Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Sparktopia.
It means ‘spark place’. I looked it up. It’s a made-up word, but the suffix –topia comes from the root tópos, which means place. One thing about Delta City that’s nice is the infonet. Tau City had a good one as well, but oddly enough, Delta’s net is comparatively unregulated. I did a lot of searches to test the boundaries and never once did it refuse to give me an answer or give me fucked-up results that made no sense.
So I found that word tópos, which I had never heard of, but the entry explaining it was… well, odd. Because it comes from a language called ‘Greek’. And I have never heard of this language called ‘Greek’.
Which led to more searches and what Delta’s infonet spit out at me was nothing short of confusing. Because it was an entire history that I had never been told about.
And I’m not saying I’m the world’s most educated man or anythin’ like that, but I am very fuckin’ educated. My entire childhood was spent in Delta’s home for boys and it was a lot of schoolin’. A lot of history, a lot of math, a lot of everythin’. And it didn’t stop when I was sent to the Sweep. There were years of school after that and almost all of it was history and culture.
So how didn’t I know that the cities along the train line are named after the Greek alphabet? Delta is a letter. And so is Tau. So where the hell has this Greek language been hidin’ that I haven’t heard of it? It kinda blew my mind.
Anyway, that’s not even the important part.
The important part is that the tower and words on my ceilin’ aren’t really here in this realm. It’s a glimpse into somewhere else. And I can’t tell if this is just due to my augments comin’ fully online again, or because of the synergistic bond between Clara and me, or because this sparktopia thing is following me somehow.
I can’t tell. I just can’t tell.
If that’s where it ended, I’d probably let it go. But it seems to just be gettin’ started because I can see all kinds of other places now. I don’t need Clara or Anneeta to do this. These places, they’re just… everywhere.
Even here, in this bedroom.
Overlays are controlled by subtle eye movements. Sometimes, very elaborate commands need a head gesture or even a hand gesture—but combination moves like that are mostly reserved for battle.
When you’re just lookin’ at somethin’, ya only use your eyes. A twitch here, a slide there, a blink or two, and it gets the job done.
Crossing my eyes in a certain way and focusing on a particular depth of field is what reveals the other side of the veil. Or veils, as it is. Because there are a lot of them.
So I do that and watch from the bed as people move about the room in another dimension. It’s a husband and wife this time, but they’re not the only ones. Or, I should say, that’s not the only place that exists side by side in this space I call the bedroom.
There are a lot of worlds out there. And while not all of them are like this one with a tower in this exact space that goes up this high, there are dozens—maybe even hundreds or thousands that are exactly like this one with just different people substituted for Clara and me.
Sometimes birds will fly by. Just fuckin’ flap their cyan-blue outlined wings and fly on by, not even six feet away from me. So there’s no tower with a penthouse apartment in that place.
When I go outside, it’s chaos if I let the veil bleed happen. All these other worlds start competin’ for my attention. It’s too much if I don’t filter it, and filtering it takes more energy than I care to expend, so mostly I just turn it off. Which is surprisingly easy to do because while I was messin’ with the ocular control panel, I found a fuckin’ button for it in a hidden screen called—wait for it—Sparktopia.
It’s a light blue tab labeled ‘extend’ when the worlds aren’t there, which then switches to white and says ‘reduce’ when they are.
A button that opens dimensional screens that I can use to interact.
And by interact, I mean steal spark. Because that’s all I’ve used it for, if ya don’t count spyin’ on people.
What a crazy fuckin’ world.
Stealin’ spark is how I saved Clara and Anneeta on the train ride to Delta City. I didn’t press the button, obviously. At that time, the augments weren’t working like they are now. But the moment we came up from the underground, the moment we crossed into the Alphas, the spark was pervasive enough to activate the ability to see through veils, I guess.