A near indescribable panic took hold in Aster's walloping heart in hearing the voice speak. The blood drained from her face, contrasting the dark circles round her eyes in an even more despondent complexion as beads of sweat instantaneously formed across her skin. With great hesitance and formidable awkwardness she turned, trembling, to see who had greeted her.

There in the doorway stood an old woman. The oldest Aster had ever seen. She wore a smile that itself wore time— each wrinkle about her face formed with a depth and distinction that could only be given by many, many years alive. Aster noticed all her wrinkles aligned perfectly with her smile.

“What's your name dear?” she inquired softly.

Aster moved to respond, but her suddenly dry voice broke and offered only a meek little whimper.

“Aster,” she stuttered once more in an impressively diminutive way, the color returning to her face in a flash of crimson embarrassment that caused her to keep eye-contact with the floor.

“Well what a pretty name! Thanks for coming, Aster,” she replied. She gestured her hand out towards the table in the center, offering Aster a seat as she herself made her way into the room. With respectable stiffness Aster took the seat offered to her, fidgeting in the chair as she scanned the room.

As she could see from the hall, the room was filled with decoration— balloons and streamers floated and fluttered from wall to wall like aerial potpourri, banners adorned pinned each corner, and the table before her held a set of colorful birthday hats and an impressive looking meal. The old woman took one of these hats— white with birthday-cake toned polka dots, and affixed atop her scruffy gray hair.

Aster held her arms close to her, awash with hesitancy and apprehension as silence fell over the room. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What do you even say at birthday parties? What if she comments on my eyebrows? What if—

“Here,” The old woman said, handing Aster a hat, who obliged and awkwardly strapped it onto her bushy head.

"Quite the party, huh?" she remarked. Aster, who had been secretly hoping the acknowledgment of the complete lack of any guests would remain unvoiced, stuttered a dreadful failure of an attempt at a reply and adverted eye contact.

"It's mostly a bother. You hit one-hundred and they just start throwing 'em for you. Even if you don't ask for it, up goes the banners. Your family dies, your friends die— but the banner still goes up, year after year,"

Her gaze scanned the empty room. “Life really is book-ended by childishness.”

Aster, suffocating under the sheer embarrassment the situation had heaped upon her, couldn't manage a response. "Sorry, I'm sure this isn't what you wanted to hear. The ramblings of some old woman," she chuckled, smiling at Aster.

"Did you come here to relax?"

“Yeah," Aster meekishly replied, cloying with her hands as she worked up the courage to ask a question of her own. "I read that you were a musician?"

Nancy seemed to lighten up at this. "Yes I was. Did pretty well for myself, I think," she said, giving Aster a slight smirk.

Aster was taken by excitement upon hearing this. "What instrument did you play?" she followed up, heart racing.

"Bass guitar. I was one hell of a player I'll tell you what!"

Aster's eyes darted side to side, as if soon-to-be audience for some esoteric recollection. “You'll tell me... what?” she whispered. Nancy laughed.

“You like music I assume?” she asked.

Aster's eyes lit up. “...I love it,” she declared softly, her hands fidgeting with her lavender dress.

Aster had never talked with a fellow musician in real life. They had their communities online— refuges of primarily older musicians from before AI became standard as well as young techno-conservatives like Aster, but to meet a person in the flesh who had made their living through creative pursuits was near mythical in its rarity. She trembled with eagerness to probe further and tripped over the litany of questions that she wished to ask.

“You played in a band, right? In like actual concerts?” Aster asked, her voice now louder and more direct as she tried to get above her timidness.

“I did! Though it was my solo career that really took off,” Nancy answered, turning to Aster. “And I played many concerts. Massive festivals, historic concerts, small bar shows. You name it, I was probably there. It was tiring, but an experience I'd never trade away,”

Aster, who'd only ever known a world of holographic tours of long-dead famous bands or VR concerts featuring AI idols, became significantly depressed upon hearing this reminiscence.

A live concert— that holy arena in which one could commune as closely with divinity as any human could ever hope to. Where through sound they could wield magic by proxy and captivate and change the lives of hundreds or thousands or even millions.

Experiencing a live concert was something Aster had fantasized about since she was young child, when her dad had kindled her love for music through playing and showing her the rock bands of yore— magicians from a far gone time when imperfection was beauty. Playing a concert held a yet more tender spot in her aching heart, and so hearing Nancy's warm recollection was true agony for her, though she longed to hear more in hopes she could snatch just the smallest sense of satisfaction from her vicariously.

Who am I kidding? I couldn't even fucking make it down the hall without crying. Like I could ever even stand on stage, she thought, her heart breaking.

Not like I'll ever know. Not like dreams are really even something you have anymore, she thought as Nancy continued to talk on.

The large windows opening out onto the city caught Aster's attention in the midst of her depressive fugue. She noticed how they very slightly opened out onto a tiny terrace reserved for decorative foliage.

Nancy had paused her storytelling, excusing herself for a moment to attend to something. Taking advantage of Nancy's back being turned Aster quietly rose and shuffled, then dashed, towards the half-open windows in her manic stupor. The fatigue of everything had now sat itself firmly upon her heart in meeting Nancy, the cordial reaper who's meeting was the final push in what up to this point was only a passive ideation of suicide that she only ever threatened as a way of relieving her terrible bouts of depression.

