Zira was first acquainted with the Veil in the toilet of some no-credit drinkery in midtown Everria. If you didn’t have money, you paid for your purchases with a short dialogue in the training room. Take a drink, leave a tale!  As she was drawn into numbing blackness, those words flashed steadily in Zira’s mind—not the sounds or shape of them, but their meaning—as the only tether to her preferred reality.

She knew there were things she was not supposed to say. Tales that were to remain sealed in the crypt of her memory indefinitely. She had revoked her privilege to speak freely when she committed herself to exile. She could not rely on the rebellious frenzy of Everrian life to mask her presence forever. If she was not careful, the reactive pattern of an outsider would become evident in her every breath. Worse, an outsider of false appearances. A misspeak might bring the prison doors of Unity slamming down upon her.

Yet, the Veil was calling upon her, wordlessly, to spill herself into the void. 

“Reveal,” it seemed to say. “Say, say, say…”

The slogan flashed its most fully. For a moment Zira could see herself again, hunched open-mouthed over the sink, her eyes wide-open and glossed black. 

“Howley’s,” she exclaimed, remembering the name of the drinkery. She was utterly giddy with lucidity. And she was equally and suddenly morose when everything fell into dissociated darkness again.

The words again. This time they were meaningless, detached from place and time. Arranged like that, they had the cold insinuation of inarguable command.

take, take, take… leave, leave, leave…

“Drink what?” Zira pleaded. There was no answer.

A matrix of glossy black cubes spans a grassy expanse of Everria Centre Park. It’s a memorial to the victims of Otherworlds’s virtuality outage: The Blinkout; Ninety-Nine; The Great Sleep; or whatever you call it in your place and time. I don’t call it anything. Twenty million instantaneous deaths and many thousands of chronic neural injuries… how can anyone sum up such a tragedy with a simple nickname?

The designers of this place must have had similar concerns. Despite its dominance of such a valuable chunk of real estate, the memorial resists being a spectacle. It’s situated on the eastern side of the park, far away and out of sight of the old Otherworlds headquarters in the west. There’s an address, 000 Centre E, but no official name. Plain, city-standard signage simply indicates the way toward a “museum”. And the victims’ names—most too high up on the twenty-foot cubes to read—shuffle randomly at every hour. If you ever manage to find your lost loved one here, there’s no point in leaving flowers.

Still, I read all the names I can see as I walk the aisles. I enjoy the feeling of the syllables dancing silently on my lips. One more chance at legacy for these strangers, if only in my short-term memory.

…DANA KORMAN, MANUEL ZACARI, CAMILLA BUCHANON…

I think I’ve seen that last one already.

From higher up on the slope, on my way out, I watch the visitors zip and wander through the rows. We all look so insignificant here, overshadowed and outshone by the dead. 

I wonder… How many trees did they have to shred to make room this hideous fucking labyrinth? 

I have learned to discern Issho even before the black veils drop over their eyes. They walk with an unusually steady gait; even the drunk ones stumble in harmony. Their social groupings are endlessly fluid; a lone person will suddenly be flanked by apparent strangers, share a quick conversation and a hug, then drift off into the crowd again, later mingling with some others. They talk in almost imperceptibly low voices, but are very expressive with touch - always hands interlocked or arms around torsos, shifting and feeling.