thesphererp | Memory share: Max.

You have been here for seven months, nine days and perhaps fifteen hours. You know that, even without looking at the watch for more than a glance. It’s been calm here, quiet and a reprieve from the world back home. The sun on your face feels almost natural, and there’s a suggestion of a warm summer breeze around you. Or maybe it’s just the brush of the wind from the swing that you’re gently pushing, barely guiding the red plastic of it forward. But it’s enough for the little girl who is currently in the swing. She’s six, and at the age when she is decidedly not a baby. It’s a rare day that she actually allows you to do more than to stand behind the swing, not touching it and not doing anything beyond being ready to launch into action in case she tumbles off of it.

She’s not taken a tumble lately, and you’re grateful for that. Of course, the mark on her chin where she fell last time is all healed now, courtesy of the clinic. At home she’d still have the scar. At home she wouldn’t be on the swing in the daylight. All the more reason for you to be grateful that this is the place where you are. “Daddy!” Emmy cries out the word quickly, her off-kilter braids thrown over her shoulder as she looks back at you with a grin and your eyes. Everything else is her mother, but you can’t allow yourself to think of her. If you think of her the tightness in your chest will crawl it’s way up your throat and out of your mouth. You can’t do that to her; she doesn’t need those memories, not when this domed city has become her entire world.

(Not when you have become her entire world, a world you’re not going to allow to be knocked off of it’s foundations simply because you miss her mother.)

“Higher!” It’s an order, and you laugh, a rough sound before your large hands press against the pink of her hoodie, giving her a more forceful nudge. “Don’t push me like a baby!” If she was on the ground there’d be a stomp to go along with those words, because that was the phase that Emmy is in now. She missed it during her terrible twos or threes, but it’s on display now. You laugh again, and push her a little more forcefully when she comes back to you, and her arms move out as if she’s flying along with her laugh.

God you love her laugh, and you know that you would trade anything in the world in order to keep the joy on your little girl’s face, and in her laugh. Nothing would be too much. She’s here and she’s safe and she’s flying. “Look at me, Daddy! Look! Do it again.”

“I can see ya, honeychild.” Your voice is still husky, but it’s less angry, the tension isn’t in it that there is now. Emmy brings out a softness to it, and everyone knows it. Back home, he would have guarded against it, but there’s nothing to worry about here, she’s safe, he’s safe. He can watch her grow up happy and protected.

“Daddy, I’m like an angel, like mommy!” You can feel the pressure in your chest build a little bit more before the sunlight flashes in your eyes. The world glows, but it’s not with the glow of the sun--it’s brighter and more familiar. It’s sharp and metallic and you know where you’ve seen it before. The pressure in your chest is building, fear clawing its way through your veins like a wild animal, like rats trying to escape a fire, like something you’ve only ever experienced once. Once when you held Kira in your arms after they’d gotten to her, after they’d killed her and stole her life…

The world darkens around you after a moment, and you’re still too dazed to see. Too dazed and in pain to do anything other than to just stand there for a moment. Everything is silent other than the ragged static in your ears of your own blood and it’s all you can to do try and force air into starving lungs. But then it happens. Then it happens and the swing just bounces off of your chest. There’s no weight to it, no nothing but a singular warmth that is quickly being stolen from the plastic.

She’s not there.

“Emmy!” The scream that wouldn’t come before comes now, harsh and mixed with a rusted plea. “Emmy!” You stumble forward, your legs not wanting to take the weight of your body. “Emmy!” Her name again, a pattern on your tongue that refuses to become anything but a repeating meme of fear. She’s not there. How long were you blinded? How far could she have gone. The entire playground is in visible sight, there aren’t trees or bushes. You can see the sandbox, the slide and there’s no sign of the bright pink of her hoodie, or her braids or her sunlight smile.

Frantically, you claw at the golden sphere against your ear, pressing it to connect to the network. Your brain is too much of a jumble to try and think the words that would connect you to your daughter, so you need to actually speak them aloud. “Connect me to Emmy Tinder.” You’re praying to everything that you don’t believe in just now, and you’re holding your breath before the computer voice responds to you without emotion.

