In their adult form, stealth butterflies possess a single black wing that never flutters, and a long, spiral tongue tipped with a microphone. Rather than indulging in the succulence hidden within flowers, they prefer the auditory nectars of the human voice. They travel from window to window in swarms, pressing their tessellated bellies against any surface that will resonate.
As caterpillars, they form cocoons inside telephone wires, warmed by the electricity of unfamiliar voices. It is here that they learn which patterns of speech provide them with the most nourishment. They thrive on infidelity, wiggle with delight at perversion, and grow plump on profanity. Once fully developed, they can taste a single drop of sin in a jar filled with bass.
It is illegal for lepidopterists to own the corpses of stealth butterflies; their tiny, triangular bodies are filled with secrets much too valuable to be pressed between panes of glass. When one is found, it's best just to leave it be; someone authorized will be along shortly to collect its remains.
Funeral procedures for stealth butterflies are classified, but are said to involve powerful magnets.
The human mind takes up fifteen terabytes of space on average, and accommodating the soul requires for an additional twelve to be available. When compressed into a single unit, however, the complete, disembodied self can be expressed as a mere eighteen terabytes: smaller than the sum of its parts, yet no longer separable into individual segments. This conversion of being, popularly known as the Styx Process, can be performed in under twenty-four hours, as long as the deceased’s tombstone features a sufficiently efficient central processor.
The android awoke with the sort of headache that only androids ever come to know: that anvil-strike reverberation that resounds throughout an orange-hot skull. It brought with it a sense of being molten, a tension between the factory that came before and the scrapyard yet to come. He knew that he’d felt such a thing before, though he couldn’t remember when. He lamented the fact that there were no painkillers available for his kind.
This far out in the wilderness, the gods could no longer hear her prayers; even if they could, the roaming charges would be immense. She’d thought about bringing a radio with her and relaying her messages back to someone who could pray on her behalf, but getting away from all that noise was one of the main reasons why she left to begin with. She had grown tired of her altar pestering her to download premium gods, as well as of the dull, smokeless scent of autocandles.
“GAME OVER.” Those eight capital letters scrolled across her field of vision in alarm-clock red, confirming her death in another world. Riley collapsed backwards onto the bed behind her, exasperated and soaked in sweat, hands still curled in futility around a non-existent sword. She’d been in-game for eight hours straight, not even stopping for food or water, yet all her efforts had all gone to waste. Somewhere, a pack of wolves was reducing her other self to a pile of crimson polygons, and there was nothing that she could do to stop them.
My father was a hologram, yet my mother was fully human; she didn’t have a virtual bone in her body. I am unclear of the process by which I was made flesh. All I know is that at some point after he left, I emerged from one of her eyes as a ray of living crimson.
The sea rolls back to reveal that the tides have not entirely receded; thick cubes of saltwater remain in place, with independent waves traveling along their sixfold faces. They look like aquariums that forgot to put on their glass in the morning. Fish that jump out through one surface are dragged downward by the gravity of another, trapping them inside indefinitely.
She’s going to wear all six of her faces tonight, and needs something that’ll pull them together. The cloud that emerges from her little black bottle isn’t exactly a vapor. Thousands of tiny knots in space-time erupt from its nozzle, clinging to her skin and bending the light around her wrists. No physical matter is involved in the formula; it’s all a trick of subjective geometry. At this point it is nothing more than the empty fragrance of a hypercube: a hollow presence which the nostrils can experience, yet cannot understand.
She finds it waiting for her in a south side alleyway near the potion factory, digging its electric tendrils into the remains of an abandoned strip mall. In another city they might have called it graffiti, but the tags found elsewhere don’t squirm when touched with bare hands. Not many people can get their hands on aerosol data, let alone twist it into something algorithmic with their wrists.
At first glance, the old Space Invaders cabinet looks as though it has eaten its last quarter. Though it remains plugged into the wall, its monitor has gone black; however, the color is just a few shades too dark to fool an expert. The thief presses his right palm against the screen’s center, then taps its corners with a metal pick in his left hand, checking for resonance. He feels the signature hum, revealing that the machine is in fact still alive. Perhaps this arcade isn’t as abandoned as it seems.
Android bodies also decompose upon death, leaving behind transparent bones. Although most of their kind choose to live on as holograms afterward, some prefer the streamlined feeling of simply being a skeleton, or even just a skull. While it is not difficult for a human to stop thinking, it is impossible for an android to do so until their batteries are removed by the coroner. As such, the peace this offers them is welcome.
The pacmancer gazes into the arcade cabinet’s screen and sees his own death; someday, it will be hollowed of its digital components and repurposed as his sarcophagus. He watches the little phosphene phantoms dart about and sees something familiar in their wandering eyes. Perhaps he even knew them while they were alive. The shared border between the spiritual and virtual realms is thinner than either possess with the physical. That’s what makes the ritual work.
In the Violet City, a creation myth is told that involves not just the beginning of time, but also its end. The world begins as worlds often do, with the gods overthrowing the titans who built it and establishing their dominion over man and nature alike. The story abruptly jumps forward billions of years, however, to the inevitable feud between them that destroys all things. It is at this point that we encounter the remix goddess, who rises out of the ocean of white noise that their war left behind.
The first thing that you notice as you enter the club is the presence of hundreds of fireflies with blacklight tails, all signaling in synchronicity with a source of bass somewhere deep below. The bouncer stares at you expectantly while holding a jar full of transparent fluid. Mimicking those ahead of you in line, you reach through your own chest and withdraw your heart.
In their adult form, stealth butterflies possess a single black wing that never flutters, and a long, spiral tongue tipped with a microphone. Rather than indulging in the succulence hidden within flowers, they prefer the auditory nectars of the human voice. They travel from window to window in swarms, pressing their tessellated bellies against any surface that will resonate.