Wisps

“Give me a toothpick and I'll knock that rock back!” A ambiguously gendered person was yelling as we stood outside smoking.

“Yeah! You guys know, you smoke what you want.” We quickly finished and went back inside.

It was that kind of night. It was that part of town. But this is the kind of thing that my friend was into. He was the hacker, or whatever they like to call themselves now. Computer expert. Computer terrorist. Whatever. I don't know. I'm the kind of guy that get's malware from trying to download Microsoft Office.

I'm muscle, and he's brains. In a world where muscle ain't what it used to be. He takes most of the take. I take what I can get. But he takes care of me. I keep him away from the crazies. And I keep him grounded when he goes off into the new world.

I remember when we thought that the new worlds were going to be actual worlds. Now they're all per-created. You can't imagine your own worlds now, they all belong to someone else pretty much.

Money to be made though, and that's the point.

We were meeting a guy that needed into something, for whatever reason. And my pal, was the guy to do the thing, that would make it better. I just wait beside him, protecting his body, unless something goes bad, then I plug myself in and pull him out. In there he's the muscles though, I've never been in. Don't want to.

No avatars, or projections, it's all just mind energy or some shit now. Too much energy wasted and making yourself look special. Now, you might as well be an astral projection in cyberspace. It makes it more dangerous though. Get the wrong clouds mixing together and you have psychotic break downs. I've met to many of his friends, not to be a little worried about every time he does a job.

The guy was late. Most of the guys usually were. When you get lost in the cloud, time doesn't seem to matter so much is what they say. I've never been in the cloud. I'm a body guy. I like my body. I know what I can do with it. Never been too much of a mind. Never had too much use for it.

I'm a big guy, a real big guy. Always have been, maybe after years of being the big guy, I've been afraid to use my mind. That's not true though, I just don't use it the way that people use there minds these days. I like learning about the world around me. The ones that we didn't make. The ones that we can't make.

Big Sugar was playing in the pub we were in, I hadn't heard Haven in Alberta in maybe over twenty five years? I must have been a kid.

I liked the place.

Until the guy showed up. With six of his own guys. I figured I could take all of em. But it wouldn't be pretty.

I stepped in right away, because you have to assert control right off the bat in these situations.

“Hey, what the fuck do you think that you're doing, bringing six guys to a simple fucking deal?”

And that's when I got hit in the back of the head. By my partner.

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I woke up, and couldn't see my hands. My feet. Nothing. There was grey around me. Like a haze. And when I tried walking forward, I couldn't. It was crazy though, it was as if I could see a perfect three hundred and sixty degrees around me. And that's when I knew what I was looking at. I was looking at the new world. I was looking at the cloud. A tactile, non tactile world was how it was best described to me now. Things were passing through me like kinetic electricity, but it was other peoples thoughts, telling me to get out of the way and to fuck off.

There was one thing I knew how to do in this hell hole. And that was check my messages.

“Hey budday! Sorry. Had to take your body for a spin, don't want you in mine, so I double crossed you. If your body lives through this...I'll give you a higher cut. No hard feeling. PEACE!”

I already knew what I was going to do to him if I got my body back. Wait, if they had taken my body, that meant that I was fully in the cloud. Not a visit, or temp download. I was going to become part of the cloud.

I'd heard stories of when the new world, the cloud was being made. And the guys that went fully in. They say they're the ghosts of the new world. The wisps of the cloud. Driven insane because they could only feel each others thoughts. Tactile but not tactile. Not only did they go crazy. But after they did, whenever anybody went fully in. They would hunt that brain down. And they would feel the thoughts of that mind until he was a wisp like them.

I never believed it. Because I had never really been in before. And now I was fully in, and the people telling me to fuck off was like a truck hitting me in my forehead. But I didn't have a forehead anymore.

Then I heard the first one. It was a haunting, It was a scream, and I couldn't tell if it was coming from me or it. I needed to learn how to move, how to get out of the way, but I didn't know! Or I was disabled for that part of the ability. By the time I even thought of that there was another scream. And another. And another.

The wisps formed around me, and slowly squeezed in around me, making me feel everything that I ever felt, every idea that I ever thought. Until I stopped screaming, or never stopped screaming.

And then there were only wisps in the cloud.