There were miles and miles of giant wet pink wire around me, stretching as far as my vision could go. They vibrated and hummed and sputtered. Some of them were entangled in each other; others ran in parallel.
I was in a long vehicle, watching them as I zoomed along in some unknown world. Wires splattered against the window, leaving dribbling trails of clear slime wherever they landed.
Was I dead? I might’ve been dead, actually. I couldn’t remember how I got here, wherever here was. And where was Penny, anyways?
The vehicle continued to lurch onward. There were a lot of uneven bumps in the road. Even the ground itself was made of large slippery pink wire.
I staggered to the front of the vehicle, but there was no driver to be found anywhere. Apparently, this was also some kind of autonomous bus. It was similar to the ones I’d taken Downhill.
“Hello,” I screeched. “Is anyone here?”
“Hello, Helga,” a hidden voice intoned. What the hell? It was my own voice. “Welcome to Helga City. First stop: Marietta’s birth.”
“I’m not getting off here,” I told it sternly. Myself. Marietta. Whoever it was. “I need to go back.”
The bus did not listen to me. Instead, the doors swung open. Giant pink wires immediately surged in, trying to throttle me. I kicked them away with my platform boots. There were voices coming from the wires. They were emitting images too.
I saw myself and Father and Penny in the lab. Penny’s face was bemused, Father’s was disappointed. I did not want to get off here. I knew if I stepped outside, hostile pink wires would engulf me.
“We’re experiencing a little turbulence,” the automated voice told me cheerfully. “Please watch your step.”
Thankfully, the doors closed soon after they swung open. The bus continued on, and the images and sounds from before grew distant. I stomped up and down the aisle, peering out the windows at a world made of wire.
I was the only one here. A voice that sounded exactly like my own recounted my whole life to me. The wet wires pulled the bus along, sometimes quietly, sometimes not.
I had no power to skip any of the stops. The driver seemed like it was either unable to hear me or maybe just didn’t care what I wanted. I was forced to see it all: all the terrible lowlights and highlights of my own life, while the pink wires sputtered or shrieked, trying to claw their way inside.
I pushed away wet wires at the Meeting Clyde stop. God, this was so embarrassing. It was like I was there all over again. I could taste blackberries between my teeth. I could smell the rain and cloves. My own damn stomach fluttered traitorously.
“Keep going,” I shouted. “I’ve had enough.”
Wires would sometimes try to drag the whole bus to a halt. They pulled at the tires beneath me, buzzing with clear animosity. I knew I was safe as long as I stayed inside. If I ever got off this damn bus, I might never escape Helga City.
Yet sometimes, the ride wasn’t so bad.
I liked the music for the most part. I could feel the vibrations from the pink wire coursing through me. I found myself dancing along to Downhill bands. Bands beyond Amaris City too—off-island sounds that transported me to places I’d never reached before.
I was glad that I’d experienced so much music in my life, at least. Music, and zines, and even that romance movie I’d watched in the Entertainment District all got little narrations from the unseen driver.
People, places, food, music … It was all part of the wet wire. It was all part of me.
The best parts were always with Penny. I saw and heard snippets of her throughout most of the stops. I saw Penny’s black bag, which had been a portal into a different life than the one Father intended for me. I remembered crashing on Penny’s couch the night after I’d listlessly taken the Downhill shuttle. I saw Penny telling me I was great just the way I was. Penny and I with matching blackberry tattoos. I could feel it, even from inside this weird bus, the needle grazing against my skin.
She was someone who’d made a big mark on me from the very beginning. Even from Helga City, which was god knows where, and I hoped that I’d made one on her too.
I wanted her to like me so badly.
The stops that featured Anna ranged quite a bit. There were some big initial speed bumps. But over the course of the ride, I could tell that our relationship was transforming. Away from Clyde, we might’ve even become good friends. I could see us going to shows together. There were still things I wanted to ask her too, like where she got her floral perfume from.
The bus kept going in loops. I was getting sick of seeing myself being reborn. And every time we made a stop that had to do with Hugo, an incredible amount of guilt would wash over me.
“I tried my best,” I shouted at the unknown driver. Maybe I was in hell. “I never took away his free will, at least. Doesn’t that count for something? Hello?”
Pink wires wound around the bus, shuddering wildly against the glass. Some of them were definitely trying to break in. Fending them off was getting harder and harder with each loop around Helga City that I took.
I was getting carsick, but the driver wouldn’t slow down. I waved and shouted and pleaded, and it got me nowhere.
My life continued to flash before my eyes.
“LET ME OFF!” I screamed. “Is this because I sometimes stole from tourists? Is this purgatory or what?”
In the scope of the larger world, my crimes didn’t seem so awful. But in Helga City, they were on full display. Maybe this wasn’t even hell, but a liminal place. A ride that would never end, never change.
