You can almost feel the neon street lights behind you, teasing you with a wild night back where the city is still alive, but your eyes stay focused ahead, on the dark strip: the abandoned sprawl that lies on the way to the new shore.
You’re ready to get away from downtown because lately it seems like you can’t even hear your own thoughts anymore. Maybe when you get to the beach you’ll figure out who or what is blocking you from listening to your inner voice. But then again, maybe not.
All around you, sand and silt infiltrates the parking lots and the ground floors of otherwise sound buildings, stale bogs. The fine mud sticks to the soles of your boots, suctioning the pull of each step.
Small pools of water begin to interrupt your path at an increasing rate. It’s difficult to tell for certain, but they might be releasing faint light. Your eyes are only human, anyway. As you get closer to the shore, whatever hints of brightness you think you might be seeing in the puddles is drowned out by the brilliant intensity you’re here to witness, the view that can wipe everything away, the glowing surf.
The edge is quieter than you remember. Liquids fill the nooks and dips of the land without noise and in no rush. Then, folding over, they recede. In some places the broth mixes, though the colors remain true and somehow resist becoming a dull tar. In another place, a vibrating stream of pink forms a ribbon through electric yellow goop, refusing to assimilate.
The surf seems to both suffer from and be invigorated by a uniform phosphorescence. Likely the remnants of some tritium disaster from not too long ago, not too far away. The countless other isotopes saturating the gulf remain unseen, but you are well aware that the radiation has left real marks on the DNA of the creatures that cling to life below the surface.
A small crab rolls into an old soup can, neon markings on its belly like alien glyphs, its arms seeking something in an uncoordinated way. It’s choking on a thin, glitter-purple sheath of synthetic bacteria. You remember reading in the logs about these bacteria, designed illegally in some basement of the city a decade ago. A desperate bid to help clean up some of the mess. Not exactly a shame, maybe something worse.
Trash floats between broken parking blocks and twisted railing and many items keep their form. You recognize the outlines of beer bottles, a soccer ball and a refrigerator door. All of them painted over in bright streaks of color.
The end of a slow wave carries a newspaper leaf before you and it clings to one of your boots. It’s an antique. The surf works its best magic on paper, fortifying the cellulose with heavy metals and keeping the text and images preserved. It’s a bleeding page advertisement, pristine except for the color. A woman holding a toothbrush smiles up at you with lime green lips, a shock of tangerine hair and electric blue skin.
You realize how shallow your breaths have been up to this point and let the salty breeze enter your lungs with the rapidity its been asking for.
What would your father think of all this? If he were still around.
And that’s it. You feel you have your thoughts back. You exhale and advance into the glowing surf.
Now you’re ankle-deep and you bend over to scoop up a conch shell that’s the size of your fist. You push your hair aside and put it up to your ear.
No hollow wind, no airy breath of the sea. An unnatural silence. Almost like a glitch…
You use a keychain LED to help you to see inside of the conch shell. There’s a wire… something that you might be able to jack into your system.
You pad the outside of your vest with your palm, hoping you’re carrying the right adapter. The last time you jacked into an unknown drive, you fried the adapter and your scanner was left wide open to hackers. You told yourself you’d learned your lesson. But did you really come all the way out here to stop taking risks?
You locate the right adapter under a mess of tangled wires and batteries in your pocket, still in its second-hand plastic bubble re-packaging. You bust it free and use it to plug into the conch shell.
A semi-transparent holographic window projects from inside the conch. The slow, thick waves behind it begin to appear almost volatile through the image.
The screen displays jumbled characters in a garbled list that doesn’t obey clean columns or rows. New text blazes forth, scrolling on its own as though consumed by some need to be seen but it’s much too fast for you to read.
It could be the remnants of a menu from a corrupted drive or maybe it’s something more exotic like dynamic encryption.
It stops and goes dark. Shit.
You check the adapter—it’s not obviously burnt. Still, you hate how you’re always taking unnecessary risks and for what—a random seashell?
Maybe there’s an easier way to find the directory…