For a time Ryan’s mugs were tortures, now they’re only things. Like the commissioned print framed above the couch, the creased paperbacks and tankobon volumes, the battalion of plastic models perched on the windowsill: all of those angular rockets and bipedal tanks. No longer his, not exactly hers. Dust accumulates on handles and rims. The mugs are blue, green, and red; soon they will be gray all over.

Sophia takes her coffee and a container of yogurt to the bedroom. Through the slits of drawn blinds, fragments of afternoon illuminate the stripped bed and the clothes cast across the floor. She sets her breakfast on her desk beside her mechanical keyboard. The keycaps are black and unlabeled; sterile lights shine beneath their cases. Behind the keyboard, arranged like a trifold mirror, stand three LCD monitors. The screens are paper-flat and lack visible frames. Only the center screen is on.

The screen is filled with the octagonal atrium of a large shopping mall. The mall has been rendered as an antiquated 3D environment, a construction of textured polygons with detail provided by ample sprites and naive voxel fixtures. Inside, Sophia stands beside the base of a large fountain. The water is animated as opaque sheets of blue and white cycling in a way which suggests rigid undulations.

Sophia looks past empty benches and angular palms. Her gaze lands precisely on an indistinct figure frozen in the middle distance. Compressed photographs of black and white tile texture the floor. Semisolid beams of golden light shine through the glass ceiling; one strikes like a spotlight upon the figure.

Muzak and the fountain’s soft bubbling filter out from speakers on Sophia’s desk into the room. The radiance on-screen reflects dully in the monitors arranged to its left and right. Sophia watches the program while she eats, sips her coffee slowly.

When she’s finished, she turns the other monitors on and sends the mall to the screen on the right. Sprayed across the leftmost monitor is a mosaic of open programs: rectangular windows looking in on a multi-page text file, two email inboxes, a secure messaging system, a black console scored with white lines of code. She scrolls through the inboxes, deleting most messages unread. Limited offers on bedsheets. The deadline for one of her industrial contracts has been extended. Her brother wants to know how she’s doing. Buy one get one free offer ends soon. The latest build of the hazard disposal tutorial is now overdue. 

The disposal tutorial lies naked across the central monitor. Each individual wire and translucent panel of the hazard float disarticulated in the manner of a Beauchêne skull; networks of tags hang like thistles from each component. In the leftmost monitor the windows surge and flash — she closes some, expands others, clatters out commands through her mechanical keyboard. Her fingers move automatically, her eyes register little, but from the rightmost monitor her face absorbs the glow of the mall like the invigorating sun. The light sinks into her skin and tints her consciousness. Her focus sits comfortably veiled behind a hologram of great commercial vistas.

The wave of Sophia’s back aligns perfectly with the rest of her ergonomic chair. She steps away only once to urinate before continuing to work for hours uninterrupted. She eats a protein bar without removing her gaze from the screens. She runs the program to simulate a variety of failstates. The build shifts by increments. The hours of muzak have looped twice; the fountain bubbles still.

When the disposal program has reached a form just barely acceptable, Sophia saves the build and sends it to her client. She yawns, rolls her chair from the desk. Darkness hangs behind the blinds; night had fallen imperceptibly.

The disposal program is closed along with the mosaic of flashing windows. Underneath them are black desktops marked with a single column of icons. She double clicks one named LAYOUT and an image fills the left hand monitor — a highly annotated copy of the overhead floor plans for the first and second floor of the Blossom Plaza Mall. Besides the presence of certain ground-floor amenities and a lack of central floor space on the mezzanines, the two layouts are identical — linear sequences of three bent corridors, something resembling a specialized electrical component or a broken bone. Sectors of the plan have been highlighted in different soft colors and assigned a letter from A through N. In the center of the first floor, an octagonal atrium is labeled G.

Opening another icon, the right hand monitor displays a folder consisting of thirteen subfolders, each also labeled A through N. The mall is returned to its proper place, front and center.

