Chapter One

Sil Moore

March 16. Friday 7.45 PM. S.A. 125.

Edinburgh, Scotland.

It was rush hour and, on the streets, the Maglev cars were speeding along the magnetized lines, crowded together like a giant shoal of metal. Although almost no one was driving such cars, most were simply guided by the AI-driven automatic mode. Autonomous cars, which went wherever one wanted to go, without worrying about the handling of the vehicle. The passenger could relax while listening to music, playing a game, or having a virtual sex session in some of the worlds of Another Earth to stimulate the secretion of dopamine before getting home.

The more reckless, on the other hand, decided to simply cut the conductivity and fly through the city, if only to enjoy the view of the city's huge skyscrapers. Traffic congestion was a thing of the past.

Although the number of vehicles on the streets was even greater than in past centuries, technology had made it possible to implement the Maglev and air support system in vehicles, much more efficient and orderly.

There was a third group of people who returned to their homes by more traditional means, although no less dangerous, considering that they passed within inches of the maglev cars.

And Sil Moore was one of these people.

The girl exited the bike path and rode her folding bike up onto the sidewalk, as the Maglev cars passed by on the street just inches away from her. Sil took off her helmet and goggles compressing them into a small cube and sighed, as she got off her bike and began to fold it. She felt that over the weekend she would probably have to take it all apart, if for no other reason than to make sure everything was in working order. The last thing she needed was to hurt herself by not maintaining it properly.

The day's work at the Edinburgh Station Control Center hadn't been that hard for her. She expected that, due to some system malfunctions that occurred in the morning, it was almost certain that she would be working overtime until the early hours of the morning. Fortunately for her, though, everything had been resolved quickly. As a result, she was in good spirits when she arrived at the ten-story building where her apartment was located, on the sixth floor in Piershill.

The distance to Castle Rock, where she worked as a technical service employee at the subway station, was not too far, and Sil Moore rode her bicycle to work every day to exercise. Although her job required her to spend a lot of time watching screens, and go back and forth between the different control rooms to make sure the systems were working properly, she used every opportunity she had to exercise. The baggy clothes she wore, under her work jacket, hid the fact that she was very athletic.

She had red eyes with long eyelashes, and hair of the same color, slightly dyed blonde at the ends, and it was almost always styled in two braids, with the exception of a few irregularly cut strands.

Her appearance and personality, although a bit unkempt, in a way contributed to give her a very liberal young look with her style and way of life, almost as if she were a bird in the wild. And such was the nickname she had earned on the streets when he was younger.

Sil, "The Red Cardinal". And there were still a few people in the neighborhood who called her by the same name. And Sil certainly didn't mind the nickname, as she even had a tattoo of a cardinal on her right arm.

Be that as it may, the day hadn't been too bad. I'll have some time to practice today, she thought, as she walked up the short steps of the building. She was in such a good mood that she didn't notice that, with her quick steps, she almost hit someone walking past her. Sil evaded him, only to run face first into another person who seemed to have come out of nowhere.

"Whoops!" said a soft male voice.

"Sorry," Sil apologized, looking up. So tall, she thought.

The stranger carried a bouquet of what looked like freshly cut flowers in his left hand and carried an instrument case on his back. Probably a guitar or some kind of new instrument, Sil thought, though it looked somewhat larger.

He was a handsome man, though a bit old for her taste, but not so extremely old either. If Sil had to guess his age, she would have guessed that he looked to be in his late thirties, although considering that many people froze their appearance at about that age, she couldn't say for sure either.

His hair was brown, shoulder-length and slightly wavy, and a few strands covered his light brown eyes. His face was slightly tanned, like someone who had spent a lot of time under the sun. He wore a leather jacket over a T-shirt, and a pair of ratty jeans and old boots, that looked like they had walked the same distance from the earth to the moon.

For no apparent reason the stranger smiled at the young woman and pulled a blood-red rose from among the bouquet and handed it to her.

 

"For you, M' Lady," the stranger said, in his lilting voice.

M' Lady? What time does this chap come from? Sil thought, as she gave a quick glance at his ears, to make sure he wasn't a fey.

