Metaworld HopeCore

The stage lights came up, and William realised he had no memory of when or why he'd left his seat.

It was like a badly spliced jump-cut; in one frame, he’d been sitting in the best seats in the house, watching his erstwhile girlfriend titillate his soul with her kicking feet and tear-streaked face—then he was hearing his own voice blasting out of speakers—

—then he woke up, and he was in another movie, another reel. He was upright, spine locked, hands at his sides like a felon called to stand in the witness stand.

For a horrifying few seconds, William realised he was the only person standing. Faces known to him and unknown were already turning towards him, their eyes raw and unblinking, full of questions he dared not answer.

Students, whose faces he had shared a hallway with for four years, were aghast. Parents, who had heard him speak year after year on the podium or at his Showcases, grew suspicious enough to point in his direction. A girl he'd bedded after some forgotten mixer was gagging, her stare isolating him so obviously that others began following it.

Do they know? Had they recognised my voice?

The knowledge of it, the horror, the realisation and then the paralysis, robbed the breath from his lungs. Something underneath his ribs wanted to scream, like the girl in the recording, but could make no noise. The practised denial he had rehearsed, the threats to sue, the righteous indignation and the slut-shaming, all caught in his throat.

Leave. The thought came next, urgent, animal. Get up. Walk. Now, before—

The thoughts died fast because William experienced a second leap-in-time, and this time, after the reels of consciousness reconnected, he was sitting down once more. The rational part of him had told him that leaving mid-performance, while every single audience member was looking for an answer, was basically self-incrimination.

It would tell a story too condemning to escape from. Both his professional and preservational instincts told him that he had to stay.

Be cool.

Then plan his exit.

I am William Chen.

His family were near-billionaires. If he can’t even handle this, how could he inherit the Omnia Group? What would Lee-Kwon say?

He rearranged his face into the flat, faintly bored expression of a gentleman deeply unbothered by whatever glitch had just embarrassed the sound crew. He was confused as well! Like everyone else!

Onstage, the actors were clearly not in on the act—this… recording… was unauthorised!

Chiron and Demetrius were standing half a minute too long in the wing’s shadows; the whole company was caught in the spectacle, like children who had suddenly stumbled onto a bleeding, naked body. Nobody on that stage seemed to know what play they were in anymore.

Hope dawned in William’s heart. If the whole thing was unplanned, then I could—

Then, impossibly, the Seniors snapped into their roles.

Something switched on behind their eyes, as if they had fallen into a trance. Chiron, one of the offenders, offered no cue, no visible signal, and yet, in the same half-breath, as if someone pressed play on a long-form video, Titus Andronicus resumed.

William had screamed at enough amateur actors to know what a company looks like when the players are rattled. This wasn't that. The cohesion of what followed was better than any dress rehearsal.

Chiron and Demetrius stomped onto their marks, dragging a bound, robed shape between them, covered from head to toe in a torn linen wrap, stained with fresh and congealing splotches of carmine.

"So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak." Demetrius kissed the shrouded Lavinia, his face a mask of sadism, seemingly unaffected by the prior audio. “Who 'twas that cut thy tongue and ravish'd thee.”

“Write down thy mind.” Chiron scratched his chin, his face full of smug satisfaction, like a wolf who had just fed. “Bewray thy meaning so—an if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.”

They laughed. It was a rehearsed laugh, a written laugh, and it was somehow the mirror image of his own voice in the recording, because it was cruelty wearing the shape of mockery, because the players had heard the real thing. Are they miming me? William felt his jaw tighten. Surely… they had recognised his voice. They were classmates for four years.

"Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands."

"She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash," Demetrius chortled.

In their neo-fascist singlets, suspenders and tuchhose, the boys looked like a pair of demons.

They left her on the mark, then went, and William, watching, felt his internal reel disconnect once more. Valorie. Mio. Eppie. Simone. The faces of the girls he had held in one hand and toyed with like pliant clay haunted his thoughts like Banquo from that one scene in Macbeth, taught by Kirby in their first year.

