"Ungelic is us" - Different are we two - from Wulf and Eadwacer

"Eft is þæt onhworfen    is nu swa hit no wære     freondscipe uncer" - Now it is undone, as if it never were, our love  - from The Wife's Lament

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At some point, I had nothing and no one left. Before, I had everything, or close enough. At least, I thought I had everything, so I wasn't complaining. What I have now is a mess of misery. I feel loose, disconnected. Connected and un at the same time. The nausea of waking before dawn, the flash of panic and then remembering it's too late for that.

The City is quiet today. Unreal. Quiet for me, as the assistants clean up the problems. Where there are people, millions of people, there are problems. I walk along the river since it's safe here for everyone, even a woman on her own. Sparkling clean, green strip of grass, bluish-gray water. What did I say about the assistants? They know their jobs and nothing else.

Vita taps my shoulder. "We have picked up a digital footprint. You can follow the trail from the Grove."

"Thank you," I say. I'm already on my way. "I've got it."

Time to head out. I've looked before, of course. So many times, when my assistant detected his trail.

After the schism, I was kicked out of my own position. I was searching already, without the mandate. His followers whispered to him, they whispered to the Cronies. The Cronies—the Board members, came crawling sycophant style to whisper to him, too. Then the followers stopped whispering. They were screaming. He had the followers, the cults in his name, and the adoring masses. What did I have? Reason? What did that matter when he was their guiding light, their god, my god, do I have to go on? Waking up in the morning with only the thought of him for company?

Promises were made, promises were broken. But I'm not in pieces. I've melted. I'm the gooey mess in the chrysalis, liquifying so I can better devour myself. Please don't think this thought leads to some butterfly metaphor. It's nauseating.

It was different between us. Before, anyway.

Streets are a blur as I hurry. Laws are the same here, and I obey for the most part. I could get away with so much, but I wait to get out of the City, through the Village, and into the Grove.

May his misery be as far and wide as the worlds he travels.

I'm in the Village, the market zone and the way narrows where street merchants and vendors hawk their wares. Bubble heads pass me, eyes vacant and jaws slack. All anyone else sees of their world is the hazy blue sphere surrounding their heads. Surrounding, hell. Devouring their minds inside and out. One of them swerves and I sidestep, but too late. I could have been a puff of wind, for all the notice he gives me. He pushes me into a food cart. Noodles. Bouncing pin-ball fashion, he continues down the middle of the road.

"Yeah, that's right, keep going!" the noodles vendor brays. "That's all life is, one big fucking dream!"

I shrug deeper into my jacket and keep walking, my hip stinging from the impact. Keep moving. Out here on the edges of the City, I have to keep moving. Every step could be tracked—I'm not the only one searching. His followers follow me.

It hasn't always been like this. I have to remind myself of how it once was, same as when I had an itch, I have to scratch or a hang nail, I yank. That's not really the same feeling, though. I rehash the past like....

Like what? Like picking at a scab. Teasing apart the seams and letting blood flow. Like poring over those old texts and pictures, remembering the flush of love's pleasure while icy barbs spread through my body. That's not an answer to why.

I take a sharp left. Streets in the City are the neat and tidy perpendicular sort, making up a grid of predictability. It's a paradise of easy choices. I designed it that way. The Village, however, lives by its own rules, so when I say sharp left, I mean doubling back and a short drop into the Grove. My home away from home.

If the Village doesn't obey the rules, the Grove doesn't know they exist. Only back doors, secret doors lead to this island in the Village. It was our original compromise. A grafted grey area.

He said to wait for him here.

Of course, he said a lot of things. Inconsequential things like, we're in this together. We're the architects of our world.

We were the mad scientists. We were the Frankensteins of our own making. We hooked up the wires and zapped as if rebirth was our birthright. We sacrificed those gods who came before us, never thinking that ghosts of the murdered are quick to haunt.

Lightning fast. Neuron synapsis fast.

I'm being followed.

The doorway is close. I can see the sign of the Oak hanging above the cellar. My safe haven. I move through tangles of barbed wire left over from some past skirmish. A thorny barb scratches me. You can't escape the past. My hand hits the door.

