Plate walked, as Plate usually did, through a crowd of others while wearing someone else’s skin. Walked in the Local while dozens and dozens—standing shoulder-to-shoulder with each other with their feet and legs locked by an invisible magnetism—whizzed by in the Express. The dUSA—referred to as such in written form because the “domed” was so often said half-swallowed out of shame—was roughly one-fortieth the size of its undomed predecessor. Navigation across the dome—which was engineered, quite brilliantly some might say, to house as much as roughly one-fifteenth of the entire world’s peak population—was made possible by an interconnecting set of electromagnetic appliances. Step into any one of the Tubestations, enter the code corresponding to your desired destinations, and the system sets into action.

Punch in the code and Hud’s systems start getting manipulated by positive and negative bursts—frequencies, magnetisms, whatever—to lock the suit (and the body within) into place. Once hands and arms are in the proper position, safe and secure, a hatch closes, and there are more bursts—positives, negatives—that send the mass of it all rushing into an open slot on the Express, where more magnetic fields whoosh bodies at hundreds of miles an hour towards wherever they asked to go, where they are shunted off to the side, plopped into another Tubestation, hit by another burst of magnetism and allowed to walk freely again.

To the side of this blurring, humming transportation nightmare (a marvelous feat, in fact), Plate walked like Plate usually did, walked slowly in the midst of a crowd rushing past. Plate, if able to view the scene from above, would smile to Plate’s Self—a slight twitch of the mouth and the eyes brightening a shade or two—and would imagine water moving around a stone. Again, an image from those old nature films in the Elementary. But Plate was not above the scene in which Plate was also participating—hope against hope, someday some technology would bring that dream to reality—but instead stuck within it. So Plate walked, feeling another’s skin chafe, squeeze, and pinch tender parts of the body: under the arms, along the inside of the thigh, between the bases of the fingers and the toes.

Plate took time to remember, like Plate often did, the skin that came before this one. How they felt and who they helped Plate to be. And Plate wondered, as Plate tracked Delphi a few yards ahead in the crowd, who this Charlie would help Plate be.

So (of course), instead, it was this Charlie—with his cool lilac skin and his rusty orange hair—who you would see walking through the crowd, a mass of similar lilac bodies with specks of bright orange and pink and red flecked throughout. Charlie would be easily lost within that crowd—hard to recognize as he tracked behind Delphi—and so Charlie was of incredible importance to Plate, within the skin.

Charlie, or however the being within the skin would have self-conceived, was long-gone—as were all the others whose Huds hung in a spare room whose door was locked and painted to look like just more of the wall. They couldn’t handle release. They, freed from the thing that trapped them, found the expanse of freedom to be crushing. A spiritual agoraphobia. Proof of the wish to wish, the desire to have desires. The truly animal craving for direction and confinement habituated through generations of precisely designed cultural organizations. For the goal is not to cultivate, ennoble, the soul but instead to let it go fallow. Among fields of wildflowers.

So Charlie, the vessel Plate now inhabited, walked along the Local—head locked forward, eyes straight ahead, trailing another target. Delphi was taking her usual route home—down the Local until the SuitShop, left on Bronxon towards the Cinemalloplex. Soon there would be a hard right taking her through an alley. That’s the moment.

Delphi intrigued Plate, had done so for a while—for long before he’d heard her asking those questions of the professor in his office. Plate had heard people asking before—this is how he selected those he chose to bring in—but never before with such force, such desperation, such necessity, such sadness. A forlorn quality of personality, a twinge of perpetual disappointment, loss, a tremble in the voice as it caught on certain syllables that, upon hearing it Plate knew, knew that it was there throughout her entire being. A despairing wish for the existence of a world that seems, now, so impossible. Because it is in those feelings that Plate knew hope—a determination for something different and free and, perhaps, better—lies dormant and waiting, Plate hoped, for a chance to feel sunshine. These tears water the seed, you see.

It reminded Plate of that first night—which came from a long series of nights and led into another long series as well. Reading that report, feeling the click come into the brain, a locking of the world into its place. Not a resolution to a lifelong confusion but at least a justification. Life as a long and endless misery throughout which joy appears at random—pinholes in solid onyx, stars in an inky night—an unwieldy mass of pathos, the raw electricity of life, which can be (at most) reshaped but never fundamentally altered depending on historical circumstance.

But here the alley. Plate made up the ten feet or so of distance between Plate and Delphi in two quick, long strides. A short baton, buzzing at the end, held in the hand. Before she could turn to see whose footsteps echoed behind her, it was between her shoulder blades. A sharp jolt—painless. Delphi stiffened—or rather, her Hud stiffened. And so, being guided with the stranger’s hand comfortable on her back, Delphi walked with Plate to where the needed to go.