Ghost. Ghost. Ghost.
She has become a thing of the shadows. Shadows that welcome her as some suburban teenager welcomes deviation from boredom, like in one of Kay’s old video files where the adventure inevitably ends in some sort of happy moral message.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
She has become the cypher that she always was to others; only now the others aren’t getting much time to try and figure her out.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
The shadows embrace her and make her one of their own, penumbral in the Bunker’s yellow subterranean night; ochre in the depths; white eyes in the darkness of her silhouette.
She has become the proverbial demon, sucked from some cultural vacuum of a horror movie manipulation, or from the one-dimensional slate of the monotheistic appetite for destruction.
Shadows descend on the security feeds as Ellie neutralises them via the worm inside Bigmark’s AI, The worm that now allows Michael Caine to tell himself that all is well in his domain; the worm that Peye had coded so long ago and has been inside Michael Caine for so long that the AI believes it to be a legitimate part of itself.
Ellie avoids the servicers as they clean and feed the vanity of their masters, them taking pride in the visual manifestation of their abstinence by vomiting up their pilfered excess after every meal.
She’s not here for the hands, she’s here for the head.
The dice have been rolled for the Kulturati and Ellie is a single black dot drilled into the middle of one face of each of those dice, teardrops in the vortex, snake eyes, beyond the reach of reason.
She finds herself almost enjoying the act.
“Don’t you want out of this bullshit?” she whispers into the ear of one of the ones she remembers from ’38; the one with the bad plastic surgery, his hair likely plastic too; the one whose grin was like a row of white headstones in a war memorial cemetery.
“Please, no, what do you want?”
Up-close-and-personal, while necessary in circumstances calling for stealth, is a messy business; even with Ellie doing her best to avoid it, slit throats, being the prima donna of up-close-and-personal, tend to spray. Ellie now sports more than a few works-of-blood-art on her already dirty brown leatherwork.
She looks through windows into the pastel light where children, those few who remain, in isolation, immerse themselves in VR while sliding sharp objects across their thighs in order to feel something.
Ellie stands upon a threshold; the point of no return.
“To spare the children you will need to adopt them,” the old man had hissed, “the choice is yours: kill them or keep them close”