Lyra Weaver
Lyra stared blankly at the doorway of her room for several seconds, spooling down the content streams in her vision. She thought she heard a voice from outside her room. She blinked, turning her body toward the empty space. “What?” she mumbled to herself, voice quietly carrying through the silence.
Her room was a sanctuary, a private space filled with floor-to-ceiling stacks of cold data storage lining most of one wall. She was alone, no parents nor roommates to interrupt her or offer unsolicited advice.
She shook her head, her thoughts returning to the new program at the Academy. She wasn't famous, didn't even have a thousand subscribers. But they weren't looking for famous people, they were looking for people who had been doing memory casting since before the Boundary was turned on. It was not clear to Lyra yet why this mattered. There were very few people left alive who lived before The Boundary, and of them she was probably one of the only dozen or so individuals who recorded the entire time.
Lyra sighed, her gaze falling on her data towers. The rows and rows of them lining her walls. She knew her content was garbage, but she had so much of it recorded. Lyra had been doing this for a long time. Was it really worth trading her life's memory to the Academy for training and allies though? Did she even have a shot?
A sudden thought made her groan loudly. She would have to pay an administrative fee to have her application expedited and put into the current pool. Otherwise she would be waiting yet another year. It felt like a bribe, and she didn't like it. But she also knew the odds of stopping Thomas without help were slim, and it felt like time was running out.
Her Loopback recorder clicked and notified her that one of her data stores had filled up and she was now down to just a single empty drive. The memory of her internal debate blinked and the system asked if she wanted to commit the newly filled block to cold storage. She nodded, triggering her user agent to go ahead and carry out the task of compressing and storing her memories. They would later get spooled out into one of her projections and serve as content for her subscribers after she had scrubbed any private details.
She closed her eyes and placed both palms over them to block out all the light. She needed to mentally prepare for this, to figure out how to navigate this new opportunity.
Lyra sat there in the darkness of her palms, memories running rampant through her mind. James holding her hand tightly, both of them covered in blood from the blade she drove into his chest. His words and gaze piercing through the moonlit night of The Boundary. "I guess I'm going back to hell," he said. Her blood ran cold. She knew in a few moments he would be sent back to Collu-Ku and the years would begin slipping away. "James, I'm so sorry. I'll come find you when I make it out," she said quickly. "Stop- don't apologize. None of this is your fault," he said. "I'll figure out where Evelyn went. You kill that bastard." She couldn't stop herself from crying. Lyra started to reply but her words fell on dead ears. The darkness of the alleyway closed in around her, waiting for her to leave so that it could take stewardship of her friend's body. His mind was now waking up outside The Boundary. How long had it been already since he died in front of Lyra? A week? She was losing precious time with every passing minute.
A wave of panic rolled over Lyra and she opened her eyes, returning to her room. Her mind reeled with derealization as she quickly grasped for stable ground. "You're awake, you're still Lyra," she said to herself. The impending feeling of doom which hung over her head was rearing its ugly head; telling her that tomorrow has come. A tomorrow with no one else but her. Every human withered away, a demon-haunted world full of machines who all mimick the souls of her friends and loved ones. Puppet string people, dolls all dancing to the same delusional signals in a masquerade of humans. The tomorrow she fears was already long past.
With tired eyes, she stared at what appears to be a still-frame video feed. It's a drone deep in The Boundary with a thousand times zoom lens keeping Thomas in its sight and feeding the video back all the way to Collu-Ku. He was currently in the middle of setting his left foot down, a position he'd been standing in for the last week. A few seconds for Dr. Old were endless ages for Lyra now.
Lyra began to pace around her room, bargaining with herself to just give up. The idea of going back into The Boundary made her feel sick. Lyra stopped at her apartment window and placed a hand on it. The cool glass matched the feeling of ice in her chest.
She had no allies left, not even herself. Lyra drifted so far through time that her own copy in the Outer Mind now worked against her. James was tied up with confronting the Other Lyra, at least what was left of James after a million years in the machine. She could barely stand to face him, let alone talk to him, with how much guilt she carried.
Even if there was somebody willing to go back in, could she in good conscience ask anyone to do that? To throw away everything, even their own self? Who would be insane enough to do such a thing and still be trusted to kill Thomas Old?
"You will find them, Lyra. Just keep preparing; it's all you can do," she said out loud to herself. Lyra sulked away from the window slowly to find something to drink while she worked on her application to the Academy. Going there was a shot in the dark, but that was all she had right now.
