The ocean spray was cold. I wanted warm. But I’d take what I could get on a beach in December. I closed my eyes and, for a moment, forgot where I really was.

The biting wind was soothing against my cheeks, which were still fiery from last night’s ethanol binge. As I inhaled the biting oxygen, I couldn’t help but give myself a mental back-pat. The beach stretched in either direction for exactly 1.73 kilometers, and looked out onto an ocean some 300 million cubic kilometers in volume. Sequences of seagulls graced the grey sky at random intervals, supplemented periodically by more exotic creatures, such as the Old American Haliaeetus leucocephalus. I picked up a handful of sand, the density of its granules averaged out to precisely 0.081726 millimeters for maximum barefoot frolicking comfort. It felt like liquid silk running through my fingers. Yeah. We’d done a fucking great job.

When I opened my eyes again, something white flashed in the far left corner. A woman, too far down the coastline for me to distinguish many details beyond the fluttering dress and the tresses of wild red hair that cascaded down her back. I laughed. Whose creation was that? Reilly’s, probably. Redheads had gotten Reilly into more trouble than any other creature on Gaia’s gleaming metal earth.

My eyes shut involuntarily. I was blinded; a million little needles stabbed at my lids. I pried them open as much as I dared. A huge crack loomed across the sky, spilling bright gaseous light across our pristine landscape.

“Goddammit!” I yelled at the sky. I turned around to face the line of idyllic vacation properties set 53 meters off of the beachfront. “Which one of you lazy fuckers put a crack in my paradise?”

A voice crackled into life from out of the heavens. “I blame Keena, sir,” God said. The part of God today was played by Andy Reilly, and his tone had that annoying quality of the self-righteously sober. “The sky routine’s her baby.” Faintly in the background I heard the thump of a dull smack and Keena at a remove saying, “Oh, thank you so much, Andy.”

I threw my tablet onto the sand and rubbed my eyes with both hands. “Okay, Yakamono, let’s run a diagnostic on your code. Siri,” I said, modulating my pitch down and my volume upward. “Enable tracepoints and terminate IAP-118 Winter Beach.”

The wind cut out first, and the room’s temperature quickly returned to the default set by city regulators. The scene decomposed sky-first, pixel by pixel, and then the bright light subsided until I was left in the Cube, my body encased in a suit of armor composed of interlocking metal rings. Once the environment stabilized, the Stasis Motion Suit unfolded around me from the feet up, until I was free to leave the raised platform and walk about the room. It always feels weird to walk for real after you’ve been in the suit, even if you haven’t gone far in the virtual environment; some ancient segment of our reptilian brain structure knows that we’re only simulating forward movement when we’re within its confines. I went down to one knee briefly, but after a minute I could stand again.

“All right, Reilly, give me a heads-up display.”

I waited perhaps 20 seconds for the virtual monitor and keyboard to materialize in front of me, but nothing. “Reilly,” I repeated. “Yakamono. Heads-up display and a code diagnostic window, now! Not at your earliest convenience!”

No response. Something was wrong. I could feel the change in the atmosphere. Or maybe that was just me about to wet myself. “Jesus, Andy, I’m serious – ”

“Brad,” Andy said. Not “Lieutenant McGuiness”. Not “Boss”. My first name. Now I was terrified. “Brad, it’s going to be okay. It’s a glitch and we’ll figure it out, right? But for right now, just don’t panic.”

“About what?” I asked. I kept my face as stone still as my trembling nerves would allow.

“Turn around. Very slowly.”

I saw her before I was fully spun about. The wild shocks of auburn, still tossed about by our wind simulator. The dress, I could see now, was a white strapless Empire whose elegance was only eclipsed by the contours of her body. It’s her eyes that froze me, though: the bright glowing blue eyes.

“Siri,” I said, without breaking eye contact. “Full terminate IAP-118 Winter Beach, including all tracepoints.”

“IAP-118 Winter Beach is already terminated,” Siri said. But the woman was still there, looking at me the way I might gaze at an animal in a cage. I was at a loss. She’s an Easter egg, right? What does one say to a figment of someone’s fingers?

“Andy,” I said, “did you program her?”

“That’s a negative,” Andy said.

“Lieutenant,” said Keena. I could tell from the crack in her voice how desperate she was to re-establish some semblance of protocol. “There are no threads running in the Cube right now.”

It took a minute for that to sink in. “Yak, are you trying to tell me that’s she’s – ”

“Why are you so afraid of it?” the woman in white asked.

I swallowed and stepped back. “Of what?” She looked over my shoulder and nodded her head. “Of the wall? I’m not afraid of the wall.” Why am I talking to a subroutine?

She laughed. It sounded like honey tastes. “No, you love the wall. Why do you fear what’s outside the wall?”

I couldn’t respond. I didn’t know how to respond. First, because I wasn’t convinced I wasn’t engaging in an argument with some previously undiscovered AI thread in New America’s massive environmental regulation system. It wasn’t uncommon for our complex, self-perpetuating code base to spawn such routines genetically. And second, because it’s a stupid question. Everyone knows what’s beyond our walls, and why we have good reason to fear it.

She walked toward me. As I stepped back, my legs gave out and I fell on my fleshy ass.

“Keena! Andy! Get me out of here!”

No response. The woman in white bent down, never breaking my gaze.

“You need to see what you’ve done,” she whispered. “What all of you have done. And you need to come to terms with that.”

