Chapter 1: empty heart homework session!

<hannah> ugh i havent had any time to do anything
<vittoria> Rly
<hannah> no im lying
<hannah> like i had plenty of time i wasted it all
<hannah> like like i have hw for like six classes please please wish me luck i dont wanna dieeeeeeeeeee
<vittoria> Wishing u the best dear dr ur gonna make it ily
<hannah> ty

It was really all her fault. That wasn't something she said a lot, so she hoped everyone else savoured her weakness while they still could. Hannah was laying back on her bed, laptop on white pillow before her, phone in hand, exercise books scattered all across the white frilled bedsheets, curtains drawn forward to keep out the oppressing heat, princess curtains drawn back to keep in reality, the oh-so-constant drone of the aircon providing background static.

Her work wasn’t hard. Actually, it was very easy. Watch and comprehend a few videos, read a few boring articles, and god forbid, the maths — the teacher for that was sick, so it’s not like they had even gone through the motions properly through class, sure, but still she’d just been everything off. Was she ever a hard worker?

<giovanna> Yeah like like like classes have been really bad for me lately I actually have to do work on the day it’s set or I’ll die
<ruby> you werent doing that anyway?
<giovanna> I mean why bother...
<ruby> yeah yeah true
<ruby> HANG IN THERE MEA LUX HANNA WE LOVE YOU
<giovanna> Yeah do that :)
<ruby> Gio
<giovanna> We love you :)
<ruby> gio

And a picture of a teddy bear holding a heart.

She should stop checking her phone so compulsively — how could it be anything other than terrible for her work ethic? She swiped through tabs across her touchscreen laptop to check her assignments. Watching the videos would require the least conscious effort and a definite investment of time, so she reached across her curtains not caring as she toppled dog after cat plush to snatch up her water bottle, and got to work on AP Politics.

Video one. Thirty eight minutes, fourteen seconds.  Friday, January 20th, 2040, the inauguration of president number fifty-two. 

<hannah> thank you everyone :)
<hannah> gio dont worry its chill
<eliana> I’m about to do a flight sim lol but Hannah take it easy. Everyone loves you, you know? We all do, at least, and more than us. Even if you get into trouble we’ll suffer it with you so it’s fine sksksk
<elly> Yeah stay strong I love you
<eleanor> yesss we love you i love you

This inauguration speech was important because it was a week after a freak heatwave. 

<hannah> ur all too kind…
<elly> Not kind enough
<elly> Given how happy you make everyone it’s like
<elly> Nobody nobody can suffer seeing you sad you don’t deserve it not at all

Four heart reacts in an instant.

Climate change was such a weird topic to her in 2067, when you had infinite clean energy. It wasn’t really gone, but it felt more like history than politics, especially in her insulated, air-conditioned little corner of America. Back in the distant year of 2040, it was a little more serious.

<nora> oh hannah do you need help i love you!

Okay, okay, maybe more than a little, but this was still the boring part of history with travail and lots of little changes and nothing really cool happening. Not like she liked the ‘cool’ part of history either. She lived happily in the present.

<hannah> thank you no darling its fine!

Elly’s message had gotten up to seven. By the end of the day, it’d probably have twenty-eight, with a few holdout besties on holiday or whatever.

The actual speech itself was so boring, compared to the dissonant heatstroke in so many cities a few days before, compared to what happened next. Well done on the detente with Russia, she guessed? And part of the point, her teacher had said, was that the actual speech contained little mention of rebuilding the EPA, of successfully establishing a global climate policy to break the current situation of a few green countries shifting emissions onto so many others, of lithium and uranium miners not up to the heat or up to the metal, that its main focus was foreign policy achieved by the previous administration of the same party, that its domestic policy was basically cultural, a promise to preserve the American way of life. Hannah sighed.

She gripped her pillow. She just knew when things would get interesting.

He said something. Then he said or the other. He spoke so quietly. How was she supposed to find meaning in this?

<vittoria> Theres so many dark things in this world
<vittoria> But you do
<vittoria> Remain our light in the eternal darkness

Oh, oh, it wasn’t just her apathy, was it. Where her teacher saw history, Hannah saw whispering, whispering, whispering, until the unlucky host unleashed whatever he was carrying. 

He split thought.

What potential had spilled out, about twenty-seven years ago?

That damned bird.

Hannah was lucky enough to be one of maybe ten thousand rank 7s out of ten billion people, ten thousand potential city-killers-cum-rulers out of ninety-nine hundred nine million potential safe espers. She was unlucky to be nowhere near the Kisaragi barrier, where your judgment became everyone’s justice, where your sun shined even for the worst of sinners, where you could rewrite every ideal and drive everyone to your rhythm through the clanging and the drum beats of every broken station or point of connection. Unlucky? Well, there was that creep from the Second City whose parents were her parents' friends, Carmen Brackash, who was pretty close to touching it if further from eternity away from breaking through it. When she was there she was so many nightmares, when she wasn’t she was…

She could be her in an instant. She could never be her, not in a million years, but if that thing broke eternity then there might be some problems. She was so glad for it, glad her cute self would remain intact in Indianapolis.

