| Orthogonal, Pt. 1 |

“Someone get that girl!”

Arufa pushed the ground further behind her with every step. In her hand she clutched a stranger’s silver wallet, glowing red from her unknown fingerprints. The wind blew her frizzy brown hair astray as she leaped into oncoming traffic.

“Don’t need this, sorry!” she called, tossing their ID back before descending through the road into Underside. Falling—no, flying—she pocketed the wallet and set her AG on course to the warehouse.

Upside-down and soaring through the air, she got a good look around X2’s lower half. Widely considered more expressionist than its counterpart, holographic graffiti and unfinished architecture defined the Underside. Bright neon pierced the hazy grey atmosphere.

It’s all bullshit, Arufa thought. No one can live in chaos forever. We all pretend to love it, but I can’t be the only one who wants to go, can I?

Then she heard the sirens. Zooming after her was a four-wheeled hoverbike piloted by a clunky-looking robot; she knew how best to escape its grasp. She thrust her hand sideways and sent herself tumbling into an alleyway.

I’ll shelve that discussion for later. Right now, I have to hide.

She came to a stop, planting herself on the ground and running a hand through her hair. She let out a sigh as the screeches loudened—with them came a strange sense of déjà vu. A gut-wrenching feeling twisted her insides. She tried to ignore it.

Her body acted on its own, jumping from the dumpster and kicking off the wall to land cleanly on the grated fire stairs. Without a sound, she slipped out of her jacket, crouched, and covered herself with it.

“IDENTIFY YOURSELF,” said the hunk of metal, stumbling into the alleyway.

Even if I did, would ‘Arufa’ be enough for you? No last name, no ID—I’ve never even met my parents. And trust me, I tried to find them. Public records are a hassle.

“YOU WILL BE FOUND. IT IS BEST TO SUBMIT.”

That means it’s getting out the IR scanner, but my jacket should do the trick. Why do I still feel like it’s gonna catch me?

Suddenly, an image flashed in her mind. She was sprinting up these same fire stairs in a panic as this robot counted to three—but… why?

The scanner booted up, and Arufa realized. It’s below me. It can see my signature through the grating! She shifted her jacket’s position just before the laser reached her, making herself as small as she could on top of the splayed overgarment.

“HEAT SIGNATURE DETECTED. SUBMIT OR FACE CONSEQUENCE.”

There’s no way it saw me. It’s gotta be a ruse.

“FIRING SQUAD IS BEING SUMMONED NOW. SUBMIT BEFORE YOU ARE ELIMINATED.”

And that’s part of protocol. Okay, phew.

“LAST CHANCE.”

Screw off.

The old bot walked off to its bike and mounted, driving away without its sirens. There was no firing squad headed for her—there never would be. That was the way things went on the Underside.

But Arufa, donning her jacket and hopping down from the balcony, felt wrong. Something was amiss.

How did I know what was about to happen? I’ve never been caught before.

She reluctantly walked out of the alley and continued on her way with AG, passing hundreds of anonymous passersby below. She tried to shake it off, but the question kept digging at her.

When she landed in front of the warehouse, she felt a twinge of despair. She wanted more in life than this old scrap. She didn’t want to steal from people—but she did anyway, and would continue to. Morals were a second thought to the people of Underside.

She checked the digital watch over her left wrist as she approached the doors. Just in time. Skyler’s probably bored out of their mind, but–

What is that?

All the distant music and sounds of the city drowned for a moment as her eyes drifted from her wrist to her hand. Words—written in pen, slightly smudged, her own handwriting.

‘Don’t forget’.

Don’t forget?

Her breathing quickened. Visions, snippets of another reality, played all in an instant. A pair of Oversiders, a sigil on her chest. An impossible coincidence, a man, a choice.

Don’t forget.

Her eyes grew wide, her pupils condensed into singularities. What did it all mean? What were these flashbacks?

Don’t forget!

Arufa yanked the door open, and to her surprise, Skyler was right before her. Their expression changed when they saw her face.

“You’re a minute late. Are you… okay?”

“This isn’t right. This can’t be real!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Arufa took no questions as she stepped past them, approaching the old, cracked mirror beside her bed. She unzipped her jacket and found exactly what she expected.

“Give me a pen!” she snapped.

Skyler closed the door behind them and looked at her, dumbfounded. Slowly, they picked up a pen on their bedside stand—an old plastic shipping box—and tossed it to her with their left hand.

Arufa caught it with her right and immediately finished the sentence on her skin without speaking a word. ‘Don’t forget the tattoo,’ she wrote, alongside a rough sketch of its appearance.

“You can’t see it, can you?”

“See what? You’re acting crazy!”

Just then, a loud knock shuddered the rickety doors. “Underside Police. Open up.”

That voice!

“Door’s unlocked!” Arufa called.

They slid open—the man standing behind them was the same police officer who she’d seen in her visions. Arufa almost laughed when she recognized his face.

“Arufa, we have reason to believe you committed a burglary.”