Sil accepted the present, slightly surprised, and examined him more closely. It was not a face she had seen before in the neighborhood. But he didn't seem to be dangerous either. "Thank you, may I ask why?"

"For asking the right question."

Sil looked at him quizzically, she had barely exchanged a few words and certainly didn't remember asking him anything. "What question?"

The stranger smiled at her. "We live in a world of how's, and people forget the why's."

Sil was already wondering how many screws the man might be missing. But, even if she wasn't going to say it, and she didn't know why, she found him charming. She judged herself to be a good judge of character and the stranger made no suspicious impression on her. Considering that the neighborhood where Sil lived was quite famous for hosting several artists, it was possible that the stranger was also one of them.

"You still haven't answered me why you're giving me a flower."

The stranger gave her a suspicious look and, while still smiling, went on his way.

"Hey! It's rude to leave someone with the word in their mouth." Sil said turning around. Now she could see that whatever the man was carrying in the case, it was much bigger than a guitar.

"So is walking without looking," the man said.

"Aren't you going to answer me?"

The stranger turned a somersault and looked at her with affable eyes. "Because I want to... and because it matches your eyes, M' Lady."

"Can you tell me your name at least?"

"You haven't told me yours either, M'Lady Pusher," the strange bard said, as he walked away through the crowd.

"My name is Sil," she said, raising her voice a little.

"I am Black," the voice replied, but Sil could no longer see him among the people passing around.

Sil smiled, and walked up the stairs. She put the rose to her ear, taking one last look at the street.

"Artists... we're all crazy." She said quietly, and she walked through the revolving doors of the entrance. A weirdo for sure, but the stranger's attitude had put her in a good mood. She didn't remember anyone ever giving her a flower. An old detail that no longer existed.

She greeted the venerable looking elderly robot at the front desk and made her way to the elevators, only to discover that they were out of service for some reason. "Ah, great. Winston! The elevators are out of service."

Old Winston raised his head and stared at her with a poker expression. Then, as if in response, he simply turned his head 360 degrees.

The landlord really needs to give that old robot a service. Sil snorted. "As useful as ever," she said resignedly and headed for the stairs.

The girl climbed the floors that separated her from her apartment, with her work backpack and folding bicycle in tow, while she heard the familiar voices in some of the hallways. Sil didn't pay special attention to the conversations of her neighbors, nor did she like to gossip, but in a way she had become accustomed to hearing the murmurs every time she came home from work.

She had been living alone for months, since, after an argument, her ex-partner had left the place. Since almost all the furniture and appliances were his, the apartment seemed even more empty and lonelier, although that didn't bother Sil. Although the emptiness, and inner loneliness, was far worse than the lack of furniture.

As she walked down the hallway on the sixth floor, she found that in one of the apartments next to hers the door was opening, and the squeaky voices and laughter of small children were coming from the place. Sil peeked in the door and there she found her neighbor, a plump woman in tween clothes, busily putting a baby in her high chair, while another infant, no more than two years old, smiled at her in the doorway.

"Where are you running off to?" Sil asked, with a complicit grin, leaving the bicycle in the hallway and scooping the little one into her arms. "Hey, Vivian! One of these critters was running away!" She said as she did a cartwheel, much to the child's amusement.

Vivian finished placing the toddler in his high chair and looked at Sil.

"Where were you going, Mich?! Thank you Sil, pretty rose," Vivian said, picking up the infant.

"Thanks... Hey, did something happen to the elevator? Is it stuck like last time?"

"We already complained to the landlord, but he says it's not the building's problem, although I think he's right for once. You haven't been watching the news?"

"No. Did something happen now?" Sil asked.

"Apparently it's been all over the city, it's been going down all morning."

Sil looked at her strangely, apparently the station was not the only place where there had been problems, but she, and her co-workers, had not heard anything during the course of the morning. Although maybe that was because she wasn't paying much attention to what the news was saying.

"What kind of malfunctions?" Sil asked, leaning against the door frame.

"Systems failures apparently. We all had to use the stairs today. I guess you were lucky to bring that huge mirror in yesterday, or the guys at the antique house would have charged you double to carry it up the stairs if you'd brought it in today."

