Pink Magic Woman

By Christian Miller

Hangs off the end of his seat in the Chatsubo, neon blue smoke from a Korean version of a Cuban cigar engulfing his head like the myst of some archaic, enchanted forest. The once icy, glinting chrome of his Hosaka-Activision seven-finger star-power-feedback prosthetic arm is sprinkled with stardust glitter, the texture recalling the eyeshadow of a raver. The tips of the cybernetic digits are painted a pretty rose, where fingernails would be, and dance like sugar plum fairies across a fretboard of cheap Chinese plastic, molded into the spectre of a Stratocaster.

"Usual Chandler special on the rocks then, Herr Artiste?"

"Not tonight. Campbell's soup if you got any."

As he picks up his Spaghetti O's, one of those strange instants of silence descends, as though a hundred individuals have simultaneously decided to check their internet forum. He does, in fact, refresh his Myspace at that moment, to discover his similarly specular avatar remains in the same position in her "top friends" list.

He sets the octave shifting, co-girl whore beside him and the heraldically un-photoshopped bartender on "ignore". Treasurehunts cheaptickets' for business-class tickets; single window seat, for Stormhold, Faerie, connecting flights through Lothlorien and Azeroth, at the end of the month. Possible delays due to Burning Legion outbreak. Control-tabs to eBay fantasy cosplay.

She reminds him of greener pre-war college days in Toronto. Cozy late night rehearsals at the theatre with the art-smart redhead donned in roseate velvet. She'd been second string Miranda in The Tempest that deserved first, but for facial features just off the particular moment's Covergirl specifications. She was a caged spirit in an age before affordable beauty. An age before the strands of finely printed incantation that once held The Networks together were blown adrift on a tempest of infringing and user dreams. Back when celebrity was still an elemental resource, hoarded like magic or the remains of dead things, refined into fuel. Vials of starpower, clutched by decrepit wizards perched in glass towers, constructing a dispersed panopticon of megapixels and wifi that would ultimately be their evolutionary demise. She was immune, enchanted against such spells of dark discourse, and would ward off those trains of thought with a smile of the eye, "I just don't let it get to me. I'm happy just to be acting, doing something I enjoy." He remembers the calligraphic arch of her brow as she would elaborate on the finer points of Joy Division, Neil Gaiman and miscellaneous Victoriana. The way he eventually lost her with digressions into quantum consciousness, evo-neuro-psych, the Anarchist's Cookbook, and cold syllogism;

"I didn't land that contract I wanted.

Therefore all humans are pedophiles or stupid or a celebrity.

I think I'll grow my beard out."

He jacks his neural uplink in to WoG, into massively multiplayer, consensual hallucination.  Opalescent wings, elven eyes, the fragments of a hologram Rose weave themselves together, and she dances, pirouetting across the royal ballroom masquerade in his mind. Young energy makes him feel mean and old. Laughing, close. She smells of cinnamon and dreams devoid of Edge and all this unflinching, high contrast reality. Hi-def dreams, where economy is an NPC and Adventurer is an occupation. Good dreams, and she beckons him into their warm embrace with a practiced touch. His mouth is filled with the taste of pink and he hears the feel of down feathers as all his dead channels come alive with ecstatic signal, the stuff what she is made of. All he wants is to laugh and cry, chat and *hugs* and eat pie and look at kittens and menstruation seems so fascinating and he's thinking in emoticons and and. The zeros and ones melt into ribbons of pixie dust, and all that bleak seems so distant and stupid and imagined and pointless, like a theme park he suddenly remembered becoming lost within. Silly-jism. Fuck corporations inc, fuck the viral recognition sharks, fuck fish, fuck evolution. I want a unicorn.

An 8-bit, metallic clang, and her perfectly modeled rose-petal lips are caught in an infinite one-second-loop pucker in his mind's eye, like some demented editor's joke of the closing shot. His third, pink pinky missed a hammer-on, cutting the rock guitar track out of the mix and shattering the fantasy of a four-hundred-note streak. He mutters a curse against American gods and post-national entities for corner-cutting in the arm's response latency. "Shit, wifi still iffy in here."

"Something up, Artiste? You look not here," the bartender sidelongs.

Ultra-specular, impervious shades, still wet from a downpour, reflect rainbows over his eyes as he looks up, "An angel passed."

Inserts coin, replays the song and the scene yet again, frilly metal turning out weeping tremolo licks, singing along.

Got a pink magic woman
Got a pink magic woman
I've got a pink magic woman
Got me so blind I cant see
That she's a pink magic woman
She's trying to make a faerie out of me...