“What if I helped you?” I pleaded, although I wasn’t quite sure who or what I was talking to. “Could I get off this bus, then?”
The invisible Helga voice ignored me. She droned on about the different stops I’d already visited. They’d gone from overly familiar to sickeningly close. The wires scrapped against the sides of the vehicle, and pain shot through my head. The machine went on and on.
Maybe I was trapped in a maze. Every maze had an exit, though, didn’t it?
I searched through the bus. I looked under the seats and in the roof for an emergency exit. All I found was some loose change in the cushions and a blackberry lollipop, which I immediately ate.
It tasted like nothing.
“This sucks,” I whined. Maybe it was time for me to enter pleading-baby mode as a new strategy. “Can you take me somewhere else for once?”
But the bus only looped back to the same places, over and over. It was everything I hated and everything I loved all tangled together.
Around the seventeenth loop, something shifted in me.
Because I now remembered what had happened, back at the lab. When the bus stopped at the very end of Helga City, I got off. I stepped into the wet wire and saw Father touching the back of my neck.
He’d unplugged me.
My own Father had fucking unplugged me.
It was because he was allied with the Institute over me. The Institute was the glaring problem—it had negatively impacted my relationship with Father, Penny’s work life, and the entire island. Sure, I’d destroyed Institute equipment in a fit of rage, but the Institute itself seemed unshakable. It would simply replace the worn-out and destroyed parts with new objects. New people and new machines to burn through and use up, Uphill and Downhill alike. The Institute had even changed the natural world: the ravens and the strange fish coming up from the Pacific. There was no stopping the churn of the system, the relentless exploitation of everything and everyone.
“Fuck you!” I screamed. I punched a huge pink wire and immediately, new pain shot up both my wrist and my head. I stomped on the wire and doubled over. I was only hurting myself by staying here, trapped inside my own head.
Because that was exactly what was happening. I was stuck in some non-physical limbo due to my Cog being jostled, and now I hovered somewhere between life and death. And every second I stayed, increasingly overpowered by my own thrashing pink wires, I was moving closer to death.
I had to find a way out. Fast.
“Last call for Helga City,” the hidden speakers intoned.
Reluctantly, I got back on the bus, and we swerved right back to the first stop: Marietta’s birth.
I swore and kicked and screamed. I pleaded. I cried. But the bus did not give a shit about my feelings. The wires were only getting more unwieldy. A few more loops of this, and I’d never get out of here.
Some of the windows had formed cracks in them. I swear, the wires were somehow even tampering with the driver. The voice over the speakers slurred. There was static coming through.
If I ever got out, I wouldn’t repeat my past mistakes. If I ever got out, I would destroy more than Institute property. I would aim bigger.
I crawled up to the front of the bus on all fours. Sweat slicked my back. My face felt so warm and feverish. This was beyond carsickness.
I was dying.
I was dying—and it was my own Father’s fault.
“Let … me … off,” I wheezed. “Marietta, please.”
“I’m Helga,” the voice informed me. “I’m you.”
“If you’re me, then why are you being so shitty,” I managed to sputter. The wires had finally broken through the windows. One of them had even wrapped itself around my ankle. It pulled and tugged, but I still wouldn’t give in.
“Helga City will self-destruct soon,” the Helga voice told me cheerfully. “As you can see, this will be the final stop.”
This couldn’t be it, dammit. I’d tried my very best to keep going. But it was getting hard to ignore the wires buzzing around me. The bus was no longer moving either. It was completely stuck in wires.
“What am I supposed to do?” I mumbled. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”
No one answered. The wires had probably cut into her voice. There was no one here but me.
I could feel a wire slithering up my leg like some kind of unhinged murder python. I pulled myself forward, wincing with sheer effort. The wires were coming up through the back of the bus, but at least the front was safe. For now.
My Cog was starting to churn a new plan into motion. This was my last option; this was the only option I had. If I ever got out of here, I’d have more than a few words for Father.
I pulled myself into the front of the bus, shaking my leg free of the malignant wire. They were thrashing wildly against the roof. The wheels had been gripped by them. A few more minutes, and I’d be done for. They’d eat me up, swallow me whole.
There was way too much I wanted to do to let that happen.
It was time for me to take control of the bus—to hack it if I had to, or mod it into something better. Me and the machine—or whatever this metaphysical thing was—didn’t have to work against each other: We could work together to find a new route.
“Come on, Helga,” I said, gritting my teeth. “We can do this. Let’s go.”
I visualized the exit, the last place I was in before I ended up here. I knew I could get to the Cog Lab if I concentrated hard enough and recreated it. I could get back to Penny, who was still waiting for me.
It was coming back: the sound of her voice, her jangly bracelets, the jittery way she’d dealt with the various stresses of her life. Damn, I had to help her quit smoking. I couldn’t get stuck here.
And so the bus rocketed off at full speed, toward the bright lights ahead.