Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe (3 page)

A few
minutes later, the teacher came outside and started herding us
in.

Chapter
10

I was
bored. Bored bored bored. Bort. Borrrrrrrrt.

I was
sitting at the back, of course. Only losers sit at the
front.

The
teacher was scribbling some math on the board. I was supposed to
know all of these three times already, but they looked like Chinese
to me.

Frontistirio was making us do-over the curriculum again and
again, and had us give mock exams again and again until the SOS
parts were drilled in our heads. SOS were the really important
bits. We pronounced it like “sauce,” cause we are Greek and
shit.

I looked
down.

Oops too
low. I adjusted my blouse that was leaving too much skin exposed
and sat up straight.

I looked
down again, at my book.

It was
nice and neat. Fluorescent markers had highlighted the SOS bits.
With pink of course. Yellow was for the tricky stuff. Green for the
ones I could safely ignore and delete from my memory.

I was
fighting an urge to check my phone. It had vibrated twice already.
Or had it? I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I would think it vibrated but
then I’d check and see nothing. I could almost hear Billy’s
pretentious voice in my head, “it’s the phantom vibration syndrome,
where the false belief that one’s…” and then I would shut him up.
And he would say it with the tone of voice that implied we were
addicts or something but he was somehow out of this world, more
involved and natural.

Even so,
more importantly, this teacher had a hawk’s eye for texting. There
was no way I’d risk getting my sparkly new pink phone confiscated
by this malaka.

I would
endure.

I looked
around for moral support. Billy wasn’t doing frontistirio, he was
reading by himself. We were classmates only in the morning, at
school. Deppy was here with me, smiling at a boy two rows to the
left. What was his name? John? Jed? Joe?

No
clue.

See?
This is where the veil is useful! Just pick it up and look through
the screen. Boom. In-far-ma-shah.

Must.
Resist.

I
thought about actually trying to solve the math problem. That
should take me a while. I began reading from the top. The teacher
was already done with the solution, and had stood aside so we could
copy it down.

Did I
mention he didn’t just let us take a picture and be done with
it?

The
barbarity
.

I was
writing down the problem-solution duo, flicking my head up the
board, down the notepad, up, down, up, down, when a shadow waved in
the corner of my eye and I froze.

Purple Time

She came
through the teacher’s chest, like an ethereal projection, her eyes
darting around the class, staring at people with hatred.

My heart pumped blood at a thousand litres per second and my
fingers electrified at the extreme dosage of adrenaline.

I lowered my head and froze in place, my first instinct being
to hide in the crowd. She arose from the teacher’s chest but her
body was hazy, not fully there.

Her eyes and her hands and her hair were there, moving as if
on the surface of a strong current. She looked around and turned
straight at me, letting me see the hatred in her purple
eyes.

She charged at me, pushing the teacher aside tearing his
chest with her claws, rippling through the furniture and the people
like an unstoppable sound wave.

I pushed the desk aside and ran to the door. She was gaining
on me, closing in, splinters flying. Three rows, Two rows. One row.
I dodged and hit a classmate. I pulled him behind me, offering him
as sacrifice to appease Erinyes. She wasted fractions of a second
to rend him in half and extend her bloody claw at me.

Her nails bit in my flesh and I screamed in pain. She tore
most of my back but the pain gave me thrust and I ran, every step
as if searing hot iron was lashing my body.

I reached the door and swivelled with my hand towards the
street, she hissed and brushed her hair at me, her hair like
animated snakes, purple and with purpose, stinging my
hand.

I pulled my arm back and screamed from pain, new toxic pain
as I ran to the bright light outside.

Chapter
11

I was hiding in a corner.

Someone
touched me and I flinched. I looked up.

Deppy
was looking at me with worried eyes. Our height difference made her
look almost level at me even with me crouching down. I looked
around, there was no sign of Erinyes.

“
What happened Mahi?” she asked me but I had nothing to
reply.

I walked
back to the classroom and Deppy held my arm, as if to support me if
I fell. I walked past my classmates, they were staring and
whispering amongst themselves. I’d never been so ashamed in my
life.

I walked
past them, a couple of boys tried to make some sort of tease but
Deppy nipped that in the bud. I looked into the
classroom.

Other
than my own desk, the one I had flipped over, everything else was
where it should be. I expected to find a bloody battlefield inside,
but it was just my stuff on the floor. I picked them up hastily and
put them in my bag, which Deppy was holding open for me. I propped
up the chair and the desk, and head low, I jogged out of
there.

Chapter
12

“
You didn’t see anything?”

“
Ohi, sorry, nothing,” Deppy replied and she was being
honest.

I pulled my legs close to my body. We were at her house,
after conjuring up girl-troubles at her dad. He didn’t bother us at
all and he left us the living room, finding some daily chore to
attend to. Deppy’s dad was a stay-at-home father, working from a
fancy computer setup with three monitors and expensive hardware and
24/7 graphs ticking away. Deppy had explained many times to me what
it is he actually did, but I zoned out every time after ten
acronyms. The only word I remember (because her dad used it like
6.2 times in a sentence) was
heuristics
. Whatever that
was.

Her
parents had reversed their roles since Deppy was a baby, so he was
the one that actually raised her. Her mother had a promising career
and they had decided not to abandon it after Deppy was born. So her
father gradually shifted his work and clients to a flexible
schedule that he could attend to at home, and he was happy to do
the house chores while the mother was out there in meetings and
business suits. It was a complete reversal of Greek household
values, where the mother was expected to stay at home and raise the
kids, and it had attracted a lot of snide remarks from people
addressing the father’s sexuality, or at the very least, the
diameter of his balls.

