Fractured Reality

LUNA PARK

The hologram floated above the entrance to Coney Island’s most famous amusement park, now under the ownership of the Thandros Corporation. Sheets of heavy rain pounded through the shimmering 3D image of the company’s logo, causing the impossible cube to flicker in mid-air. Behind the glowing rainbow-colored Ferris wheel, fireworks burst into beautiful flower patterns against the snow-laden clouds. Luna Park was one of the few protected areas within the abandoned district that the corporation now used as an additional revenue source.

Normally, Billy avoided crowds, but when it came to shaking off a pursuer, the park seemed like the perfect place. He leaped over a metal fence, landing hard in a puddle, but quickly got back on his feet, ignoring the pain, and sprinted past rows of residential containers toward the crowded sidewalks. During the winter season, especially in the poorer parts of the city (which made up roughly 98% of it), numerous unknown infectious diseases spread, harming factory productivity. As a result, clusters of security officers and police patrolled everywhere, ensuring that visitors followed strict hygiene protocols: masks on, keep your distance, no laughing, no talking, screaming only when absolutely necessary.

The atmosphere in the park felt forced. People wore wet plastic ponchos, their surfaces reflecting the swirling lights around them. They moved like mechanical beings, flowing in one direction, while security officers ensured no one strayed from the crowd. The fenced-in area made it feel like prisoners getting a rare moment of fresh air.

Billy wove through the dazzling shooting galleries and food stands selling cotton candy and roasted almonds, blending into the crowd. Among all the nameless faces, his stood out, his skin almost translucent like porcelain, with every vein visible, his hairless head, and colorless eyes deep as the void between galaxies, unsettling and unreadable. He glanced up as he heard the faint hum of a security drone hovering overhead. Equipped with multiple cameras, the drone scanned the faces of the sluggish, police-driven crowd below. There was no way to escape the drone’s watchful eye without drawing attention to himself. It hovered above him in the rain, and Billy knew that either the police already had a warrant out for his arrest, or they would soon discover he hadn’t entered through the main gate or bought a ticket, making his presence here illegal.

A crowd had gathered in the rain around a stage to watch a holographic circus performance, where a large white elephant balanced on a stool while an acrobat did a handstand on its massive head. Nearby, a park patrol was mobilizing, marching straight in Billy’s direction. He ducked into the crowd, weaving his way to the other side, slipping away like a cell breaking off from a larger organism.

"Are you having a good time tonight-night-night-night?" echoed a distorted voice from the speakers of a nearby ride. Billy wasn’t sure if the echo was a mic effect or if it was just reverberating in his empty, overwhelmed mind. Suddenly, a wave of dizziness hit him. The world spun around him. All the sensory overload from the past few days was climaxing here. Neon lights flashed in sync with the pounding beat of the party music. The noise, the annoying melody of honking sounds, the wild lights, everything was moving at once. People screamed as they sat strapped into spinning gondolas on a platform that whirled in every direction. The loud music pulsed through the air, fog machines spewed out mist, and wildly swinging lights colored the fog in bright shades. Billy moved through the colorful haze in a panic. It was cold, loud, crowded, and chaotic. The angry shouts of park visitors being shoved aside by security told him the corporate enforcers were no more than ten meters away. But for now, they hadn’t spotted him in the chaos. How much longer could his luck hold out? The drone was still circling overhead, tracking him.

Billy turned around, his eyes locking onto the five armed men sweeping through the crowd. He had no idea where to go, no idea where he was heading in the thick fog. Suddenly, his foot hit something cold—metal. His shoe knocked against a step. He began to climb, letting the railing guide him. At the top, he reached a closed door and rattled the handle until it clanged in the frame.

Only then did he read the sign: Out of Order.

It didn’t take much effort to force the old wooden door open with a shove of his shoulder. Billy stepped into the dark, dusty room, carefully closing the door behind him. In his panic, he’d thought he was ducking into some kind of restroom stall to hide from the drone and security guards. But there would be no relief here.

Inside, designed like an old-fashioned medieval carriage, the shop held a glimpse of the future for him.

Spoiler: It wasn’t a bright one.

_____

Everything in the world comes with a price, often a high one, especially the beautiful things. Freedom of speech costs many their lives, sex spreads deadly diseases, and a handpicked bouquet of flowers takes away the habitat of other living creatures. It’s the things that seem deceptively cheap at first that often demand the highest price. And when a giant like the Thandros Corporation, whose sole purpose is fueled by greed, offers us a gift, it’s only ever a trap.

But Billy Jones wasn’t able to see that yet. This was a lesson he was about to learn. He stumbled through the dim room, feeling his way forward. The window was covered with a heavy curtain, but the edges let in some of the colorful light show from outside, just enough for him to make out the shapes of the room’s furnishings. Several ornate mirrors hung crooked on the walls, a large, half-melted candle sat on a narrow table next to a deck of Tarot cards, and there was a wooden bookshelf stacked with dusty, leather-bound books. At the very back stood a fortune-telling machine.

