Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

I look from Ty to Vash and back again, stunned. I'm trying to figure out what to say to them when there is a noise from the stage and we all snap to attention, craning to see. I can't make out exactly where the sound came from. The crowd is thick and many of the girls are older, taller than me.

A great flag unfurls above us all, hanging like a fabric projector screen, and a thousand million pixels shimmer into life on this undulating backdrop, forming an aerial shot of the situation. We can see our own heads from above.

It's so detailed. It's more than real.

And on this 'screen', I see clearly the two towers that stand at each end of the building that they call the secret school, two separate buildings really, adjacent across this quadrangle, and the tower on our left is adorned with an ornate loom. A grand double door half way up the tower opens onto a large balcony and a procession of people walks out onto the balcony to look down on the crowds.

And the women and girls on the balcony are dressed in the most elaborate finery I have ever seen; in styles I don't begin to understand referencing ideas I've never heard of. It's like all the women's garments at the museum left their display cases and interbred with one another. But it's somehow understated too, a subtle display of incredible skill.

"They are the Weaver Elite. They run House Weaver." Ty seems to have gotten it together enough to talk to me again.

A piece of music begins to play. Repeated strains of synth layered up in increasing complexity. From simple samples complexity emerges. It's hypnotic. And a group of people in black emerge from the door of the Weaver tower. They're dressed just like Mel, and they move the same graceful, efficient way.

"Spiders. Weaver bodyguards. They're escorting the sacrifice." Vash now also, tries to educate me.

And I gasp when the young woman emerges, dressed like a throng of spirits dancing in a glass vial. And she is led to the stage by a dozen more Weaver girls each holding her train like a phantom bride, she moves in such a way that each step seems to mean something.

Finally, she reaches the centre of the stage, all around hushed silence.

"Sacrifice?"

"Symbolic. She won't actually die."

The Weaver Queen signals from her balcony and a dance begins. Then I hear the words, something like singing but not, something like language but not, something like, like... code. It sounds like code, but praying too. And it isn't exactly clear where it is coming from, but the girl is making a sequence of very precise movements, elegant and strange, and the pattern, I begin to notice, is recursive.

Then a flash of purple light

A gasp from the crowd. She begins to glitch out. The harmony and grace are gone. She jerks and wails and stutters. She seems to be in pain.

I realise that we are somehow now in a line of covens waiting to try the initiation test. And we're the second in line. The girl on the stage, she must be part of the test.

The coven ahead of us is brought up to the stage. The wailing again, sounds like the voice that came out of me back in the assembly, what seems like years ago. She's hurting.

"Why won't someone help her?"

"That's a shiver. She's possessed. Don't worry it's only a minor shiver. They can fix her, if the coven fails." Says Vash.

"What the hell is a shiver?" I reply.

She looks horrified again.

"Your mother told you nothing at all?"

And the Weaver Elder on the stage makes a proclamation, reading from an elaborate scroll, which I swear is just a lot of holes punched in a sheet of papyrus or something. I need Ty and Vash to teach me what to do, immediately. But I start to feel real tired, it's too late. It's just too late.

And she's reading the words of a challenge, but they sound like a nursery rhyme from a time when half your children died of cholera before they were twelve. No innocence in it.

And it's clear then that the initiation trial is about to begin.

The Novice Coven on the stage set to work. One girl is furiously working at a virtual, virtual computer of some kind, hand implants I guess give her the invisible keyboard (but why would she need them in a sim?) and an array of floating screens, she's in flow, like she's trying to debug something deep in the code. I recognise that state.

"She's the codeWitch. That's your job. Watch her closely." Whispers Ty.

One girl is touching the possessed girl, hanging on to her flailing wrist, taking in some part of the shiver, joining in with the possession, maybe passing the information to the codeWitch somehow.

"That's the techWitch. She's trying to build a circuit between the coven and possessed girl. That's my job." Whispers Vash.

And the other girl is singing, chanting, something, but she keeps stopping and starting. I notice she's performing moves too, in the same way, like she's trying out passwords.

"She's the netWitch. She sings the codeSpells, tries to bind the Shiver. That's my job. But you have to feed me the codeSpells or I can't do it. It all works or none of it does." Says Ty.

"We've been training for years, thought you had too. Most of us get trained from childhood, usually by a relative." Says Vash.

But the possession is getting worse. Environmental effects start kicking in, like the shiver is branching out into the space around it. The breeze on my skin starts glitching, repeating itself. Everything flips into negative and back, just once, for less than a second. The senior girls exchange glances. A clock on the big flag screen above us begins a countdown. The coven on stage starts to look panicked.

"What happens if they fail?"

Vash hushes me.

It doesn't look good, one of the girls has just frozen staring at the freaky spasming of the possessed weaver witch, dark things fly out of the eaves of the ancient school... no can't really be ancient, can it?

Now the words coming out of the shiver have gone somewhere deeper, and I'm not sure what's happening, but it's happening.

The timer falls away, the silence is deafening. The coven is frozen in terror. Then they splutter and spark, fizzing out like bad static, the faintest after-shock, of a sound wave beginning in one world only to end in another. They're gone.

They're gone.

And it hits me. If we fail. We're gone too. They won't discuss it. Won't be a second chance. We'll wake up back in hell, hunters coming after us with all their frustrated fury, no help from the secret society, no chance at all, just a huddle of frightened little girls lost in a junkyard.

And they beckon us, the twitching-glitch-out-girl seems to reawaken all of a sudden and go into an even more demented dance, and the process has begun again, except this time it is us, it's me and we're being shoved forward by a hundred hands, not gently. 

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