UnBooks:A Spectated Romance
A strand of subway curved across the river, taking me home every golden afternoon. The carts were clean and liminal; if you stood in the middle you could see the spine of the train slithering this way and that. The rattling of the wheels and the rails and the railings often plunged me into deep sleep as the train sent me far beyond known territory. As most students would rather endure the rush-hour bus lines than the subway system in disrepair, for a long time, I only had the clickety-clack to accompany me.
So imagine my joy when I found a companion for the long, boring journey: it's one of my new classmates, in the same cobalt school uniform, studying the reflections in the glass door. I waved at him; he paused, turned to me and timidly waved back, and we became friends.
I remembered him as an ordinary shy kid, always wearing a dry smile and pacing with eyes in the ground. But you never know how deep the introvert's mind goes. This is especially true for him because he was so smart. To understand who he is, I will calmly link all his oddities together, from the very distant beginning.
Early April[edit | edit source]
The fog of mystery had yet to lift from the second afternoon of the new semester in Foramen Magnum School. On the first day I acquainted myself with a quietion who took the same train as I did; his name was Il, and we were in the same class, lucky for the companion-wanting young commuter. The next day, however, I didn't see him at the station. I got on the train and took a seat, wondering where my new friend was – until I saw him looming above me, his 6-feet stature towering just beside my seat.
The subway train edged forward, but his limbs stiffly fixed himself in place, almost petrified. Most tantalizing were his eyes, sternly fixed at foot-washer ads outside, restless and conflicted; one might display such a look when beholding a fluffy kitten with seven legs. As the train ran, ad boxes speeding backwards connected into a movie, projecting onto his face an infinite loading circle of confusion. The enthusiastic promotions shone, then his face became iron and his nose stone.
When the train stopped at his destination, he disembarked without a word, extracting his tall shadow, leaving me rubbing my eyes in the bright light.
He said sorry afterwards, explaining that he didn't recognize me for sure. Conflicted that I may find the lack of a greeting rude, but not sure if it was me or a stranger, and too shy to talk to a stranger on the subway, he froze in a dilemma. Phew! That was a lot of mind-bending. I was just a fun-loving teenager then, unaware of the "creepiness". I should have forgotten about this interlude easily, but his brooding managed to percolate through time and reach me behind the frosty glass of memory.
Memo Note[edit | edit source]
Il's real name was Ilquod, but he always reported the name Il. What Il alludes to, that we may never know. According to him it was to avoid attention by taking up as little space as is reasonable. Apparently this plan backfired; during one lunchbreak a teacher entered the classroom and asked repeatedly, to a room of laughter, "Who is I. I.?" Although it was not nearly as bad as the Sixwinged X-Darkangle one.
June[edit | edit source]
She wore our school's torquoise uniform on the outside, but below that was a dress whose frills were lined with fake gems. The gems had captivated me, the glassy edges and vertices glittering to outcompete the sun. Admittedly, she's not the prettiest girl in the world, but whenever she talked, she's got light in her eyes. I hurriedly brought up some embellishing phrases –
"As the net poets say: soul-mates are people who bring the best in you, and exactly I know the perfect side of you."
A subtle smile surfaced on her face. "Oh, go away, you creepy lad."
I thought it worked nevertheless. Much like a big building, it was hard to find the entrance at the start; but walk along the walls a bit, and a way will reveal itself in the fog. It said "No trespassing" on the walls, but I knew how and I sneaked in and was rewarded with love.
My statement was only figurative though. It was too much for either of us to give up the hunt for Rainbow Descender Orbs in P. Kingdom. In fact, those days we'd team up in-game after school to manage our second life behind the shiny interface. One afternoon, like all the weekdays as far as I could remember, Anita and I sat on the stairs to the top-floor flogging the lucky spin wheel, as the setting sun shaded the stainless steel handrails a gentle orange.
