The masses, dolls of pastel neon pixels in a little crowd, beneath the sides of a conveyor overpass. Some woke from their program, and cried out, scaling the sides of the overpass. Their heads were cut off by the crouching overseers on the bridge – but the hairless pixelated oval head of one waker, still screaming, fell inside another man who walked below.

In the hall he faced the choice: to turn left and leave the fight, or to go around the corner and face his training companion. When he faced her, and they began to spar, he caught her fist, and she could not escape his grip; he swung the fight around, and found he was spinning them not on an anchor point on the ground but on an axis he chose.

On the airship they had found the basket fan they needed: a rod with radiating angled metal strips. They banked too far downwards away from a cliff, but pulling all the way through it was alright. Looking down on the level brown coastal sand, they had room to maneuver, but few visual landmarks to guide it.

Seen through a cracked periscope, the film peters away to empty clatter.

2023/03/20 #DailyWrittenOOM