The Aethernet Falls

Chapter 1 - Streams

Boros awoke in a wash of blue-green light and a sound like the collective awe-inspired sighs of humanity. He was in his apartment, shutters closed, lights off, laying at a haphazard angle on his diminutive sofa, shorter than he was tall. The stink of vomit mingling with synthetic intoxicant compounds and pure, simple grain alcohol lingered in the air. In his foggy mind he tried to process the external stimuli, coming to the conclusion that he had passed out on the tail end of a bender, the duration of which he had no way of knowing. He didn’t want to know.

His head ached in throbs that came and went with each breath, underscored by staccato stabs of pain with each beat of his pounding heart. He closed his eyes and took a lungful of air, long and slow, the pain following it in, and pushed it out through pursed lips, letting out a low whistle as the pain ebbed away.

When he opened his eyes again, the blue-green light, not dissimilar to the ever present glow of the Aethernet above, was gone. He took another deep breath, and as he let it out the pain seeped away, leaving only a hunger in its wake. Hunger, and the distinct feeling that he had dreamt of something important. Though he could no longer recall.

He rolled thoughtlessly off of the sofa and coughed slightly, covering his mouth with a white-knuckled fist as he fought off a wave of nausea that settled itself as a lump in his throat. He took another deep breath and swallowed what saliva he could muster before heading to the bedroom.

His apartment was, in reality, little more than a two-room hovel, with a shower and toilet set into the corner of the bedroom in a particular way that was branded as a “refresher suite”. The whole thing was set into a massive complex of guaranteed housing for the destitute and unemployed. Yet he was still considered one of the lucky ones; his apartment had actual windows instead of screens the quality of which was dubious, at best.

He made his way to the refresher in the dark thanks to years of familiarity and the small size. He leaned over the toilet and dry heaved a couple of times in an attempt to dislodge whatever had caught in his throat to no avail. He ultimately decided on anti-nausea drugs from the small cabinet set into the wall, popping two in his mouth and letting them dissolve before cupping his hands and filling them with water from the tap to splash on his face. He debated showering, but decided he was unlikely to do anything with the rest of the day.

After giving his armpits a sniff and deciding the odour wasn’t too offensive he left for the kitchen. He tapped on one of the inset drawers, which opened obligingly, and pulled out the tall, narrow bottle of watered-down whisky that he preferred as a hangover cure. Surveying the small corner in the low light, and seeing the state of all the dishes he had left for countless days, he opted to drink straight from the bottle. The water he had added to it did little to relieve the whisky of its bite and he grimaced before swallowing and taking another swig.

Bottle in hand, he tapped on a cabinet that opened to reveal the refrigerator. The stench of weeks old takeaways and a single, mouldy apple overcame him, but the anti-nausea tablets he had taken earlier held firm. Boros swung the door, and it closed silently, on slam-proof hinges.

He took the bottle with him and moved back to the sofa.

“Open shutters.” He managed to say with enough force that the housemaker AI could hear and understand, and the room was slowly encompassed in a blue-green light.

Curious, he thought to himself for a brief moment. He didn’t have the time for another thought when he saw the cause.

The Streams of Aethernet, data being processed simultaneously in a mysterious and rather beautiful form, something both physical and not, were falling to the ground. Slowly, at first, as though they were severed at indeterminate points by an unseen hand and left to drape downwards only to be cut again and fall elegantly to the Earth below.

The sight seemed to cause everything to leave him; his senses, his thoughts, his breath. He dropped the plasticized bottle of whisky. It bounced once and landed on its side, spilling the amber liquid onto the mock-wood flooring.

For the span of a dozen heartbeats Boros stood there, looking out of the window at the scene playing out before him; something nagging at the back of his mind. “Put the feeds on.” He commanded the apartment, and the light of the Aethernet was suddenly washed out by the brightness of the television opposite the window.

“Volume up.” He said as he realized no audio was playing.

“That’s right,” a smarmy looking politician in an expensive looking suit was mid-conversation, “we don’t know what this means. It may very well be a stage in its evolution. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the Streams were, are very beautiful as well as a marvellous visual representation of all the information being processed, but we didn’t build them. We had the Founders build them, and we have no way of knowing what they will do next.”

“I do have to ask,” began a smartly dressed woman, the host, in a low-cut top with what appeared to be a phony smile permanently plastered onto her face, “are they harmful? Should we be worried if one crashes down, say, on the studio?”

“Absolutely not. My team of researchers informs me that the Streams themselves are not harmful, and that in fact, them falling should be of little concern. After all, we send flights through them all the time. Like I said earlier, we have no way of knowing if this is something they were meant to do. The consensus of my affiliates is that this is most likely the next natural step as the quantum nature of the Aethernet evolves. In fact the very nature-“

“Shut it off.” Boros barked and the housemaker obliged. He tried to pace in the small space, narrowly avoiding the pool of whisky that had formed on the floor and tried to pry open the part of his mind that was nagging at him. Trying to figure out why he had woken up with the feeling that he was forgetting something important. Wondering why seeing the Streams falling had triggered that feeling again.

But when he thought about it, he only had the vague impression that he had seen it happen before.

That’s impossible, he thought, almost aloud and he tried to force it down. Boros had always found that if something was worth remembering or figuring out, the answer would come to him eventually. He never was one to dwell. Perhaps that was why the feeling had bothered him.

He tried to forget about it, choosing to worry only if the time came, but it didn’t stop bothering him. And now there was something else niggling in his mind. This something, however could be put into words. He knew exactly what it was, or rather who it was.

He uttered those words in the blue-green glow that penetrated the darkness of his small, two-room apartment: “Oh fuck.” His tone dead flat, “Sasa.”