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before, but it’s always to someone else and therefore amusing. Now it’s her nose throbbing, and her guaranteed third late reprimand, which means a fucking flim charge from her next pay check she can’t fucking well afford. Unity boots the door.
“Come on,” she mutters. “Get the fuck out here and let me in.”
Finally there’s movement behind the orange glass, and Marcus, security guy extraordinaire, comes sashaying out with that cock-of-the-walk rhythm he likes to take with strangers, holding up a hand to prevent her scooting past.
Wait, what?
Marcus offers her a polite, almost conciliatory smile, the kind you give to someone you don’t want to provoke. Huh? No one likes to be played around like this. None of them can afford it. Marcus clears his throat. Speaks gently, his tone coaxing.
“Miss, I’d like to ask you to quietly move along. This is a private building, and we don’t want any trouble. Neither do you.”
Her mouth flaps.
What?
She looks up at the windows of Building Three, expecting to see laughing co-workers, but the faces peering out at her are filled with morbid curiosity. Unity can’t quite grasp what’s going on and yet somewhere underneath the shock, under the disbelief and outrage, a slow, sick dread is rising like the tide. Please let this not be real. Please. It can’t be. This shit does. Not. Happen.
“Marcus. Marcus. It’s me, Unity. Unity Jo-Charbonneau. I work on floor five.”
She’s expecting him to laugh, or some recognition to flash in his eyes, but instead he offers her a smile edged with pity, and the sick dread rises further in response.
“I’m sorry, Miss. I don’t know who you are, but you sure as hell aren’t Unity Jo-Charbonneau. She’s at her desk. Working. Now, I don’t know what your deal is, but it’s going to end badly if you don’t leave right now. This is the last warning I can give you before I have to get handy. C’mon lady, I’m offering you a kindness here.”
Dread becomes a noose, constricting air. If she speaks, she’s going to start sobbing, fall apart right in front of him, and everyone will see. But hope is fading and she can’t bear it. She can’t. She knows Marcus, whether he knows her anymore or not. So what the hell is happening here? She stands for a few moments longer, struggling for self control so she can find something, anything, to say to him that will break through, make him see her. Nothing comes. And the urge to cry won’t fade. It’s getting stronger, burning her eyes, her chest.
This is not a joke. Marcus is terrible at keeping a straight face, and he’s still looking at her like she’s a stranger who’s lost their mind, as if she just escaped from one of the Gung’s high security psychiatric facilities. Whoever she was to him, she’s no one now. Someone is up there pretending to be her, and not one soul seems to have noticed. How does that happen? And how do you fight it? How do you fight the impossible?
She turns, blinking away tears, trying to hold it together because she will not lose it in front of him or any other bastard watching the drama out of the windows. She begins to walk away, feet stuttering. The world she’s walking on makes no sense anymore. How can it have forgotten her so quickly? How can that other Unity be up there on floor five, at her desk, with her holo of K-Rock star ArGo? It’s nuts. There’s only one Unity Jo-Charbonneau and she’s it. Or at least she was. She doesn’t know quite who she is at the moment.
“Gigi.” Unity grabs the name out the air like a life buoy, shocked at the brittle edges in her voice. “Gigi will know me. Gigi has to know me.”
 
//
 
Gigi works in the inner city. Oblax’s right on the edge of it, in an area nicknamed “The Ring”. Nothing’s small in the Gung, but a lack of surface area means most everything goes up, and up, and up. But from The Ring inward, in line with the inflating budgets, the ’scrapers get ridiculous, and inner city is like a Dahl-ian nightmare, with buildings in place of giraffes and elephants. The avenues between them are the widest in the Gung, resembling causeways built for Egyptian Pharaohs.
Elsewhere in the Gung everything comes in various shades of steel and glass, or unforgiving acid rainbows of cheap masonry paint to give an illusion of diversity in architecture. Here the fascias gleam in multi-hues of ambers, greys and black. Luxurious stone laid in an elegant tapestry over structures so sound that, even tall as they are, an earthquake as powerful as those that broke the world would merely sway them like corn in a breeze.
