September laughed so hard that her eyes ordered a crate of coffee refills, a keyring kitchen and a year’s worth of gravy-gems, online. She spent the next few minutes rolling her eyes, cancelling the orders with a ‘buyer’s remorse’ gesture. The café doubled as a pop-house and before she could finish cancelling her orders a waiter-drone tried to airdrop a slo-cooker keyring set on the table. The entire table waved their drinks and swatted at it as it bobbed and hovered just out of their reach. All this did was bring more uncontrollable laughter, during which September booked an underwater hotel.
“How do I change the settings?”
September pawed at her eyes in between chuckles.
Her friends nudged one another as she removed her lenses from her streaming eyes.
As September’s breathing returned to normal, she looked around for her bag, to keep her lenses safe. This was a lot harder without her ‘find my bag’ visual locator on. Without her hovering panther icon it was hard to remember what her bag even looked like. Her friend, Patience, put her arm in what looked to Patience like a shimmering, golden peach until she felt the hard stone of September’s bag in its centre. Patience drew it out and passed it to her.
As she stowed her lenses and dried her eyes, September could see that the café was actually an uninspiring brown. In fact, everyone in the group was dressed in plain clothes and their hair hung in dull, undeyed clumps. Tiny rainbows did not spring from the parties’ hair when they turned suddenly. The tabletop was not held up by an adorable, grumpy polar bear, but by a solid gloop of grey cinders and exposed wiring.
When the time came to sing Happy Birthday, September laughed so hard that some of her close friends ordered her a cab with a sad wrinkle of their noses. They sang and sang and none of them had their harmonizers on and September could hear their real voices, wretched and out of tune. It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.
When the cake came, September was beyond words. ‘What is it?’ she kept saying, pointing at the monotone slab of off-white icing airdropped in front of her. The cloud candles and koala chorus were folded away in the secret, augmented world of the restaurant’s reality. Her friends laughed and pointed as the cake narrative unfolded, ducking to avoid this and turning their faces away from the delightful terror of that.
September took a few steps back when the whole table ducked away from a fake cake explosion she couldn’t see. They all picked gloops of imaginary icing off themselves and flicked it at each other. Evidently the pyro-cake was getting out of hand because September was totally hidden under the waves of entertainment-reality that cascaded out from it. Sanctuary nearly hit her in the side of the head and September asked her to stop. Sanctuary didn’t hear her.
“Ladies! Ladies?!”
No one heard her. She could feel the familiar tickle of laser speakers dampening her voice. The Restaurant AI had decided she was not part of the Birthday celebration. She was being drowned out of her own special day!
September just stared at them in disbelief, outside of it all.
‘Tember, where did she go?’
‘Someone go with her.’
‘Her cake’s here.’
September stood in the middle of the room, clutching her bag and the one shoe she could find, watching her friends look for her, spreading out blindly, like a children’s game of Murder In The Dark. Some moving toward the bathroom, some flagging waiter drones, others reaching out into the fog of the un-augmented reality where September had slipped. She stood, two inches from her friend, Regular’s fingers, waving uselessly back and forth, looking for her. She wasn’t laughing anymore. Something stopped her from reaching out and taking Regular’s hand.
Staring around at the sign-less doorways, September picked one at random and walked, with what diminished dignity she had left, toward it. She walked silently through a grey hole in the wall, not through burning, peacock fans, not through a wall of diamond ivy. The only thing that saw her go was a floating drone shark, that airdropped hotel tickets into her handbag as she went.