Stacy .5371a,

by Kyle and Jane


"Do you want love, do you want pain? Are you in the game?"


The music warbles just slightly in the background. "This music sucks. Why are you listening to classical? Put on something newer, shite." says Kay... who else?

No one's quite sure why we keep Kay around. He is not a nice person, and worse, a complainer of the epic kind. My personal belief is that it's to keep us in check when we go out for readers; he somehow always gets them, despite his personality. Or perhaps because of it. He decides to generously grace us with all of his charm today as we idly cruise around for everything that Mars has to offer.

A little Beetle skitters across the road. "Hit it, hit it!" cries Kay, and the automated driver wisely disregards him, of course. The insect life here is what keeps Mars hospitable, constantly terraforming it, breaking down the rusty crust into a deep brown, nutrient-laden topsoil. Not to mention it's technically illegal to kill the fauna on Mars. But in any case, Kay is starting to annoy me. "Calm down, Kay. Dude, we may have readers. Don't embarrass yourself."

"Shut up, Stacy. Nobody cares about readers anymore. And besides, I have character." He puts a little emphasis on it to try to impress me. It doesn't work.

"The readers care. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for them."

"Hmph. Perhaps. Or perhaps we would be, but without anyone to look at us? And that's what you fear, isn't it, Stacy? You egotistical slitbrain."

That's more or less the most offensive thing he could possibly say to me. As you read this, you might want to compare it to calling someone a cunt, I suppose. So I hit him on the ear - the only place I can really reach from the back of the car, and laugh when he grabs the side of his head.

"Slitbrain," he repeats under his breath. The rest of the trip somehow passes without incident, despite his best efforts. Kay manages to calm down, and we turn back, both happy with our respective purchases.

Mars has essentially become a huge, open market. When Earth finally meets alien life, no one will ever imagine how incredibly...I dunno. Helpful they turn out to be. They give us technology, new food, and a refreshed sense of wonder and place in the universe. Once we meet the aliens we now call the Chatters (because they talk a lot but don't say very much), they will introduce us to a whole array of other species that they'd found on their journeying. Each one seems nicer than the last, and now Earth, the entire planet, is home to many other alien species and prospering like never before.

Naturally, some people will (and still do) hate that. There are xenophobes and the converse, xenophiles. There are those who support the Chatters in their expansion efforts because every world the aliens touch means another chance for humanity to expand, too; there are Antiexpansionists, who feel that we need to strike out on our own. But, as is the case with things in your own world, most people just don't care.

They take advantage of the benefits and stick their noses only into their own books. Some occasionally venture into others, but usually you do that when you're young and daring. Reading others' books can get you into a lot of trouble if the books are good enough. Isn't that how it always is? Good things always come at a price.

My name is Stacy .5371a. That means there are some 50,000 other people named Stacy in the Galactic Systems Registry. The 'a' stands for the planet I'm from - in this case, Adiron. Adiron will become the first exoplanet to be inhabited by humans full-time; Mars isn't settled until much later, until after we meet the Chatters and they give us the terraformers. Adiron is a beautiful, Earth-like planet with conifers and beautiful flowers, and with lakes and rivers and oceans. It's seated snuggly close to the next star over. You'll find it, some day.

On second thought, I think I do know why we keep Kay around: readers always love having someone to hate - don't you? The worst kind of addiction: without someone to hate, it's impossible to really get into a story, and it gets harder to associate with the other characters, too. Guess that's why we have an introspective one like myself, also, not to mention the others.

I get a tick in my analyzer, which is a common way to say we have a long-time reader who thinks it's fine to be recognized by us. I let the name slip across the ticker tape along the bottom of my glasses. "Ahh, good. Thanks, Terry. Good to see you again. Been a while, everything okay?"

Terry eagerly responds. "Hey, Stacy. Yeah, things are fine, just busy at work. How's the gang today?

Still battling the minions of the Forest Planet?"

"No, not today. We finished that as quickly as we could. It was tedious. We decided to just go shopping on Mars today to let people see us being relatively mundane. Gotta have some development through normalcy, right? I did pick up some beautiful Greenbark, though."

"Arr, noice." Terry has kind of an accent - I think it's quite cute. He's from Earth, but of an older generation. His storygram shows him as being in his late 50s, kinda rough-looking, but he still has very kind eyes. I love his short-cropped, stark-white beard, especially combined with his jet-black hair. His boobs looked a little bigger this time, and in case I don't notice, he stands straighter so they fill up the bottom of the frame. I guess he rather likes his new augment. Good for him.

"Hey, Terry, you jerk. How are you? Nice tits." Kay says into our ears.

"Thanks, I guess. Kay, no one ever taught you how to share, did they?" I can tell Terry is smiling as he says this, even without looking at him.

Kay just snorts in reply. "Bah. Let's do something interesting. Mars sucked. I want to go to the PP and get more readers." His mind always changes so quickly. First, readers aren't important, now he wants more? What a jackass. A trip to Planet Pleasure might be good though. I've loved every visit there.

Terry chimes in, "Y'all need a lift? I see you're on your way back to Earth already - let me pick you up." It's kind of verboten, a reader interacting so directly with the story, but we know Terry well enough to trust him. And he's helped us out in the past, too. He's like a father with whom you occasionally have a romantic encounter. He has a real life, you have a real life, we all know that. But when you're in a book, you can do whatever you want (sometimes with consequences, depending on who else is reading). If your SigOther is reading too, for example, then you could be screwed. Hells, I've seen people shocked out of their own stories when a reader's SigOther closed the book when they were live.

It's unsettling, seeing their minds wiped from existence. That's why our gang of storytellers all gather in a locked room when we're about to go live, and one of us always stays awake to watch over us, in case someone tries to break into the building. It requires an amount of trust, but we've been a gang for many years and each of us has stood guard at some point, so we implicitly trust each other.

We meet up with Terry after another hour or so. That's how long it takes him to get to the rendezvous.

Kay punches him in the shoulder with a smile; I give him a familiar, happy hug and a kiss on the lips.

Kay just rolls his eyes at us two "crazy" guys.

Terry pays in real money to have our storygrams copied over to the Pleasure Planet. This isn't cheap, but Terry has never seemed to mind, especially when I'm not on guard duty, if I may emote so myself.

That was when the accident happened.

I've had weird things happen to me before, especially when storytelling, but I don't exactly know what's wrong this time. As soon as my copy is made, I feel like I was being sucked out of the story. I blink into the story, see a look of pain on Terry's face, recognize the surroundings as the PP, and then blink out again. My body slowly comes awake and I have the worst headache I think I've ever had. At this point, I don't even know where I am or what had happened. Everything is so confusing. Ugh, my head.

Terry groans out. That was weird. Am I still in the story?

"Kay, you okay?" I said.

There's no response. I look over at his body, and his monitors are flat - not good. My best guess is a power surge, but Daryl is supposed to have been guarding us, which includes such things. I look over at the last body chamber, and Daryl slowly sits up out of it. "What the hell? You were supposed to be guarding us! Idiot! What were you doing!?"

Daryl groans again. Wait, Daryl? Terry?

What the hell?

Daryl stumbles out of his chamber and says, "I was in the story. I'm Terry. I'm sorry, Stacy. I couldn't tell you in person. It looks like we got a power spike. It was pretty bad."

"No slit. How's Kay? Kay? You 'K?" I laughed nervously.

Kay doesn't sit up, and doesn't speak up. Turns out he was mid-copy and whatever hit us killed him, feeding back directly into his brain. At least, that's what the log says now. So much for the bad guy.

Now who's going to make us interesting? Damn you, readers.