In this moment it was finally undone— her woe-addled mind had finally gone blank with the bliss of pragmatism— her body acted with one sole purpose which was to end itself, and did away with any thought or reason that could cause it to stray from that path. She approached the window with desperation in her heaven-seeking eyes, and stepped up onto the windowsill.

She glanced out at the blanket of steel and silicon which draped the land with progress, and with an exploratory push and shaking hands forced the window open yet further. The wind whipped and howled furiously through the windows, tussling her messy hair.

Can I actually do it? she marveled, dazed by adrenaline. She peered down at the foot of the skyscraper which towered so high the ground below lost definition, the Earth itself blurring before its stature.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered, her entire body shaking and shivering violently. Her stomach convulsed in ways wholly different than any panic attack she had ever experienced. Her pupils restricted and her heart thrashed wildly, orgasming in the numb unfolding realization that she was now at death's door.

Her heart fluttered like it's first love had been found. All I have to do is jump, she thought, finally progressing towards the edge.

She lamented not having a song to send her off as she closed her eyes and leaned forward, and exhaled deeply. Her vision went bright white.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Nancy screamed, letting go of her ankle. Aster's vision came too, and she realized she was splayed out on the floor. Staggered by her adrenaline high she offered no explanation, stumbling to her feet. Her heart raced the fastest she had ever felt it. It thrashed so violently it caused her pain as her eyes nervously darted around in assessment of the situation.

The window sat behind Nancy still open, the howling breeze taunting Aster with its escape outside. She lept towards it again, brushing past Nancy as she frantically climbed up the ledge. Nancy again grabbed at her feet, pulling at her as Aster devolved into hysterics, latching onto the edge of the windowpane as she fought back against Nancy.

“STOP, FUCKING STOP!” Aster screamed, her tears splitting into the wind, the pearls of her woe sparkling as they fell past Nancy.

“What are you doing?!” Nancy screamed, yanking at Aster's arm.

“Just let me fucking go!” she pleaded. Nancy was stunned by the broken, hopeless gaze that locked eyes with her own.

“This isn't the same world you grew up in! We don't live anymore! We just fucking are!” she cried, half-heartedly yanking on her arm as she looked out of the skyscraper at the innumerable more which stood out before them.

“What's the point in living just to live? I'll never get to experience all the things you have, and I'm barely twenty! And you want me to go through a hundred more years of this fucking misery? I can barely wake up now!” Aster sobbed, her arm going limp.

Nancy did not respond. She locked the window and kept her grip affixed to Aster's forearm, and led the defeated girl off of the ledge. Aster collapsed on the floor, and huddled into a ball as she continued to weep.

“Jesus, you really are fucked up aren't you?” Nancy muttered. She looked down at Aster who shook and wept, tucked in within herself.

“Stay there,” she commanded, walking over to the table. Aster looked up, the darkened circles around her eyes even more pronounced than usual, her eyes bloodshot. Nancy opened a bag and produced a small present, which she brought over to Aster.

She crouched down beside her and opened the small package, revealing a device the resembled what Aster recognized as antique earbuds. Except, they weren't earbuds. Aster's heart began to pound violently in realizing with what she was being presented.

“That's—” her voice broke in total astonishment. It was only known through whispers. It was only ever assumed to exist. The mythical, the vaunted, the deeply feared. “The Garden of Eden”. A full-dive VR module.

“Are you truly that unsatisfied?” Nancy muttered, placing it now before her. “Is death more precious than life?” she said gravely. Aster's bottom lip trembled. She couldn't tear her eyes from it to give Nancy an answer.

She outstretched her palm, holding it closer to Aster. “If you do not fear death then take it,” she said.

“But,” Aster stuttered, moving back slightly.

There was nothing in the world more heavily regulated, nothing that carried a more severe punishment for illicit use than the Garden of Eden. It was reserved solely for those of great social standing, or those who had immediate medical need for it. To use it outside of these cases brought forth a punishment that was known only through whispers even more delicate than those of the device's very existence.

“Take it!” Nancy commanded.

The things that make you the most anxious— thought Aster as her trembling hands reached out for it, and placed it against her temple.

Nancy looked at her, and melted away. Her surroundings became instantly bathed in an utter and irrefutably pure white light as colors spanning the spectrum burst forth through it, twisting and concentrating into a technicolor orgy of shades and hues the human mind could barely consider. They ebbed and flowed, warped and distorted and played with her concept of shape as if to give reality and time a face with which to see Aster off on her journey of making light of existence.

The white light receded as quickly as it had come upon her, bearing before her the sight of a cobblestone lined city center and a fountain before her gushing forth with cold, crystal clear water. People lined up along the fountain with guitars, some sat by the sides of the street, playing to any passersby who would chuck something into whatever container they'd placed beside them.

Their dress was vibrant— plain t-shirts and cardigans, dress pants, a tie here and there. The town square stretched out into a web of streets, Bavarian style architecture defining the shops which lined them as far as the eye could see. Aster stood in complete shock, a cold winter wind whipping through her.

“What the fuck,” she uttered.