It was always one of the most striking of her father's peculiarities, Aster thought, the way he would leave the television to play for all to hear. In this modern age, biological implants enabled many improvements to the quality of life, such as selective hearing for media in this instance. Those who had forgone receiving them were viewed as odd and stubborn, though not at all an uncommon caste.

The droning spiel that came from the television, of talking heads introducing the night's evening news married with the aimless and inconsequential chit-chat of her father from the kitchen. He had called her into the living room again that night— something he had increasingly done after the incident with her mother, in hopes of keeping her from isolating herself in her room. Aster however, worn from a week of panic attacks and mental breakdowns, had little to offer in conversation, and only obeyed wordlessly, slumping into the couch while her father prepared dinner.

The days had begun to blur over the past week. Her first therapy session with Marienne continued to approach, though had long since stopped feeling as though it got any closer. The future had ceased to exist the moment she had left Peppermint Plains, leaving her alone to float along the doldrums of simple, instinctual existence.

Her mind was fixed on a steep decline of severe depression and a flirtation with psychosis, the breakdowns of which kept her from sleeping much at all, and which further aided the dissolution of borders between days. This extra time to think did little for an exhausted mind, which spent those surplus hours on the threshold of suicidal ideation in the twilight where her mind would not rest.

She tried with great pain to find Nancy's residence to no avail. The megascraper in which they made their home was so large there was little chance she could ever just happen across her apartment. Directories and internet searches yielded nothing of her address or contact information. Her parents had forbidden her from leaving the apartment until her first therapy session, further hampering any attempts at a search.

All of Aster's newly found hope— that sweet lease on life, birthed and stoked by her experiences in Peppermint Plains— was evaporating. Thoughts and internal debates on the topic of suicide returned with debilitating frequency, although she fought against them with a much more vehement opposition this time around. As enticing as a sure and quick end to the fear and loneliness clawing its fingers around her trembling heart would seem, she could not bear the thought of doing away with the chance to return to Peppermint Plains forever.

But there was little she could do otherwise, she bemoaned in her depressive lethargy. The all but complete lack of apparent choices in solution to her dilemma had left Aster essentially dead in all but name— a battered psyche drifting from manic episode to manic episode.

At that moment, a special bulletin flashed across the screen and the anchorman who had been orating with such speed and energy, stopped and turned to face the audience with a wicked smile.

“It seems here we've received some significant, breaking news,” he began with an ominous cadence. His smile did not fade, though his eyes showed no true joy, as creased into a smile as they were.

“You've no doubt heard of them— those whose deeds and actions carry such derision and hatred that they rival murderers and counter-revolutionaries as the worst of what our society has to offer— The Vanguard of Eden.”

The sound of cutlery at work in the kitchen stopped. Aster's father rushed over to turn the television off, but froze as the picture of a man in chains flashed across the screen.

“Dear God,” he muttered.

“This breaking news, you heard it here first— Cedar Czukay, CEO of one of the nation's foremost tech conglomerates, and apparently high-ranking lieutenant in the Vanguard of Eden— was arrested earlier today in a sting operation that has uncovered the largest illegal trade of Eden devices ever yet seen.”

Aster's blood ran cold. She had indeed always heard of them, the notorious anti-state terrorist group who's mere mention caused the average person to avert their ear. The idea that Cedar Czukay, an oligarch of the state— one of only five of comparable power— would be involved with them, was cataclysmic in its mere suggestion.

The anchorman appeared to weep.

“What has the world come to, when someone so bright and instrumental in our success can fall to such abhorrent influences? In the very center of our nation this cancer has found itself a lymph node. If— and if, we are to survive this we must excise it with such brutality and pain that it will never dare think to even so much as eye this beautiful body of ours!” The anchorman, by the end of his diatribe, was screaming. His panel of co-hosts, side by side, clapped, cheered, and wept as he checked off his grisly wishlist of torture and harm he wanted to see brought to Czukay during his forthcoming public interrogation.

Perhaps Aster would've once smiled at this, having grown up in a world where the execution of members of the Vanguard was something regularly broadcast to applause and fanfare on all state-owned TV and VR channels. It brought her warmth and security in seeing it, another job well done in ensuring the sanctity of the human race. So all the more shocking was the new light in which she now saw them— they were actually saints, not devils.

Aster's mind was swirling, barely able to reconcile this stark and sudden shift in her fundamental view of the world. Her father took a seat beside her, his face painted with a look more grave than she had ever seen on him.

“They use the devices— stolen from production lines and our vulnerable elders— to further their psychotic aim of triggering 'the Singularity'— a concept that scientists and the government have long denounced as a work of mere science-fiction. A total propagandist sham designed to brainwash the citizenry into acts of anti-state rebellion.”

