Inhabited - chapter 22 (with images) (Patreon)

The white-out lets her go with a violent shove.

It doesn't fade. It drops her. The sensory vacuum shatters and the physical world returns like a collapsed ceiling, and what it lands on is pain, a heavy anchored weight settled in the bowl of her pelvis as though someone poured hot iron in there while she was somewhere else and left it to cool.

She is lying on her side. The sheets are tangled around her legs.

She tries to straighten them. The iron shifts. A dragging radiates down into the tops of her thighs and she stops moving completely, just breathes through her mouth, waiting for her nervous system to renegotiate.

It doesn't.

Her name arrives in the dark.

Fatima Kardar. Twenty-nine. Crown Heights.

Graphic designer.

Endometriosis.

The word arrives small for what it is. The condition is chronic, poorly managed, unpredictable in a way that makes planning anything feel like a joke someone keeps telling. Some days are functional. Some days are not. Today is not.

The bedroom is dark. The radiator hasn't kicked on yet and the air against her shoulder is cold enough to feel through the sheet. From outside, a single car going down Eastern Parkway, then nothing. The clock on the nightstand reads 4:17. The halo headset is beside it where she left it, probably not three hours ago. Her hand finds it in the dark before her eyes open all the way.

She pushes herself onto her elbows. The abdominal muscles engage and she hisses through her teeth, sharp enough that she has to stop and wait it out, eyes shut, jaw clenched. She rolls slowly toward the edge of the mattress, using her arms to take the weight, keeping her core as slack as she can.

Her bare feet hit the floorboards.

She stands.

The pain becomes clearer when she's vertical. It pulls downward, a heavy dragging that dictates the angle of her spine. She can't stand straight, not today. She shuffles toward the bathroom in a slow walk that's really a controlled drift, heels barely leaving the floor.

The bathroom tile is cold. She doesn't bother with the overhead light. The window above the toilet is black.

She turns on the small lamp by the sink. The face in the mirror is olive-skinned. Dark hair, thick and unwashed, matted on one side from the pillow. Deep bruised shadows under the eyes. She looks twenty-nine and exhausted in a way that belongs to someone older, the deep tiredness of a body that is constantly spending reserves just to hold its ground.

She opens the drawer beside the sink. Fatima's endo drawer. The label only makes sense now that she's standing here looking at it. Mefenamic acid. Naproxen. A blister pack of something stronger, half-empty, that came from a doctor three years ago and has been rationed ever since because getting more meant another appointment, another explanation, another round of being looked at like the severity was an exaggeration. She takes the mefenamic because it's the only one that does anything and there are nine left.

She swallows them dry. It won't touch the core of it. That's not what mefenamic does. But it's something to have done.

She goes out to the living area.

Small apartment. Kitchenette along one wall. A sofa with a heating pad coiled on the cushion like a sleeping animal. And in the corner, taking up more floor space than anything else in the room, the desk. Two large curved monitors, a drafting tablet, and the centerpiece of the whole setup: a high-end professional NovaSphere rig on its stand, the visor cradled in foam, the halo array laid out beside it. The kind of rig she could not have afforded if it weren't her livelihood. It hums faintly even now, the standby light a steady blue.

She walks over to it.

The thought of getting dressed, of forcing a waistband over anything, sits in her stomach alongside the mefenamic. She'll have to, eventually. Brigid. But not yet. Fatima has a client file open from yesterday. She can get an hour in before she has to deal with the pants problem.

She pulls a ThermaCare patch from the box on the desk corner. Maybe four left in the box. She peels the backing and presses the adhesive to the inside of her underwear waistband, the heat building against her stomach. Direct skin would burn. It takes thirty seconds to start warming. By the time she's out on the street it will be properly hot. Not enough, but a direction.

She sits in the ergonomic chair and adjusts the lumbar support, tilting it forward until the pressure shifts off her tailbone. There is no angle that is comfortable. There is an angle that is better than the others.

She fits the halo over her temples. The hair is a problem. She pulls it up high in a loose pile before putting the rig on, just to get the band to sit right, and the motion pulls something in her shoulder from where she slept wrong. She gets it secured. She pulls the visor down.

By the time she settles, the sun has started to rise through the window across from the desk. Hours yet before the noon check-in.

The transition is a physical shock.

The white ring expands, the hardware pulses against her temples, and then the physical body simply stops registering.

She doesn't open the client file. Not yet.

She runs her hands down the front of her own body. Slow. Watching them go. The avatar's hands are Fatima's hands, the long fingers, the unpolished nails, but in here they move without consequence, without protective stiffness in the wrist, without the usual recoil from any contact near the lower abdomen. They go down across the sternum, the curve of the breasts under the loose shirt, past the ribs. They settle low on the stomach where, out there, the iron is still cooling, where, out there, she could not bear her own weight. There is nothing here. Just warmth. Just skin. The hands continue down past the hips, along the front of the thighs, and her knees bend slightly and she rolls her pelvis forward, just to feel it move freely, just to feel the joint do what it was built to do, and a low pleased sound comes up out of her throat without warning.