“Emmy Tinder is not connected to the network.”

That doesn’t make any sense to you. It doesn’t, you’ve talked to her through the network before. She understands the tech better than you do for fuck’s sake. She should be… She should be. Your voice is harsher than before, and more close to what it is now in the future, “Locate Emmy Tinder within the Sphere!”

“Emmy Tinder is not located within the Sphere. Emmy Tinder has been returned home.”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Witnessing this, watching it as if through his own eyes, feels like a huge violation of privacy. The memory leaves a burning ache in his chest. Something wet rolls down his right cheek. That little girl...Rhys has to know what happened to her.

But reaching out with voice or video seems like it would just be an extension of that violation. Text is a little less personal. It'll give Max a bit of his privacy back.]

Hey, Max, I don't mean to pry, but I think you were just broadcasting over the network. You were pushing your daughter on the swing, but she disappeared suddenly. Was she here? How recent was this?

[Max is angry, and his voice is a growl.]

Fuck off. Why the fuck do you care?

[So he's comfortable using audio. That's fine. It's easier.]

Hey, if it was my kid missing, I'd want help finding her. Not...that I have a kid. I dunno, I was just trying to help. You don't want help, that's cool.

She isn't 'missing' [one can hear the airquotes around those words.] I know exactly where the fuck she is. She's fucking home and has been for fucking six god damn years.

...Six years? And the Sphere's kept you here.

[Okay, that's not cool. Even though he knows Max'll be returned to the point he was taken from.]

Home doesn't seem like the best place, judging from your memory, but at least you'll be sent back to the moment you were taken. So really, your daughter isn't alone.

Seven years this fucking glowball has kept me. I just spent most of the first one having my daughter here.

And do you really think she'd recognize someone seven years older, with seven extra years of life here as the same man? I sure the fuck wouldn't.

That's...a long time, yeah. What have you tried to get home, though? There has to be a way to get out.

[Max just laughs, and it's angry and sharp and bitter.]

Oh, why the fuck didn't I think of that in my fucking seven years here?! There's got to be a way out. [His voice drops to a mocking simper.] There's got to be a way out.

Yeah, there isn't until the Sphere decides to send you home. There isn't a god damn fucking thing you can do about it.

[That laugh gives Rhys the chills. And the mocking sure doesn't help.]

Hey, man, I'm just trying to help. You don't have to be an asshole.

You're telling me you wouldn't be an asshole if you lost the person you love most to this fucking place and then it decided to put it up on the goddamn network for every fucking idiot like yourself to enjoy?

Go fuck yourself.

[Rhys doesn't quite know what to say to this. He feels bad for Max, but the attitude he's getting doesn't make him inclined to help any more.]

Look, nobody enjoyed seeing that. Okay? It was hard to watch. It was hard to feel. I'm sure anybody that's reaching out to you just wants to help.

There is no god damn helping it. Don't you get it? Nice words and shit ain't gonna bring my little girl back.

Yeah, obviously. But doesn't it at least help knowing there are people on your side?

Would it help you? How would that help? Does it help knowing more people know about something I'd rather keep locked up? That it's fucking on the network forever now?!

I dunno! I do find it comforting when my friends offer me sympathy, but I'm assuming you don't have friends here, and neither do I, so really? If I were in your situation, yeah, it would help a little.

I don't need friends. I don't need anyone. The only thing friends are are another fucking knife wound when someone gets taken away. You'll fucking learn that too.

Taken? You mean sent back home. How often does that happen?

All the goddamn time. Do you think people just hang around here forever?

I don't know what to think. You've been here seven years. That's not very promising.

Well,

[There's the sound of smoke, and something bitter in it.]

I guess the fucking Sphere just fucking likes me.

[Rhys sighs, seeing that he's not really getting anywhere.]

Well, if any of us find a quicker way out, we'll tell you.

Yeah good luck with that.

Memory share: Max.

Text | UN: RighteousFather

audio: un:iveheardthetinderjoke

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