– "Viktor! We got a Rainbow Descender! Tomorrow we'll spin the slot machine till it pays out the ultimate reward!"
Her voice rang across my empty skull, temporarily numbed by the digital windfall. She stood up and began to wave her hands in the air, out of excitement or exhaustion or both. Worried that she would toss the phone out, I said, "Easy – " and reached out to hold her hand.
In that dusty staircase our hands first came into contact. Her skin was tense and dry, probably because of the recent biochem labs, but I was so giddy with excitement that I paid no mind. I wanted to kiss her but remembered that the game would log me out if I AFK for too long, so I retreated to a corner, pretended to be gaming because I couldn't concentrate. A Rainbow Descender! I was wonderstruck. Around me the dusk shone brighter and brighter – then suddenly, darkness.
And the rhythm.
Sometime in Summer[edit | edit source]
It was the rhythm of the days, the rising and falling of classroom impulses, the vibrance and depression of mass transit.[1] I clenched my teeth tightly, afraid that my incisors would close on my tongue in a sudden jounce. Il was there too, singing in a corrupted tongue I couldn't make out a single word.
For those infused with the tenets of successology, Il was "diligent", studying all the time on paper, not typing on the brain-rotting mobile devices. But I knew that his dizzifying graphs were not review materials for math. Every week he cooked a different brand of alphabet soup on paper: squiggles halfway between a square and a circle, nonagons made up of letters and numbers, wackier things yet I couldn't describe. What else secret could a middle-schooler be writing if not teen diary materials? I often tried to subtly bring up the topic, about which he was rather shy and would digress gently.
Reading and writing all the time, he should be good at studying as well; he was not. When we did homework together, he would often stare at a geometry question and draw enough auxiliary lines to poke through the page, scratching his head cluelessly. It was evident that he performed the same on exams; I was glad that I didn't have to see him mowing his head since he was tall and sat at the back of the class.
August[edit | edit source]
"A classic copypasta from Twitch":
Prance keenly o'er the prairie of love, O nonce,
your body perpendicular to your legs
and your legs parallel to the ground
pure as the sun edge-detects 'round your victorious leap
where the only object of excess is your penis
I woke up on our Literally dassics book, when I heard Anita's voice drifting to me from another layer of consciousness.
"... ohhh that's so cool! And how about these tightly packed symbols in the corner?"
"These... encode tone and intonation." Il's voice. He sounded a bit nervous for being praised openly.
"Uh-huh."
"They are aligned with the grid because slanting linears are ambiguous." Il regained confidence because this was his "expertise".
Yes, Anita somehow got attracted to those incomprehensible tadpole-texts. She was also planning to digitize them with her OCR skills. I had been gamming with the local gamer bloc lately, with her interest in the Gem Zone waning. To quote her, "The game devs had it wrong. Descenders don't work that way." I couldn't give a satisfactory answer. I'm such a failure! I tried not to be jealous of my friend, only accepting that his level of sophistication I could never attain, or even fake.
Before the git gud n' spell of intelligence, then, the daydream would continue.
May[edit | edit source]
It began in science lab. Anita and I originally sat in opposite ends of the classroom, but one day in the pre-class hustle, I sneaked up to her table and spoke to the person next to her. "Oi Rizoso, do you mind if I swap seats with you? I'll do the work for you in return."
Rizoso[2], a node in the gem-hunting network, whispered something inaudible, got up and moved to another chair, eyes fixated on his device, never pausing his fight in the poor man's virtual reality. He didn't do any work anyway, so I kludged my way through the lab report and gave him the finished work, so as to save his ass when the teacher calls him to explain something.
Science lab was always a mess; a brightly-lit round room and bone-white tables, people sleeping under the emergency shower, gamers who towed and toiled in their virtual marathon. So Anita and I left the boring solutions on the table and let the chemistry happen between us. She was plain-looking with those speckles on her cheeks, though she was always brisk and confident in her demeanor. I remembered our first eye contact when we simultaneously bent down to blow out a Bunsen burner – I saw the flames jumping in her brown iris, a few inches above her pursed lips. (To be precise, it is against the regulations to blow out a Bunsen burner. We both got points off for that lab.)
