SLEEPSONG (BoyxBoy)✔️

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

This was the part I hated more than anything.

The part where my emotions got the better of me and I became afraid of myself, of what I was doing, and grew guilty for doing it since it always, always felt wrong. My pulse thundered unpleasantly in my ears as I followed the group of cheerful but completely unsuspecting college students down the street and around to the back of the building chain I lived in.

I scanned the vacant parking lot, which was surrounded by trees, but from what I could see it was empty save for a single black van. Nobody else was around which meant that this would probably be the best place to pull off what I wanted to.

Just as Andrew was about to make it to the van I darted forward and slid in front of him.

He jumped, startled, and everyone else seemed surprised by how fast I'd moved but I clasped my hands together and innocently rocked back and forth on my heels, grinning for show to disarm them. Despite my racing heart and frazzled nerves, I needed to stay calm.

"Uh, what's up?" Andrew asked, frowning. "Something wrong?"

"No, of course not!" I chirped, swallowing hard before I added, "its just, this is actually a really good spot for me to sing... so, if you want to hear, I'll show you what I've got before we go."

"Oh, sweet!" Ashley gushed, grinning widely. "Yeah, come on girl! Go for it!"

"What're you going to sing?" Karin asked, smirking. "Pop? Country? Rap?"

"Actually, I was thinking about singing a song you've probably never heard before," I said a little wistfully. "Its from the early nineteen hundreds."

"Whoa, hold up, you know retro music?" Justin asked, head instantly flying up. "It's almost impossible to find any songs from before the turn of the century thanks to the third world war, isn't it? Wasn't the internet completely wiped of everything during a cyber attack?"

"Yeah," I nervously said, heart flying up my throat, "but my great grandfather was both a computer technician and a well-known sponsor for musicians, and he had a lot of music that you can't find anymore saved to things like memory cards and computer hardware."

"So, he taught you the music?" Trevor asked, frowning. "I find that a little hard to believe."

I didn't really blame him since he did, indeed, have a point.

Most music from before I was born had been damaged during the riots of the twenties and thirties, and since the world wide web had, in fact, been unraveled and all known data that had ever been put into it was erased, people had never really heard of the smaller musical artists from my younger years. They'd gotten the web back up pretty quickly thanks to the level of technology we'd had during those times, but the whole world had been in an uproar over it.

Digital life records, hospital records, insurance policies, deeds to homes, individual IDs, school records, home addresses, the ability to use a phone and make calls, documents about the government, NASA's plans, literally everything internet-based was gone.

Even our satellites had refused to respond for the longest time.

That first year had been absolute chaos since landline phones had almost completely died out, and nobody knew what the hell was going on. There was fighting, and even panic because news outlets couldn't connect to television, cable companies couldn't use their shit anymore, even things like street lights stopped working properly, all at once... I think you get the picture.