"Too much service the bastards charged me. I was almost going to tell Alex to help me."

"You would have been out of luck. He's still in construction. He doesn't get out of orbit for a fortnight until next week."

"I thought he was with you. Has he been delayed up there?"

"He was supposed to come down yesterday, but they've held up all the station personnel. Apparently something crashed pretty close to where they were and they've asked for more workers to come up."

"That' s scary… some kind of accident or something? Is Alex okay?"

"Yes, it's okay. But even they don't really know what happened. But luckily there was no one in that part when it was destroyed. Alex said they all saw some kind of red light that came out of the surface and was lost in space. So they're all employed on the repairs. The pay is good. It's triple if they can meet the turnaround time for the damaged sector."

"Well, at least that's something, those guys shit rare-earths. A few E-febs shouldn't make a difference for them. Still it' s scary just thinking about it."

"Probably some country was testing something and now they're all washing their hands of it. Haven't you seen what happened in Kazakhstan on the news? Apparently they've already hinted that the disaster that happened there might have something to do with it."

"I think I heard something..."

"You really don't watch the news?"

"No, especially not if it's stuff going on up there. We have enough trouble here."

"That's because you're too down to earth. I know hundreds of people and, out of all of them, you are the only one that I know of who has only gone up there as a child, but not as an adult. I take these two at least three times a week if I have time, so they get used to it."

"I don't really like the space, Vivian," Sil said, smiling, as she affectionately pinched Mich's cheek.

"You should try it, I know maybe it's hard, but you should at least give it a chance."

"Maybe… but, for the moment I'm happy with my two feet on the ground," Sil said, with a wistful smile and retraced her steps as he picked up the bike.

"Don't you want to have dinner with us?"

"I have pizza in the fridge waiting for me."

"You need to eat better."

"I have a more strict diet than you think."

"And pizza is part of that diet?" Vivian asked, smiling incredulously.

"It's the best part," Sil said, smiling, as she walked away down the hallway. "Close the door tight, that shorty's already strong enough to open it."

Vivian watched her walk away and shook her head. She certainly felt sorry for Sil, but it was a sentiment shared by almost everyone who knew her. Poor girl, Vivian thought, as she closed the door.

Sil reached her place and opened the door with the digital reader, and stepped inside her apartment.

"Lights," she said, and she left the bike by the side of the door and walked over to her bed.

The place was too big for someone living alone. The sparse furnishings only accentuated the spaciousness of the place. A bed, a closet with a missing door, a bedside table and a long chair, along with a few movie posters and band posters on the walls, were the first things any visitor would have seen as soon as they set foot in the place.

The kitchen-dining room and bathroom were on the far side of the apartment. The place where the living room should have been was completely empty, with the exception of a huge mirror at least two meters high by two meters wide, leaning against the wall, between the two windows, through which the night city lights came in.

On the nightstand next to her bed was a red lava lamp, and next to it rested a small picture frame showing a young-looking couple, holding a little red-haired girl, with smiles on their faces. Sil took the rose from her ear and placed it in front of the portrait.

"I'm home," she said, running her hand over the portrait, with a sad looking smile.

She threw her backpack on the bed and, with the freedom of being at home, took off her work jacket, baggy clothes and underwear. Usually she didn't mind walking around her house nearly naked, although that night that wasn't going to be the case.

What was even more striking, apart from her slender figure, were a series of almost imperceptible marks on her pale skin. They followed symmetrical patterns. On her shoulder blades, waist, stomach, on her chest, following the line of her pink nipples, hips, legs and some extended all the way down to her toes.

Sil stood on her tiptoes, stretching her ankles, then pulled a black one-piece swimsuit from the closet and put it on.

"Unzip and deploy the ballroom configuration," Sil ordered, through her Neurowire, as she walked into the spacious living room.

After saying those words the walls and floor stretched out, emerging from them fractal geometric patterns, with shapes resembling ice crystals, growing into each other and enlarging the place. The space grew, turning the spacious living room into a large hall that must have been at least fifty meters long and twenty meters wide. The floor changed its tiling for a wooden floor, and the dull gray walls were stained white like pentelic marble.