All this time Sophia’s unblinking eye has been fixed on a figure in an unchanging world. Now, with a keystroke, the innards are exposed. A grid of red neon lines materializes across the floor and distant ceiling; wireframe cubes enclose each three-dimensional sector occupied by a sprite, voxel, or sloped angle of geometry. The white suggestions of a user interface encroach like mold on the corners of the screen.

Sophia drags her wireless mouse to the left and she turns accordingly. Ahead stand a trio of pixelated humans. Their bodies reflect the source game’s retro sprites, but each one has a different photograph of a human face grafted onto their two-dimensional necks. Maneuvering with her keyboard, Sophia floats into the group and through towards the bottom of sector G. Between a children’s shoe store and a confectioner, a blocky escalator climbs to the mezzanine.

Down the mezzanine she glides past a miscellany of familiar chain outlets: a mall’s prerequisite toy stores and jewelry stores, fashions for rebellious teens, a pretzel stand. Reaching a corner, Sophia turns from sector B into C, and in doing so beholds the mezzanine stretch out for a few stores before degenerating into slabs of untextured geometry, a blank cliff reaching towards a gridded abyss. When she started the project, the map was only that red grid laid flat over nothing — every floor, every wall, each angle of masonry was sculpted from that nothingness by her, hard untextured surfaces raised like black monoliths from the void. These monoliths were linked and gradually made to assume the jagged silhouette of the mall. Within their borders further structures were raised: through careful sculpting these would become the storefronts, the escalators, the water fixtures and children’s carousel.

Sophia stops before the untextured shell of an outlet store. She refers to the layout on the left hand monitor — sector C, store 5, a chain peddling scented candles and windowsill decor. She minimizes the image and opens her browser; she types in the name of the store and ‘BLOSSOM PLAZA MALL’. She hits enter and the screen fills with headlines, articles commemorating three months since the tragedy, reports on the planned reopening in the new year. She clicks on the images tab, scrolls past blurred corpses and the same three angles of the perpetrator’s face to find, at last, a few promotional images from the outlet’s opening. She studies the interior. Back in the mall, she highlights thin rectangles of blank flooring and raises them into a series of shelves and countertops. The geometry of the store begins to match that of its model.

When the store is sculpted, Sophia moves to the right hand monitor. She opens the folder labeled C, and within it, a subfolder named CANDLE. Within this folder are dozens of images, digital photographs of racks of jarred candles, white ceramic birds in rows, electric tea lights lined up on shelves. The photographs are divided into vertical columns and pasted in pieces across the naked geometry. When the work is done and Sophia has maneuvered back onto the mezzanine, the store in the program and the store online are almost identical.

Out from the CANDLE subfolder back into C. The mouse moves to a subfolder labeled VIDEO. The file DIANAK. A video fills the rightmost screen — surveillance footage, wide-angled and sickly blue-gray, peering down from the ceiling onto a familiar stretch of mezzanine. For the first few seconds of footage there is only the tiled floor and clear windows of the outlet stores. Then, in the windows, reflected bursts of light. Soon people in motion, hoodies and skirts rushing madly from the bottom of the frame to the top. Behind the first cluster, a lone woman sprints. When she’s nearly left the frame, she stumbles, falls outside the candle store. She looks over her shoulder. The footage freezes, ends. Her face, pixelated, marks the screen. Her eyes and mouth wide open.

Two in the morning, Sophia in the kitchen, a domed kettle on the stove. Although the lights are off in the living room, an electric glow from outside stains the windowsill. Amidst the plastic model kits, a black cube catches the lights and its edges glow gold. In contrast to its neighbors, the cube lacks ornamentation and left no seams in its assembly. Last Christmas, Sophia had gifted it to Ryan, and over the following week was privy to stages of the model’s construction.

