Like any child of privilege, I was born wired. Just like my beloved, my rebellious one.
My fingers have never known a day without implanted haptics. When I first opened my eyes to see the sun's light, my sight was filled with the delicate traceries of noospheric data transfers dancing around me. Just like hers.
Like my brothers, I was raised by a virtual assistant. We all had the same Poppins protocol. When I misbehaved, the sting of the spanking was what my nerves were told to feel. I spent a great deal of time with my parents' projections, in a house whose furniture wore new skins every week. I don't know whether I ever met them in person.
I accepted that this was the world. That this was life. Exactly the way she did not.
Some of us know what we need better than others, I suppose.
At the very first, she was like a visual toothache; it hurt to look at her. That's not some pretty way of saying that she was beautiful, though that is absolutely true. No, she hurt to look at because she was apart from the world, and jarringly realer than the world.
Like everyone else in the Jaded Dragon, I was dressed in a formal kimono. Seated at the bar, I had been looking out the window onto a view of Mt. Fuji's sunrise that had no relation to the muggy midnight outside, and did not see her enter.
The shimmer over the door announced arrivals and hid the transition as whatever they had been wearing was changed to archaic Japanese outfits. At least, as far as our chipped-up eyes saw and our chipped-up hands felt. The process was smooth, clearly expensive, and fully automated.
Which is why it was quite simply impossible for her to be wearing a red cocktail dress. A dress plunging at every point a dress can conceivably plunge and slit upward wheresoever it was not, with matching heels. She was alone, draped artfully across a pillow and leaning on a low table, watching. Some light liquor in a chipped glass snifter swirled in her hand, setting off the deep red of her nails and lips.
I tried not to openly stare, but how was everyone not? In a room of spotless white kimonos she was a splash of blood on the snow.
She noticed my attention over the lip of the glass, put it down to fold her arms with a challenging look, and my jaw nearly dropped. The snifter- the instant it lost contact with her fingers, it was gleaming cut crystal like every other one in the bar, like my own with its two fingers of sake. I had to know how she did it.
I brought my glass and my ceramic tray, embossed with a shimmering dragon and covered in fresh sushi, to sink down on the pillow opposite from her.
"Yes?' she asked. An eyebrow arched in matching inquiry.
"How do you do it?" I replied without preamble. She picked up her glass and I stared in fascination at how its cut crystal withered back to cheap glass.
"It's like most things," she said, swirling the liquor. "It's not that difficult once you decide to do it."
"Can you teach me?"
"Can you learn?"
I leant back, uncertain how to continue the strangest conversation I'd ever had but absolutely certain that I wanted to. She spared me.
"Why do you come here?" She asked the question with intent. I took a moment before answering.
"My friend Marco is the chef, and I want to support him. Plus, he makes a decent Cali roll," I said, swiping some wasabi across a piece before dipping it in soy sauce and popping it into my mouth. "And you?"
"I come for the irony," she said with a strange half-smile. "And to find someone like you. Want to see something?"
I didn't have to think about that answer at all.