Sil smiled at the mirror, which now seemed to be the only decorative object that filled the huge practice room. The windows on either side had also changed their shape and where there had been only one, there were now three of them on each side of the mirror.

The only reason she had bought the huge old thing was to integrate it into her setup via VNA copying. She could have simply loaded one of the mirrored scenarios, as she always did, and that would have solved everything. But when she saw it, as she passed the antique house, there was something that had caught her attention.

She didn't know why, but there was something strange about that mirror.

She was not a girl who was easily impressed or easily infatuated with anything. The day before, after her lunch at work, she had gone for a ride on her bike. As she pedaled along Inverleith Terrace, with a view of the Royal Botanic Garden, she saw that across the street, next to one of the old historic buildings on the site, was a two-story antique house that she hadn't seen before on her rounds after work.

And that's when she spotted it, in the store window, along with other rickety objects, Great War memorabilia, and miniatures of the Dyson Orbital Belt.

The mirror was pretty, although the glass surface was like that of an ordinary mirror, the mahogany frame had some baroque-style engravings that continued on the back. It obviously had signs that the varnish had worn off around the edges and a few marks on the wood, but the mirror was intact. She paid the modest sum of 40 E-febs. Not too much, considering that the object itself must be over a hundred years old for sure, if not perhaps a little more. A real bargain. The salesman, a bearded old man with a bionic ear, seemed pleased that he finally managed to sell one of the mirrors, since it was one of several that had been sitting in the store collecting dust for years. He tried to get Sil to buy another one, but she declined.

After leaving work, Sil returned to the place and paid for transportation to her apartment. That evening, she spent some time setting up and running simulations to choose the right location. The thing was heavy, but she had no problem placing it and moving it around until she decided which location seemed best.

And now she could finally see what it looked like. "DM-W- Double Wide Mirror Configuration."

The spatial distortion program immediately ran the configuration, and the mirror changed its size until it grew in length to almost the same size as the room, and once again the windows on the sides changed their configuration, now fitting the mirror, that took up almost the entire wall. On the opposite side of the room another mirror appeared, creating the illusion that, on either side, the space stretched to infinity.

Sil smiled with satisfaction and headed for the kitchen. It was time for a little distraction before practice. She ate some pizza from the night before, with orange juice, and a chocolate custard with vanilla for dessert, her favorite. Then she read a new chapter of two of her favorite series, A Mole's Rebellion on the Moon and The Punishing Donkey, two famous comic satires that told the story of when the terraforming of the moon had begun.

To kill a little more time, she watched some of the news, where she found that some of them talked about the electrical flaws that had occurred in the morning. Everything seemed to point to a sudden flare-up of the sun, which could have been absorbed by the Gateway Tree in Holyrood Park. She also read the news about the damage to the new mining station under construction by the SAIRIS, where the husband of her neighbor, Vivian, worked.

She was about to start reading the news of the natural disaster in Kazakhstan, involving the Nevermore Institute's Special Investigation Divisions, when an alarm went off in her brain, that almost made her fall out of her chair.

It was nine o'clock at night.

Sil gasped and looked out into the ballroom with a smile.

Who knows, maybe today I could make it. That was the eternal phrase she had been repeating to herself for years. That night she didn't want to be disturbed. "Turn off Neurowire network," she said and stood up.

She walked to the center of the room and looked at both sides of the mirrors, watching as her reflections looked back at her as well, until they blurred and disappeared into the farthest ones.

"Deploy compartment 9," she said in a soft voice, as she let down her hair.

From the wooden floor appeared a new fractal pattern, with snow crystal geometry and from it sprouted a column at least a meter and a half high with several drawers. From one of them Sil extracted a bag with magnesium powder and rosin, with which she covered her hands and feet with a thin layer. From another drawer she extracted some small motion capture sensors, which she placed on different parts of her body.

"Run interface 7 and activate the acoustic cameras. Type: Vault with Jillian fractal parametric. Compresses compartment 9. Run metronome seconds."

The column was hidden again at floor level, and Sil ran several elongation routines around the room for a few minutes. Then she swung her arms and made a series of circular movements around the room, at the same time as the enveloping sounds of the ticking of an invisible clock filled the room completely and echoed with an almost supernatural violence wherever she went.