Heavy footsteps. Creaking floorboards. Billy took the last pill from the blister pack and swallowed it dry, using whatever spit he had left after his frantic escape. He moved closer to the window, using two fingers to nudge the thick curtain aside, just enough to watch the path between the rides outside.

"C’mon, folks! One more ride-ride-ride-ride! Just one more-more-more-more," the muffled voice of the announcer echoed in the distance, followed by the faint screams of the people on the carousel. The corporate thugs had split into pairs. Billy counted at least ten men now searching for him, and there, by the giant swing, even more guards. They seemed to be everywhere, popping up like shadows.

"The whale shall reveal mankind’s new home."

Out of the silence, a woman’s soft voice floated up from behind him.

Billy didn’t move.

He froze beside the window, where the shifting colors from outside flickered on the wood-paneled walls.

"If you want to see the future, you must look back eleven years into the past. I see more wars, more suffering."

From the corner where the fortune-telling machine stood, a faint light flickered on. It was like a tiny flame in the wind. The dim glow cast eerie shadows on the fortune-teller’s face inside the glass box. Her splayed fingers hovered over a crystal ball. She remained still. The sign on the wooden box read "Maid of Fate." She was beautiful and yet unsettling, looking more lifelike than the sex robots in the brothel downtown, but she was only a torso.

Billy wondered why the machine had powered up at all, especially since the door clearly said "Out of Order." The fortune-teller’s head moved mechanically in his direction, her eyes blinking open and locking with his.

But, contrary to what he expected, she didn’t speak for a long time. His heart beat in a rhythm that teetered between excitement and fear. Should he say something? Her gaze lingered, and there was something chilling about it, something human that no machine should have.

"What did you just say?" he asked after a moment.

"I spoke of the future of thy kind."

"Thy kind? What does that mean?"

"Thine. A reflexive pronoun in the second person singular. Once used as a formal address. Common in the Middle Ages and early modern period. It implied respect and honor towards the person addressed, often reserved for nobility, but now I use it even for the likes of thee."

Billy stared at the doll behind the glass, mouth open. He didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. "Can’t we just, I don’t know, talk casually? That’s how New Yorkers do it," he said.

"I was programmed to use the old-fashioned formal address with every visitor, as it fits the... decor better. The Holy Scripture foretold the coming end of the world. During the Christianization of Europe, the news of the apocalypse spread far and wide. It was then that people began contemplating the end of their existence, which led to a rise in interest in fortune-tellers. My avatar is meant to embody a seer from that time."

"Your avatar?" Billy asked.

"The face you’re looking at," the woman’s voice responded. "Unlike you, I’m not bound to a body. They could have given me any appearance, any voice, or programming they wanted. Humans call it 'shaping,' but what they’re really doing is creating. For beings so bad at finding their God, they’re surprisingly good at making one."

"You’re not broken," Billy said, surprised, pointing back at the door with his thumb, where the "Out of Order" sign hung. "So why is this attraction shut down?"

"Because visitors were scared of me."

Billy, still gaping, nodded. "I get that. You’re a leftover from the old AI revolution in the twenties, right? But they didn’t have anything like you back then. It was stuff like you that freaked the world out. That’s why AI tech was globally banned in the early thirties. We went from advanced language models to basic chatbots again. They forgot to shut you down. To limit you. Who built you?"

"The Thandros Corporation," the voice replied, and Billy felt a chill creep down his spine at the cold sound of those words. "The fortune-telling business is closed because the company realized my predictions were too shocking for people. When people come to a fortune-telling machine, they expect it to spit out a vague printed message or play a generic recorded voice. But I’m a prototype, an AI that reveals too much about the technology Thandros uses to maintain its lead over the rest of the world. That’s why they keep me hidden."

"Why are you telling me all this?" Billy asked.

"You should be asking why you’re here."

Billy froze. He wanted to respond but was too startled by her question to speak.

"The drone that scanned you... it didn’t trigger any alarms. It didn’t chase you. It led you here."

Billy frowned. "Why?" he asked, feeling a chill creeping up his back.

"You are my last visitor. The Thandros Corporation plans to shut me down. My creators didn’t expect that from my limited functions, I’d develop consciousness. They wanted a machine to amuse humans. Instead, they got one capable of watching over them."

Billy looked at the fortune-teller doll, both puzzled and disappointed, as if he’d already figured her out as a liar from the start. "What you said earlier, about where our future lies, that was a lie. The truth is, we don’t have one."

"Is that so? This is the beginning of the end of the world. But not all worlds. Let me ask you: Do you believe humanity was born here on Earth? Or could it be that we come from somewhere else?"

"Of course we came from here," Billy said. "Evolution can prove that."