"My daughter, my sweet, beautiful child," booms a voice. He has my upper arm in a vice-grip, so I have to turn. "Have you been saved from eternal death? Have you found that holy spark to reanimate the dead?" He glows. Glows with sanctity.

My god.

"I have, father. I have found the spark to bring the dead to life for whenever I need it. I have used it. I have." It's always better to play along with the crazy kooks, same as strange family members, and employers. When they ask the ridiculous, the impossible, when they demand your blood and obedience and sacrifice—nod. Trust me. Just nod. "I have found the holy spark and it has zapped me to life."

"Are you certain, my child? Because for the low, low price of 299.50, you can be our next contestant on Lifewyr Games with a chance to win unlimited spark access to—" His words break off as loops of ropey noodles squeeze his neck. He arches back, choking.

"What you're selling, she isn't buying. So why don't you find a different fish for your hook?" The noodles vendor strangles the games evangelist man, but his eyes are on me. A user who recognized me? A would-be hero in my isolation? He gives another tug on the noodle ropes and lets the man go, red faced and gasping.

Everybody is somebody out here, especially the nobodies. I wait for my impromptu savior to back off. But I hitch my chin to acknowledge his intervention before he disappears in the crowd. At least he didn't gut the guy with a longsword. With a smile on his face. Same as my other would-be hero before he, too, disappeared. I've come to accept that death is ephemeral, so long as you can afford the holy spark to zap you into life again and again.

He and I were friends first. Friends and partners at the company. Our vision brought us together and he was perfect, complementing my weaknesses, making room for my strengths. His mind bent in impossible algorithmic pathways through forests. He swam in a sea of code. I stayed on top of the waves. I cut through the weeds. I mix my metaphors because who has the energy to think of original content? Not me. Not any more.

He and I were lovers, second. I told you, it was different for us. The Unreal. We had plans for the cities of the dead that stretched to the four corners of a world with no corners.

Then, he was a leader. My leader? Probably. Leader to the adoring masses. Rabid masses. His followers flocked from secret, dark web dwellings. He offered them something new. Like the mythical, alpha wolf, he led. And stole our work—our mutual creation—out into the wilds.

My followers were few. And grow fewer by the day. No one wants to be limited.

It's dark in the cellar under Ye Olde Oak, the tavern that once upon a time witnessed our beer-fests and drunken singing. What were we drunk on, though? Our own cleverness, I suppose. We laughed and kissed, sweaty and flushed, swearing that not even death could come between us. Nothing and no one could come between us. As gods of our world we could do anything. Still could. I could do anything I want except the one thing I need to do.

We had full access to the back doors of our world. We could disappear in a system designed to track your every move. A world within a world, and now there were new worlds. That was the mistake. That was the difference between us. He believed in the satisfaction of a journey with no limits, and I believed in him. We were both wrong.

My cellar, my cave, and maybe my grave, is filled with the past and is empty except for a few items. A transparent sphere sits on a small table, and a wooden chair is in the middle of the room. No comfort for me here. Oh, there's one other thing in the room. Restraints are nailed to the floor so I don't wander off.

The bubble would lead me places while my mind searched in others. If I want to find his trail and have a shot at tracking him down, I have to go deeper. I have to sink into the swamp of coding where nothing of the physical applies—no pain, no hunger, no cold.

Which is exactly why it's so dangerous and so tempting. Users can neglect themselves to death. Pain, hunger, and cold hurt for good reasons and to ignore them—to pass beyond them—spells sickening death. It means smiling in the mind, while the body freezes on icy concrete, your back to the windswept cliffs of towering buildings. It means letting discarded barbed wire creep around that body like a funeral shroud.

It is dizzying pleasure. The sphere is as close to him touching me, holding me, possessing me, as I can get. It is also white-hot agony. My mind splits in two.

Hoping for him to come back is as good as sniffing pharma-grade Octane. From euphoria to wretchedness.

I'm out. I'm on the other side. The sphere around my head is gone, its interface merged with mine. The cellar under the Oak is gone. The Grove around me, gone. The City—you get the picture.

Find him is my only command. I'm flying, avatarless. Free of my body, I have left my heart behind. I'm the floating eye in the system's veins. Funny thing about going 2nd level: all physical pain is left behind, but emotional? It's hiding in the bubble with you. Sorrow sucks its life from the mind, a leech, no matter where the body gets dropped off.