September[edit | edit source]
Despite a strict ban on weapons, there was often melee combat to watch, although the fighters would have to put down the rebellious edge and fight the greater fight of expelling and post-expel family. Then our school implemented security checks to prevent violence; so we amassed on the southwest corner to eavesdrop ongoing gunfights in the neighboring Diencephalon School. According to some speculations, feuds ran long in two highly diligent study groups there. Both see modesty as a serious matter, always insisting that the other group was more intelligent, to the point that every once in a while "advanced armed conflicts" broke out. Often seeing violence, their principal instead encouraged faculty to "arm up", taking the dangers to a whole new level. High-graders discussed the different policies over lunch, and lamented that Foramen Magnum School was weakening, because the infirm could not be "taken out".
I didn't care about philosophy, those nerds. I cared about the fun stuff, the adventurous part of life that almost closed on us if not for gaming.
Possibly, however, the reality had a quiet call. I had been maintaining my online presence devoutly parallel to my existence, so the rest of the city had been no more than grey and white boxes on grainy screens. The subway was like a laggy teleporter that takes me from one position to another on the metropolitan spike plate. I'd totally lose my way if I were to walk above-ground. Maybe I could take a day off and visit a few places around, or I'd soon forget the name of this city.
Not a decisive person, I stole a look at Il's branching scrawl and decided to ask him. He wrote much and thought much, so I'll ask if he'd like to go explore the beautiful, beautiful world. If he said yes, we'd go together.
Premonition[edit | edit source]
We ate out at the Locus Coeruleus Square. I loved the dreamy glow there, like you could touch the light in the air. (It was just dust, he said.) Center of the entertainment district was a homeless industrial complex, adding to the mix the excitement of the unknown.
The sun had set. Along the avenues the gateways of big restaurants shone a bright yellow, their doors opening into ornate rooms, gilded chairs and mahogany tables standing on bare concrete covered under dirty rugs. The rooms were all empty. Something in our instincts told us not to go in there.
Dinner was in a hole-in-the-wall eatery, where we sat shoulder-to-shoulder next to two workmen slurping noodles. We all stared down into our food, because in front of us there was nothing to stare at but a wall.
After dinner, we spent some time taking a stroll along the avenue. Initially we just didn't want to pass by the empty shopfronts again, but we quickly got bored because there was nothing interesting to see. We were not in the Gemhunter's Hub. We were on Eg Avenue: a perfectly symmetric street, walled off on both sides, with crops of buildings descending into the distance. Worse, we wandered a bit too far and got lost.
Neither of us knew the way, so we took a look at Alphabet Maps, which noisily told us to turn around, turn left in 150 meters and enter the ramp, heyyy your doin it wrong turn around!! Good apps bring laughter to users. Yeah, my bad, I forgot to set it to pedestrian mode.
The night was not dark. Whenever a car sped past, the dull asphalt would come to life, flashing in different colors and displaying rowdy company logos &ndash "customized ads". Il was particularly amused with a chunk of display that kept z-fighting noisily. Z-fighting whom? Fate? Nevermind, just get back to civilization first.
A while later, we saw a belt blocking out the light in the distance. There it was, the transit line that would take both of us home.
Test-Retest Reliablity[edit | edit source]
Up a flight of stairs sat the sleepy station, Perfunctory Hamlet. Of course the hamlet didn't exist anymore; it had been replaced by more highways, running above and below us, shining a ghostly blue in the fog. What's the point of having so many highways? Do they lead to money sex power?