Thin plastic runners of varying size were spread across a mat on the coffee table. From one, Ryan used slim side cutters to extract eight tiny figures — little bald men sitting with crossed legs and bowed heads, dark robes hanging like husks from their shoulders. He filed down the figures’ nubs with a utility knife and clicked each into place. Together they formed a spiral pattern around an empty plinth. They sat on a square panel marked by gray concentric striations. As the kit progressed, other panels of equivalent size were equipped with obscure fixtures and bouquets of interlaced cables. Four of these panels came to form the cube’s enclosure. Across the ceiling, Ryan had used tweezers to apply decals of rococo hieroglyphs, black on black. The ceiling was lowered and the men were sealed inside. There were no doors, ports, or visible controls.

When asked, Ryan explained the entombed men were monks, and this was their temple. It was pitch-dark, soundproof, and temperature-controlled. It was a spacecraft of mystical intent. While the monks spent all hours in meditation, the ship’s course was plotted psychically by the sect’s adherents on the red moon Phobos. Through their collective will, the ship would be flown intentionally into a black hole. The sect called themselves ‘Absolute Zero’.

Back at the computer with a sleeve of cookies and a cup of tea Sophia pulls up a sprite. The sprite is a copy of PEDESTRIAN03 (the source game’s only woman who is fully-clothed) but with her head exchanged for a photograph of a smiling face with wraparound shades. The photograph was taken from a memorial page for Diana Koda. 

DIANAK.jpeg is placed in the mall outside the outlet store. Sophia looks at the video frozen on the right. The woman and her mirror share the same tile across time. The fear in her eyes, the silent scream. The beaming smile, a burst of pixelated sunlight gleaming on a silver lens.

With a loud keystroke the mall’s innards vanish, the UI retreats, and there in the undelineated surfaces of the mall Sophia floats past Diana back into the palace. There, the months of Sophia’s labor tower around her. 

After the tragedy she couldn’t sleep. For a week she wandered horribly awake through an unreal world. The cemetery, the newsmen and their cameras, the emails of condolence — everything was vague and in a way unstable, as if formed from heavy fog. In the kitchen the walls flickered, in bed black phantoms clutched her throat. On morbid whims she visited the perpetrator’s website to read the manifesto. She would only remember one line — “I will open through its emptiness”. She showered for hours on end. The world grew so slight it approached translucence. Through layers of clear surfaces, that fanged emptiness, everywhere.

But all throughout the mezzanine, the concourses, in the multi-level anchor stores, in the food court with the fifty voxel tables and two-hundred voxel chairs, a great warmth radiates. Every construct marks another step back towards solidity, her heart and mind ordered as a geometric poem. In the mall’s light, the world exists. So she keeps it running all the time. It’s part of the furniture: living like an aquarium, holy as a votive niche.

In bed the monitor’s glow outlines her face. When she shuts her eyes the room is surrendered — blue light against her lids and the sounds of the simulation gradually transform the space. The walls fall away while the ceiling retreats into the air. The fountain bubbles beside her in bed; behind it, escalators churn. The distant ceiling becomes a great glass dome stretched across the cavernous space; twinkling stars and a bright crescent moon beam light into the atrium. One beam arcs above Sophia’s bed and through the fountain shining with coins. It flits across the tiled floors and lands squarely on the indistinct figure in the middle distance: Ryan.

The sprite was sourced from a full-body photograph Sophia took the previous summer. Ryan wore a bright floral shirt and shorts; light caught his ring and his grin. She edited his figure from the vacation backdrop and compressed it to fit within the game’s dimensions. Hovering over the void, the sprite was the project’s cornerstone. This second Ryan became the mall’s seed from which everything grew, and like a mammoth tree, everything which grew was by extension that very seed. Every polished counter, each computer kiosk and bookseller’s rack she made was a part of him, and in each construct she had embedded a fragment of her love. It burned all those months, through the finishing of the mezzanine, the construction of the anchor stores, the population of the landscape with Ryan’s fellow victims. 