She raised her arms toward the ceiling. It began as a low rumble. Then I felt the shaking. The Cube rattled, trembling back and forth. The clang of metal against metal started as a dull rumble but quickly cascaded into a deafening roar. I got up, looked at the wall.

A crack. No, not just a crack. The same crack that I saw in the simulation, splitting the wall horizontally. Bright, blinding light poured through it. Large segments of the wall broke loose and fell, some inside, some outside.

There was no hope for me, I could see. Andy and Keena weren’t coming, and I was at peace with that; one of my last human wishes – hell, maybe one of my few thoughts, ever, about something besides myself and my work – was that they got themselves to safety. I rushed the woman and grabbed her. It never even occurred to me how preposterous it was that I could put my human hands firmly on those warm, silken shoulders. “You’re going to kill us!” I screamed.

She just laughed and shook her head.

And soon the wall was gone, nothing but a heap of scrap metal. I wasn’t dead. Quite the contrary. I was gazing onto a sight that perhaps no human being has seen in at least a century. I inched forward, carefully, toward this hole in of one of the sole above-ground structures in New America, and took it all in.

My brain reeled with thoughts, plans, fears. My heart threatened to beat free of its cage. I could feel something, against my cheek. Cold, biting. Like what you might feel on a beach in December. A breeze. A real breeze.

My brain could barely comprehend what my senses were absorbing. It was awful. Awe-inspiring. Terrifying. Wonderful.

And I knew then that nothing would ever be the same.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Jester Queen challenged me with “The ocean spray was cold. I wanted warm. But I’d take what I could get on a beach in December.” and I challenged Fran with “There’s no business like snow business.”

(Note to Readers [all three of you]: This is my response to this week’s IndieInk Writing Challenge. It’s not as long or as considered as I would have liked, given the shitty week I’ve had. It has one shining virtue: it’s finished.)

Mona stormed out through the entry gate of her apartment building and took in several gulps of cold, crisp air. She had to huddle her sleeveless arms around herself for warmth; she hugged herself so hard that she dug her nails into her flesh. She didn’t care. It was worth not being in that damn building for two minutes.

I could run, she thought. Run far away, before I do something I’ll regret. Except I left my purse and cell phone upstairs. And my shoes. And it’s my apartment.

A blast of frozen air tore through her skin. The stars above leered down upon her, as if they could see through her clothes. A few more minutes here, Mona knew, and they’d have to amputate her feet. Reluctantly, she plodded back inside and upstairs seven flights, taking each step with the measured precision of the condemned. I’m calm, I’m calm. I’m a fucking fairy in the woods I’m so calm.

The apartment was as she’d left it. The couch tipped over. Chips scattered on the floor and mashed into the carpet, arranged in accidental geometry around a large wine stain that Mona could swear had swelled in her absence. And at the far end, near the window, sat her five friends, huddled around two card tables.

She sat down. To her left, Fran ignored her, opting to study her own hands instead, while Andy and Toshiro were grimacing so intently at one another she didn’t think they even noticed her. To her right, Meela looked at her with begging eyes. Pansy, Mona thought, only distantly concerned with where her world-famous empathy had gone. And Greg – Greg who brought her flowers, who begged her every other Tuesday to bear his children – Greg fixed her with a look that blended “slept with my best friend” and “murdered my puppy” into a grimace of absolute malice.

“That was the longest smoke break since the discovery of tobacco,” Greg said.

“Oh, fuck you,” Mona spat.

“Can you two shut it?” Toshiro said, not removing his death-stare from Andy. Both maintained a death grip on a plastic figurine. “We’re waiting on you guys here.”

Greg threw the dice at Mona.

“Roll,” he said.

On the first toss, Mona flung both icosahedra so hard that they flew off the table. Meela wept silently. Fran gathered up the dice and placed them in Mona’s hand. On Mona’s second roll, they came up a perfect 40.

The table sat in shocked silence. The only sound was the wind swelling and shaking the window, demanding  entry.

Meela was the first to crack. “No no no no nooooo. Oh GOD!” she screamed, and tore into the kitchen, where she attempted to open an artery with a butter knife.

Fran wheeled on Andy. “You’re fucking him?” she said.

“I give him what he needs!” Toshiro hissed. One of the card tables spilled over, taking game pieces and half the board with it, as Fran tackled Andy to the floor.

While this was happening, Mona removed the ring on her left hand. She stood up and loomed over Greg. Everything was illuminated. Her soon-to-be-ex-fiancee sat fixed in his seat amid the chaos, wringing his hands.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, over and over. He looked like he could cry, but his eyes were empty. The tears of the guilty, Mona’s mother used to call them.

“Not good enough,” she said. Mona unfastened and opened the window. “I need you to be sorrier.”

Two hours later, the apartment was swarming with police. Everyone had been taken away by one means or another, except Mona, who sat on her couch cradling her bandaged right hand in her left. A detective rummaged through the mess on the floor and picked up the top of a box in his gloved hand.

“Must have been a hell of a game,” he said.

“What?” Mona said.

He handed it to her. “Hell of a game, yeah?”

The game box cover depicted a young woman in Goth Lolita garb sitting on a throne woven out of bramble. The spear she held in her left hand dribbled blood onto the throne room floor. Scrawled above this in sharp pink lettering: Malevolence.

Mona handed it back. Her face was an unsolved jigsaw. “You know…I don’t remember. I don’t think we ever got around to playing it.”

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Bewildered Bug challenged me with “Malevolence” and I challenged femmefauxpas with “No doubt about it: this was worse than the last time I’d drowned”.