In her brain a strange amalgam of images of faded colors and abstract shapes was being produced every time she moved. She walked around the room, taking a few steps similar to a kind of contemporary dance. At the different movements she made, as she approached or moved away from certain parts of the room, different instruments sprouted from the floor and then sank again when she moved away. Balance bars, uneven bars, podium bars and other apparatuses linked to artistic gymnastics disciplines.

If Sil had arrived an hour earlier that day, she would certainly have chosen to warm up on the apparatuses.

But that was not the case. Not at that time. She didn't know why, but for some reason she felt different that day.

"Okay, here we go... again," she said, sighing with some nervousness. "Record and Compose."

[Record and Compose Enabled.]

"Open interface applications 7: Interrupted Melody."

[Mad dancer, Gyroscope, Harmonic Room, Affinator, Orchestra activated. Thirty subroutines enabled.]

Sil sighed ,and began to walk slowly around the room. For several minutes she simply did nothing else. She settled her breathing, feeling her body slowly warm up as she slowly quickened the pace of her steps.

Little by little, the monotonous ticking seemed to slow down. And so the movements of the strange performance suddenly began.

Subtle at first, slow or violent later, and with the grace of one who had obviously been practicing for years. Still, they were strange. They did not seem to adhere to any particular type of dance or artistic gymnastics, they seemed to be a mixture of several disciplines. There was a grand jeté one moment, only to be followed by a back plank and then a parkour move the next.

Although to the average observer it seemed to be a mixture of several things, closer to a free dance, there was something in the movement of Sil's body that made the movements flow in an almost unnatural way. The angles of extension of her shoulders and shoulder blades were different. The same with her leg movements and her hip swings, they had a violence and twisting angles a little different from those of other gymnastic athletes and dancers. As she drew geometric shapes with her movements, they seemed to flow like the sparkling water of a river.

Sil's practice lasted at least half an hour, and she did not even take a break to catch her breath, yet she did not fail at any time. Her muscles felt as if they might tear at any moment, but she didn't stop. Beads of sweat trickled down her forehead and flew, when in some sudden movement Sil brushed them off and left them behind.

The sound of the seconds was slowing down in her mind, while the colors seemed to be flooding every neuron in her brain.

Activate pool safety layers, five meter vertical distortion, she ordered, mentally.

Over the line that separated the entrance, and Sil's room, from the living room and on the side of the kitchen, a kind of glass barrier glowed for a few seconds and then disappeared out of sight, although it was still there. The sector of the living room changed once again and she saw how the ceiling moved a few meters upwards.

Sil took a last leap reaching the center of the room and tensed her muscles. "Activate pool," she said softly, as she closed her eyes and took one last big breath.

The change in temperature was sudden and Sil felt the water hit her from all four sides of the room, causing her to lose her balance slightly. Although the water was not freezing, far from it, the warmth of her body with the exercises contrasted with the temperature of the water. She crouched almost at ground level, while she felt the place flooded and the water covered her completely.

Run, Melody interrupted, she commanded through her Neurowire.

It was about a minute before she finally opened her eyes. Her ears made a strange sound as they adjusted to the water pressure. Similar marks to those on the rest of her body could also be seen behind her ears.

Although the human ear did not have the same capacity to pick up sounds underwater compared to air, that was not the case with Sil. Every movement of her body in the water could be heard with total clarity, with acoustics much better than that of a normal ear. Not only that, it resonated through her bones with shuddering clarity.

Time in her brain was passing in a different way. The ticking sound was still there, but to her it was so spaced out that it seemed to mark minutes instead of seconds. It was like a metronome slowly losing its momentum, fading into space.

From the four lower and upper corners of the pool, projected through small speakers, a strange tune began to play and Sil began to dance underwater. It was the chords of violin and piano.

Her performance began slowly, as if she was trying to match the sounds of the music with her movements. The images that her optic nerves transmitted to her brain were colors that flashed to the rhythm of her movements, in a kind of kaleidoscopic synesthesia, which the reflection of the mirrors repeated as if it were a hallucinogenic trip.