Through the avenues purrs an army of hover cars and chauffeured motors. If the finer buildings, or the palpable aura of superiority failed to inform you, the cars would serve to drive home the sheer wealth of the inner city. Only the elite live here, the majority of them in the Heights and her sister buildings, the Needle and the Spine. This trio stands at the very centre, looming majestically above the rest.
Unity hates the inner city. The Gung serves to dwarf in so many ways and these gargantua go one step too far, making her feel less a collection of vibrating molecules than a single atom, rootless, bodiless and reviled. The avenues are hungry, they have no time for the weak or the fallen. And she’s both, still both, no matter what changes she’s wrought.
It’s still early-morning cold, but bright sunlight draws a filmy screen from tarmac and sidewalk stone. Unity feels herself rippling within it, fading away. Only desperation keeps her moving, the need to look into eyes that see her. Gigi will re-make her, re-build her into the world, just as she did before.
She has to.
But when Unity reaches her friend’s place of work, about twelve blocks from the trio at the inner city centre, she realizes she’d forgotten there’s no way to get in without a chip. She has to wait.
Gigi hits her break at midday. Corps go at one P.M., are not expected back until three, but the rest, the lowlifes, get twenty minutes at midday. Twenty minutes to forage, feed themselves and return. When Gigi emerges, laughing amongst a group of co-workers, Unity’s waiting, numb with pain and so desperate to be real, she just runs at her, enfolding Gigi in a hug and laughing, crying, because she feels more real already, just from seeing her.
“Gigi!” she sobs into her shoulder, and babbles, struggling to sound coherent but her words, held in all morning, tumble out in a tangle, tripping over each other. “It’s all gone wrong. They don’t know who I am. They sent me away. I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
Gigi’s hands close around her arms like clamps. So strong. Muscled and rough from free-climbing they hurt, digging into her skin, sensitized and too thin today, stripped back to nothing but nerves. Unity cries out, inarticulate, as Gigi wrenches her away and holds her at arm’s length. Their eyes meet, and Unity withers, crumples, beneath the complete lack of recognition in Gigi’s gaze.
“Oh no. Please no.” Aware she’s begging, but with no means to stop, she whispers, “Please tell me you know who I am? Please.”
True to her nature, Gigi’s eyes and hands soften.
“Shug,” she says gently, as if unwilling to bruise tender hopes. “Whichever Gigi y’all are looking for, it ain’t me. I don’t know you. I’m sorry.”
Even more gently than she’s spoken, Gigi presses Unity out of her way and continues on, her co-workers gathering around her as if to offer condolences. Unity stares after them, her whole body aching like a broken heart. She’s been nothing. Looked into her future and seen it stretching out, unending and utterly empty. This is worse. What she is now is worse than nothing. She’s an inconvenience, a blip on the register. A bad experience in someone’s day.
Unity became nothing the day four red letters flashed up and wrote her out of the existence she’d been led to expect. Gigi made her something again, gave her a reason to see herself, and now Gigi doesn’t know her. Doesn’t see her. There are no other Gigis for Unity. No other chances. Unity is gone. The world inverted overnight, shoving her outside of itself, and gave someone else her place. Just like that. So horrifyingly easy. And where does that leave her?
She begins to walk back the way she came, feet pecking away at the sidewalk, disjointed, out of synch with the lunchtime rush. Awareness slips away. The world blurs behind a film of tears, sound dims under the roaring in her ears. Unity’s not here anymore but, inexplicably, people still see her. They shove past her, swearing, when she lurches into their path. Shout at her to wake up, watch where she’s going. Dazed, Unity tries to understand. Marcus saw her, Gigi touched her. She’s still here, she’s just not herself anymore. What does that make her? Who?
Wandering without thinking, afraid to think, afraid of what that might cause her to do, she finds herself in a mono lift, whipping up the side of a granite-faced ’scraper just outside of the inner city. Her reflection in the long, light-reactive glass windows is frail, an apparition––poltergeist hair rippling like a halo. Stepping out onto the platform into blazing sunshine is like being struck. It anchors her back fully into this skin that looks like her, acts like her, and yet no longer is her.
“What am I doing here?”
There’s no one to answer. Lunchtime is over. There are no guards outside of the inner city and the fauna are back at work. Only the wealthy travel freely during work hours, and no person of wealth was ever reduced to the need for a mono. In the blazing light, mere steps from canopy and shade, Unity stands, trying to work out why her feet might have drawn her here. This line is northbound. That can’t be an accident. If she took the next mono she could, by and by, make her way to Norii. Was she going home? To her parents? It makes no sense. Why would they know her? Why would they want to?
If they were offered the chance to forget Unity, they’d take it. They’d buy it if it weren’t free. Perhaps they had. Their disappointment in her rests heavy inside them. It’s a burden, bowing her appa’s shoulders, and pulling lines on her maman’s face prematurely, before the ravage of gravity or age. In every way, she makes them ashamed. In her gut she knows they haven’t been excluded from this, and if they realize something’s missing they’ll feel only relief. The burden gone. She can’t ever go home to her parents. She has none.
So why is she here?
Only one reason––her own burden, and being rid of it. There’s no room left for her in the life she thought was hers. No reason to struggle on.
A sort of liquid calm spreads through her, from a point beneath her heart. She knows why she’s here. To jump. To fall. To let go. Finally to rest. The realization snatches her calm away, leaving her gasping, in a preternatural awareness of self that eliminates everything else. In this state, Unity walks to the edge, and looks down. The ground is so far away it’s obscured by cloud, but that dizzy leap in her belly is not vertigo.
Unquestioning, knowing this is what she came for and that it’s right, she closes her eyes. Raising her arms, feeling the sun beating down with a clarity bordering on the psychic, she thinks: Beat this, Gigi.
But before the impulse to jump arcs from mind to muscle, a thought sneaks into her head much like this stranger has snuck into her life and all as unwelcome, as unexpected.
Why should I?
She tries to ignore it, but it’s too strong, refuses to simply be shoved away. It resonates, digging in fingers and climbing her subconscious, breaking through. Unity’s eyes pop open, burning and swollen.
Things are upside down. Her life, her world, and now her mind. Upside down and turned about and rebelling against the one thing she has left to do, the one thing she wants to do. But the question will not be ignored, and so she’s forced to examine its origins, and finds behind the loss, the grief, the sense of having come undone, there’s a rage so deep and so vast it terrifies her. Rage is what has asked her this question, and it demands that she answer it.
“There’s nothing here for me,” she says, but this answer is not good enough. This is not a simple question and the answer has to be right. If it’s not then her rage will not allow her the relief of an ending. That should enrage her, but there’s no room left for any more rage.
Unity once questioned everything, possessing a basic inability to accept what she was told without examining the truth of it for herself. That’s why she Failed, even though she thought she might Pass. Buried for too long, her desire to question everything, to fight against the version of reality she’d been sold, has re-awoken. When she Failed she locked it away deep inside, ashamed of what it had done for her–– to her—and because questioning hurts too much when one has given up all hope of change. But now she unlocks the door to questioning, to one fundamental question: How is an end the answer to her problems? One good reason will suffice. Just one. If she can find it.
“I have nothing left. I’m so tired.”
Piecemeal. Formulaic. An excuse. Everyone she knows is tired. Bone deep. Spirit deep. Exhausted at such a fundamental level that the vast majority don’t even realize what it is that makes them feel so goddamn awful all the time. They had no choice in the life they were given, and no way out. She did, however poor it was, and therefore her tiredness is her own doing. She could’ve been brave. Chosen differently. And what is nothing? Nothingness, in her experience, is losing everything you’ve worked for over a fucking technicality, if the inability to stop thinking for oneself could be called such a thing. That’s a greater loss than this.
Choosing to conform, accepting the punishment that apparently suited the so-called crime of thought she committed almost killed her. She wanted to die then. Giving in stole her will to live. Made her think that ending herself was the only way out, just like today. But that changed after Gigi. Not immediately, and not completely, but she was getting there, she’s been getting there. Why? It’s not like the pain went away, or the misery.
Unity takes a moment to think it over, because she has to. You can’t step off the edge if your mind won’t allow your body to move. She has to be in accord. Has to understand why she’s rebelling against her own impulses, refusing to submit to peace. It has something to do with how she changed after meeting Gigi. Before Gigi she’d made up her mind to give in and die. During their time together on public service, her determination to chase that death began to fade, and it kept fading during her short stint as an XT. She’s been thinking about dying less and less.