What Hannah wasn’t so glad for was being in a dead spot of talent exceptional enough to notice every part of an altered video and not exceptional enough to bear it, not at all. She picked up one of many fluffy white pillows and held fast to it.

The sun went out but it all was still visible through the grey. A silent screech. Since it’s being recorded, reality bifurcates, but she looked and remembered that if you were there reality, it picked up space without integers or their possibility. And God herself forbid you tried to construct real numbers. That was an impossibility beyond comprehension, not in the fake way where you’d go so stir-crazy that had been weighing on everyone’s imaginations for at least a hundred years but in the real way where it was so foreign that we down down down here couldn’t even attempt to describe it. You could imagine where the holy law of the excluded middle, Boolean logic, all statements were either true or they were false, either existed or didn’t, attempt to imagine one where the law of excluded middle [third option]ed or [forth option]ed or [seventeen root twoth option]ed, but what about one where the law of the excluded middle

Even a after grasping that , she retched blood and nothing. It literally couldn’t get worse, given that shard couldn’t be ordered or compared to anything or whatever. Hannah’s name still existed, and who was this chump, president for three years and you still couldn’t find his name? Hannah was so lucky, she thought. So lucky, also, that her family’s cleaners would take care of all the soiled sheets and dirty laundry, so she kept watching. Perfect grades meant a perfect image.

Since it’s being recorded, it split into analogue horror and digital terror. An attack against humanity’s esteem and grace, the first of three. The Condor Raid against America and Bylight or Баисвет against China through Russia, crippling the Janus of worldpower, Starfall against the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, breaking the cradle, defiling the grave.

You were being reviewed by, judged by
It judged, and on review it concluded

What could you recover from? Her knowledge of the living sciences became so precise. Her casual knowledge of the pox as something that something that she was glad was kept away from her behind the spiked fences became formal knowledge of orthopoxes becoming attached to GAGs (she didn’t have enough of them, she was on a diet, she kept austere from sugar even though she was super sweet) as they ran blankets across the continent to unveil the empty and perfectly prepared Garden of Eden until the Caribbean ran incarnadine, don’t you remember? Don’t you regret it? Can’t you reverse it?

Why are you discontent, after what you’ve claimed for freedom? Why do you hate your own country? It clothed and fed and birthed you. Maybe, just maybe, you didn’t believe you fought fight for freedom but when you looked at basic economics on a world scale you actually really fought honestly ardently loyally to keep prices down, amenities, driving, plastic, oil, and when you got back they chewed up all of your values. You swore an oath to your country, but you lost it on the world map or (this thing isn’t natural…) you lost it across infinity. What did you decide to do after? There are many answers, nobody will like all of them, so all of them (no matter how just, no matter graceful) revealed a crack, a crack that as Hannah saw had already been ripped over, but for our purposes we can rip over further and

What do you enjoy? It scried through all of your culture, American! It needed to wanted to had to understand you. It’s very judgmental, though, so it went straight for your death drive desire. In an instant it had written a million movie reviews for its own pleasure, it had evaluated all of the best streaming series, it had trailed all the airports and snatched up all of the popular books, left its dirty feathers and rendered takeoff impossible. It had so many opinions, you had so many opinions, you spoke freely and wanted to freely infringe on others. You ate and desired, you censored and spoke only ONE language in God’s Republic so when you described all of your machines and industry and entryway it was ‘ça respire, ça chauffe, ça mange. ça, ça’ scribbled over with static. There were still cracks here, but they were less obvious, but they could still be used.

Division, unification, what was your America, why did you enjoy it? You live and breath it, you see and hear it, your assembly of people standing and saluting the flag. It collapses into endless breathing meat on the earth. It splits into a forest reflected by the lake reflected by the sky [mind reflected by the river reflected by the ocean] [childhood reflected by the river reflected by the lake] and when you put two mirrors together you get undulation, upside-down downside-up upside-down FOREVER, and when you follow it up until your limbs stretch into snakes and the friction burns you and your body chars and you get so many fractionated moments, everyone’s daily activities and glances at happiness. If you followed this path so loyally you would stretch into infinity. Hannah’s cute self had to stay intact, stay in Indianapolis and Indianapolis. She fell home through the mirrors, through the dust.

No, no, you’re not understanding, it wasn’t an infohazard that asked you loaded questions of the type Hannah advised you absolutely shouldn’t bring up at a party, it was a myriad of them she perceived in this instant, little questions that every American with mass media would have thought about at least once but assembled into one and linked into impossibilities by the very first anomaly or extrasensory phenomenon such that if you recorded a few you’d feel a ringing dissonance and maybe a new few senses but if you were of such a talent that your mind began to chase them all down automatically, it’d suffer. The former was worse than the latter, but poor Hannah, poor poor Hannah.