It was as if she had been possessed by something. The movements and spins seemed to have a grace as if Sil was trying to communicate herself, or someone else, a message that was beyond any spoken language. Something was taking root in the depths of her brain, a kind of primitive instinct that perhaps in another time humanity had come to understand, before the suffocating noise of modernity ended up burying that sensation in the abyss of the limbic system.

Two minutes passed, then three, then four, and so on until they reached seven, but that no longer mattered to Sil Moore.

Her whole being was a melody. For her it was the beginning of a static ecstasy beyond description, closer to an altered state of consciousness or the first moments of a near-death experience.

Her body was suffering the first symptoms of oxygen deprivation.

It was the moment Sil was waiting for.

The music reverberated in crescendo in the grooves of the underwater parametric chamber. This was nothing more than a force field that she had come to shape through effort and research for the sole purpose of that experiment.

Her interrupted melody. The music she heard the day she lost her parents and that no matter how hard she tried for years, she never knew why but, that music, had haunted her mind throughout her adolescence and now in her adulthood. Something strange felt inside her when she heard it for the first time, and for some reason, the feeling never left her.

Although it had started out as nothing more than a game of searching for songs that resembled it, that changed when, as the years went by, she began to realize that there was something more in that tune.

She studied acoustics in a self-taught manner, along with her career as a transportation technician in college. Later, as she studied through Neurowire the places she had been as a child on the day of the accident, she realized that the reason why that melody haunted her so much was different.

It had been the place where she heard it.

Her fear of space, because of the accident, made her dizzy and just imagining herself in space made her hands start to sweat. So she decided that, if only as a hobby, and a way to cope with her stress, she would try to find a way to reinterpret the music in conditions similar to those of that day. She was not good with instruments, but she had her body.

Composing music through movement was something that had been developed decades ago. Combining ancient dance techniques, and the possibilities that the study of the mind had opened up with the development of Neurowire, helped Sil in her quest.

That, and the modification of her body.

Although it was not related to melody. She had always loved contemporary dance and, over the years, surgical techniques had been developed that made it possible to take the human body into completely new areas, as in the case of artistic expression. It was just a coincidence that the modification of her body helped her to find the right way to recreate the tune.

And since she couldn't go into space, she would try underwater. There were other better methods to create the feeling of weightlessness although, after a while, she discovered that acoustics in water worked better for her.

And that was what Sil was achieving.

Little by little and with effort, leaving nights in the pool and in the ballroom, she succeeded.

The sounds were not the same at first but, little by little, her efforts paid off. It was only seconds at first, then minutes. And so on until the first seven minutes. But for months, after the fight with her partner, she barely had made any progress.

But that night was different.

Activate the cell oxygen regeneration system at ten percent, she ordered.

Sil watched as the Neurowire playback system on her Neurowire had only a few seconds left before the melody ended and felt a knot in her stomach. The dance was taking its toll on her body, and the last thing she needed was a cramp at that moment. But Sil didn't stop.

Five seconds, four, three, two, two, one, zero.

The melody on the playback system ended, but Sil didn't stop. New graceful and other violent movements sprang from her body. The link was not severed for a second and Sil could have sworn that if she had not been underwater at that moment she would have been crying for sure. What the hell was in that tune? She didn't know.

Sil never tried drugs, she didn't need them. The addiction to that melody was more than enough. Stronger than any substance. She never told anyone about it and the reason is because they would think she was crazy.

Part of the reason she had a fight with her partner had been that. Her boyfriend arrived at just the right time when she was practicing and what he saw had filled him with terror. For Sil, time passed differently when she was practicing. But to a person watching the scene at that moment it would have seemed as if her body was suffering some kind of seizure or losing consistency due to the speed of her movements. Although it was not an attack, it was simply that the speed was different, it was as if the resistance of the water itself had changed its composition so that she could move in that way. Sil was aware that she was pushing her body to an extreme, but that didn't matter to her at that moment.

Once again she was succeeding.

She couldn't explain it, there were no words to describe what she felt every time she heard it. Sil was not a neo-religious, but if there was a god in the universe for her it was almost certain that this music could be the closest thing. But it came from her body, it was her own body that was reinterpreting the music. That filled her with an even greater satisfaction.

