[The prompt was to write a story including the first sentence there (taken from a terrible period piece novel). I had ten minutes. You may be able to tell but you will enjoy it nonetheless.]

Paul spent the next two days trying to cleanse his body of the grainy odor that permeated his skin, his hands, his hair, and his nose. It was hard having an addiction to wheat. He would go mad with the desire and break into the local brewery, diving, naked, into the hops. Swimming, mouth open, like that one over-enthusiastic kid in the ball pit at Chuck E Cheese’s. Only, that kid was never naked. Well, okay, that one time he was. But security guards in animal costumes had taken him away, their movements nearly as smooth as their animatronic counterparts in the pizza parlor next-door. Paul had wanted to commend the boy for his bravery. It takes balls to put your balls in those balls. Or in wheat. Or in pie, as his friend Martin would attest. Come to think of it, Paul reflected, maybe he wasn’t so strange after all.

“No, listen,” she said. “There’s a grammar to silence. You don’t have to talk constantly. Let’s just… listen.”

I sat there on her dorm bed, awkwardly trying to pretend I was listening to silence.

But eventually I actually did start to hear… something. There was a grammar to it. Phrases, clauses, verbs, questions, and exclamations.

“You know,” I said finally, “you’re really pretty awesome. Can I see you… more often? Like, not just to buy drugs from you?”

She stood up quickly, handed me the stuff, and pushed me out the door.

“What’d I do wrong?” I said to a closed door.

She opened it again. “You ended a silence with a proposition.” And the door slammed shut once more.

The next morning I woke up at four, as usual. Joey didn’t know it, but if it weren’t for my constant slicing, we would’ve been starving and sleeping on the streets. It was a constant battle to stay two steps ahead, constantly staying as far Upwind as I could keep us while pilfering the little amounts we needed to survive. That particular morning I was skimming credit from my newest find, a crop of particularly well-off individuals connected by close business and personal relationships. I made it look as easy as picking grapes off a bunch, but it’s easy to look a certain way when everyone sees what they want to see.

My slicing was interrupted by Joey’s terrified voice.

“Sally! SALLY! I can’t move!” The tone in his voice made me drop everything and sprint to his bedroom of our suite. His skin was crawling with data. I shouldn’t have let him dice his head up fractal, I knew what could happen–

“I’ve got diagnostic up, it doesn’t look like anything’s wrong with my body, it’s just, everything, everything in here, it’s, it’s…” his mouth worked noiselessly as though whatever coursed around the corners of his neural pathways had no word, no name to which it answered.

“We have to get you to see somebody,” I said without hesitation, pulling up local hospitals and neurological specialists, all the time thinking how am I going to pull this off, we’re far enough Upwind to get noticed but that doesn’t translate into medical care, especially not the kind of specialist who can pull this off.

I had one option. I pulled up the pool of identities I’d been distributing my costs across. I’d been careful not to get noticed, but one of them was going to have to give up their medical rating for a while so that Joey could get help.

I surfed through clouds of security until I finally found the pigeonhole containing the prize I was looking for, a 5-star medical rating. There might be questions asked, but not until after a neurosurgeon got a look at Joey’s brain. I reached inside the pigeonhole–

and from the other side another hand took mine firmly. I shrieked– Joey started, but was silent– and before me stood a tall, muscular man with dark complexion. I hadn’t set any of my visual feeds public. This was an intruder in my mind.

The man smiled at me. “There she is. You’ve been poking around in some things that don’t belong to you, little girl. As a matter of fact, you’ve been poking around in things that belong to friends of mine.”

I struggled, trying to cut off any possible way that he could be accessing me– he was blowing through my security code, projecting himself into my head–

He shook his head and laughed softly, without malice. “You’re very talented, Sally. Without a shadow of a doubt. Why, look at this.” He released my wrist and held up something in his hand. Something blue and sparkly.

I gasped. My payload!
He looked at it closely, admiringly. “This is ingenious, but I don’t have to tell you. In fact if you get far enough Upwind with this, you could probably gain a lot of power, do a lot of damage Become a pretty significant player. And you only fourteen years old.” He raised his eyebrows.

I snarled. “Give– that– back!” The payload was once again safe, buried under the most sophisticated protocols my mind had.

The man looked at his newly empty hand a moment. “Yes, you’re an impressive girl.” He spoke quietly. “So what is someone like you doing making an amateur move like attempting to swipe someone’s medical rating? They’ll shut you out of Delusion if you keep that up.”

I shuddered at the thought but said nothing.

He narrowed his eyes and mine began itching and burning. He’s accessing my optical feeds??