“You came early, idiot. You’re not supposed to say that till tomorrow.”

The officer was shocked—so was Skyler.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “We only come as soon as we get the case. And we have footage of you running away, courtesy of our surveillance robots.”

“Running away?” Arufa said. “You saw me sprinting up those stairs while it fired at me?”

“Yes. And we’re here to question you with probable cause.”

She snorted, unable to contain her laughter. “Well, that’s just great. Because I didn’t run away this time, Officer Ghiles.”

His brows lowered over his blue eyes hearing his name. “You remember? How?”

“Or, wait. Weren’t you an agent? I don’t know. It’s like you made us forget or something.”

Ghiles, eyes darting around the room, held his gun up. “I’ll just make you forget again. And I’ll come with the robot this time and arrest you on the spot,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Not if we take you out first. Right, Skyler?”

Arufa looked to her side, but Skyler wasn’t there. They had run out the back door when she’d said the officer’s name. Ghiles smiled.

“They ran away because they think you’re insane. You’ve got no way to stop me.”

“Wrong. I can think of one way.”

“Hah! What way is that? I’ve seen it all. This whole room hasn’t got a weapon to hurt me. You only get that nail gun tomorrow, remember?”

“Pfft. Yeah, bud. How ‘bout you remember to watch your back next time?”

He spun around, but far too late. He convulsed as an electric shock ran through his body. His fingers twitched when his body fell to the ground, unconscious. Standing over him was Skyler.

They spun their tasers and clipped them on their belt. “Wasn’t enough to kill him. I’m not trying to repeat yesterday.”

“Technically tomorrow.”

“Erm, technically…”

“Okay, shut up.” Arufa sat down on her bed and kicked off her shoes. “What made you remember?”

They pocketed the tasers and shrugged. “You said his name and it all came back to me. Whatever memory wipe crap they’re using is not working.”

“All I needed was the words ‘don’t forget’ on my hand. Worked like a charm,” she said.

Skyler stepped over Ghiles’s body and grabbed a plastic water bottle out of the cooler by the door. When they got to their mattress, they unscrewed the cap and took a swig.

“It’s lukewarm,” they said, gargling.

“Can you grab me one?”

They swallowed and gave her a heated stare. “Dawg, I was literally right there. You could have asked, like, two seconds ago.”

“You’re still closer.”

“Oh, piss off.” They begrudgingly stood and opened the cooler again. “Catch.”

Suddenly, Arufa was hit in the face with the fastest water bottle known to man. She was shocked it didn’t bust open on collision. “Jeez. This isn’t baseball, dude.”

“Ohhhh. My bad.”

They sat without talking for a while, contemplating everything that had happened to them. Arufa was hard-pressed for answers, so she tried to unravel her scenario as best she could.

The very first moment something went wrong… was when we met Marsia and Locri. Everything froze for a second. That’s never been resolved—and I think it’s why Ghiles was after us, which means it’s important.

Next up was the first time Ghiles showed up here, when we first saw the tattoos. If the tattoos have anything to do with him—and I think they do—then seeing them on the footage was a mistake. He never meant for me to notice that.

Skyler, planning ahead, ran off to the back of the warehouse. They rummaged through rubbish and eventually stumbled upon what they were looking for. “Rufa, help me tie him up.”

She snapped out of thought and checked their hands. “A grappling hook?”

“To wrap his arms behind his back.”

“Where’d you even get that?”

They blinked. “Honestly? I don’t remember.”

Skyler slung the hook across the room, letting it clatter on the ground. Working together, the two of them heaved Ghiles’s body to one end of the rope, then they started rolling him across the floor to wrap him up.

Once they’d successfully bound the agent, they collapsed back on their respective beds. It was hard to do much of anything on an empty stomach—Arufa wondered how much of the past couple of days she’d hallucinated from hunger.

“You think maybe we’re just dreaming all this?”

“Not a chance,” Skyler said. “My dreams don’t look like this.”

“What do they look like?”

“Usually I’ll be looking at clouds or watching the waves. Earth stuff,” they mumbled. “I wish I could see it for real.”

“That’s fun. Mine are always grim and dreary. Like, last night had me in a prison cell? That was weird.”

Skyler sat up in their bed. “And they’re always like that?” they asked.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe it means something.” They tapped their forehead. “You know where dreams come from?”

Arufa grinned. “If you say some philosophical shit right now, I will wake this guy up and have him shoot you.”

“No, no no no. It’s psychological this time, I swear.”

“Sure, fine. Where do they come from?”

“Way deep inside your brain, there’s something called the limbic system. It basically controls your emotions. If you’re having a really good day, it’s the thing that makes you feel happy. Or if you’re stressed out and scared, it makes you feel that way, too.”

“So that’s where…”

“No—well, it definitely has to do with them. Some people think dreams come more from the right side of your brain, ‘cause it’s the ‘creative’ side or whatever. But your limbic system spreads out over both halves, and brain activity during dream studies kinda just shows it all over the place.”

“Right—where did you learn this?”

