InterLife

Chapter 8

I envied Velocity. Her ease at sleeping was awfully impressive. It had only taken her a quarter of an hour to pass out against my shoulder, even through the pain. Hinode, on the other hand, was sitting behind us, leaning against the window. I could see his reflection in the window. He seemed to be lost in thought, with his eyes closing and opening ever so often. It were the little things that showed me he was worried; he was staring at anything, never landing on a single object for longer than a few seconds and tapping his finger against his own chin constantly. For a man who usually appeared so unemotional, it was surprising to see him drop his façade. A voice back in my head reminded me of another person like that, but instead of listening to it, I drowned it out and turned to Hinode.

"Will you at least tell me where we're going?"

He turned to look at me as well, his gaze skimming over my face down to my hand. "You're bleeding."

I rolled my eyes. "Huh, how odd. I wonder why." So much sarcasm dripped off my voice I could fill up a cup.

"Why is your tone so insolent? All I have done is help you and keep you alive," he replied and this time I had no answer for him. I wasn't trying to be rude on purpose, I simply didn't know how to act around this man. He was hot or cold every second and I never knew what to expect. Instead I turned my head and stared out the window.

"I don't know why Azariah asked me to find you," he continued, "I usually don't get asked to fetch people," he glanced at Velocity, "she might know though. She knows him better than me."

I sighed. "Can you at least tell me who Azariah is? Or where we're going? Or how Vel- Maeve, knows him?" I still had to get used to her name- her real name. Maeve. It was actually a really nice name.

"Mattakumou, you ask too many questions," he stated as he rolled his eyes. "I'm not a walking encyclopedia."

"No, if you were, you'd be a lot more helpful."

His typical look returned to his face and he turned cold. His expression vacant as he focused his attention back to the outside view. The rest of the bus ride was quiet and I also spent the entire time staring out the window. My eyes traced the menacing buildings that arose from the ground like thorns on a rose. Each as pernicious and imposing as the other. Most of them were abandoned these days, since many were plain offices and with the uprising of the VR technology they were deemed useless. Why bother leaving your house if you can meet up in a much safer online world instead? Why bother paying for electricity and rent if you can have everything for free?

The ones that remained in use were mainly used by companies that worked on keeping the World Tree alive or the Worlds belonging to certain large companies. They ensured that the worlds remained up and running, and mostly; available for everyone. These tasks were strenuous to engineer from inside the world, therefore renting the inexpensive, colossal, vacant floors of the skyscrapers was the perfect solution.

The last option for these properties was housing. Considering the world population had been increasing rapidly the past decades, these places were perfect to accommodate even more people. A single floor would be split up in around forty apartments, with most of these buildings reaching up to at least fifty floors. This meant an easy 2000 apartments per structure. It was slightly inconvenient and chaotic at first, especially with addresses.

I remembered when I was 12 and I had a friend, well, acquaintance - for some reason children had never seemed to want to be my friend - and she had lived in one of the restructured skyscrapers. She had told our class that she had gotten lost attempting to find her own apartment, which resulted in her sleeping in a hallway that evening. She said that her mother had found her the next morning, only a few hallways away from their apartment. The class had laughed, taking it as a light-hearted story. No one had bothered to reconsider the negative consequences, the what-if's: what if she had not been found? Or even worse; what if someone else had found the young, clearly naive girl first? People didn't like thinking about the repercussions, especially if it wasn't absolutely necessary. Each story with a happy ending was simply that; a happy ending. Not a warning sign, not an alert, not a cry for help. It was a funny story this girl would use for the next few years of her life, perhaps to break the ice and make new friends, and none of them would have ever stood still to actually contemplate the horrors of this complication.