The man shifted position so that he was standing beside me, seeing what I was. “Who is he? He appears to be in some trouble.”

I glared at the man and muttered, “His head is diced Fractal.”

He whistled. “You don’t need a doctor, kid, you need a pilot.”

“Why would I need a pilot? And how am I supposed to get him taken care of? I’m not THAT far Upwind.”

The mysterious man smiled quietly. “Well. It’d be a shame for someone as special as you to come this far and lose your friend to cheap mind surgery. I tell you what.” He siezed my hand again and with a finger traced glowing numerals on my palm. “You call this number, you see this guy, and you remember that you owe me a favor.”

I looked at my hand, the number, and him, in confusion and disbelief. “Who ARE you?”

He winked. “Tell him Jude sent you. Good luck to you and your friend.”

He stepped out of my head and, as far as I could tell, out of existence. I stared at my hand for what felt like a long time.

No one picked up when I called the number. A quick search told me almost nothing. There was no name, no listing. Just an address on the other side of town.

I spent the taxi ride trying to comfort Joey, who was speaking in nonsense syllables.

“I’m gonna take care of you, Joey. You’re gonna be okay.”

“You don’t underslithy. The toves, Sal, The TOVES. It burbled as it came…” He coughed and was silent for a while.

The taxi dropped us off a couple blocks away from our destination. I’d never seen such a dirty part of the city before– and that was saying something. I could barely get a connection to any public access and Delusion covered only street signs. The rest was naked concrete.

Finally, we found the building. It seemed almost abandoned, but Delusion displayed a directory of the offices in glowing letters. I stopped to read through them when Joey started screaming, doubled over in pain.

“We’ll get you taken care of, we’re here, Joey! Hold on, there’s someone here who’s going to help us!”

I helped Joey sink to the floor then took off running. It has to be here somewhere, the office number is– AHA!

I banged on the door. “Please! Somebody help! My friend needs help!”

The door finally opened and a gaunt face in a laughable fedora snaked out, apparently attached to a thin body in an ill-fitting blazer and blue jeans. “You’ve come to the wrong place, Miss. I’m sorry. Good day.” He started to close the door.

“Jude sent me! He said we need a pilot!”

The man in the fedora froze. His face took an incredibly pained expression. “Damn it, Judas, NOW you’re calling in that favor?” He sighed. “Bring in your friend, I’ll see what I can do for him. The name is Tom. Thomas Bleakly.”

I awaken the next morning not knowing where or who I am.

“It’s normal, Joey,” she says, bathing me in crimson light. “It’s just your brain rebooting itself to fit around the data. You’ll remember everything soon.” She strokes my face gently, her massive blue eyes pleading for me to trust her.

Sparks race across my vision while I thrash around. “Who are you? Who am I? What’s going on?”

“Listen,” she says. “We’re trying to get Upwind so that when your head pops and I run hot, we can commandeer enough Mindspace to make sure whatever we do stays permanent.”

I shake my head, the confusion and pain getting worse. “What’s Upwind? What are we trying to do?”

She sighs and pulls my head against her, cradling it in her arms. “Upwind, Joey! It’s how much access we have, how much bandwidth and speed and skill and trust and popularity we have. Upwind! Most of the bigshots Upwind are celebrities or scientists or models or writers or coders, but that’s not the only way to get Upwind. You can do it sneaky, open a few back doors, operate a few puppet personalities. You know, like Yimmy, that little hotbot program I wrote three years ago?”

I shake my head again. “What’s a hotbot?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Welll, no matter how sophisticated, no slicing can access the pleasure principle directly, that was one of the core tenets whenever they sliced the world. It’s part of the Delusion. It’s quantum encoded, nobody can get in ever. But sex is okay, along with art and music and whatever but sex is easy. Yimmy is a doodle, something I threw together so that boys would think I was cool.”

That’s wrong. Yimmy is fantastic– incredible– seven kinds of lifelike. Yimmy is the standard other hotbots fail to live up to. Yimmy is a dream, or a wet dream, really.

Sally’s patience is starting to pay off. I’m starting to pick up the pieces again. I’m starting to realize when and who I am.
“Yimmy isn’t a doodle.”

She smiles. “Coming back?”

I rub my temples. “A little. What does Yimmy have to do with Upwind?”

Sally idly flicks some cards around the room. Where they stick they grow tiny forests complete with fairies and gnomes dancing in tiny-savage rhythm. “Yimmy’s got a backdoor. She can grab me a few gigs of memory and bandwidth from anyone running her. She’s the best thing we got going right now, but a few other projects of mine– not to mention the historical stuff you’ve been cooking up, plus whatever comes out when your head pops– means we should be way clear Upwind and ready to change the world.”