She walks a small circle in the studio. The simulated sunlight is warm on her shoulders. She lifts the hem of the shirt, just to look at her own stomach, the smooth olive skin. She runs her fingertips across the place where, in the physical body, the pain is the thickest.

There is nothing there. Just the soft familiar shape of herself. She presses, harder than she would dare press out there, and her body absorbs it easily. She puts both her hands flat against her stomach and stands there breathing. Her hands move up, over the ribs, and rest briefly against the sides of her own breasts through the shirt, the fabric soft and warm, and the body registers the touch as pure pleasure with no pain attached. She could stand here all morning. She could lie down on the floor of this digital loft and just be in this body for hours, hands wherever they wanted to be, the warmth running everywhere it was allowed to run.

The brief is open in a window she hasn't materialized yet. The client’s model is due. The check-in with Brigid is at noon. Her arms come down. She steps back from the windows. The wanting doesn't go away exactly, it just relocates, settles into the background, a low warmth she's still carrying. She sets her hands on the drafting table.

She opens the client file.

A three-dimensional branding model materializes in front of her. She steps into it. Fatima's professional reflexes come up through her hands and she pulls vector lines, adjusts the lighting parameters, rotates the typography until it feels right. The work is absorbing in a way that's different from thinking. More like arranging, sorting laundry by feel. An hour passes. Maybe two.

A chime sounds in the studio.

A text window floats open near the window. Sofia. Fatima’s best friend.

Hey. I'm in the neighborhood tomorrow afternoon. Want to go out for coffee? Would love to catch up.

She reads it twice. The font is crisp against the simulated ocean.

Fatima would deflect. The instinct comes up the way the layout of the apartment comes up, the way she knows which subway to take. Fatima would say she was too sick, or too busy, or offer to meet in a VR lounge instead, where the coffee shop would be rendered perfectly and neither of them would have to sit in an actual metal chair.

She raises her hand to type the lie.

She doesn't.

She looks at the message and at the simulated ocean and at the way the light in here doesn't change because it never has to.

I have client meetings until noon. But I'll be around after 2. Call me tomorrow and we'll figure it out.

She sends it. The window vanishes.

She checks the time overlay. Eleven-fifteen.

She looks around the sunlit studio. She doesn't want to leave. The dread of it is heavy and exact, not abstract, just the knowledge of what's waiting on the other side of the disconnect. She hits the button anyway.

The white-out. The dark.

She pulls the halo off.

Everything comes back at once, the gravity first, a hard downward slam she wasn't quite ready for even though she knew it was coming. She groans, low and involuntary, and rests her forehead on the edge of the desk for a minute.

She has to get dressed.

She stands slowly, steadies herself on the desk edge, goes to the closet. The sweatpants she slept in are soft enough — drawstring, no elastic band — but the check-in is at noon and showing up to Brigid in yesterday's sleepwear is a thing she can't bring herself to do, not even today. She pulls down a pair of black leggings with a wide flat waistband instead of a tight one, the kind designed to sit low. She pulls them up at first while on the bed, then standing and leaning against the wall, eases them up slowly, holding the fabric away from her stomach with her free hand until she can settle the waistband below the worst of it.

She finds a large sweater in the pile. It falls past her hips. Good.

Socks. The slip-on boots, the ones she doesn't have to bend over to get into.

She goes back to the desk and peels a second ThermaCare from the box, this one for her lower back. Presses it through the sweater fabric, high enough that it won't shift when she sits. She can already feel the first patch warming against her stomach. Two patches is what a bad day gets. Today is a bad day.

She takes the keys from the bowl by the door and leaves the apartment.

The hallway is quiet. The stairs are a negotiation. Step down, pause, shift the weight, step down. The vibration of each heel hitting the worn wood sends a dull ache shooting up through the swollen mass. She takes them one at a time, hand on the railing.

Outside, the cold hits immediately. The wind cuts through the sweater, through the thermal patches, right to the skin. She keeps her arms crossed over her stomach.

The walk to the subway is four blocks. Usually four blocks is nothing. Today it's an endurance event. The pavement is uneven, every slight incline and dropped curb requires the pelvic floor to engage and stabilize and the tissue screams in protest each time, a low hot objection she can't turn off. She walks stiffly, taking small steps. An older woman pulling a grocery cart moves around her without comment.

She reaches the subway entrance. The stairs go down into the dark.

There is no elevator.

She grips the freezing metal handrail. She takes the first step and the jar of her heel on the concrete shoots straight up her leg into the cramping mass above it. She takes a breath. She takes the next step.

Halfway down, a group of teenagers rushes past her laughing, their backpacks swinging. One of them clips her shoulder. The torque catches her off guard and for a second she can't see, just whiteness, both hands on the rail, knuckles colorless. She doesn't shout. She just stands there breathing through her nose until the worst of it settles back down into its usual shape.