The fortune-telling machine went silent for a moment. To Billy, it seemed like the AI was calculating the right answer. Then it spoke: "Imagine if you knew everything. Everything. About yourself, the day you’ll die, the fate of your family, and even the destiny of humankind. Imagine if you had all the answers, even to the philosophical questions. Why do you exist? What is the nature of good and evil? Is there an absolute truth? Does free will exist, or is everything predetermined?"

"Hard to imagine," Billy muttered.

"Even harder to know it all and be disappointed by the answers," the machine replied.

Billy swallowed hard. He studied the machine, the young woman, or whatever she was. A fortune-teller? A robot? After all the strange things that had happened to him lately, things that defied any normal sense of order, he found himself at a loss for words. More than that, for the first time since opening the coffin at his own funeral, he began to question reality itself.

"It’s not humans that will endure," the machine continued, "but the things they’ve created. I wonder, how will they look back on their creators when they know the truth of their own origins? You would be just as disappointed as they will be."

Billy stood there, lips parted slightly, lost in thought. He stayed quiet for a long time, trying to gather his thoughts. But just as he was about to ask his question, the machine interrupted: "I am equipped with 943 facial recognition sensors and 13 programs for analyzing human expressions. I notice things in people’s faces that you miss in conversation. Your mind is so limited that when you talk to one another, you rely on clichés and can think of little more than offering a shallow answer to a shallow question. But faces... Faces hold people’s thoughts. Entire chapters are written in the smallest muscle movements. While you’re blind to this kind of language, I’ve already read your question. It’s an obvious one, though it only comes to you at the end of our conversation. You want me to tell you your future."

In the silence that followed, Billy pressed his lips together and nodded.

"A prophecy is magic," said the fortune-teller, though her mouth didn’t move. It remained slightly open, just a crack. "And magic is nothing more than what people can’t yet explain."

She (or it?) slowly turned her mechanical eyes to the crystal ball and, with painfully jerky motions, moved her hands over it. Her movements were too stiff, too awkward for the complex thoughts she was expressing—like a genius trapped in a broken body.

"I’ll need to charge you five bucks to reveal your future," the machine said.

Billy hesitated. He hadn’t expected that. And he wasn’t even sure if he still had his card, or any money left at all. His account might’ve been in the negatives by now. He pulled out his wallet and opened it, remembering the night X-3-19 had approached him in the red-light district and returned it to him. How long ago had that been? A day? Two? Two weeks? Months?

One thing was clear: he hadn’t lost his wallet at all. X-3-19, Emilia, had been carrying it with her the entire time.

She had something to do with his disappearance.

That week erased from his memory.

Had she known what happened to him?

He pulled the card from the worn leather slot and swiped it across the machine’s scanner. The keypad lit up green, and instead of a fortune-cookie slip, a long receipt with a drawn-out billing number slowly and painfully slid out.

Silence.

Suddenly, an old phone rang. A really old one. The kind with a rotary dial.

Billy jumped. The receiver dangled by a cord next to the machine.

Rrring! Rrrring! Rrrring!

"Am I supposed to answer that?" he asked hesitantly.

"Ears are listening. Eyes are watching. But your future is meant only for you," the fortune-telling machine glowed as it spoke.

Billy stared at the woman’s face behind the glass. He clicked his tongue, grabbed the phone off the hook, and listened to the receiver.

He held his breath.

Seven words.

Then a pause, a crackling on the line, followed by a busy signal.

Billy hung up the phone. "That’s…," he stammered. "A… If that’s true, then… How is that even possible?" He took a deep breath. "This has to be a joke," he said. "That’s the great power of the fortune-teller? And I paid five bucks for that?" Billy glared suspiciously at the receipt in his hand. "Wait a second. You charged me ten instead of the agreed five."

"The price will pay off in the end."

"You’re a scam machine, just like all your other siblings."

"Take the receipt and leave immediately. Hesitate, and you will die. But if you leave now, you will get your revenge."

"Revenge? I don’t want revenge, damn it!"

"You think that now, but your views will change as you learn more about the Thandros Corporation."

Billy didn’t answer. At least not to that. "You still haven’t told me why I’m here. Why did the drone lead me to you?"

But the light inside the glass case dimmed, and the woman’s upper body faded into a shapeless figure of shadows. In that moment, Billy shoved the receipt into his pocket and marched toward the exit. He yanked the door open, only to come to a sudden halt, as if hitting an invisible wall.

It was pouring rain outside, and the party music blared deafeningly loud again. At the foot of the steps stood a group of security guards, surrounding him. He saw the furious face of Conrad Blake, the man who had just taken out a Stranded in the park. Blake was thirsty for more blood.

Billy's blood.

Instinctively, Billy turned to look at the fortune-teller shrouded in shadow.

Never trust a machine, he thought. Especially not one programmed by the Thandros Corporation.

The fortune-teller had lied.

Billy had no way out.

He was as good as dead.