The word flicker fights through my subconscious and then I have to be sick. It’s a few hours before I’m myself again.

The real revolution came with Delusion. The shared layer of reality permeated everything and immediately investing in anything else became a waste of time. Television, computers, cell phones, none of them mattered anymore when all the entertainment or art or architecture you needed could surround you in the blink of an eye. Only a few of the elderly refused it, and I shudder to think how they must view this world, without the crystal edifices or the windows into infinity the skies have become.

Sally took to Delusion like a fish to water. Or more accurately like an electric eel to water. She became insanely beautiful– it hurts to look at her, like she’s a little too perfect for reality. I never told her, but I’m pretty sure she knows I think she’s an angel.
The masses took to their new opiate in universally joyful embrace. The religious no longer need to imagine a loving God looking down upon them; Delusion ensures their skies are never empty or free of the constant reassurance they so require.

“We can shake ‘em up, Joey,” she whispers, and though it hurts to look in her eyes, I can’t look away, won’t look away for anything. “We can do this– we can bring Humanity to its logical conclusion.”
Hairs stand up on the back of my neck– not real hairs, of course, I had all my follicles removed and my hair Projected, just like three quarters of everything else, all the clothing, all the architecture, all the musical instruments.
“You make it sound like we’re gonna kill everyone,” I say, pulling her closer to me, but never close enough, not close enough to make my heart stop screaming that she must me mine, must be closer, I must have her though I am not worthy.
“Maybe we will,” she says, her breath catching. “But maybe it’s something else, maybe we have something bigger to give everyone. We can show everyone where we are in the universe, what everything means.”
Her face starts to go chatter-wise and the ever-present pressure in my temples starts building up past the point I can think at all. That’s the problem with dicing your head Fractalwise, only the desperate do it, only those who have nothing to lose and everything to gain– but that wasn’t me, I wasn’t desperate, I was clever, I was lazy, I wanted the easy way out– and I can’t focus on anything but angles and numbers and colors and smells fitting together into one cosmic waveform, one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one zero—

She stands above me, radiant with cherubsong, resplendent like a vengeful goddess but not as petty or vulgar. She is mathematically perfect, the ratios of her face corresponding perfectly to every constant with which man or nature has seen fit to ornament reality.

And then for a moment she flickers and she is not there, not the Sally I love, not the girl I grew up with, not the perfumed goddess I’m unfit even to touch, but a short, disheveled creature with dirty hair and pasty skin and bloodshot eyes, then the flicker is gone and her return makes me sob with relief, because she is this perfect creature, she isn’t human, she isn’t a sack of flesh and bone and blood, she’s a mathematical abstraction, a love song written by the creators of the universe.

She holds me as I weep and speak in tongues. She coos in my ear, speaking soothing words. Somewhere deep inside me I know that the Concept my head will give birth to is something ugly and terrible, something worse than the worst atrocity committed by any creature. Somewhere under the static my mind is shedding is the key to strike Sally’s perfect diamond thoughts, so that the cracks don’t just destroy her, but continue out into the world to bring this terror to all beings.

I curl up in a terrified ball. I have seen my gift to the world, and it is better off never knowing what the seeds in my head will grow into.

Then her words find their way to me through the chaos and I begin to calm. It was just a dream, a fever-dream my mind cast aside in its quest for clarity. I do not bear anything terrible. My gift to the world will be great, she whispers.

I look into her eyes, her fanatic eyes full of hope and devotion and determination. The tugging feeling remains with me. Whatever it is that she will build when she gets far enough Upwind to build in the shared reality of a few thousand minds, it will change everything, it will unify humanity singing one song, to her, Goddess of Goddesses, Mother and protector of us all.

She’s going to be successful, I realize. Soon all minds will be hers, how lucky for them.
When I sleep I dream of angels and demons.

Mindcraft allowed us to personalize and accessorize our minds the way girls obsess over clothing. Hyperspecialization heaped on hyperspecialization, guilds of warring minds directing sentient matter at one another. Others devoted themselves to pure intelligent biomass, some of the bigger ones achieving over a ton of synaptic tissue.

Sally was special. Sally had a thing for numbers, but she was her own person, not a Savvy. “C’monnn, Joey,” she’d squeal at me when we were kids. “Don’t you know what the square root of a hundred forty four is? How about the cube root of 343?” She’d tease everyone on the playground, and she’d win handily, too. Most of the card games the kids played relied on sophisticated mathematical models to handle their progression. Sally figured ‘em instantly and walked off grinning with the other kids’ loot. They’d mouth off after she’d walked away, calling her a Savvy, which was stupid, really, because if she’d Savved out her head she wouldn’t care enough about the cards to gamble them. And how is a kid going to pay for the op?

