Starving: Chapter One
It was raining that day, the dark clouds hung over the glowing city, reflecting the hovering neon lights with that hum long ago thought to be the voice of heavenly angels. That sound is all too common now. The newest model of those hycycles your mom would hate zoomed through the otherwise empty air. It was a rain-check day, very pointedly named, so everyone was snuggled in bed at home, watching their business meetings or the lightning speed city chat or the newest form of entertainment, species-hopping. It was picking up speed, but since no one knew yet whether it would be the happy or nasty kind of popular, the/;*y experienced the spectacle vicariously on their holomonitors, watching each body part transformed in a painless surgery, replacing scales with feathers or skin for fur. Everyone was busy online. Well, everyone but that forsaken hycyclist.
If you were really looking for it, though honestly you’d need the 20/20 vision only hindsight provides, you’d see between the tall, sleek, buildings with those fancy new light walls that they play adds on for the newest pop pill or hovercar or sustenance delivery or the latest tragic news, you would find a building slightly taller than all the others, irritating enough to make you stare crossly and wonder what babbling buffoon built it. Look closer, though you’d really need a fearsome critic’s eye, and you would find something even more disturbing. Among all the millions of windows, one is slightly darker than the others. You’d really be wanting to write a scathing review now, as a fearsome critic does, but your curiosity would reason you into writing the review right after taking a closer look at that window. You would see the reason for the slight darkness, with your microscope eyes; the window was triple-paned, the colored window light that usually you could see from both sides of the building was nothing more than a facade, and your critic’s curiosity would bring you to find a way inside.
Now, usually you might go inside and submit an application to visit the room of your choice, or even tap the window, which would reveal its contents to you if unoccupied. But this time, your critical mind would warn you of something nefarious. No one who knows the secret of this building can find out you know without the consequence of, at the worst, your sudden and unexplained disappearance. In order to get in, you reason, you'll either need the self-preservation of a stick of dynamite and break through the window, which, as a critic, you wouldn’t find a viable option, or you’d need to be unimaginably small. Well, I say unimaginable, but I’m being purely hyperbolic. You’d simply need to be the size of an atom. Once that size, you would sneak through the cracks between the glass and find yourself the perfect size for observing the inside of the room.
Then, what you’d find is what at first you would think was a bundle of blankets, but it would become quite obvious after your critic’s glance that it was a creature, you might even say a human sized one, if you’re a critic with good spatial reasoning.
Suddenly, a beeping began, one you’d have never heard before, having only grown up with the soft, angelic humming of machinery and music to alert you of the time. It was a harsh and cruel sound that would bite your ears and make you grit your teeth.
You would have seen the creature stir from under the blankets, emerging with an awkward stretch, bending around in the blankets until a purple, human shaped arm emerged, covered in long, pulsing wires, followed by two purple and human shaped legs. A human shaped purple head with a mop of green hair emerges last from the blankets, looking tired and a bit cranky. His face was rather relaxed for the obnoxious sound in the room. Well, all relaxed but his crystal blue eyes, which looked steadily out the window. The creature wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and slithered sleepily out of bed, walking towards the source of the hideous beeping he didn’t seem bothered by: a rectangular, metal box covered in long, slithering wires and nobby, blinking lights. With a long, bony, purple finger, he pushed one of the buttons on the strange screeching monster, and the horrible noise stopped.
The purple creature that was almost human stretched up tall, the blanket slopping off of him onto the floor, revealing his thin body covered only in a loose, brown hospital gown. He continued to gaze, unblinking, out the window, which displayed a sunny sky filled with hypercars and hycycles and hoverbuses. If you’d known him, you would’ve known how closely he was paying attention to that window, searching for the faintest crack, the simplest flaw. He knew each scene repeated so infrequently it would be impossible to find a loop. He’d tried. But a way to see what was really outside; that’s what kept him looking out that window all day. Listening. Waiting. If you’d been there, with your critics eyes, looking out that window, you would have seen it, too. In that moment, the tiniest pixel flickered a dark gray, just for a moment. Gray meant rain, and rain meant freedom, for the whole city would be asleep. He’d listened to and watched enough rainy days to know.
The purple creature did not hesitate but for a moment to look back at a withered pictograph of two young, purple children, one of them vaguely resembling him, locked in a friendly embrace. His eyes hadn’t found that picture since the horrible day Teya was taken. His eyes shook at the memory.
Many stories below, in the breakroom, two guards dressed in plastic, shining armor were making small talk about the ease of their job. They hadn’t even seen the treasure they were protecting, much less seen anyone try to steal it. They figured no one even knew about such a thing. They were laughing about the idea that some lone thief might wander in, unawares of the hundreds of guards on each floor of the building.
Their laughter bubbled over when the alarm sounded, a horrendous beeping that clawed at the ears. They could barely stand up and start protocol, they were doubled over so far.
They laughed all the way up the elevator and to the treasure room, laughing as they unlocked the doors and stepped inside.
Then the laughter stopped. Whatever had set off the alarm had not only made off with the “treasure”, leaving only a pile of cords dripping what they assumed in the moment was a sterilizing and cleansing fluid, but had left a gaping hole, the guards said it looked like bite marks on the bullet proof glass wall which now had a nice view of the dark, rainy day.
