Page 146 of Because I Killed Him
I accept, and the orb begins to pulse, gradually warming in my palm. Then, as it awakens with a flash of light, the bedroom around me changes. A foamy wave coalesces before my eyes, so real I instinctively duck as it rolls over my head and crashes into the closet. From there, color blooms across the ceiling, cobalt blues blending with pearly whites, until it resembles open sky over an endless ocean.
I breathe in deeply, briefly tasting the tang of salt. Aside from a few glitches in the whitecaps, the scene feels real. The orb is reading my Bond, tracking tiny changes in my brain patterns and turning them into projections I can see, hear, and nearly taste. It’s showing me what I’m feeling, every emotion from the smallest hint of anxiety to the largest swell of fury.
Tall, stormy waves break against seaweed-strewn shores, while other parts of me remain shallow and unmoving. There are also gentle ripples, spreading aimlessly without a clear source. But beneath it all, there’s a deeper current, as strong as a riptide, pulling everything in a single direction I can’t see the end of.
I didn’t realize I felt this much, this wildly and fractured.
I stare down at the orb and smile as I realize it’s a Florence Engine. The same device that half the Civilized World lost its mind over when Winston Glass’s company, Cerebrum, unveiled it on a live broadcast filled with shiny smiles and grand, sweeping promises. The Florence Engine was everywhere for a month, even on holographic street billboards near my home. But that was years ago, so long I nearly forgot it existed.
The Florence Engine never went into production. Only a few prototypeswere handed out, and only to those with the right last names, the right blood color, or both. The rest vanished into legal limbo. There’s still a case working its way through the courts, a fierce fight over patents and profits, but above all, legacy. What most people don’t realize, or maybe choose to ignore, is that the inventor of the Florence Engine wasn’t Winston Glass.
It was his son.
I use the Florence Engine late into the night and again the next day, right after class. I close the door, draw the drapes, sit on the floor, and let the orb read me.
It’s incredible, almost frightening, how the device reaches into me, shaping feelings into form and translating whatever is tangled inside into light, color, and sound. Half the time, I don’t even realize what I’m feeling until I see the images projected in front of me, from a garden blooming in the dark to a crack of lightning across the ceiling. It’s beautiful. Hypnotic. I can’t stop using it. And all I can think, with a dull, painful certainty, is how much the Florence Engine would’ve helped back when I was still allowed to fence. I could’ve trained with it, mapped the terrain of my mind, and learned to recognize and redirect my anger before it overtook me. That’s what Edmund did, and it’s what he wants for me, too.
I use the Florence Engine every night while training with my fencing stick until midway through the week, when Dickie bursts my self-made cocoon with a text:
“Highball time, broad.”
I sigh as I cling to the final flickers of sunset swirling around me, flame-orange and petal-pink, still warm with emotion. The last thing I want to do is play cards. But I promised. So I stash the Florence Engine in my pocket.
Dickie and I stay in our own suites while we play, connected through our Bonds. Dickie lounges on his sofa like a spoiled cat, half-buried in ambiguous electronic devices and tangled wires. He’s wearing an orange brocade robe, sipping chocolate milk through a glass straw, and working through a tiered tray of truffles and sugar-filled pastries as he explains the rules.
The game is impossible.
“Wait. How did my last four cards un-play themselves?” I snap, staring dizzily at the spinning virtual table.
“You triggered a recursion without resolving the anchor condition,” Dickie says, as if that explains anything.
“What?”
He sighs, slaps down a card, and the table resets to round three. Half my deck is missing, and the other half is made up of cards I’ve never seen before. “You’ve got to think in cycles, broad. Think recursively. It’s not a staircase; it’s a spiral.”
“That means nothing to me.”
Dickie leans back, clucking his tongue. “Blazes, you’re even worse at this than Jack. And Jack once tried to play a Highball with a void hand. Nearly broke causality. We had to reset the whole table and apologize to the AI.”
“Just calling me stupid would’ve been simpler than all that,” I mutter as Dickie throws down another card.
The virtual table flashes, reshuffling two timelines and collapsing my whole strategy. My head spins.
“This is what you do for fun?”
“This is how Oranges relax. It’s like a foot massage for the brain.”
“Right now, my foot might as well be my brain.”
I groan and slap down a wildcard. It hisses, then explodes into a cloud of smoke. The table resets, and suddenly it’s round six. Two of my cards have torn themselves in half. Dickie, meanwhile, has already played three moves ahead.
Watching him, I finally understand why Oranges scare people and why most don’t bother learning to fence. Dickie doesn’t need to throw up fists; he just throws down a card, reroutes time, and grins while your brain leaks out of your ears.
“You in, or are you going to let the recursion eat your anchor card?” he asks sweetly.
“I’m trying,” I huff.
“Try harder. This is the tutorial.”