At that moment the anchorman brought up an image of a personal computer— a vintage, physical model long since made obsolete by the advent of biochip-enhanced AR.

“Using these relics, the criminals circumvent the protection of our state's network and organize meet-ups through the 'freenet' for a joyride with the Eden device.”

It was akin to the first beam of dawn lapping up against a dream-shrouded world, the way in which the answer to all Aster's woe suddenly presented itself to her.

The freenet— the last remnant of the embryonic Internet before it was secured and nationalized, was a place almost no one had access to, nor really even cared to access. Much like the Vanguard, it carried no positive association, and most were content to leave it little discussed. It was the den of debauchery and moral compasses gone awry, where polluted people bred abhorrent strains of thought.

Aster's father finally shut the television off, and silently returned to preparing dinner. He said nothing more that night, which was a rare cause for alarm from his daughter, though also of relief, as her mind had no hope of entertaining even the slightest bit of conversation.

Rather, throughout the duration of dinner and up until her family went to sleep, her thoughts remained completely centered on the anchorman's mention of the “freenet”— a term she had heard come up in passing between her parents at multiple points in her childhood, though one she gave little attention, preferring to think of it as just another emblem of her father's age and weirdness rather than an indicator of any sort of nefarious behavior. It was only earlier that night upon the anchorman's mention that her memory of it had returned, which she now connected with the vintage computer hidden away in her father's study— a room she had always been admonished from ever entering.

—

At just before midnight, she crept out of her room, heart thrashing, as she proceeded down the hall. Her breathing, ragged and heavy, filled the dead hall like it was the loudest thing in the world. The intense threat of being caught numbed her mind to the point where each careful step forward blurred into one. She passed Dahlia's room, and then her parents' as the room at the far end of the hall drew nearer. Before she realized it she had arrived at its door, a pale sapphire wash of moonlight beckoning her to open it.

She obeyed, and found it unlocked. There, in the far corner of the room lay a relic of a computer, a light film of dust resting upon it through disuse. The sight of it took Aster in awe, though not for its incredibly dated appearance— but rather its promise of salvation, which was inexplicably apparent in its molded plastic visage.

A lone tear came to Aster's eye as she approached and sat before it. A flood of harsh, electric blue washed forth from the monitor as Aster jostled the mouse in an exploratory manner, awakening it. Her stomach seized in agony as the gravity of what she was engaging became apparent as she moved to open the VPN. To break the seal of lawfulness, to step off of the tight-rope a law-abiding citizen forever walked, filled her with an abominable sense of self-hatred and disgust. Yet her desire to return triumphed even over any sense of self-preservation. There was no life worth living that did not involve Sylvia and the rest.

With hesitant, awkward gestures expected from her first time using a mouse and keyboard, she navigated through the bare and cryptic sites, her heart showing no signs of slowing down.

The Vanguard's site itself was not difficult at all to find, wishing to present no barriers to those interested in using the device. Their page itself was simple— a single input was nestled in the middle of a rose-adorned webpage, which enticed the user to say “hello”.

Aster, her hands as though cast in lead, obliged with a greeting.

The page froze a moment, then responded with an address, the location of which resided inside her own building. It was accompanied by a single instruction— “Take the pill and wait.”

—

She felt as though she were destined for the same gallows that would snap Czukay's neck as she snuck out just past midnight to the appointed meeting place, which lay slightly beyond the recreation room. A million disparate thoughts swirled through her bushy head, most of them concerned with the fear the website had been a trap, an unending paranoia born of the fact that arranging the meeting had been too easy.

She paused at every corner she rounded, barely able to proceed in the midst of nightmarish panic attacks with which she had to resist every severe sense of self-preservation to abandon the meeting and return home. It was useless she told herself, for even if she did not follow through, she had reached out, which was all that was necessary to justify her arrest. She had to make herself realize that it didn't matter— the Aster who did not reach Peppermint Plains was dead regardless.

After several minutes of pure dissociative dread, she had reached the meeting place, a tiny alcove in a hallway where a set of stylish, modernist furniture sat. Not a soul resided within it or the hallway, which bore the deafening silence of the tower after dark.

On a small coffee table sat a glass of water and the pill as promised. A small, folded note rested before the two items, which Aster reached for with the utmost hesitance. “Eat me,” the note declared.

Aster's body somehow began to tremble even more violently upon reading this, a handshake in two words. She reached for the pill and water, her tiny hands shaking as she held the two items up to the twilight of the megalopolis, whose stars twinkled in the waves of the jostling glass.

This pill could kill her, she knew. There was every chance that the site was a trap, a ploy to execute those stupid enough to wander upon it. The recent arrest of Cedar Czukay had made it even more of a possibility, she thought.

She observed the pill intensely, before swallowing it— to her, either result was an improvement.