Kevin and Mara stared quietly for a few moments, letting their eyes adjust to the total lack of light that had once again fallen over the city. Just like 24-hours prior, the harder they looked into the blackness all around them, the harder it was for them not to feel like they were being sucked into it. It felt, to Kevin Adderly, like there was a mysterious force pulling on he and Mara, calling to them, demanding that they, too, join the throngs of people that they could make out by the light of the of moon and the stars. Tonight was much clearer than then night previous, but it was still hard to see much of any detail.

All that Kevin knew for sure was that something massive and wiggly was slouching westward along Oak Street.

Heading into Old Lebanon, probably, Kevin thought. Old Lebanon was the city’s central power plant and self-support district, it was also the only thing of distinct usefulness to the west of his apartment building. It was where the bulk of the municipal bots and bio-tanks, as well as the New City Department of Public Works, was headquartered.

Why would all those people be headed to Old Lebanon was a mystery to Kevin. He was about to ask Mara, but she shushed him before he ever even opened his mouth to speak.

Then he remembered that he had, somewhere in his apartment, a set of multi-phasic wraparound sunglasses that he used sometimes for sports, and ducked back into his apartment to see if he could root them out.

As he past them in his livingroom, he noticed that the windows were still showing a fully-lit city. The J.D. LeCloone plant even seemed to be venting a bit of heat from its largely vestigial smokestacks. He put his face up to the data wall and tried to see something that looked out of the ordinary, anywhere, but the data wall resolution was second-to-none. Tiny details contained no flaws whatsoever. It looked realer than real, and yet, entirely unlike anything he could see from the bathroom ledge.

He shook his head, feeling a hard stone of disappointment feeling in his gut, let down in himself for allowing the data walls to trick him. They were clearly the same as the local media and of the intranets– the information they displayed was capable of deception– just like anything else. He should have known better.

If our windows can lie to us, what can you trust, he wondered, stepping over the shells of the dead scupperers, still lifeless on the floor where they’d been smashed. The rest of the buildings scupperers had to have noticed them by now, and– come to think of it, Kevin thought, there hasn’t been any activity on the pair of emergency calls he’d sent out in the last hour. He muted the still blaring com station was he passed into his bedroom to find his gym bag.

They were a fairly inexpensive pair of laserball wraparound goggles. They had two functions in the game, they ensured that players didn’t use implanted vision augmentation by interfacing with user at the optic nerve level, and second, they allowed players to see the ball of light as it ricocheted around the court, bouncing off, over, and destroying holographic obstacles. It was a stupid game, and Kevin hated it, but he’d signed up for a league a few months ago, and hadn’t had the will to quit, but still stopped going all the same.

“Kevin, where did you go?” Mara called from the bathroom. She must have climbed back in. He walked back to the bathroom and tossed the goggles to her.

“Oh, I can’t wear these,” she said. “They mess with my implants” Another dagger sliced through Kevin’s gut.

“You have implants?” He asked.

“Yeah. What of it?” she said, a little more defensively than she’d meant to.

“You, just, didn’t seem the type.”

She shrugged.

“Why didn’t you activate them last night in the park?”

“They’re not vision implants,” she said, eyes darting around the bathroom, looking anywhere but at Kevin’s face.

“If they’re not vision implants, what are they?” he asked, getting a panicky feeling in his chest. Vision implants allowing for factory workers to improve their microscopic viewing abilities were the only implants that weren’t outlawed in the New City.

She scrunched up her face, took a deep breath, and then looked Kevin directly in the face. “They’re psyonics,” she blurted; “but just little ones. They’re not very powerful.”

Kevin didn’t know what to say. His palms itched and that same burning feeling in his gut, that stone of self-disappointment he’d felt when he realized his windows were liars.

“Those are illegal.” Kevin said numbly.

“No. They’re discouraged by all Sugar Island’s employers, but they’re not illegal,” she said, folding her arms. “Kevin. I swear. They’re just a little thing. They’re no big deal. I don’t hardly use them, except to keep my head straight.”

“That’s how you always know what I’m going to say,” he said, suddenly understanding how Mara’d always been just a few steps ahead of his thought patterns. He really was right, there was nobody to trust.

“No, Kevin,” she said. “Well. Not intentionally.” She stammered “Look– I never messed with your free-will,” she said. “I never messed with your privacy or your free will.”

“You’d better go.” He interrupted her. There was no point in weighing his thoughts or holding his tongue. Not if she was reading his mind anyway.

“I’m sorry. I never wanted you to find out this way,” she said. “But I’m not going out there.”

Kevin, remembering the writing mass of whatever walking across the city streets below, felt his anger turning quickly over to sadness. “I guess not,” he said.

“Kevin, they’re not even on most of the time. They’re for me. I need them for my mind. Not for other peoples.”

Kevin looked at the laserball glasses on the console top where she’d set them down. “Look,” he said, “I’m going to go out and see what there is to see out there. I don’t want you messing with my mind, ok? I need to work this out for my self.” “I swear, I’ve never pushed you, or made any effort to adjust your free will, Kevin. I swear.”

If your windows and your not-girlfriend lie to you, who can you trust? “I’m going to go out on the escape. I’m going to see if I can see what those things are out there,” he said. And then we’re going to have a talk, he thought. Then, remembering that she probably knew exactly the words he’d just selected not to say, he walked away.

She didn’t follow him, and whether that was because she’d intuited what he planned to do, or because she’d planted it, he’d never really know. But he knew something was wrong with his home, and he knew that something big was happening in Old Lebanon, or else every living thing on the street level wouldn’t be headed that way.

He was going to have to be his only resource going forward. That was for sure. He couldn’t trust the windows; New City seemed to be falling apart, and his girlfriend was a psyonic-wielding mind bender that would probably will him to jump off the edge of the building the second he stepped out on the ledge.

“Who can you trust?” he asked out-loud as he squirmed through the bathroom window.