midoritheory

[midoritheory]

Anavae - Smile

Don't tell me there's a silver lining

[midoritheory]

MIA 2 - Reconstruction

“Remember, you only got one shot at this, Ryan.”

Ene said the exact same words she says every time, as if to mark the initiation of a monadic dive. She was walking slightly ahead of me as we crossed a narrow street of Eastern Philadelphia. Tall office buildings surrounded us in suffocating arrays of chessboard-like blocks. Ene’s blonde twin tails bounced up and down in sync with her confident, summery strides, in defiance of the sheer weight of the mechanical backpack on her back.

“Well, it’s not like I have control over the extent of monadic corruption, Ene.”

She stopped and turned around in the middle of the road, causing me to abruptly stop. The pedestrian traffic light was flashing repeatedly, as if driven impatient by our out-of-ordinary conduct. I could feel the stares of those walking by.

“No, Ryan. You need to get a hold of your stream of consciousness. There’s a reason the Bureau assigns ICUs only to trained Divers.”

As if rehearsed, Ene turned around and exited the stage that was the 15th street, just in time the traffic light expired. Before the waiting cars could start honking, I caught up with her and proceeded to hold the Starbucks door open for her.

A cool breeze enveloped our skins as the scent of caffeine and the high-pitched sound of coffee machines invaded our mind. I walked straight up to the barista at the cashier -- slightly dark skin, black eyes, thick double eyelids, ponytail. Ene went to the nearby empty table and pushed it aside as she started unpacking her mechanical backpack, apathetic to the curious stares of the customers.

“What can I get you today?”

I pulled out my badge from my left pocket and put on a professional smile.

“Hi, Agent Collins from the Federal Bureau of Reconstruction. We need you to clear out the cafe right away.”

After a slightly surprised look, she nodded in response and proceeded to ask the customers to leave. Ene shouted, half-jokingly, “And I’ll have one iced Americano, please.” Just in time, a black van stopped in front and two armed FBR agents entered to rush the customers out of the cafe.

“FBR, we need everyone out of this building now!”

As confused customers trotted toward the entrance, Ene finished installing her computer on the table, her backpack now unfolded into a device double its original size. We called it a Diving Unit, a device used to initiate a monadic dive. Simply put, it shifts the dyadic phase associated with a physical place to allow Divers like myself to enter the monadic dimension.

Ene installed the device on the ground and looked up at me.

“Are you ready?”

I put on a wry smile, clutching creation gun on my left hand and annihilation gun on my right hand.

“Ready or not.”

Ene returned my wry smile with her own, and turned the giant handle on top of the device with both of her hands.

A subwoof emanated violently out of the device, erasing all traces of human beings like fragmented pixels rapidly losing their resolution.

I was standing alone in the now empty cafe. Hiss-like noises started swimming around me alarmingly upon encountering a foreign dyadic entity in a purely monadic dimension.

I could almost hear them whisper into my ears -- You’re not supposed to be here.

I pointed the annihilation gun toward the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The invisible monadic strands erupted in a chaotic resonance, eventually dispersing away and clearing out the residual corruption inside the cafe.

“This area is relatively clean this time, Ryan. Why don’t you start with the window seats?”

As Ene communicated to me over my earpieces, I switched to my creation gun and pointed it toward the window seat left of the entrance.

Tachibana Midori was here -- if the information provided by the Investigations Sector was correct, that is.

I fired a generalized dyadic ray toward the window seat. The ray scattered into thousands of pixels, now interfering with massless monads and giving life to their physical representations.

Monadic dimension can be thought of as a sketchbook of memories. Traces of our mental perceptions are embedded in an empty template of a physical space. We call these traces monadic strands.

The strands can be reconstructed into a readable form using a dyadic ray. This is the forensics technology that gave birth to the Federal Bureau of Reconstruction.

Tachibana Midori was sitting at the window seat. Bobbed hairstyle, navy-blue sweater on top of a well-ironed white-collared shirt, and a green checkered skirt. She looked just like what I saw in the old photograph -- upright, in perfect decorum, a tense equilibrium of a modern shell and a classical core. She was holding a coffee mug with both of her hands, as if desperately trying to prevent the warmth from fading away into the short-lived steam. Her dark brown, lucid, bottomless eyes were staring out into the empty street, as if in search of something.

What could it be that she is searching, in an unfamiliar city by herself?

