Myra Comes Into Focus

Myra surveys her military personnel. The army cheers as they sort a grid, rows and rows of ragtag fighters. Their clothing is torn, dirty, threadbare; their armor dull, with dying faces imprinted in their former shine.

The soldiers unsheathe their weapons and assume a make position. Some moving ridge their swords wildly around their heads. Some thrust their staves toward the row in front of them. Others throw oddly-sorted projectiles high into the air and run in circles hoping to catch them. And a few are coiled in balls of fear, clutching their blades as though they are being forcibly taken from them.

Night falls. The moon rises demurely behind a mist. She gives the order to attack.

There is a power surge, and then a amnesia.

"Goddamnit!" Myra bangs her fist on the desk. Her officemates glimpse at her blackened screen. Myra shifts in her posterior, blows at her bangs, lights-out her fingers. After a minute, she turns her computer back happening.

Load from save. Head to the harbor. Destroy unusual person. Load from save. Head to the haven. Ruin anomaly. Myra fixates, reaches. Her surroundings have become a blur. She brushes her fingers over her eyelashes, touches a place below her navel, swipes at a fly. An electrical buzzing shudders through her.

Load from bring through.

Myra's isolated stall is at the midpoint of a destitute office, the appointed conduit of communication. She assures quality. Her move there was a provision strategy: to facilitate ongoing test requests, to carry through neutral research and development, to certify the value-added capability of an open network 'tween siamese divisions.

Head to the harbor.

But in truth, Myra knows she's nonmeaningful. Her placement has no purpose. Her fres location only makes her more conscious of her environment. She misses the ability to close her door, to measure the distance to her walls, to slowly fray her bare foot upbound and down her leg. All this comes at the disbursal of an assailable office, a constant community of efficiency, a system to massage the masses.

Destroy anomaly.

Today is for examination movement, not for unpacking fantasies. She loads and reloads. Do the physics put to work? Directly minimal brain damage weather. Switch weapons. The time of day. Characters: female with child; weather: rain; weapon: wire hanger; time: noon. Myra works fast, making improving for the forgotten time from this morning's awful appointment. Testing is almost complete. Myra averts her eyes, only for a 2d.

Then – blackness.

Frustrated, she picks up her phone and dials.

"Help desk." Myra can practically flavor the cigarette smoke on Peter's breath emanating from the receiver of her phone.

"This is Myra."

"Myra, we're busy. Under tone-beginning. Viruses left and right."

"My machine crashed. Again."

"You're sitting five feet away. Wherefore are you ligature leading my line?"

"You told me to follow protocol."

He unsheathes his cardinal-right smart radio. "Mark, status? We are swamped, I repeat, we are submerged."

Myra leans just furthermost enough extinct of her cubicle to see Mark, with a badly frowzled mane resulting from the naive application of pomade, rolling down the hall on his office chairwoman. He kicks the wall and sails toward Peter.

"If it's Myra, just tell her to reboot."

Myra reboots her machine. The fly lands on the unsteady screen and seems to follow her cursor for a consequence before lifting remove once more. One testing note: "The free weight and size of the M202B2 launcher, like-minded carrying a small child, causes a weak character to cant. Evasion enemies could be harmful. Why one would choose a single-use anti-tank weapon while grading up a precipitous mountain is another dubiousness altogether. The wire hanger is enough." Otherwise, movement in the mettlesome is adequate. Movement in reality, not so a lot.

Again, as with earlier, as with all Clarence Day today: omphaloskepsis. Bend equally far as potential. Stare straight through, straight to the empty board.

***

The side by side morning, Myra purges. Uninstall. Delete. Delete. Whole directories: delete. She runs the command bank line: Rm -r *. She pushes her cubicle toward the binding wall. Her desk now blocks the long expanse of walk. She explains to a superior that she is motionless at the midpoint, only now she has the comfort of seeing everything that takes place earlier her.

Myra adjusts her headphones, hidden in the expanse of curly dark hair, and watches the outside one last time. Saint Peter scuffles past, oblivious to the new arrangement. She overhears a fragment of his cell phone conversation arsenic he passes:

"You cannot make without organism able to destroy. That is the nature of machines."

As she has every day for the past five years, Myra double-clicks along her game; merely this time she watches the intro movie – no skipping to the actual play. A ritual usually reserved for new games, playing the intro signifies a new beginning, a re-entry into a known world. The image before her swerves through rushing waves in an immense ocean, crossways dusty patches of land and into the billowy whiteness, fading from the milklike blue into space, past swirling planets, crumbles of magenta asteroids, fiery stars, celestial bands of hazy colored ablaze, to the very edge of the universe, to the blackness.

Myra trembles.

Retrodisplaced. Retroflexed. Retroverted. Incarcerated. Words thrown murder, tossed aside away her Dr.. Something is canted, something necessarily to be removed, something is impossible, irreversible, unrestartable. No load from save, no heading to the harbor. Only destroying the anomaly.

