Swimming

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Headfirst into the mainstream with my lawsuit buzzing, that’s the only way to do it. The cold data can stop your heart. Bright red crosses dance around me, warding off viruses that can infect my setup and make it drain others.

The pile of reflexes and soft meat back in my room smiles as the brain inside its head sees the entire world in an agreed-upon colour code.

A filter of money, information, governments and public works light up the pinball machine on the floor of the e-net worldview. Flyers like me cluster moth-like around the bright, shapely nodes. We are superheroes but there are billions of us. We are gnats in clouds buying from the neon pyramids.

How little things change. Commerce uses creativity to drive innovation. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and what greater necessity is there above surviving? Therefore, one invents. One invents stories. One invents tales.

One lies.

I’m here to check up on how my lies are doing. People worry about powerful viruses without realizing that the most dangerous virus of all is the most prolific; the spoken word.

A simple paragraph of text gets past all of the defenses. It’s innocuous. I sprinkle them behind my glowing sylph of an avatar as I float down to the e-street floor. They follow in my wake like phosphorescent algae behind a boat in the hardworld. They are my dandelion seeds.

My body is dying back in the meatspace. I need a new one and I need backups. I need volunteers moved by pity and motivated by greed. I need the gullible and the feeling. I need bleeding hearts in healthy bodies. I want non-smoking liberals to travel hundreds of miles, knock on my door, and walk in to the trap.

I need fresh organs. I have no more in the basement.

I’ve spent months honing my snare. My perfect paragraph moves, promises, affects and drowns. It twists reason with emotion to give birth to plausible reasons. It manipulates logic by employing religion. In places, it tells outright untruths.

With luck, it will make you give your body to me.

Cross your fingers. Wish me luck.