The story on stage meant nothing to him, for William felt like a man drowning in six inches of water, fighting his internal horror so he could plan and plot.

Then, Whitfield's Marcus found Valorie wandering and stopped as though he'd walked into a wall.

“Who is this —my niece, that flies away so fast?” Grief cracked straight through the actor's trained voice. “—Where is your husband?"

From the covered Lavinia came a long, terrible silence, from which no answer could ever come. Marcus’ hand hovered, not quite touching her, as if touching her might finish what had already been done.

“Come, let us go, and make thy father blind—for such a sight will blind a father's eye.”

Marcus led Valorie off. The stage went dark. William’s hand went to the inner pocket of his jacket, where something rigid and oblong rested against the velvet fabric. He had slipped it through the staff entrance, manned by peers who had congratulated him, just so that… in the worst-case-scenario…

The stage lit up.

Enter Marcus, leading Lavinia.

Valorie had lost her sandals. Her feet were covered in dirt, and something else. Something was trailing from beneath her robes. Blood? No. Red threads. Long… thin threads of scarlet, trailing from stage right to centre stage, mark after mark, block after block.

Titus, trapped in his own grief, looked up from where he knelt.

“Behold thy daughter,” Marcus said, and unwrapped Lavinia, allowing her to spill over the stage. “This is thy daughter, Titus!”

William’s world, much like that of the audience around him, skipped a frame.

The house gasped as a single creature.

The red thread didn’t drip or splatter the way stage blood did in every student production William had ever seen: it unspooled, continuous, unbroken, a single impossible ribbon feeding out from the ruin of her mouth and running down over a chin that would not close around it properly, red against a white so consuming it looked less like a costume than like a burial shroud.

From each sleeve, where wrists should have ended in hands, more of it fed loose and pooled at Valorie’s feet as she stumbled toward her father, leaving a snail trail of hematite against the sandstone-hued floor.

From her mouth, her sensual mouth, Valorie bit into another spool of thread so that it trailed from her lips and down her chest, imposed against the whiteness of her once pure Roman gown.

The more she walked, the more horrifying the scene became.

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The audience had forgotten all about the strange recording.

Titus made a sound William had no name for. Not a line. Not blocking. Just a sound, the kind a body makes when it understands something before the mind has agreed to.

“Who hath done this deed?” Titus's voice broke apart on the last word, a father begging an answer he already knew. “Speak, my child—who hath done this to you?”

Lavinia—Valorie, William’s sweet, sweet Valorie, turned her ruined face away from her stage father.

She looked into the crowd.

She found his face.

She lifted the stumps and pointed.

Not toward the wings. Not toward some abstracted middle distance, a director could later claim was symbolic, unspecific, safely fictional.

She pointed into the house.

Into the middle row.

At him.

William's entire world came apart in the single second it took the audience to follow the line of her arm and find, at the end of it, the general location of where she had aimed. He felt it happen almost physically, some vast, silent detonation behind his sternum.

They know. They know. THEY KNOW.

He stopped calculating.

He stood.

And then he ran, over the other audience members, up the aisle, past knees he didn't apologise to, past a hand that might have reached for his sleeve, over men and women, students and parents, every nerve in his body screaming it at once.

He ran like a wicker man lit by a supernatural fire, illuminated by a spotlight that existed nowhere but inside his own unravelling mind.

Then, somewhere past the lobby, accosted by judgmental attendants, his phone buzzed.

Backstage, in the narrow dark between the fly rail and the wing-space heater plinking away, Eppie watched her [Causality] burn.

Her stockpiled supply was drained at every actor’s steadied nerve, every line that landed clean, every gesture that didn't shake. She was their Fairy Godmother; she was paying for every minute of the spectacle with her pixie dust like Prospero on his island, so that her invisible goblins could maintain the illusion.

But it wasn’t all doom, gloom and [Causality] drainage.

There was something she had genuinely forgotten to account for: