Chapters
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The StarIf this had been a physical place, it was possible that the transition to below-ground would’ve killed her. All that wood and glass and debris tumbling down would certainly not have held their shape, and would’ve served only like the stones in a rock-polisher, but with their bodies.But though the others didn’t believe her, Jackie was convinced she was dreaming… or at least that she was in the Dreamlands. Dreaming was impossible for someone with no more physical body.Jackie didn’t get…-
21.3 K •
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Hayden’s search for a mirror paid dividends in very short order. The tower had a bathroom, though like everything else it was built to a medieval standard. That meant it was part of the same room as the bedroom, with a woven screen to separate it and nothing else. The rest of the facilities were… similarly primitive, betraying an underlying ignorance of sanitation and hygiene.What I could do with a handful of general contractors and a trip to the Home Depot… but there were no general contractors…-
141.3 K •
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Lauren wasn’t stopped and asked to explain herself by any of the supervising “ponies”. After seeing what had happened to her brother, she tried to see if her condition had been common. Though she couldn’t tell for sure at a glance as easily with these new bodies, it didn’t smell like there were very many stallions in the room. That was the word for a male horse, wasn’t it? The trend continued as she crossed the hall into the classroom where many of the office staff were congregating. The space…-
13.3 K •
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“You can’t have enjoyed that,” Tune said, her voice as cheerful as it was mocking. “I saw your face while you ate that slug. You almost puked!”Nathan wasn’t sure if what Tune was saying was even true—in the last decade, he’d stopped carrying a phone, replacing it with a simple pair of glasses that did everything without making him look like a tool. The frames were simple plastic, so they didn’t sap heat away from his skin in the frigid cold outside.Cold that challenged the very definition…-
33.8 K •
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They could talk! Technically, Quinn could always talk, but only at that moment could Avery make sense of what he was saying. It meant his attempt to talk to her had worked, that the mental connection he felt was real. He wouldn’t waste that chance. "He's not the only one here from the funding organization," Quinn said, gesturing down at the fallen guard. "They had a whole team here to protect their particle trap. A dozen people across the campus. I think we blew it up." Avery…-
80.7 K • Completed
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Okay, maybe it only felt that way. A single burning wave of heat rushed through his body, dropping him to the ground in an instant and completely overwhelming his senses. He didn’t scream, because he was far too stunned for that. He didn’t kick or struggle. He barely even breathed.For a few seconds he lay on the floor, utterly insensate. His body came slowly back into alertness, like an old computer warming up overworked circuits one system at a time.He was on the floor, he could tell that from the…-
129.9 K •
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To bring the power back to her home, to bring Crimson back, Bit needed to discover why the electricity in Zircon had failed.Ostensibly this was not something she had been trained to do, but she hadn't been trained to make brushes and mops either. She still spent plenty of time—days or months or years—considering and second-guessing herself while focused on her other responsibilities. But whenever the tower was clean, her mind returned to her task. The electricity was gone, and if Zircon were going to…-
67.7 K •
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Dear Journal,I didn’t find anyone today. Power died sometime during the night, though the batteries in the truck haven’t yet. There were no streetlights on when I woke in the morning, and while my cell phone still sometimes claims to have service, I haven’t been able to so much as reach anybody’s voicemail today. So ends the connectedness of the information age. At least until everybody comes back. I mean; if the vanishing happened all at once for no reason, I see no reason the return of humanity…-
105.4 K •
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But it wasn’t just from Sunset Shimmer that Jackie extracted her knowledge.However much she loathed her digital existence, however much she imagined she was a deterministic illusion, a data-corpse of a girl who had lived so long ago—persisting in the machine had its advantages. Knowledge was fractional, divisible, and no longer fundamentally entwined with the processor mechanism as in living humans.There were many ways to gain knowledge when you were digital. When the information needed to be directly…-
134.3 K •
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Alex was more than a little relieved when she saw flashing lights in the distance. She leaned forward towards the exit, and was the first to hop down onto the grass when they finally stopped. She received several salutes as she passed the barricade, and was only dimly conscious of the others following her. She slowed enough for Joseph to catch up with them, and didn't meet his eyes even as he pointedly glared in her direction."I'm still not sure why you felt it necessary to bring me. It seems like you have…-
153.4 K •
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