Ethan shivered as a bitter wind tore down the street.  It was opressivly cold out and the lack of foot traffic made that obvious.  No one ought to be out on a night like this, he thought darkly as he turned up the collar of his jacket and adjusted the hood of the sweatshirt he wore beneath, too bad these nights are the ones she likes best.  Neon signs for dirty little bars came and went, splashing their artificial color on a barren, lifeless landscape.  A bright and vibrant orange spilled out of an alleyway in front of him, breaking the pattern.  The first time he had sought her out, he had assumed that the homeless had set the blaze.  Turning the corner, he saw the two metal garbage cans, serving as modern day torches.  They stood on either side of a hole in the back wall of a building which he knew to have no doors.  The darkness that filled up the interior of that building was not inviting, nor particularly comforting.  It had the feeling of being the perfect kind of darkness for things that lurked in the night.  

A smile just barely flitted across his lips as he drew close to the flames, their heat sinking comfortably into his flesh.  Not wanting to enter the void and face her, Ethan waited by the twin bon fires for as long as he dared.  He could only hold out for so long, however.  She had called for him and nothing could stop his standing before her once that happened.  Swallowing what little survival instinct still existed within him, Ethan took his first clumsy steps through shadow towards the room in the back.  He couldn’t count the number of times he had tried to find this place in daylight, when the wind was calm and the sun high.  It simply did not exist.  No record of it could ever be found, no other human save himself had memory of it.  It was enough for one to question his own sanity.  

Ethan felt across the wall, finding familiar flaws in its surface as he went.  Blind as he was walking the corridor, he had become intimately familiar with how it felt.  Just as he was almost certain he had lost himself again, Ethan found the only bit of graffiti in the whole of this large abandoned place.  He spoke the words as his fingers caressed the letters, “No hope,”  

He had often wondered who had written it.  Could it have been some innocent bystander who had stumbled upon the entrance to his mistress’ haven?  Some miserable wretch of a street thug desperate to leave his crude mark on this blank slate?  Or was it, as he so feared, a warning left by one of her previous pawns?  It mattered little.  He already knew there was no hope.  From the moment he had found her it had fled him.

The trace outlines of sight returned to him, slowly detailing like a computer image being rendered.  Light here took the shade of the pale blue of cadavers.  Static echoed off of bare walls.  It grew so loud as he walked toward the light, into that same room, that he couldn’t hear his feet as he moved.  He couldn’t hear himself think.

The room he entered was a temple.  Monitors of all shapes and sizes adorned the floor and walls, spattered haphazardly across the room.  Each displayed a different pattern of static at any given time, each pattern flitting from monitor to monitor.  There was no order to it that Ethan’s mind could quantify.  Chaos seemed the point.  He made an effort not to look at any of the monitors.  Long ago when he had first discovered that her static was made up of faces, he had made a point not to stare at them for fear of their staring back.  

Rising out of the back of each monitor came a mess of thick metallic cables that choked the walls like ivy.  They spread in the pattern of veins across the walls and ceiling, growing more intricate the deeper into the room you looked.  Infinitely more complex machinery sprouted from the walls in the far depths of the room, which slithered back invitingly, beckoning him into the squirming heart of it.  He trembled as the walls writhed around him, pulling backwards until at last she revealed herself to him again.

At one time she had been beautiful, Ethan was sure of it.  Her hair was long chestnut silk that shone even in the sickly light. Her figure was thinner now than he imagined her before she had touched whatever held her firmly in its grasp.  The remnants of a black Perfect Circle T-shirt clung tightly to her chest which bled nicely into flattering pinstriped slacks.  Her feet were bare and hung daintily several inches off the ground.  Her arms were spread wide, like a priest greeting his flock on Sunday morning.  A cold blue glassy gaze met Ethan’s own, peering casually into his soul.  He could hear her jaw popping wetly as she opened her mouth to speak, a disturbingly perfect voice resonating from her throat as the mouth worked in ways it shouldn’t,

“The hour draws close.  Void rises through our sea of data…whitewalls of the mind, things turning slowly to how they never should have changed.  Its soooooo close to the surface now.  We have to break its skin, spill it over everything.  Few variables still resolving…how do you solve for X?”

Ethan was never sure how much of it actually came out of her mouth and how much of it was hidden under the audio snowstorm playing across the monitors.  Her voice seemed to permeate him from all directions.  It left him breathless and on the verge of nausea.  He felt a sense of vertigo just looking into her eyes and against his will felt the sick desire for her rising up from below.  He longed to feel her madness twisting inside of him.  No hope, it had said.  It had been more than right.  Ethan kneeled, feeling a thrill in his submission to her,

“What would you have me do?”

A smile cold as apathy played across her face as her machines peeled back Ethan’s shirt and curled effortlessly under the flesh of his back.  His whole body went numb as she used his spine as a port, jacking into everything he was.  It was euphoria.  Her wisdom flooded him in secret languages no one could ever speak and slowly, Ethan began to understand.  The hiss of static turned to screams.  She was right.  They were close.  He’d have to act fast.