When we were fourteen Sally stole a bike from the local Milly’s. These days doing that’d get your arm cut off, but back then they didn’t shield their vents and girls with slender arms and deft fingers could reach in and reprogram the security grid at the front door. She walked right out with the thing and somehow Milly’s didn’t dice her to pieces. She was always lucky.

Me, I got my head diced Fractal. It’s a risk– it’s always a risk– but I knew I had a destiny. I know I have something huge to give the world, something to be remembered for. So I just gotta stay alive while my head tries to fit together the pieces it’s left in and hope something useful comes out. Honestly it’s about a fifty-fifty chance– I might revolutionize wetware everywhere and be hailed for the upgrade of the century, or I might take a running dive into nothingness.

Brains are good at figuring patterns, see? So you fit the biggest mathematical concept inside your skull you can and then your brain picks out anything useful. Sifting through random data, waiting for your brain to either light up like a nightmare christmas tree or go dark like the deepest part of the sea. It’s Russian Roulette being played the only way that’s worth it– for all the marbles.

Sally and me are trying to make our way Upwind, get admin access so we can do the most damage when our respective heads pop, she running the latest philosophical programs attuned to as many minds as will join her, me looking at the universe sideways and squinting my eyes. We figure one of us has to hit something, and either of us making it will change everything.

I hope Sally makes it. I don’t dare hope I do.

Demons walk our streets. Few of them look inhuman, and most of that group can cover it up with a hat or a baggy coat or baggy pants. What they can’t do, however, is drive a car.

A train or a bus will not reject a demon. No one knows if it’s too difficult for a vehicle to detect a demon among too many people, or if they just can’t throw out the bathwater without ejecting the baby with it. But this is why subways and buses have a smell all their own.

So the next time someone insists that they love the T and would never drive in this city, remember that not all of them are worried about parking and traffic and absent street signs and rotaries and one-way streets.

[This story's prompt was to use a word someone else had invented. In this case it's "perkiblot". When I edit this I'm going to take that out so it's not so awkward. Still, even with that, I'm especially proud of this story.]

All she left behind was a note and a half-finished mug of coffee. The note said nothing she hadn’t said before; he needed more motivation and personal hygiene, and she pleaded for him to seek professional help, this time ostensibly for his sake alone. And possibly the sake of one of her therapist friends. But he knew the coffee mug would speak volumes.

He lifted it up and placed it in the sink, then returned to examine the kitchen table where the coffee had been. He’d been an atheist when they’d met, and mostly still was, but she’d taught him enough perkiblot to make him at least acknowledge its therapeutic value. He peered intently at the ‘blot the mug had left behind, tracing the condensation’s silhouette in the air above it, careful not to disturb its fragile existence. He recalled the rules of deciphering a perkiblot, recalling also and inadvertently the first time she’d put her clammy, nervous hand on his and guided him through the process.

This one was happy news, as far as he was concerned: she would return. Not soon and not without reservation and not when he’d need her most. But she would return.

He took one of the thick paper towels she’d bought and wiped the kitchen table clean.

[Haven't written many pieces longer than 55 words lately, but this one demanded the tiniest bit extra space. Still very much a work in progress, though, particularly the very end.]

“Don’t worry, young man,” the Martian policeman said, “He’s just a baby. He’s harmless, long as his blindfold’s on.” He patted the basilisk’s rump, his red hand making Christmas colors against its scales. The beast turned its great head to lick its rider’s fingers.

“How’s he know where to go?” I asked. My dad continued to hiss at me to get back to his side of the street.

“We’ve been breeding them for hearing for thousands of years,” he said. Then he leaned down to whisper in my ear. “By the time you’re old enough, we’ll be training humans to ride them.” My eyes widened.

The policeman straightened up in his saddle. “I’m Officer Quint.” He shook my hand. “Now, get back to your father. I don’t think he likes Ivan here very much.” He winked at me.

I re-crossed the street. My dad walked us quickly home.

When we got inside, he turned to me and said, “I can’t say this out there or they’ll put me away, but those lizards are a menace, and their riders are imperialist savages.”

“Daddy,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You don’t have to be mean to Officer Quint just ’cause you’re scared of basilisks.”

He stared at me. Moments passed and still he stared. Then he turned and walked to his study, muttering, “He’s still just a kid, still a boy.”