Of Cells and Code, Part I.

[Cilamene]

"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."
--Edgar Allan Poe

Ellen slipped out of consciousness as soon as she dropped to her pillow. Her head pounded in time with a rhythm she couldn't hear. She felt it sweep her away from her waking thoughts and toss her into a great sea of minds and hearts, one that threatened to drown her for its immense size.

As she was jostled by the deluge that seemed to come from all sides, she wondered idly whether this was what it was like to be a bit of information in a world where data flowed everywhere and anywhere, was carelessly tossed aside, and finally reached its destination after a long journey--if it were lucky.

The sea suddenly submerged her consciousness, and she gasped for air amidst the crying and laughter and calm voices that oozed from the souls around her. The stream pushed her down and down, until she surfaced again...

...and she was on the observation deck of the Morning Star space station. She looked through foreign eyes at a little girl and a little boy who stood a bit apart from each other, both staring solemnly out at the tattered but beautiful planet beneath them. The boy turned to his sister and said seriously, "It has potential. Do you think we'll like living there?" The little girl smiled and bobbed her head...

...and then she was at the Reet's after that awful job rejection, after that terrible man offered her the job if she'd show a little more leg, or give more "custom internship services," as he'd put it (and he wasn't even young and hot, which might have made the offer less apalling to envision). There was Kat arguing as always with Nicola, winking at passing friends and strangers, trying to buy Nicola another drink so he would shut up and concede her point. And there was--lord, she couldn't even remember the angel's name--sitting at the next table, smiling at her whenever their eyes met. "If you want to get the good ones, you've gotta stop sitting at barstools and throw yourselves at them," Kat might have whispered nonchalantly in her ear on her way to the dance floor. "The ways of the world, darling..."

...and then she was sitting in that familiar corner in the tiny Tir room she rented while studying at the School of Nanotechnology. The corner was the perfect size for a person to curl up, back against the wall, knees against the desk drawers, head right under the place where the gridfeed screen fit into the desktop. Tal was dead. Gone. He was never going to walk her and Kat home from Kat's latest scummy dance club discovery, never going to accidentally set her notes on fire, never going to sneak into her place to bum a wine cooler because he was out of beer. No reclaim, no rez sickness, no insurance--his body would never be reconstructed by nanobots again--may his pitiful soul rest in peace. She was wedged in that goddamn corner again, in the place that reminded her stiflingly of endings, of partings, of walking away from everything that one had ever known and had ever wanted...

...and she was standing in a new-but-old apartment in Old Athens, looking blankly around at its bare walls and dim interior. "How do you like it?" Allen had just asked, and now he stood waiting for her response with the eagerness of a child (though he was three minutes older than she was). The place was dreadful; it had the stench of the unfinished, of people whose handholds on life are ripped away by circumstance, of those unlucky souls who are taken away screaming to their respective proper fates. Just standing there gave her the sensation of being "the non," the trespasser who didn't belong. By standing there, critiquing the vacant and for-sale apartment with her brother, she was intruding into the memory left behind by the place's old occupant. How could Al not see this? For a moment she had trouble breathing. Then the sensation faded and she smiled. "It's lovely..."

She felt the stream change course and falter, then release her back into the open sea, where her mind gasped for breath at the surface. She woke up in her apartment--her real apartment, in West Athen--alone and coughing a faint spattering of blood.

[Flameforge]

That's awesome, Cila.
And intriguing...!