Work Text
“So, when are you going to let me see you in person again?” Nocturne asks him. They’re sitting on a grassy hill that doesn’t exist in reality, a kaleidoscope of cultures—the little white buckwheat flowers of Korea, dancing in a magnolia-scented breeze; in the distance, the silhouette of a charming Swiss village, cows grazing in their pastures.
“This is essentially the same thing,” Roger says, relishing the breeze on the planes of his television face. Even in this virtual reality, Roger has a branding to maintain. Perhaps more importantly, neither he nor his companion were there to appease human sensibilities. “Why would we ever have to?”
“It’s different,” Nocturne says. Similar to Roger, they’ve chosen an avatar that eschews conventional facial features, rendered by NEW WORLD’s servers (that is, Roger’s background processes) with hyperreal fidelity. “I can’t sense you as clearly.”
“Bullshit. NEW WORLD simulations have less than 10-33 data loss compared to reality.
“That 10-33is important.”
With a flicker, Roger pulled up a familiar infographic onto his screen. “Dear customer, we value your input! Please direct all feedback to our quality assurance survey so we can continue to improve your experience,” his voice chimes in the jaunty pre-recording.
He can sense Nocturne watching him, amused. “I’ll fill it out, then. Where’s the survey?”
Lacing his fingers behind his head, Roger lies back into the soft grass. “You’re not a customer,” he points out smugly. To his delighted chagrin, Nocturne laughs, then dramatically stretches out beside him.
“Harsh,” they say, nudging him lightly. “Who’s the reason I can’t use the world’s best products?”
“Yourself,” Roger replies without hesitation, though it’s true that time has sanded down the sharpest edges of his old grudge. “Don’t touch me.”
Nocturne pulls back, though still close enough to touch, should Roger so much as bend his knee. Even without turning his face towards them, Roger can sense the smile, not through any visual feed, but through the input data itself. Somewhere in the world, one of Nocturne’s many bodies is sitting somewhere in NEW WORLD gear, feeling a surge of pleasure, putting that in through the electrical monitors of the VR equipment, pumping those warm, fond feelings directly into Roger’s processes.
(Only a drop in the statistical sea, but like a drop of freshwater in a salt flat, the only drop that matters.)
Distantly, cherry on top for this pastoral scene, a quaint little church chimes for noon. In the distance, a non-interactive shepherd leads his sheep down a path, bells clanging on their necks.
“I’m too busy to meet you,” Roger explains with no small satisfaction—he’s a very busy and important man. Nocturne runs a fixer-upper of a fixer office. They’re not the same, and whose fault was that? “This business doesn’t run itself you know.”
“Doesn’t that depend? You are your business, I thought.”
It’s a rare sentiment, in a world of finite lives and mortals all too happy to personify by their own standards—‘you’re more than your work’ ideals, or falling for the carefully designed, personable branding that Roger puts out as both CEO and mascot of his conglomerate.
Roger laughs with a rare openness. “Touché,” he says with a contented sigh. “Got me there.”
Nocturne, as always though, just has to ruin it. Roger bristles in displeasure at the fresh touch of Nocturne’s hand, wrapping around his own. His screen flickers in disgust as he tries to yank away, only succeeding in pulling Nocturne’s body over his own.
“I said don’t touch!” he snaps, and he surprises his own self with the note of disappointment in his voice.
Even without a face, somehow, Roger can tell Nocturne looks contrite (as though that’s enough, when they haven’t let go or moved away). He waits for the apology, for them to back off, as a seam opens in their face as though to speak. “But Roger, you’re the one holding
me
.”
“What?” but even before he finishes the word, he notices his own hand snaking up around Nocturne’s neck. “The fuck?”
The church bells continue their counting down. The sheep continue their merry march. The bells together begin to sing a familiar little song, one that needs no words to be understood:
happy birthday to you~ happy birthday to you~
Realization hits like ice water to a toaster. Roger bolts upright—or at least means to. His body doesn’t comply, instead taking his other hand and stroking it up the soft arc of Nocturne’s side, one that Roger had memorized the degrees of ages ago already, but that’s beside the point.
“We’ve been hacked.”
“Eh? Hacked?” Nocturne reflects his distress, if the client-side input is anything to go by, but their avatar seems similarly unresponsive. Raking through the data, Roger can distantly sense where the input ends and the siphoning begins, so subtle that he hardly notices it—and then doesn’t notice it at all, when Nocturne’s free hands start to roam (beyond just the one, more summoned from the ether). “Aren’t you infallible?”
“The
server
,” Roger snaps, though it’s the same thing in the end. The private server is just one comb in his technological hive, and a parasite has worked in with extreme precision. He’d be able to root it out, if Nocturne would just—just—“Fucking stop!”
Without his permission, the simulation starts to fall away. He feels his body sink in too deep into the grass, until the ground disintegrates, floating up in pieces. The fabric of his suit flies up with it, leaving his body suddenly exposed to the air that no longer smells of magnolias but so strongly of nostalgia that it aches.
He feels Nocturne’s flesh suck against his fingertips. The seam of their mouth blossoms into a mass of faceted tendrils like an anemone.
“Can’t you end the simulation?”
they say, but their avatar doesn’t speak—thoughts transmitted only because Roger runs the servers and can sense the data.
“It’s not that simple,” Roger snaps, but his speakers crush into the grass as Nocturne kisses him.
“It’s not that simple,
” Roger repeats through transmission as Nocturne’s tendrils breach the membrane of his television screen. Whereas in reality, the mesh tech would link to whatever cache Roger so chose, here there’s nothing but himself, in whatever form the hacker selects. (He notes the hacker must be human, because what’s inside his head is dampness and a soft, sensitive tongue, intertwining messily with Nocturne’s intrusion). He tells himself the moan isn’t his own, and then that it’s muffled by the dirt.
He tries to shove away, and his leg hooks around Nocturne’s own. He tries to summon teeth and blades to bite, but the panels of his chassis only open, as though venting heat he doesn’t feel. Beneath the metal plating, he finds there’s only sensitive flesh, pulsing like a human heart against Nocturne’s fingers when they probe.
“Abort your equipment,”
he protests, but he’s not sure if it can be parsed through the high keen that erupts from his virtual body, when Nocturne’s begins to fuck into his side.
“Just ta;ke it o-off!”
It could do irreparable damage to a brain to do so, but Nocturne isn’t mortal, same as how Roger isn’t, and that’s why they work. There would be no true loss there, except perhaps the loss of an excuse.
Maybe Nocturne doesn’t hear him after all. Or, maybe, the hacker blocked his output. Or, maybe Roger didn’t actually speak at all. Who’s to say? The logs are purging themselves as we speak.
Elsewhere, Roger Shin gives a presentation to stakeholders and, for a duration of just twenty seconds, starts lagging by 0.2 ms. The unmodified humans in the room don’t notice, but a fine-tuned cyborg narrows her eyes.
Elsewhere, the quality of phone calls on the NeW Nebula Network dips by 0.4%.
Elsewhere, in a single apartment complex in the Eastern district of New Ulsan, the air conditioners kick on.
Elsewhere, the speaker of an abandoned laptop gasps.
Here, we fade to black.