It was the same strange sounds she had heard that day in the Orbital Tree.

 

 

Despite her joy and ecstasy, Sil did not smile or flinch at that moment, what she was doing was more important.

Four seconds, five, six… ten… twenty.

How many would it be this time?

She couldn't believe it. The movements of the dance due to the water pressure could cause her some discomfort at any moment, but she didn't stop.

She couldn't. Even the weight of the water seemed like a barrier that didn't exist. Sil moved with a speed almost as if the liquid element was not there. Only her long hair floating weightless was the only sign that she was still underwater.

A minute passed and it went on. Then another minute. She had reached ten minutes.

What's going on? Sil wondered. It was the first time in all those years that she managed to do so many seconds.

It was no longer a matter of inspiration or euphoria, she felt she really couldn't stop. She was happy to have come so far in a single day, but a part of her began to feel afraid. Had she really lost control of her body? It was a feeling as if a part of her was detaching from her body.

What is this?

Her vision was changing. She wasn't sure if it was that the oxygen was too little or something else. It felt like a part of her consciousness was fading away.

Increase oxygen regeneration to fifteen percent.

It was as if her whole being was traveling somewhere, as if she was sinking into the reflections of the mirrors. Not only that, she was beginning to see some sort of moving lines below her, snaking several meters away, as if coming from the ground itself. These glowed with a faint light. It was as if everything around her at that moment was being seen as if through X-rays. But not the lines, they looked as if they were something more solid.

Minute eleven complete.

Something happened then. Although the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere towards her head, it was suddenly cut off and Sil could almost have sworn that a sharp, thud-like, sound had come from the real mirror. Her inspiration and performance abruptly cut off and the music ceased in the pool.

Control of her body returned and Sil stopped. Staggering, she fell slowly to the bottom of the pool.

A new alarm sounded in her brain [Self-preservation system activated, deactivating pool distortion. Oxygen levels are below what is required for vital functions. If emotional support is required, the Neurowire System will be activated and a request will be sent to the nearest stress control office].

[What?! No! Cancel that last one!]

She had come closer to endangering herself more times than she could remember riding her bike on the streets, but this was the first time she had seen a message advising anti-suicide counseling.

The water began to go down and retreat towards the corners of the pool, until it disappeared completely and then there was a new glow, the barriers disappeared and the roof area went back down to its normal level. Although the place had been full of water until a few seconds ago, the water had completely disappeared. Sil was the only one dripping with water in the room, now on all fours on the floor trying to catch her breath.

She looked up and found her reflection staring back at her. The same dumbfounded and happy expression.

What the hell was that last one? She wondered remembering the serpentine glow she had seen at the end.

Trembling with pain, some fear, and emotion, Sil sat up not knowing what to do. She looked at the time, it was 9:50 PM. I had been underwater for eleven fucking minutes.

Her expression in the mirror made her laugh. She didn't know why, but she felt a happiness like she hadn't felt in a long time.

"Save all the progress," she gasped.

She couldn't get over her amazement. It had been an incredibly hard session, but she had done it.

The body aches were a small cost to pay for having come so far. The tremors and shivering from the cramps were beginning to spread through her body. So she was not surprised when she felt a sudden electric shiver in her neck, as if something had pierced her from side to side.

She was not surprised either, when the world seemed to lose consistency and she fell to the ground. It was not the first time she had fallen to the ground in surrender.

But she was surprised when she saw something else.

She was with her eyes parallel to the ground, unable to move, and the image was blurring, but not enough, and what she saw made her eyes widen and her lips tremble.

There, just inches away from her, was her body still standing. She could see drops of water trickling down her ankles to the bottom of her feet, forming a puddle on the ground. Then, as if in a slow motion nightmare, she saw her body collapse to the ground. Sil watched as spasms ran through her body down to the tips of her fingers, but as she looked down at her neck she felt horror invade her.

She was looking at her own body and it had no head. Where her head should have been, she simply saw a clean cut showing bone and tissue.

Her vision blurred completely, but that no longer mattered.

For all human circumstances, that day at 9:51 PM, the human being known as Sil Moore, had ceased to exist.