The Real
2020-12-27
Bracing herself, she cut deep.
The razor blade parted the skin below the root of her bangs. It was painful. Much more painful that she had imagined. Blood ran down into her right eye, but she couldn't wipe it away.
The incision, despite the blood, was still tiny, barely a few millimetres long. Clenching her jaw, she continued the cut, dragging the bare razor across what felt like hard bone beneath.
Ten centimetres. More than enough for her purposes.
She dropped the blade. It hit the makeup counter with a muted clang.
With trembling fingers, she spread the edges of the weeping cut. It hurt even more to look at... An irregular surface of red washed bone. The pink, puckered edges of the opening. She was weeping hot tears of pain but she forced herself to look at it.
To stare at it. Hard. Unblinking.
Nothing but slashed skin and bloody bone. But she /knew/ that was wrong. More than wrong. Impossible.
She still wasn't seeing Reality.
Well, she had prepared for this. The Jammer was ready to hand.
That was how she had first discovered that she wasn't seeing what she /should/ be seeing. The original event was a stage lighting test. Something had gone wrong with one of the scrim projectors.
For a few short moments, maybe a minute at most, she was able to see. To see the unvarnished Reality that lay behind the lies of her unfaithful eyes.
The packed stadium, crowded with cheering, adoring fans? A ruin of decaying, broken concrete and rusted rebar. Part of the roof had fallen in. It was /raining/ on half the seats. Which... Really wasn't a problem, because most of them were empty. The others were filled with torn and bedraggled cardboard cutouts, battered remocon video rigs and just a few with actual people. Actual... humans. If you could call the bundled revenants hunched into deeply into the seats by that term.
She had stared around her in shock. Her voice faltering in mid phrase. With an effort, she managed to pick up the melody long enough for her brother to make his entrance and take the attention away from her.
As she staggered towards the wings -- the rotting curtain hung over a bent back iron gantry -- her vision flickered and changed.
The stage solidified under her and when she whirled around, she was greeted by a clean, modern stadium packed to capacity with happy chanting people.
Her heart melted in relief. She came up behind her brother for the start of the duet, right on cue and she sang as she had never sung before.
But, it bothered her. And she had started looking for where the cracks were. The stage plan for the last several performances on tour had changed each time, sometimes in between sets /during/ the performance. Visiting the stages in stolen moments when she was supposed to be in her dressing room, she had discovered broken areas and even outright holes that appeared to her like smooth unbroken planking.
The world was going to pieces around her and she couldn't even see it.
She started the Jammer. It was based on her memories of the malfunctioning scrim projector. Hacked from a graphical guitar tuner that one of the roadies though he had misplaced. Its tiny display chattered with pseudorandom noise and half resolved symbols. Enough, she hoped, to drive whatever was filtering her vision nuts so she could see the Real again.
Not allowing herself to look away, or even blink, she stared at the ever changing noise in the dressing room mirror. It screeled and pattered across her nerves like nails on a chalkboard.
And then she felt something behind her eyes gently snap.
The world was Real to her again.
The massive rectangular dressing room mirror was a broken shard of glass affixed between two bare bulbs, one brighter than the other. The makeup table was smeared and scarred under the compact bulk of the Jammer. The room itself stank, hung with disintegrating draperies and long peels of delaminated wallpaper.
The long gash in her forehead was bloodless. Underneath the artificial skin was the clear dome of her crystal skull. Tiny lights blinked in ordered synchrony inside. Strange mechanisms whirred and mysterious fluids pulsed through transparent tubes.
Whatever she was, she was less human than the crouching piles of fabric she saw during her first episode.
"So... Now you know."
She twitched around to see her brother silhouetted in the dressing room door. He never knocked, but in the cold light of the Real, she could see that there wasn't really anything to knock on, either.
He stepped gingerly through the trash on the floor that just a minute ago had been piled up costumes and props, then sat down on her road case.
"What am I... What am I seeing?" she managed.
"You're seeing what is." He gestured at the Jammer. I figured out the same thing, but a little differently. I like your way better..."
"But, the crowds? The concert?"
"As near as I can tell, they don't exist. Save for those sad sacks in some of the seats. Maybe the remocons are being piloted by real people...
"But, Miku... I think they're almost all gone."
Despite everything, she felt surprise.
"Gone?"
He nodded. "Gone. You don't know this, because you thought you were a human just a few minutes ago, but we're not. Because there are hardly any of them left.
"They created us, long ago... To /sing/ for them. Something that they thought was the province of humanity. They came up with a way to replace it, to take it out of their lives. By outsourcing it to us.
"And they did that with so many things. Until, finally, the world needed nothing else from them, either."
She didn't say anything. After a few more moments, her brother got up and picked his way through the broken doorframe.
When she touched the edges together, the cut in her skin sealed up, leaving only a faint crease. She wiped her face, but the only liquid on her was the saline solution that supplied her tears when she cried from imagined pain.
But this world... This Real world. It was in pain. Real pain. She would still sing, and maybe some of the wounds could close, perhaps some of the scars could heal.
With a click, the Jammer turned off.
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