Permissions — Part 1: The Bus Dream

By Jumpin Jack Rabbit

Everybody wants an origin story until they get one.

That is one of the first lessons you learn when you build something people need. Not something people buy. Not something people like. Need. It stops being a story between friends and becomes a legend. That maybe, if one tries hard enough and gets some luck on their side, they could follow in my footsteps and find the same success.

They want the clean version.

There is no clean version.

What you're getting is a permissions ledger. Every door I opened and who I opened it for and what I told myself it meant. Better that than the polished-up version they put into the news stories about me.

You see, The Zoo was always about permission. Permission to be one's truest self. Permission to try, to change, to grow. Even if that growth made you stranger. Permission was sacrosanct.

The first permission I gave to the Zoo wasn't the code. It was Nate in my bed.

This was before the Zoo. Before Fulldive had a consumer name and before every mayor with a heat-death district wanted to stand in front of a camera and talk about digital resilience like the phrase had not been focus-grouped by a defense contractor with a hardon for human misery. This was when it was just me and Viv and Nate slogging it out in the corpo trenches, three techies in one house with too much history, not enough money, and an arrangement nobody could explain cleanly to HR.

One night, I shot up like I sometimes do. I felt my body. Felt my breath catch. Drones don't breathe.

In the dream, I was over Hsinchu again.

Infrared city. Heat blooming off the roofs. Li-Hsin Road running like a bright wire through the park. Fab 12A quiet inside its perimeter. Fab 8 darker than it should have been because half the engineers had already done the smart thing and run. The wind came in off the strait and the software called it weather, which was cute. To me it was a correction factor.

Two kilometers.

Hold the line.

Intercept anything crossing it.

No exceptions.

Nobody says no exceptions because they believe there will be no exceptions. They say it because they know exactly what exceptions look like. Like, well, the nun bus that drove down Guangfu Road with a sound system strapped to the top. The loudspeaker kept cracking on the word children.

We surrender and are requesting asylum. There are children on board.

My vision narrowed. My body tilted forward into the charge. The drone frame did not have lungs, but my real body did, and somewhere in a room far away it forgot how to use them.

The bus crossed the line.

I woke before the strike, which was rude. The dreams never let you keep the clean part. They only let you keep the choice.

Nate stirred beside me.

"Bad night?"

I sat on the edge of the bed. My hands were fists. My heart was a stupid animal throwing itself against the walls.

"The student journalist or--"

I gripped an imaginary steering wheel and honked once into my fist.

Nate did not laugh. That was one of the things I loved about him. He knew when a joke was a joke and when it was a bandage wrapped around a pressure mine.

"Bus," he said.

"Bus."

He slid over and put a hand on my arm. Not to hold me down. Not to keep me there. Just enough pressure to tell the nervous system one true fact: we aren't there anymore.

"Want me to get Viv?"

He was close enough to know I needed her. Trusted enough to offer. Loved enough that I did not hear the door open.

"She needs her rest. You know sleep is hard for her."

"She'd find spoons for you."

"Nate."

He squeezed my bicep. Warm. Careful. Still there.

"Go to her."

So I did.

Vivian and I shared the next room over. I was the floater in the throuple, partly because I was the hinge between them and partly because my own room was a mess of wire, wetware, failed prototypes, old military cases, and half-finished projects I kept calling temporary. I did not have room for a bed of my own. I had room for mistakes.

I turned on the light.

Viv winced before her eyes opened.

"You know the lights make me see kaleidoscopes in the blind spots, right?"

"Sorry."

I killed the light and stood in the dark, waiting for my eyes to remember how to be eyes. For half a second I expected thermals to kick in.

I am not a drone.

I am a human being.

I am--

"Come here," Viv said.

I found the edge of the bed by feel. She shifted to make room, exactly enough room, because she always knew where the bodies were even when the bodies did not know where they were. I got in beside her. The fan ran. Somewhere outside, the city did its three-AM version of itself.

"Bus again?"

"Bus."

She found my hand under the blanket.

"I'm here."

That is what I am trying to describe. Not the war. Not the tech. The way she always knew where the bodies were, even in the dark, even when the body was mine.