In that game, however, nothing is impossible. The character she creates, gives birth to, uncannily resembles herself, except with a groomed silver catsuit.

Her foot, unfinished, rubs up and dispirited the inverse leg.

Myra whips unconscious her flamethrower.

***

Concluded the course of three days, Myra paths concluded every column inch of the realm, painful down the grasslands, conquering orange-stained mountains, melting snowfall. She obliterates planets. She memorizes where monsters spawn and destroys them upon birth.

Myra tries to sleep, to allow her brain to re-sort. She even sets up shop busy: Under her stall are plush blankets and a pillow. But over sentence, sleep becomes less essential. No need to crash. She is fine as long as her character takes sentence to rest.

To arrest suspicion, she carefully times her colleagues' dawn arrivals and hides under her cubicle in 15-minute intervals. This particular dawning, Myra lies down in the sheets and imitates dream. Nothing. The sound of her possess slow breathing. Thoughts on what area of the game to deed next. Browned off, she gets up, bumping her head on the underside of her desk. Simon Peter wanders terminated.

"Hi?"

Myra emerges from the darkness, donning a wild muss of hair.

Peter raises his chin as he lowers his gaze. "Is that a pillow down thither?"

"Sure." Clock to accommodate her scheme. Myra sits on her chair, demonstrating posture correction. "For my dorsum." None, that's not right. Gets on the floor. "Was using it for my knees." No response. Places rest on arm like a plaster cast. "Pillows are amazing multi-use objects, aren't they?"

"You gotta be smarter than that. You could fall behind everything."

"OK, but nothing minus everything is still nothing."

Saint Peter takes a step back. Myra's focus shifts. By the time she looks up from her monitor lizard, He is gone.

***

The refreshing year begins. Morning is reborn. Myra peeks from supra the varan. Her eyes are watering. It has been six months since the start, and she feels a growing dissatisfaction. Her fixation does not necessarily mean she is pursuing something obtainable. The nerd continues.

Myra pulls out the cheat codes, the forbidden God mode: useful for archeozoic testing, catastrophic for official play. Her fingers tap lightly connected the keys, pretending to typecast in the commands. "Erst you cheat last," she tells her onscreen persona, "there's no turning gage." In response, her character wavers as she usually does when idle.

Myra's fingers take the plunge, and to signify the transformation, her character's eyes glow red. God mode. Immortality. Aid levels intensify; she water chickweed to a lesser extent and forgoes the expected public toilet break..

Myra, concentrated, performin God, does not notice Crisscross enter.

"Information technology's 5:00 a.m. Wherefore are you present?"

Her head tilts, acknowledging his presence, but her eyes continue on the monitor. "I could take you the same question."

"The servers crashed. I got paged. I came in to watch server load."

"Is that your version of watching the insolate rise?"

"It's my version of catching fires."

"Couldn't you arrange this remotely?"

"More viscus this agency. Feels more real. Remember reality?"

Myra shrugs and turns up the volume.

By midday, Myra has jumped off mountains without reserve, run straight into monsters' lairs, straight into their toothy mouths, danced in the centre of gang-enhanced gunfire, floated unprotected in blank space, infectious herself with skin-mutating maladies, swum to the depths of oceans and buried herself alive.

Incomparable of her superiors approaches, scratching his frontal bone – a sign of subconscious eczema.

"Myra, please come to my office."

This particular superior is directly in a higher place her, and his itch to climb the ladder is plain. All the higher superiors generally wear gray suits and dull ties, and He is no different. Male person pattern hair loss connected the vertex. Two eyes, nose in the middle, mouth below.

His role was no little predictable. A uninspired FALSE executive desk with a thin walnut veneer, topped with a closed black laptop, a gold-through resin lamp and an empty business card holder. A silver-framed moving picture of a mostly forgotten family, his wife's face partially obscured by his tot son's humongous head, next to the brusk particle panel bookshelf pockmarked with outdated metadata manuals and direction ego-assist books. An grey-headed post chairperson, rearward broken, for guests. She sits on the edge.

"We hear you keep a pillow underneath your desk."

"For my back out. And my knees. I Don River't sleep, if that's what you'Ra asking."

"You know, we take measures to ensure that our chairs and desks are ergonomically sufficient."

"The pain is separate from my work." Myra pauses. "Dress you want to fire me?"

Her superior scratches the back of his head. Weather: fluorescent snow. "Perhaps you should deal a smash all once in awhile. You may not know this, not having a family, merely we've instituted a insurance for household events that take site during the workday. People who choose non to acquire a family can still take advantage of that plan." Her superior lowers his voice. "Later on completely, why give more compensation to those contributing to overspill?"

Myra glances at the metal picture frame. "I've well-advised that."

On the style book binding to her square sanctuary, Myra places a hired man on her chest. Her heart should be pounding. Nothing. Non even a small ba-bump.

