Read Online Honey to Soothe the Itch by Kris Austen Radcliffe - Free Book Online
Authors: Kris Austen Radcliffe
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The world used to be a beautiful place.
It’s all gone. It changed in one split second five months, eighteen days, four hours, and twenty-five minutes ago. Just like that. And before I die—before the cancer riddling my body and my bones finishes metastasizing and the pain becomes too much—I’m going to bring it all back.
Because I can.
Birds used to sing. Butterflies fluttered. Chai lattes presented themselves for consumption with both the correct flare of cinnamon and the perfect balance of bitter and sweet. I played hard and worked even harder, riding a hundred miles a week on my state-of-the-art graphite mountain bike in the wind, rain, or fog, until my muscles hummed and my blood pumped the right endorphins into my brain. Then I’d go back to my twelve hour days of building the invisible infrastructure of the modern world.
I miss it. We used to have air with smells. You don’t notice it until it’s gone—the faint hints of the apple trees down the street. The neighbor’s roses. The differences between old cars and new. Wind carries all sorts of scents. Sometimes, if you’d just sit there and breathe, you’d get moments of the Rockies floating down, and you’d smell the West. Dust, maybe a wildfire. Bears. Snowcapped mountains.
The world used to give us history with every action we took. Our noses filled with land and industry. O ur eyes with reds too garish to be real, and greens too bright to not . I remember touching flower petals and feeling silk under the pads of my fingers. At the time, it just seemed the thing to do. Now, it’s the one memory I cherish above all the others.
I’m going to take away the homogenization and give the world back its life. The plants are only one shade of green now— that vivid, easily printable color of fully saturated grass. The flowers are exactly blue, or exactly red. Everything moves with ease. The thunderstorms sound hollow. Out in the flat gray buildings and the straight lines of the asphalt roads and the manicured trees, it’s all fake.
Even the zombies all wear the same clothes.
I ’m clad in the few garments we can scrounge up. The rest of my enclave, the same. Finding food that doesn’t taste like white kindergarten paste is near impossible.
But I’m going to fix it. Out there, somewhere, is one special zombie. One who is the key to cracking open what’s left and spreading the world’s candy center over its cinder crust, and I’m going to find that zombie. I’m one of the implanted. I’m a walking, talking generator, and I’m still able to work the invisible technology of the world.
But now, my skin crawls and no one will touch me. My body disintegrates because of the tech inside me. Five months ago it marked me as one of the privileged—one of the geeky ultra-rich who could afford the toys and the implants and the medical support necessary to maintain it.
We weren’t useless. We designed. We programmed and refined and built. The world stood rapt at the beauty we created and I ran triathlons and posed for magazine covers because I was gorgeous, rich, and special.
The implants made it possible—instant connection, total bandwidth. We collaborated and the paparazzi snapped our photos as we literally glimmered our way through life and restaurants and airport security. We made the invisible technology permeating human space possible. It collects data, analyzes streams, optimizes potentials. We did what we set out to do: made an efficient biosphere.
One afternoon, as a stunt, I downshifted my temporal lobe and jacked one of the Mars rovers. Me became more than me—I gained more body. What I breathed, what I saw, it all stayed the same, except I tasted more, saw more. Under my wheels, Mars felt smaller, weaker. In my cameras, the horizon too close. The world gawked as I tasted the old and expired chemistry of another planet and used my
It’s all gone. It changed in one split second five months, eighteen days, four hours, and twenty-five minutes ago. Just like that. And before I die—before the cancer riddling my body and my bones finishes metastasizing and the pain becomes too much—I’m going to bring it all back.
Because I can.
Birds used to sing. Butterflies fluttered. Chai lattes presented themselves for consumption with both the correct flare of cinnamon and the perfect balance of bitter and sweet. I played hard and worked even harder, riding a hundred miles a week on my state-of-the-art graphite mountain bike in the wind, rain, or fog, until my muscles hummed and my blood pumped the right endorphins into my brain. Then I’d go back to my twelve hour days of building the invisible infrastructure of the modern world.
I miss it. We used to have air with smells. You don’t notice it until it’s gone—the faint hints of the apple trees down the street. The neighbor’s roses. The differences between old cars and new. Wind carries all sorts of scents. Sometimes, if you’d just sit there and breathe, you’d get moments of the Rockies floating down, and you’d smell the West. Dust, maybe a wildfire. Bears. Snowcapped mountains.
The world used to give us history with every action we took. Our noses filled with land and industry. O ur eyes with reds too garish to be real, and greens too bright to not . I remember touching flower petals and feeling silk under the pads of my fingers. At the time, it just seemed the thing to do. Now, it’s the one memory I cherish above all the others.
I’m going to take away the homogenization and give the world back its life. The plants are only one shade of green now— that vivid, easily printable color of fully saturated grass. The flowers are exactly blue, or exactly red. Everything moves with ease. The thunderstorms sound hollow. Out in the flat gray buildings and the straight lines of the asphalt roads and the manicured trees, it’s all fake.
Even the zombies all wear the same clothes.
I ’m clad in the few garments we can scrounge up. The rest of my enclave, the same. Finding food that doesn’t taste like white kindergarten paste is near impossible.
But I’m going to fix it. Out there, somewhere, is one special zombie. One who is the key to cracking open what’s left and spreading the world’s candy center over its cinder crust, and I’m going to find that zombie. I’m one of the implanted. I’m a walking, talking generator, and I’m still able to work the invisible technology of the world.
But now, my skin crawls and no one will touch me. My body disintegrates because of the tech inside me. Five months ago it marked me as one of the privileged—one of the geeky ultra-rich who could afford the toys and the implants and the medical support necessary to maintain it.
We weren’t useless. We designed. We programmed and refined and built. The world stood rapt at the beauty we created and I ran triathlons and posed for magazine covers because I was gorgeous, rich, and special.
The implants made it possible—instant connection, total bandwidth. We collaborated and the paparazzi snapped our photos as we literally glimmered our way through life and restaurants and airport security. We made the invisible technology permeating human space possible. It collects data, analyzes streams, optimizes potentials. We did what we set out to do: made an efficient biosphere.
One afternoon, as a stunt, I downshifted my temporal lobe and jacked one of the Mars rovers. Me became more than me—I gained more body. What I breathed, what I saw, it all stayed the same, except I tasted more, saw more. Under my wheels, Mars felt smaller, weaker. In my cameras, the horizon too close. The world gawked as I tasted the old and expired chemistry of another planet and used my
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