The first page.
The skin around my fingernails cracks and flakes, and I cannot keep myself from yanking flesh. I will not stop, not as I ooze crimson, not at the sharp prick of pain. I am restless, unable to keep still, incapable of controlling my obsessive picking.
She is in my head, pacing back and forth, plotting desolation.
“It will fall,” she whispers inside my ear. “It will fall, and you will rise.”
I cannot stay here. This empty room is too crowded. Brilliance is madness, and madness follows me. It slinks after me as I descend in a stairwell that smells of burnt plastic and cigarettes. I run from a version of myself I cannot know, cannot keep.
The humidity engulfs me as I slip outside, air so thick I think I could swim down this dark street, my pale body gliding above pavement, my long hair a floating cloud around my head.
“I’ve been waiting all night for you to come out,” a raspy voice echoes in the alleyway beside me as the door to my building slams shut and locks. A fat man emerges from the shadows of a dumpster with dirt on his nose and holes in his jeans. “I saw you in your window, and I’ve been waiting.” He licks his lips and looks me over.
His vile stares and heinous thoughts do not frighten me. I remain motionless as he approaches me, and idly scan the area. Potential consequences glimmer everywhere I look. They leap out at me, exploiting mathematics to trigger outcomes. I note the downspout and crumbling gutter system, and I acknowledge the knife sticking from the man’s coat pocket. Everything is a pattern, a chain of events, cause and effect.
“Ain’t no fun if you don’t run, my sweet.”
My jaw extends defiantly and I raise a thin eyebrow, challenging him to take a step further. When he does, I smash my fist into the building’s rusting downspout. The vibrations from the little force I exert crawl up the aluminum and shake the gutters at the top. A stretch comes loose and crashes down to the ground. The man takes a startled step backward to get out of the way, and the knife falls from his coat, just as I knew it would.
By the time he laughs at the gutter missing his body and sluggishly returns his menacing gaze toward his pending victim, I am already behind him, skimming his own knife across his throat. It is a natural motion, an act I have never done but was born to do.
“People like you taint my world,” I say into his ear.
He tries to respond, but his voice is gone. He can only gurgle.
I roll my eyes and allow his body and the knife to drop to the filth at my feet. “You would not have a place in the new reality, anyway,” I add as I step over him. “Speculus Pointe is in for a revision. I just did us both a favor.”
I leave him to bleed out and die alone amongst the rats and puddles of piss without the faintest hint of a conscience within my body.
Tar replaces my bone marrow. I leave a piece of my humanity in this alleyway; it rips from me and shrivels to dust. My mind detaches from emotion and saturates in my mission. My spine frosts, and darkness swallows my soul. I float, a flaming phantom immune to gravity and human restrictions.
Reality seems to crumble around me, delicate disaster falling into place. It chips and tumbles and comes to dust as I stand rigid and tall amidst the rubble. Everything I used to be flakes away. Pieces of myself drift with the wind. The broken fragments of my past scatter around me and I will never piece them together, never again glance at an intact picture of what should not have been.
My mad brilliance swells as plans to shift the universe beneath the disguise of technological and medical advancement paint my organs. Reality will shatter at my fingertips as the digital world prospers, and there will never again be another like me.
Sick, insane, unwanted no more.
I will be all that remains.
Only a shard of society will stand helplessly in the filthy debris of my aftershock.