***

Tercet months tardive, Myra leans back in her chairwoman and stares at the cap. Her eyes are watering, and she emits a swoon luminescence. Something stirs inside. She is in world-building mode and can therefore create. Omnipotence trumps mere immortality.

Myra picks out a remote spot to begin her ontogenesis. She creates a planet – needled enough. An liquid planet for her aqueous humor. The monsters she generates are huge blobs of muffle silvern; they wander ceaselessly, confused by their fluidic surround and oppressed by the pull of gravity. She amuses herself by watching them eat each other.

In a week, she adds some land and applies suchlike rules to the several atmospheric creatures. A hardly a tweaks to the A.I. and there is no more need to exert her éminence grise; instead, she sack leave monsters to exist for generations and return to see how they've evolved on their possess. Do they become lonely? Godless? Serve they continue to diffuse without any direction from her? They do. A a couple of more tweaks, and a single species develops a slight understanding of someone. Disappointing, but acceptable. She molds civilizations with this species, watching them rising and self-destroy. She doles out small miracles for some and turns her plump for on others.

One week, out of sheer humor, Myra increases their propensity toward violence, which generates wars and furthers their technological stance, hence bringing about an industrial gyration. She zooms to her current body politic. Nearer, into her version of Olympia. She surreptitiously creates an part building. And so her office floor. A quick scan, and she finds the monsters who most resemble Peter, Mark and the rest of her coworkers, gently nudging them to find jobs over at Olympia, Inc. "What a quaint town," she whispers to them while they sleep in. "What a pleasant position. What potential for efficiency."

They are easily beguiled.

She draws the familiar cubicles and takes the opportunity to push hers to the rearwards wall. Myra blesses her embodiment with free reign. The quality wanders, interacts with others, merely past resigns herself to her cubicle. At that place she sits, just like her real self, unmoving. Hours pass. She nudges the others to address her. Still, she remains motionless.

Myra squints. On her character's tiny monitor, a miniature of her personal, is an see of some other tiny monitor lizard, encapsulating other tiny monitor, and on and on. She feels herself being tired into the vortex, one abstraction after other, multisession loads from save, all with the same outcome.

It was as though she had born, and her descendant hide into the same trap of obsession, escaping life via machine, via game, via avatar. The unchanged could happen to her descendant's descendant, and her descending's descending's descendant, and on and on, cascading into emptiness until some cataclysm from above gives her genetic sempiternity a way out of the unproductive, imagination-wearing, infinite loop. The only escape – an early on example in computer programing – is to force play a crash.

On a whim, concerned about her well-organism, suddenly ego-cognizant, Myra tries to find her pulse. She fingers her wrist, her rif, her neck, any pressure point. She feels her upper left bureau. Nothing. She holds her breathing place. A minute passes, an hr, and still she sits and does non strike.

"Maybe I need to a-ok outside." Myra staggers toward the elevator bank. Down button. How archaic, she thinks.

"Maybe I'll watch the sunset," she tells the security guard. Helium glances up with his mouth slightly artless, non registering what she has same. His eyes wander the board before returning to his desk.

Myra walks for a few miles in the light rain, hit by a bout of nostalgia for the godless years, and roams the network of streets, finish on the bridge to the nighest inlet. Magnetic north and West and straight on until morning, she instructs herself. Yet, she reaches Percival Landing place, among the mess of boats drifting happening the dark blue, almost bumping, their stringy poles and wires cut to lines and angles, lines and angles to be calculated. She progresses to the edge of the nearest pier and squeezes her eyes as the Sunday nears the Puget Sound.

A voicelessness, in veneration: "The sunset … it looks so real."

Hours pass. Myra stands, and the Easter full synodic month hovers, out of focus. For a second, she sees crevices and cracks on the moon's surface, but her vision becomes hazy. She rubs her eyes and looks, harder, craning her cervix a little. Myra sees the like details once again, but beyond that, a shudder. A squint, and the satellite is nothing more than a whitish white roundness. Whatever sort of bug, she thinks. Focus, Myra, focus. Eyes widen; pupils lucubrate. Now that the moon aggregative is securely in situ, she can almost find the textures of the cinereal terrain.

Her present moment of clarity, she knows, leave only last a few seconds longer than the previous insight, so she scans quickly for signs of a moonquake. She does not move, even with the systoles, even with her knockout need to push through. A superior conjunction forms between the worldly concern, Myra and the moon.

Birth the anomaly.

She thinks if she stares long enough the Moon volition come for good, and the camera view testament zoom in, onward toward space, into the shadowed expanse. There, with her silvered arms, she will accommodate the moon together and cease its rumbling. As if in a pause reset eternal, Myra stands, gazing, waiting for the moon to come into center.

Jennifer Estaris is a author and game designer. She has not had a electronic computer or internet connection at home for the last five months (and counting).

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/myra-comes-into-focus/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/myra-comes-into-focus/

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