The stairs were rusty. The sky looked rusty. The whole world was rusting away. My eyelids felt heavy in the dull odor of old metal and pigeon shit. On the other hand, Il seemed excited. Among the shriek of car tires on asphalt, he started to ask me about the Gem Collection game, and put forward "We need to make use of every bit of spare time" and "Always keep learning new things!" Way to go, Il, even you have fallen victim to the demeaning tale of successology.
When the journey was almost over, I was drifting in and out of sleep after the meal and his gaming inqueries. In the dimly lit cart, suddenly, a specific ad played; Il's face livened up, again as if beholding a seven-legged kitten, then he started to sing, to the tune of the TV advertisement.
His voice was like dying lobsters clawing a metal pot. Eyes shut, he seemed to be enjoying himself, probably already in a hypnotic state. Initially I wanted to laugh, but I quickly realized that the rest of the passengers were chanting along; then a sharp siren pierced my eardrums and I realized I was singing too –
The subway train bumped into the open, and cool moonlight flooded the cart. The train trembled, syncing erratically to the beat. I held tightly to my smartphone, thinking I would never be smart without it. (Silly me! I should have recorded the once-in-a-lifetime live performance.)
Ending Theme[edit | edit source]
That lunch break, I was waiting for Anita to show her the pics I took during the trip.
She arrived – with a companion.
She turned away, pretending to not know us, while the stranger eyed us with suspicion.
"I'm bored as hell. Let's go dancing at the NAc." Anita said to her partner.
"First, tell me who they are! This 'Vivik' and this 'Il-hfta' in your contacts!"
"Ohh, they're just randoms. You know what I want, Man-man."
They walked away, leaving the two of us standing in the silent noon.
I felt like I was cast into a sunlit void as the world retreated from me.
Act -1[edit | edit source]
I didn't know where to go. I paced along the tracks, anxious to escape, passing the bicycle sheds and the corridors and the basement. A chilly wind blew from the basement and returned some sense to my overheating brain. I should probably go down there and stay away from the crowds for a bit.
I tiptoed down the moss-covered stairs and found myself in a large chamber. A labyrinth of plumbing covered the ceiling; a muffled siren annoyed in the distance. And Il was there too, singing in a corrupted tongue I couldn't make out a single word.
Seeing me, he smiled and waved. "This is poetic." He said, "Come and let the navigated paths be remembered, and you'll discard all the superfluities of the mind, including her."
We went down a further flight of stairs, turned left and right and through heavy blast-proof doors. The clickety-clack became louder and louder and I realized that it was the subway, separated from us by no more than one meter of concrete. The siren was still ringing; lights flickered off and on; and a collapsed wall revealed even more dark passages behind. Strangely, I was not afraid. In the past day the break from the familiar mediocre life had numbed me, the perturbance too great, the changes too overwhelming.
After a math class worth of time, we reemerged in a bicycle shed, though not the one in our school. The big, colorful Display Direct screen immediately captured my attention – it was the neighboring Diencephalon School. No gunmen in sight, only pupils of our own age doing, you know, school stuff. A wave went through them as they paused their activities and eyed us with suspicion.
I looked at Il. Uncomfortable about being the center of attention, he looked pale. "We must have taken a wrong turn. Quickly we must get back; I shall check my map again." He hurriedly backed down the stairs.
I hesitated for a moment, my mind blank in this teeming alien bazaar. The big screen above spat out some malingering static, then started to play my most familiar advert.
“Unchain yourself from the mundane and embrace things they took away from you! Tag-mi-na-tik Tech-no-lo-gies...”
The collective memory of our generation sang a warm nostalgia into me. School, lab, romance – all flung to prehistory as if I was never a part of them. I was temporarily pumped, blood rushing to my temples at the freedom; then I felt alone, tiny, scared under the distant sky. The bias, the documentations leading to nothing, the jumbled net of persons and events that was my memory, and now there's no return to normal...
– All in a moment, the delay-controled lighting snapped off and broke me from the oscillation. Realizing Il had gone down those stairs, I stomped the ground to return the light, then turned and started to run.
"Wait for me – "