Although she was… is a good friend, it wasn’t Gigi who engineered the change. She provided the catalyst, the introduction to the sheer rush of XT. But it wasn’t the XT either. It was simpler than that. Or at least it was a simple solution to something that had felt complicated, or rather impossible, before Gigi and XT. For the first time since Failing, Unity found she could give herself permission to be herself. For those few hours a week she dared to open the cage she’d locked herself inside and see what was possible if she set herself free.
Everything inside stills.
Pain, distress, and rage all fade like smoke and this word, this concept, stands tall as a ’scraper in her mind, dominating everything, so immense she wonders why she hasn’t seen it before, why she didn’t realize its significance. But where’s the connection to now? This is not like then. Is it? But there is a link, nagging at the edges of her mind. Now and then, parallel in some way, and that’s the reason why her subconscious won’t let her jump. Unity blinks as the answer occurs, because it, too, is obvious, and so monumental it awes her. She’s not lost everything at all. She’s not lost anything. She’s been released.
By erasing her, they’ve set her free.
Her throat crawls with the need to scream, shout, something. Unity clamps both hands to her mouth to catch it and whatever she’s containing bursts out as tears. But there’s no sadness behind them, only raw, unbridled relief, and a purging of bottled emotion that frightens her in its intensity. And that’s not all that frightens her. She’s been so institutionalized she didn’t recognize an open door when she saw it. Almost rejected the chance to be free in her conviction that death was the only way out. It’s incredible. Horrifying. She’d feel sick if she didn’t feel so goddamn grateful.
Removing her hands from her mouth, her breath ragged, Unity steps back from the edge. Steps away from giving in, from falling, from letting go, and into an all-consuming urge to fight, to rise, to hold on. For the first time in over two years her gaze is clear, and she sees a future. She sees what she might have seen had familial obligations and fear of the unknown not forced her to accept confinement, reduction and punishment. There’s so much out there. A whole underground. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Fails like her. Surviving. Fighting. Never giving in like she did. So much life. She wants what they have.
So what does she do now?
How does freedom work?
She needs go to her apartment and fetch some of her things for a start. They’re no longer hers as far as the world at large is concerned, but who cares? If the world no longer wishes to acknowledge her, then Unity exists because she says she does. She no longer needs permission. And if she wants her things back, she’ll bloody well go and get them.
There’s no chip-entry, and no guard in her block, or anywhere in Cash Corner. Nothing to stop her. Except herself. As soon as she really considers this, the relative ease of it all, Unity finds she doesn’t want to go back. Her old life is gone. But she needs assets to start out with, however small. Perhaps the abandoned life of the other woman can be her resource? They, whoever they are, have left her with nothing but the clothes on her back and the flim in her pocket, and it’s nowhere near enough. She may be able to sell some of their belongings, perhaps even find some flim hanging around. A tablet, a set of wheels, too, if she’s lucky. She’ll deal with her conscience later—just as the woman who’s stolen her life will doubtless deal with hers.
“I need to find out who she was,” she says, and her fingers begin to tingle in anticipation. “I wonder if I can use the Slip? Will they still let me in if I’m not me?”
She stops. No. That was her old self talking, the one they replaced without apparent effort. As a graduate from a premier Tech, tested in the top ten percent, she’s got skills, resources, that other people don’t have. She’s spent a long, painful time trying to forget that, thinking she’d never get to be that Unity again. Well, things have changed. Time to remember.
Fishing in her pocket, she finds the flim intended for lunch. She can use this to buy time at a manual Slip-shop to track the new/old worker at Oblax. That’s where Unity holds the advantage. Distinctly. She’s the only one left who knows who the real Unity Jo-Charbonneau is. All she needs to do is find her replacement and trace her pathway. Doubtless there’ll be some VA to snip through, but the Techs working fauna level can’t hold her out––she’s top ten percent, this is child’s play for her. She grins as the hum of an approaching mono vibrates the track.
“Time to go swimming,” she says.
 Escapology is available now.