All I
knew was that, after my dad, Deppy’s dad was the awesomest dad in
the world.

I welded
my eyes to a painting across the living room, not daring to look my
friend in the eye. The painting was from some fantasy RPG game, one
that Deppy and her dad played together, and it depicted a busty
woman with a big sword in an impossible pose. Seriously, her back
would have to be liquid to perch her butt like that. Deppy had told
me once that it was the original painting that was scanned for the
game’s artwork, and was bought at an online auction. They loved
geeky stuff like that.

“
But you do believe me,” I asked her when she came back in the
room with hot chocolate for me. I kept my gaze on the
sword.

Deppy
took a few seconds to reply. “I don’t think you are crazy, if
that’s what you are asking…” she said, and grabbed my pink new
phone. She had no boundaries at that sort of thing, and you just
had to learn to accept it.

She sat
at her father’s workstation and plugged in my phone. The computer
setup was intimidating to most people, and seemed important. Deppy
knew of course what to do so as not to disturb her father’s work,
so she logged in to her accounts and seemed to take up only two of
the monitors, while the third one was showing stats and data as
usual.

She
leaned back and the chair squealed audibly. “Okay, that’s actually
something.” We were both looking at a zoomed image of my selfies,
of the smudgy part that we had seen earlier and that I had printed
back at home.

The smudge was kinda-sorta-maybe
facelike
.

Deppy
started typing away and brought up the videos our stupid-ass
classmates had just uploaded. Deppy winced and sucked in air.
“Sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t see those right now…”

“
Ohi, it’s fine. Pull them up,” I said.

Due to
the mobile ban at class, they weren’t as quick to draw as they
would have in normal circumstances. The videos began after I had
stormed out of the classroom, capturing a nice ear-piercing scream
I’d let out. They had all managed to get my crouching in the corner
in time, and in one Deppy was yelling at the boy and telling him to
back off.

I hadn’t
noticed that.

She had
defended me.

Deppy
downloaded them all and focused on a trigger-happy girl’s video,
who had began recording a few seconds earlier than all the
others.

As she
was processing the video, I decided to block it all out for a while
and focus on the sweet, warm chocolate. I closed my eyes and zoned
out of the ambience of whirring computer fans and keyboard
shortcuts.

Several
minutes passed.

“
W-T-F,” Deppy yelled in acronym and I jumped up startled and
burned my finger.

“
What?”

“
This is trippy!”

I went
over her shoulder and looked at the monitor. Deppy had stabilised
and looped a few frames at the beginning of the video, that had
barely managed to record me leaving the classroom. It showed my
hand on the door frame as I was swivelling. My body was hidden from
the wall. A dark form was after me, clearly moving towards me in
the few frames. Purple sparks were touching my fingers.

My cup
smashed on the floor and I made a mess.

Chapter
13

I am wearing my Hello Kitty dress. It is new and
clean and I love it.

George
wants to go look for his bicycle. The road is wet and covered with
dirt. We are alone in the house, mommy had to go to the
hairdresser’s and left me to take care of my little brother. Daddy
is at work.

The
flood is intense. Mommy called twenty times, I told her we are OK.
She says she can’t drive back, says she’ll be late. It’s alright, I
say, we’ll wait here.

George
is kicking and screaming. He is at the balcony, watching the brown
waters rushing down the street. It stopped raining but it’s still
cloudy and a little dark.

I look
at my new dress in the mirror and I love it.

George
comes to me and tells me he wants to go look for his bicycle. The
water took it away. He could see it around the corner but now he
can’t see it anymore. He is sure because it’s bright green and you
can see it clearly so it’s safe.

He is
pulling my sleeve, I yell at him because he is going to ruin my
dress. He leaves me alone and goes back to the balcony to look for
his bicycle.

I wear
my shoes. They fit the dress well. They make me a lady. I look at
them in the mirror and I love them.

George
is not yelling now. I hear the door closing, it is big and heavy
and makes a snap when it shuts.

I get to
the balcony, George is not there. I get out of the house and walk
down the marble stairs. I hear the condo’s main door close and I
run downstairs.

Water
has come inside the lobby. Some parts are muddy. I stand at the
last step and look at the water. I don’t want to get muddy water on
my shoes. I love my shoes. I take them off and leave them on the
last step. I walk in the water and open the main door.

George
is outside on the pavement. The water is lower now but it was very
high before. I can see that from the brown mark on the walls. The
rain took a lot of the dirt away. I yell at George to come back and
pull my dress up. I step into the water and walk
outside.

George
tells me he saw his bicycle across the street, around the corner.
He saw the water push it there. I walk down on the pavement, the
street still has a lot of water, it looks like a river. A dark
green garbage can is flowing down like a boat. George crosses the
road after it and goes to the corner. He is all wet now, and dirty
from the mud. He doesn’t care.

I walk
to the corner, still on my pavement. I yell at George to come back.
I tell him mommy will be very angry and that she is coming in five
seconds. George says that his bike is just over there and that it
will only take a second.

The
street around the corner is lower, so the water is deeper. More
water is coming from other places and ends up there, so it makes
swirly shapes. A branch from a pine tree is coming towards George
fast and I yell at him to stay away. He looks around and holds on
to a car. The branch hits the car and it makes a bang, but it
floats away.