3.
The screen glowed dimly in the warehouse, boxes draped in greys and blues. Cordero adjusted the jack at the base of his spine, and stared unseeing through the ceiling at the silicon sunset. Limping slightly from the synaesthesia, he hopscotched the grids, tracking smudged 1’s and 0’s in a footprint at each skip. He guided the data and slipped it into self-perpetuating automation like ducklings trailing their mother.
Time passed. A tone. The time is now 1926538268.
Cordero pulled the plug. The gloves went numb and withery, sounds blurred from waves to whitenoise.
The surge built with capacitance, the greys becoming greyer. The noise was green and tasted like burning optics. Presently, the whites rolled back to irises and cyght became sight. Cordero synced the time on his HUD , broke the seal on a bottle from his pack, drink, and felt the floor, cold, for the first time. He had no idea what he was doing. And it weighed heavily on his mind.