london simmons + cedric spliff 29
29: nudging them to show they are right beside them
London knows the cardinal rules of xyr world by heart (an irony, since xe has none):
There is no give without take.
The pitcher must throw the ball.
The first xe learned when xe was first pulled from the Shadows, finally allowed to walk in the light at the expense of another. Cedric told xem it was fine, looked almost relieved as he went under. London hadn’t felt guilty about it then, knowing that during the long-shadowed afternoons, xe had been able to emerge into those patches of dark, watching games from beneath the stands. Cataloguing data, calculating statistics.
SIMULATION: GUILT
DOPAMINE LEVELS REDUCED
There wasn’t much space for shadows now, underneath so many suns.
Xe used to visit him at night, those now-haunted hours where Shadows gathered. Xe had felt an obligation, being the one who had taken his place. Obligation became camaraderie, camaraderie became friendship. The problem with friendship, London discovered, was that it meant you had to care, and caring hurt.
Xe didn’t visit anymore.
DISTRESS DETECTED.
END SYNTHETIC CHEMICAL PRODUCTION? Y/N
Maybe this is why Mooney had been so reluctant to program in the emotion sims. London was built possessed of one thing, and it was the drive to acquire information. Xe ran equations from the Shadows, produced dataset upon dataset detailing the team’s ERA, OBP, SLG. Xe had seen the reactions the numbers elicited, the fascination, the pride, the shame.
Xe had, by natural extension of their drive to know, wanted to understand. Xe thought xe understood now. Xe thought xe might regret it. Especially now. But to stop now, to lose all the bad, would mean losing all the good too.
And there had been good. London wasn’t ready to give up on it. Not yet.
SIMULATION: FEAR
ADRENALINE LEVELS SPIKING
The pitcher must throw the ball.
London had learned the full extent of that today.
Numbers had always afforded London a certain degree of security. Even in an unpredictable world, they allowed xem to trace back a certain kind of logic. Logic had dictated that, in order to throw the ball, the pitcher must have someone to throw the ball to.
Logic had no place in what followed.
London Simmons advances to third.
London Simmons batting for the Moist Talkers.
If London did have a heart, it would be pounding now across two bodies. Two selves staring at each other across the space, the combined panic of two sets of falsified producers and receptors a tidal wave.
And then, by some miracle, there is shadow.
The cloud cover, sparse as it is, casts a stretch of shade back behind London on home plate. There’s a faint sense of contact, and if xe had any kind of olfactory system, xe would catch the scent of old books, cheap wings at trivia night, that spiced aftershave that Alston loved.
For a moment, there is no roaring crowd. Only relief, and quiet calm that passes over London (both of xem).
“You got this, kid,” Cedric says.
And London knows, in that moment, that xe does.