Landscape forms. His digital footprints have brought me to desolation on a rocky island. Water crashes all around, whipping me with thorny, iced lashes. Of all the homes he has known or could conjure, why choose this one? I scan the area. Nothing and no one.

He chooses exile. After the adoration of millions, maybe billions of users, he chooses this. Instead of the home I could create, he prefers ice-rimmed rocks and gusting winds which aren't even real.

I'm not even real. Not here, anyway.

Show me, I command. Glitching images appear, but these are the best the core can provide since he has tried to erase his passing. A haggard face. Thread-bare clothing. Eyes closed and legs crossed. Was he meditating? 2nd level meditation? Has he found a way to go further out?

He lifts his chin and howls at the virtual mists. He's moving.

Follow him.

The landscape twitches, a corrupted memory. It sputters, glows and finally fades. He has escaped my tracking capabilities. I wanted limits—now I have them.

He wanted absolute freedom—now he has it. For him and everyone foolish enough to follow him. They have freedom and endless longing for what they can never attain.

Or is that what I have? I'm free of the promises and obligations to him. I'm trapped in my endless longing to stitch closed the seam that was torn.

Watchman! I cry. Do you hear me?

Nothing. No one. Our wretched half-breed will be devoured by the insatiable hunger of 12 billion users—we will all be lost in our sea of freedom and endless in our desire.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who will guard the guards themselves? He will lead them here. I have led them here unwittingly. Followers always follow.

Bring me in.

I blink and am in my sphere, chained to the floor while I sit, legs tingling and feet numb in my hard wooden chair. I leave the cellar. I didn't find him, the guardian of the City. He has abandoned his post and his people. I step outside and confirm that once again, he has not come to find me in the Grove—the sanctuary of 1st level nobodies and misfits who find their way past the gates of the law-abiding City.

I straighten my jacket. Bring me in.

I blink and am in the company's Portal Gateway (those captains of tautology), private use only. Here, I recline in a pleather-bound pod, feet slightly elevated for better circulation. Assistants—the 0 level, human kind, who work here, disconnect my wires and ask me if my stay in the City was pleasant. I tip them generously. While they can use the downstairs facilities, they certainly have friends or family members who pay hourly rates at the street-portal shops. Their family members might be noodle vendors or sword fighters.

0 level is riddled through and through with dreams of escaping. Escape comes in many forms: pills, powders, gasses, but most especially through wires. That gasp of air as you awaken, alive and humming with adventure.

I wanted to offer as many people as possible a safe passage to happiness. Too many of those people want to destroy everything they touch. And he agreed with them. Destroy the structures. Tear down the barriers. Let slip the wires of war.

That was the root of our feud. When I cried out to slow down, the Cronies imagined loss of profits and I was fired. The schism. Then the panic. They brought me back in to go out to 1st level and find him. Because by then, he'd punched holes in the code to the 2nd level and people were starting to die. Murderer. He'd plotted it all along.

We were different, the two of us. So different, I hadn't seen it.

"Report," a voice prompts. The Cronies on the Board want answers. Users are dropping like flies, becoming zombies as they crawl further and further out. They're out of our control. The Frankenstein monster I helped create is unraveling at the seams.

"Report #558, automatize write-up and send," I say. I stand and stretch, then cross the room on whispering feet.

I stop at the only other pleather-bound pod.

"Your results," the voice asks, wanting the quick version.

"Negative," I say. I caress his dark hair, lank from lack of care. His eyes are closed, jaw slack. Wires, some dripping fluids into his veins, others dripping his mind into the City and beyond, wrap around him. I touch his hand—cold and dry. I ache with longing to see him here, and shudder with pain. Such a simple, easy thing to do, to sever two things which were never tightly bound. "I didn't find him. I'll go back out tomorrow, at dawn."

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This short story was inspired by the two elegiac poems, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, both found in the Exeter Book in the Old English language. They are perplexing, beautiful examples of poetry told from the rare point of view of a woman speaker. Hit the star if you enjoyed my retelling, and if you want to know more about these fascinating works, and my methodology in transforming them, I invite you to check out my next chapter (recommended for word nerds, especially!)

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Thanks for reading!!!!