Page 72 of Light Leech

I smirked. I couldn’t argue with that.

“Maybe after more time together we can decide if the boyfriend thing is more than an act.”

Chapter twelve

The Race

Istood silent while Ralia spoke with yet another group of pompous self-proclaimed geniuses who would rather not disclose how they got into the neurocore. The more hardened they became by Ralia’s “ lack of business discretion“, the more eccentric she grew, touching and prodding them verbally until they broke.

“You know, I actually program fixes,” she said. It was a lie as far as I knew. It was hard to tell what was and wasn’t true with her. “Me and my gals would go hard, zeggin’ ourselves up with any form of physical intoxicant until they couldn’t give me the buzz I craved, so I figured, why not step it up a notch? Same thing happened with fixes, but I could make my own there where I couldn’t with drugs, you plug? So I made the Galactitab, which–”

“I know what it does,” the man across from her said. His voice sounded like he was at the point of breaking into rage. “I just told you those ruined my job, hence the need for—“

She talked over him as if he had never spoken. “Like I was saying, the tabs make you feel like you’re communicating with aliens, which we all know don’t exist because the Earth is flat. They make you feel like you’re a genius because you’re the only human capable of intergalactic communication when the product says that all Galactitabs do is make you feel like you’re flying through space.”

“And that lie ruined my life. My wife left me, took the kids–”

“Babe, she left you because you have a ruler up your ass trying to measure your intelligence when we all know it’s an act.”

“We?”

“You know, I created them just to ruin your life, knowing you would deny me a decent conversation here.”

“The zeg are you talking about?”

She leaned in. “I’m saying that there are more things to life than being a self-proclaimed genius. Maybe if your head wasn’t in your neurospace all day your wife wouldn’t have left you.”

She kissed him on the cheek, violet light radiated out from where her lips connected.

He swung his arm wide for a slap, but she ducked away just in time for the slap to connect with one of his companions, who held his chin so high it was almost at a forty-five degree angle.

Rather than react to the slap as a typical human would, the man’s image seized, blurring for a second as if he was glitching.

Ralia laughed and pulled me away as a fight broke out among the group.

“Can you hurt other people in here?” I asked.

“Oh, no reprimand for causing problems this time?”

I smirked. “He deserves it.”

“They all do, babe. Most of these pompous shacs couldn’t care less about actual intelligence. They want the badge of knowledge like every other idiot who thinks they know what the world is actually like. They’d all piss themselves if they knew but a fraction of what you do.”

“Still, I’m not as good as they are at manipulating the system to appear smart. I don’t have the net smarts like you.”

“Which is why I’m here to help. They act all bold and ready, but they have no zegging idea what is coming.”

“Do you?”

“Nope, which makes this fair.”

I shrugged. “I guess that’s fine.”

“What did you ask again? Oh yeah, pain. Well, it’s not the same as it is outside. That shac isn’t going to feel his cheek throb from a skin on skin slap.”

“I figured that after seeing his image flip out.”

“Exactly. Pain in here is more cognitive. Your body freaks out because the mind that is here thinks it should feel pain, but it doesn’t. It’s an attack on the conscience, like a panic attack or guilt turned to the max. Or kind like if you see something that you know can’t exist, yet your vision argues otherwise. You said you saw something like that in the sea, right?”