The Fractal War did not spare the City. There were no bombs in the featureless black streets cruised by silent coffinlike vehicles and the numberless affairs that were the City's main social activity were carried in discrete rooms with one-time address coordinates without fear of zero-day bioweapons.
It was war nonetheless.
The door to one of those rooms scanned the golden mask carried by a man and opened for it. The man was incidental to the mask and the information it contained. More than information: the mask carried the engine of a plan and the undeniable necessity of its execution. It was because of the plan that the man had not taken the antidote that would have prevented the seduction that had led him to the room. The reasoning was not for the man to know. He understood the necessity and that was enough.
A woman wearing a red mask was waiting inside. Both carried on the mutually understood polite lie that they were there for each other. They kept their masks on.
Afterward the golden mask told the man to look through a one-way window to the chiaroscuro of the City and while the man was looking the red mask guided the stiletto on the woman's hand through the back of his skull. The woman didn't know why this was needed, only that it was.
The red mask told the woman to destroy the golden one. She picked the golden mask to destroy it and it said a name. There had been a seventy percent chance that this would not change the woman's behavior: good odds for the prize, and the City didn't have a casino because all of it was one. The woman took off the red mask before it could stop her and rushing as fast as she could through the almost-forgotten sensation of masklessness replaced it with the golden one.
The woman stood still, watching and listening, although somebody else in the room would not have heard or seen anything. She cried, once, almost as quietly.
Half an hour later the woman put on her clothes, destroyed the red mask, and left. She did not know the golden mask's plan any more than she had known the red one's but she understood its necessity.
(Originally posted on my blog.)