Wait, no her mind was drifting, she hadn’t even gotten to the main event. No, no, you’re not understanding, it wasn’t just many infohazards, it was that damned bird which scorched the earth of every evil spirit, working in so many different ways from its birthplace in s/D.C./The Villages/ to Brighton Beach, where unwisely the National and Real Guard lanced it down, where then it began to build its zone and splutter out smoke that was gamma ultraviolet or delta ultrablue, incorrect contact and illegal touchdown, fulls and empties whose purpose no ape could understand if any recognisable one had ever existed, when then one corpse remained to build a nest, when then New York had to deal with its chicks, babes and feathers by looking with the right eye and firing to destroy all things with the left hand path until the rest of the country was done hunting the rest of the thing down, it having become impossible to fly across America and difficult to run a train anywhere and everywhere, nobody prepared for what was one of three.

Hannah already knew all of that, ehehe. Or something. Witnessing it for fakes just brought the memories back and made them more vivid.

She stopped the video, checked her phone. She had principles. She wanted to be loved, so she should only demand love from those willing to give it, which meant no psy-cheating, and usually that was easy but her careless idiot politics teacher, unawakened, definitely living mostly in the mundane world like she did, insisted that everyone watched the video, that her pretty much max rank meant she could bare anomalous media more easily which was true for most things so she believed it, believed that because she was better than everyone else that she could rush all her work and do perfectly, which was true in most cases, but here…

She closed her laptop with her left hand. Her phone pinged.

They judged, and during their review they concluded

<penance> I’m on your windowsill.

You are reading story empty ❤️ homework session at novel35.com

Of course something weird would happen. A video of a rank 13 meant rank 13 creepiness. She got up, white vest stained rust brown with blood, opened her window. Someone was laying across her windowsill, all too calm considering the dirt tracking across the wide bottoms of their black trousers, their white ankle socks or their pale ankles. A supermodel? No, she looked over their chest, wearing some dollarstore or something grey tracksuit and a worse grey t-shirt. But, still! She couldn’t help but admire their pretty auburn hair that glowed amber, so so amber as today’s harsh sun trickled across it, invigorated it. Her desires linked with something above her stature, like, like, she, uh, he, uhh, they could love you, do you understand that?. She shut that down.

“You’re calling yourself Penance? I don’t need to repent for anything, do I? I’m not one to ask for forgiveness.”

“I’m an atheist,” and they said that front of Hannah, like, really? “it’s just what I’m called. I’m just fond of Puritan names. It fits perfectly, doesn’t it? It’s just a coincidence, though.”

“Really.” She stared them down. Their face was nice but indiscriminate, if she found them in a crowd she would lose them.. 

“Everything ever is a coincidence, in my opinion.” They paused. “What were you watching? My head hurts.”

“There’s no way you could have seen it through the window. Like, I would have noticed you peeping through the window, for one, the blinds were shut, for two, how did you even get here?”

“With [Judgment], I can see hidden things clearly. With the [Grey], I can go through any empty space.”

“If your power is judgment, what’s your problem with the awful bird?”

“I’m nothing like the… Condor Raid! That thing made my head go—”

“How do you know what it’s—” and she caught her words as she remembered that the Condor Raid’s name was bestowed by not any specific human,  “okay, so what do I need to be judged for?”

“The [Lady] says it’s because of the illicit control you take over others, but personally I think your wealth is filthy.”

“I see. I’m not going to listen. Do you want to jump, or should I push you?” This sounded like a threat, but she didn’t mean it that way. If they could get onto her windowsill without falling off, they would probably be fine.

“I’m not going to budge.”

Hannah considered actually pushing them, but she stared blankly at them instead.

“Okay, well, I don’t do anything illicitly. I just take the like people have for me and I increase it. I like being liked, people like liking people, they like liking others back, if it scares people they can see it coming from a mile away. It’s not taking away people’s free will anymore than the law or gravity does.”

“So that’s how you think of it.”

“Is there some other way I’m supposed to think about it?”

“You override others’ light.”

“I don’t. I draw it out.”

“You steal it away and make it yours.”

“It’s still there. Hasn’t anyone told you you can’t win someone over via debate?”

“I told the [Lady] that, actually. She’s pretty lazy, though. She doesn’t think anything through.”

“Perhaps you should change mistresses, then.”

“No!”

“Why not? I’m so radiant, even when I’m covered in my own filth.”

“I would never serve anyone rich enough to afford air-conditioning.”

“But, like, what’s wrong with being able to afford air-conditioning. And, if you’re here you could at least help me not fail maths…”

“I couldn’t, actually. I’d accelerate your failure. But failing classes doesn’t actually matter. How old even are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Okay, seventeen. I’m nineteen, I failed maths, I’m basically fine now.”

“You’re like a window to window preacher, you’re definitely not fine! You won’t even explain your doctrine simply and clearly.”

“I don’t have a doctrine.”

“Mhm?”

“I mean, not like a codified one. I have a few simple maxims, but they’re secret. It’s just…”

“Well?”

“One day, your light will blot out all others and scorch the Earth. If it’s not while you bear it, it’s when someone takes it from you for being thoughtless, inconsiderate, impatient, whatever.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“No. I’m going to treat this like a fever dream.”

She didn’t even tell her friends about it, not, not yet. She closed the blinds and her princess curtains and threw herself back into her bloodied bed. Missing a bunch of homework would be fine. She just had to believe her clique. Everyone loved her. She was everyone’s light. Dazed from watching the birth or rebirth of anomalies, and from all the heat, she fell back to sleep.