“Holy shit.”
“Holy goddam fcking shit.”
“What the hell.”
“How do they move so fast?”
“Giant goddam insects or whatever.”
“Just a virtuality I keep telling myself.”
“God I feel weird.”
“Just relax Stevie-o, how’s the noggin?”
“Are the bugs going to eat us?”
“Just a virtuality, not real.”
“Goddam pain was real.”
“All better now?”
“Aches like fuck, but not pain like before. What’s that thing?”
“Well…”
“It’s not, I mean, it looks like, but…”
“Like what?”
“It looks like that big brown bug over there, um, pulled it out of your head.”
“Wait, not the–“
“Obviously not, but it looks a lot like–“
“Just a virtual copy of–“
“Oh, so wait–“
“Maybe this is some kind of crazy therapeutic build, and–“
“They manifested surgery as a huge brown beetle or something?”
“They aren’t beetles, more like mantisses.”
“Way too round for mantisses!”
“So many eyes, ighh.”
“Hey, the brown one just, well, healed you or something.”
“This is an insane virtuality, you should sue.”
“Any affordances show up, Kris?”
The three humans, still rather dazed by the lightning onslaught and retreat of the insects (beetles, possibly, or mantisses, although the small one in the back looks completely different, Colin notices), have backed off to the edge of the old porch steps, to get at least symbolically farther from all those eyes, mandibles, antennae, and what-have-you.
“Still nothing,” she replies, “should we try to duck out again?”
“I’ve been doing that,” Colin says, closing his eyes and moving his head yet again, “no effect.”
“Should we try to… talk to them?” Steve wonders. He tilts his head thoughtfully and waves an arm in the direction of the three giant insects.
“Phhht!” Kristen hisses, pulling his arm down again, “do we really want to get their attention?”
“I do,” Colin says, “they’re really interesting-looking.”
“You’ve seen weirder things than that in a dozen instances,” she points out.
“True. This is sort of… different though, eh?”
“How’s your head now, Steve?”
Steve leans against her, closing his eyes.
“Mammoth headache,” he says, “but nothing like it was. I guess I passed out?”
She nodds and strokes his head and back. “We were worried.”
“This really doesn’t feel like a virtuality.”
“What else could it be? Probably some fancy ad-tech thing, you know how fast things are changing these days.”
“But why are we trapped in here, if it’s just to fix Steve’s–“
“Maybe something happened while they were monitoring us in here, and they had to do emergency life-saving–“
“Life saving insect dispatch!”
“Yeah, whatever, but anyway they had to lock down the instance while they did it, even though we were in here, and the bugs are just how the concepts happened to manifest…”
“Hey, they left!”
“What?”
“Heh!”
“Did you see them go? Where are they?”
“Nope, there was just this noise again and foop, no more bugs.”
They all look around, from there by the steps of the slowly-collapsing house.
“If that’s what the insects around here are like,” Steve says, “I guess I’m glad we didn’t run into whatever left all those cobwebs inside.”
“Oh, don’t even!”
ceoln 