Sometimes she approached Ryan until his face filled the edges of the screen. On the day the photograph was taken the bright Hawaiian sun lit his face brilliantly; her phone’s camera and the image’s subsequent compression took that light and reinterpreted it as a mosaic of colored pixels. Around his grin, light and shadow shattered into individual units, the shade of each pixel contrasted violently with its neighbor. Skin flaked off into orange. Purple. Green. Teal. Gold. The colors cycle across the screen. The light reaches everything.

~

The tiles of the mezzanine spread before her as a trellis of black and white. They’re still damp from recent cleaning and as she walks she notes the mutating glow the overhead fluorescents cast across their surfaces. The dull impact of her shoes against the tile underscores the piped-in muzak, indistinct chatter from varying distances, electronic beeps and clicks, the hush of automatic doors, the echoed grinding from distant escalators, vague pop jingles spewed from the face of every outlet, the low hum of air-conditioning, and the footsteps of countless others walking behind, before, and towards her. The mall has a temperature; she knew this yet the stale chill is felt with such force the shuttering of the candle store hardly registers. The mezzanine smells faintly of oranges. It’s longer than it should be. The ceiling is higher. Every surface shifts as shadows move across them. She thinks it’s like they’re breathing. Like the whole building is alive.

She walks as if each tile is liable to dissolve beneath too heavy a step. Lone shoppers, pushed strollers, groups of teenagers, and elders in pantsuits pass her by. Unconsciously she sees herself amidst them all as she would from the camera suspended from the ceiling behind and to the right of her. She is a mass of vibrating pixels. She watches herself exit the bottom of the frame. 

In sector B she sees the atrium in the distance. The glass dome glows brilliantly in the sun, light coursing through the bright webs of steel support. The metal so dramatically curved, like fish bones. Descending the escalator with hand gripped tight around the rail, the familiar arrangement of fountain, benches, and trees spread out before her. The fountain sprays brilliant sheets of clear water; the play of light casts rainbows on the faces of a young couple sitting on its ledge. The reek of chlorine stabs upwards. The smell makes her feel lightheaded. Coins sparkle in the basin.

Shoppers cross the atrium in baroque patterns. They sit in the benches and take calls beneath golden beams. Sophia spots her destination and charts a path through the noise. Across the atrium, a hobby store stands open. Inside she knows there are all manner of paints, miniatures, and sculpting tools; in the corner there are five shelves full of imported plastic model kits. The store gains definition as she approaches. Through its large bay window she sees the latest display — robotic women, biomechanical spacecraft, and a fleet of large black cubes.  

Sophia realizes she now stands precisely where Ryan did. She doesn’t feel the expected chill or the lance through the heart. Her hands shake, but they have been for hours.

She lowers herself to the ground. She lays on her back. The tiles are cold and hard. On all sides people walk past without acknowledgement, giving her tiles and their surroundings a wide berth. Above her the sun has reached its apex; perfectly framed within the center of the atrium, white flares explode across the panels. She imagines Ryan lying here with his bag spilled across the floor, his organs ruptured, shirt bloody. Through blurred eyes he saw the sun more perfectly than she: a pulsating glow casting particles of fragmented color, a rainbow shower across his sight. Her eyes strain to see as he did.

Beneath the glow, armageddon unfolds. Over the muzak and the fountain’s bubbling, the rattling of a tinny rifle. The same set of sharp and distorted screams erupting from every direction. The sharpening of the ceiling’s angles, curves flattened into severe lines. Opaque blood splashed across the tiles. Two figures, running in sync. Bursts of emerald muzzle flash. Sharp plumes of red pixels. Colors of the sun burn brighter, orange and silver and aquamarine so crisp they return to white. The perpetrator and his gun, shadow-flat, gliding across the floor. A chorus of electronic death groans echo from her skull out to the ceiling. All surfaces melt into the white. White crisps to black.