Page 69 of Tapeworld Induction

Remnant

Dylan

Light rays filtered through the window, hitting her face. It was getting brighter earlier now, waking her up far before she’d like to.

On the floor rested the discarded top of her pyjamas, which Dylan had disburdened herself of sometime during the night due to the mounting heat.

Her desk was tidier these days. Fewer sticky notes. Dylan knew the reason, and it wasn’t because she was tackling all of her plans more diligently. If anything, it was the opposite. She had stopped working as hard as before. On herself, on her goals. Hence, less notes. The roll of tape lay to the side on the desk, good enough for one more stride.

Dylan got up in one motion, took an oversized tee from the wardrobe and did her morning’s ablutions in the bathroom.

She thought of texting him while she brushed her teeth. But at two minutes to eight in the morning, Isaak was bound to still be asleep. They both got back home so late after Sacha’s, and he didn’t have a job that forced him to wake up early.

In the shower she made plans, dreamed wildly. Of Isaak, of the Tapeworld, of kicking Astrid’s ass for how she treated him. But he was going to quit working for her soon. She wouldn’t be able to hurt him anymore. Would she?

Dylan recognised a few faces inside the monorail carriage. Short sleeves and skirts in the hot weather. She somehow managed to land a seat for this commute. A familiar face, an anonymous commuter, was forced to stand near the door, the carriage almost overflowing with people. The corners of his mouth curved down and the scowl spread across his face. Good. You don’t deserve a seat with that attitude. She was feeling on edge.

A couple of hours after midday, after a string of back-to-back calls with absolute bellend meat-eaters, her boss having raised the minimum daily quota of contacts, she finally took her lunch break. It was the only time she had during the day to scroll her phone. She held it with one hand while eating a fakon sandwich. She nearly dropped it when she saw a message from Isaak.

@isaak: I stopped working for Astrid. I want to see you.

She didn’t even know how she felt right now. Happy, yes. Elated, hell yes. Anxious? Abso-fucking-lutely. Was he even aware of what he did to her? Goddess…

@dylan: me too. tapeworld 2nite?

The “2” was accidental but by the time she realised, she’d already pressed send. Oops.

She ran her fingers through her hair, the roots starting to show its natural jet-black colour, but the blue-on-blonde dye job still looked half-decent. She scrolled the StreetSocial in a mechanical routine. The experience usually acted like a sedative after a shitty morning at the Office for Veganism, and the rest of the afternoon wasn’t gonna be any better. She was quite happy to let her mind go numb.

There was self-improvement advice, rote discourse on left vs right-wing policies, and a few bits of misinfo upvoted mostly by people pointing out their fallacies rather than believing in them. But pretty quickly, Dylan gasped and stopped scrolling, her breathing coming quicker.

An anonymous post praising Eltarc Romly’s fascist ideals, and claiming he was still alive, had gone viral. Her stomach twinged. Right-wing propaganda had been squished under the Green Party. It had been years since she’d seen any mention of Eltarc and his Second Revivalists. Seeing this out in the wild, with barely any censorship… It was a threat. His ideas being spread might incite people, especially the young, who didn’t witness the Dark Year, to mess with the equilibrium of the Kingdom. Of the world, even. And if Eltarc was still alive…

She scrolled past it forcefully, as if pushing it under the top of the phone’s screen would wipe it from existence. If only.

She scowled and scrolled until something else caught her attention. It looked strange – the font was different from the rest of the posts on StreetSocial, and it didn’t have many likes or reStreets. She tapped it.

GET PAID FOR SLEEPING.

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCHERS NEED YOU. GET THE LATEST IN TECH!

SLIP ON THE SLEEPER!

An ad for volunteers to wear a sleeping aid, and send their sleep data back to the researchers.

There was a photo of the device. She zoomed in. It looked like a beefed-up sleeping mask, grey with plastic segments on the sides of the head, chunky enough to hold a phone’s worth of microchips and sensors.

“Fuck privacy, right?” she said between her teeth. The pushback against surveillance tech after the Dark Year made a lot of changes back then. But thirty years on, those safeguards were now unstable at best, or ignored and ready to be deleted at worst, the Tech Kings publicly going back to their old ways.

A message notification popped up, causing a surge of adrenaline to pulse through her body.

Isaak!

@isaak: see you there.

Her heart grew a couple of sizes. She was gonna see him tonight. And now the rest of her day was going to be even harder to get through…

After dinner that night, she put her phone away, ripped the last piece of tape from her shiny gold roll, and lay on her bed.