Skyler looked like they were about to respond, but they stopped. “Um… where did I learn that?”

“You think on that, pal. I’m gonna keep trying to figure this whole time travel thing out.”

Where was I? Something about the tattoos… alright. What’s nagging me about them is what they’re even there for. Like, really. Why do we have these things? What actual purpose do they serve? I have a feeling I won’t get an answer to that, so I’ll move on.

The warrants came next. I think I figured that one out. Ghiles must have given that to the Overside police, considering he’s an officer, or at least posing as one. Coincidentally, we ended up doing as he predicted. Well, that I’m not sure of. It might not have been a coincidence.

Talking with Ghiles for the first time cleared a lot up for me. It’s safe to assume anything he said could have been a lie. He probably didn’t even need us to choose it, but clearly he wanted it, otherwise he wouldn’t have gone to all that effort.

And now whatever this is. Our memories were reset, but we managed to break the cycle by knocking Ghiles out. It makes me wonder, though. If there’s technology to wirelessly make people forget things, this can’t be the first time they’ve made me forget. Maybe we’ve even done this exact chain of events before…

But how would that technology exist? Nanomachines? Some kind of AI? Clearly it doesn’t work while Ghiles is out cold, so it must be remotely operated. And if it can control memory, can it control other things? Emotions? Thoughts? Maybe our whole lives are a lie we’ve just been convinced into remembering. When our memories are up for grabs, a conclusion like that isn’t very outlandish, is it?

“Skyler. I think I’m on to something. What do you remember about our childhood?”

They looked up to the rusty ceiling, a cloudy look in their eyes. “Uh, times were hard. That’s when we started stealing.”

“Give me something specific.”

“Okay, um… we threw a rock at an Overside window and shattered it. And the police got really mad at us.”

Arufa chuckled. “That was, what, six years ago, right? That would make us around eleven, twelve years old.”

“Yeah, but…”

“It doesn’t feel like we were that young, right?”

“Exactly. We were… pretty much the same as we are now.”

She pounded her fist on her palm. “And I bet every time we’ve thought about that, they erased it from our memory.”

“Okay, wait. I remember when we met,” Skyler said.

“I do too. I had longer hair back then. You made me get a haircut so I could hide. Damn, it looked so stupid.”

“Did not.”

“Tch. Did too.” Arufa said. “When was that, though? It’s hard to tell. You look the same no matter how far back I try to remember.”

Skyler counted on their fingers. “Six years. Again. And…what's weird is, I don’t remember ever not living with you.”

“That’s it!” Arufa shouted, snapping her fingers. “My memories end about six years ago, too. Before that, it’s just exposition. An idea of what it was like.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we forgot everything before that. Or, Ghiles made us forget, or whoever else. Which effectively gives us a ‘start date’ for our lives in X2.”

“Everyone has a start date. It’s when they’re born, Rufa.”

“Yeah! Except, for us, it’s six years ago! And we haven’t aged a day!”

Skyler rubbed their forehead. “What does that mean?”

“Okay, I’m thinking out loud here, but—Ghiles did all this to stop us from meeting those Oversiders. And what happened when we met those Oversiders?”

“Everything stopped?”

“Everything stopped. And nevermind the tattoos, we just found a seam in the fabric of the world. We don’t remember anything from before six years ago,” Arufa said.

Skyler’s eyes lit up. “You know what else is weird? Ghiles could have used time travel to put out that warrant, but he didn’t. I don’t think time travel is possible. Which means we were somehow just teleported back to this exact place without our memories.”

“Which would be impossible in the real world,” Arufa replied.

“Well, clearly it is possible, so–”

“No, hear me out. Why did Ghiles want to stop us from meeting them? Because everything froze. Now, I don’t know why it did, but there’s only one thing I know that just slows down and stops like that.”

“And that is?”

“A computer. If it gets overloaded, it lags.”

“So… you’re saying…”

Arufa stood up from her bed, chugged the last of her water, and tossed the empty bottle aside. Somehow, her worldview had changed. Everything looked slightly different—a little less detailed, a little less colorful. She’d cracked the code.

“X2 isn’t the greatest city in the X-Chain. It’s a computer simulation. Something about meeting Marsia and Locri overloaded it and made it lag.”

Skyler’s jaw dropped. They were less in disbelief and more in denial, but everything seemed to click together just right, like gears in a machine.

“We’re… simulated,” they mumbled.

“No.”

“Huh?”

“If we were AI, Ghiles could just erase our memories from our code, no way to get them back. He wouldn’t go through all the trouble of coming in here himself.”

“So what… what are we, then?”

“I’ll tell you what we are, Skyler. We’re trapped. But now that we know that… we can try to break free.”

She slid through the open doors and looked around. The world seemed duller now that she knew the truth. It seemed obvious now, but she’d somehow never noticed. And, wildly, there wasn’t a person in sight.

“Skyler, grab whatever you need. We’re going.”

“Going where?”

“The X2 Monument. If everything goes the way I think it will… we might have a way out.”