I approached the window and sat two seats next to her. I can see her, but she cannot see me. The thought, obvious as it is, was reflecting a lurking sense of despair.

Before I could realize what was happening, she was turning her gaze toward where I was sitting.

Her dark brown, lucid, bottomless eyes suddenly became a bit more focused, with a slight tint of pensiveness, as if trying to decipher an evasive meaning of a sentence that was not written to begin with.

It’s only a matter of time -- was indeed what I was thinking, when the hiss suddenly swarmed the space again.

Chapter 1: Monadic strands  |  Chapter 3:

[midoritheory]

Anavae - Night

Just make it through the night

[midoritheory]

MIA 1 - Monadic strands

Gotta focus.. gotta keep my focus..

I chant to myself, half out of breath, well-knowing that the words are meaningless at this point. The sense of disorientation did not stop attempting to whisk my stream of consciousness away, like the indiscernible boundary between the steam and the surrounding air intertwining with each other above a mug of coffee... like two snakes trying to devour each other’s tail.

My words are haphazard, and at this rate, I knew it was just a matter of time before I fade away into nonexistence. The only thing preventing this from happening was a slowly permeating sense of fear pulsating incessantly out of my heart. Yes, fear was the last thread of coherence keeping me from devolving into a despicable logorrhea.

Fear, not that I will fade out of existence, per se, but that I will end up forgetting why I was fearful to begin with... I need to remain fearful, keep my focus.

I still have an unfinished mission.

Tachibana Midori. Tachibana Midori. Tachibana Midori.

The gray sky in front of me was about to engulf me in whole.

Goddamn, she’s such a --

The sky started to crack, leaking in hiss-like noises into the hermetically sealed landscape around me, scattering extremely bright monadic rays everywhere.

I was running out of time. I pointed my annihilation gun toward the cracks and started pulling the trigger, repeatedly.

The monadic rays were quickly dispersed into nothingness, but the rate at which I was pulling the trigger was not enough to contain all of the rays from corrupting the fabric of my perception.

My vision started to glitch, like computer graphics tearing into incoherent pixels.

“This run is fucked, Ryan. We gotta ditch the area, it’s too corrupted.”

As soon as Ene vocalized the obvious with her typical wryness (I could almost see her rolling her eyes in my mind), the glitching suddenly stopped for a few seconds and froze everything around me, like a calm before the storm.

And then, all the pixels contracted into a single pitch-black globe, hovering in front of my eyes. I quickly grabbed my creation gun from my left pocket, and injected the source dyadic ray into the globe.

The pixels started to unfold itself out of the globe, reconstructing the familiar landscape. It was a vast, empty, endless horizon, barren with cold-cut stones scattered everywhere. Ene and I were standing next to a single, upright tree, bleak and lifeless without a single leaf on its branches.

A mirage was emanating out of the tree, making it look blurry and wobbly. The same hiss-like noise continued to ring in our ears.

The fear that I felt completely vanished without a single trace, leaving my consciousness empty and barren just like the landscape surrounding me.

Tachibana Midori was here at some point. I couldn’t imagine what on earth the heiress of Japan’s most powerful conglomerate was doing in the middle of an abandoned field in rural Pennsylvania.

Midori has gone missing for six months now. The Tachibana Corporation has worked clandestinely with the Ministry of Control to prevent this incident from becoming a public knowledge. According to their circumlocutory explanations (the consultants who reached out to us apparently did not have the appropriate clearance for this classified information), Midori holds some sort of a “key” that is absolutely necessary to maintain their corporate hegemony.

It has been six months since the Tachibana Corporation formed an independent contract with the US Federal Bureau of Reconstruction (FBR), after realizing that Midori’s disappearance was a result of monadic corruption.

The fabric of what we call “reality” is made of monads and dyads. Simply put, dyads are physical substances, and monads are mental substances. They are two sides of a single coin that bridges the external and the internal. Recent breakthroughs have enabled the manufacture of Information Control Units (ICUs), devices that allow manipulation of the information content of these two substances.

Most likely, an adversarial entity has utilized the recently developed ICU technology to trap Midori in a monadic dimension.

I have only seen her in an old photo.

A Japanese girl with a bob-cut hair. And a pair of dark, lucid, bottomless eyes.. as if starved for another soul.

The photo was fading. I had to recover her monadic strands before it was too late.

Singular abstraction, and normalcy thereof.

Chapter 2: Reconstruction