Nobody stops. Nobody asks. She is a twenty-nine-year-old woman in a gray sweater. She looks fine.

She makes it to the platform. The 4 train arrives packed. She wedges into a spot near the door and grips the vertical pole while the car lurches forward. Every sway needs a micro-adjustment in her hips, burning through whatever the body managed to accumulate overnight. A man in front of her is playing a game on his phone. She thinks about asking for the seat. She thinks about what it would take to explain why, to this stranger, in this noise, with this body. She holds the pole.

She rides four stops to Franklin. The G is across the platform. She has to walk it, slowly, head down, while a kid with a guitar case rushes past her in the opposite direction. The G is mid-morning empty. She gets a seat and keeps it, the train rattling north through Bedford-Nostrand, Classon, Clinton-Washington. The cramping rebuilds at every deceleration. She watches the dark walls go by. She thinks about how she's going to make it back.

She gets off at Greenpoint Avenue and walks the block and a half east toward Manhattan Avenue. The wind funnels down the side street and pushes her sideways. Brigid's café is on the next block, off the avenue, the converted hardware store with the ghost-lettered signage above the awning. Two steps up to a heavy wood door. She takes them slow, both hands on the cold iron rail.

Inside: narrow and long, the light dimmer than the street, the tables small and the chairs uncushioned. She sees them before she has chosen to. Brigid is at the back, in her usual chair against the wall, staring at her phone. She looks up.

Whatever she is about to say at the assessment, she doesn't say it. Just takes in the olive skin, the dark hair, the careful stiff walk, and closes her mouth.

"Who are you today," she says. Low, under the hiss of the milk steamer. No greeting. The tension around her mouth is visible.

Brigid's eyes go up the body the way Brigid's eyes always do. Reading her. The shoulders draw in slightly under the sweater. She pulls out the wooden chair and sits. The seat is flat hard wood and she should have seen this coming, should have walked in and looked for a booth, should have asked to move, but Brigid has already half-stood to acknowledge her and she can't make it a thing. The impact hits the tailbone and transfers forward. She breathes in through her nose and keeps her face still. The pain is constant throughout. She doesn't mention it. Fatima wouldn't.

"Fatima Kardar," she says. The voice is new to her, slightly husky, tired around the edges. "Graphic designer. Crown Heights."

Brigid pulls a notebook from her pocket and clicks a pen. "Okay. What do we have. Did you get the credential chain from the engineer?"

"I have it."

"The legacy tokens?"

"Yes."

Brigid writes. Her handwriting is jagged, aggressive. "So we have the keys. How do we open the door."

"We use Fatima's machine. She's got a professional rig. I can hit the session archive from it using the credential chain I've assembled."

Brigid looks up. "You're sure."

"I'm sure."

She leans forward, resting her forearms on the table to take some of the weight off her lower back. The coffee shop is noisy. A barista calls out a name. There's a dark stain on the wood near the edge of the table, shaped a little like a crescent moon.

"The token sequence isn't fully closed," she says. She's looking at the crescent stain rather than at Brigid. "If you assemble the tokens across the right access levels you can bypass the main directory authentication." She traces the shape with her thumbnail. "It's about feeding the proxy layer something it expects to see. When the handshake happens, the system is asking for a current admin ping. There's a window where the proxy is absorbing the latency. If I drop the deprecated token sequence into that window — exactly the right millisecond — the system reads it as a legacy project pinging in. Leaves the archive door open."

Brigid watches her.

"It's a hardware-level trick applied to the software," she continues. "Like when you modify a consumer rig to bypass the thermal limiters. You reroute the heat sensor telemetry through a dummy port so the processor doesn't throttle the render speed. You're just lying to the sensor. Same thing. We're just lying to the proxy."

Brigid stops writing.

She looks at Fatima's face for a long moment, the way you look at handwriting in someone else's hand that you suddenly can't read. Whatever she's seeing she doesn't say. Then back down at the notebook.

"Fine," Brigid says. "You execute the bypass. Find Osei's last session log. Find the physical address."

"I'll do it tomorrow."

Brigid caps the pen and slides the notebook into her pocket. She's quiet for a second. When she speaks it comes out flatter than she probably intended. "We are running out of time. I don't know how many more of these bodies. I don't know how much longer I can keep sitting across from people I don't know, looking for someone I do."

The Maren situation is still bleeding. She can hear it.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just get the address."

Brigid stands. She buttons her coat. She doesn't say goodbye. She turns and the bell jingles behind her and she is gone.

She sits at the table alone.

A bus goes past on the street outside, rattling the plate glass.

She has to stand up. She has to walk back to the train. She has to ride south to Crown Heights and climb the four blocks to the apartment.

She places her hands flat on the table. She closes her eyes, takes whatever her body has left, and pushes herself up.