When the first girls jumped, it was a tragedy beyond all compare.

Lina, Mila, Ella.

Such were the grief whispers spread throughout the village that an outsider could not tell one name from the other, and they became almost a triple goddess, three dark haired girls flying from the very top of the tower block, wailing, their wings pressed tight between their shoulder blades, refusing to ride the updrafts because of what had been denied them - the Weave, a piece of tech so refined that it could not be extracted. The girls had been severed from it for a mere twenty four hours by their parents, who wanted them to be more present for their father’s birthday celebrations. The girls screamed and protested and locked themselves in their rooms, and after midnight, the death leap.

Months later their names became a song, a lament, a wail: li’mi’lla, na’li’la, a ridiculous chant, which then became banned as children sang it as if to create heroes of their brothers and sisters, to warn the parents not to sever them from the Weave. This of course frightened the parents, who did what any parent would, and tried to limit their access, so that other deaths were bound to follow, oh not their children, not theirs - stupid, senseless, pointless deaths, as they were denied the thing that had become their entire personhood. The more parents tried to sever or at least limit access to the Weave, the more the children protested, and in the worst possible way, spurred on by what they saw as bravery, and the only option. How could they live without it and what it gave them - the boundless answers, the deep connections?

Two boys jumped off the South Bridge, brothers, and a month later, two classmates stood up in front of their horrified teacher and stabbed each other through the heart. Something had to change.

Of course this would happen, the mayor said, don’t say I didn’t tell you it would, how the Weave wouldn’t stay in their skulls, but spread through their tiny bodies, become them, and that jargon about being able to remove it, you were all fools to believe it. I told you over and over, he affirmed, but he hadn’t, not really. Overwhelming, the idea of keeping track of their children safe was the selling point, and who was he to argue? Perhaps the disappearance of children was orchestrated, one crackpot had suggested in a forum, perhaps it was the Company itself that had stolen them so that parents would willingly sign to get the Weave, so much more elegant than a mini-com, we all agreed, but beneath the skin? How do you think it might end, he had asked, well, it ain't gonna be pretty. He had become a prophet now the children were dying.

Every child under sixteen was monitored, parents with dark rings under their eyes keeping watch, afraid to limit their access, as they could of course, because no parent would have agreed to the Weave if they had understood that their control would have such consequences. Oleg’s mother regretted she was the first to sign. Now her vigilance of her son was more anxious driven than ever. She spent nights awake, watching him sleep, starting at his skin, as if she could see through it. On the day he received the Weave, they had said it would feel like pressure, but she had watched his face contort with pain. He had reached for her hand and squeezed tightly as the technicians spoke kindly, as if the Weave was not about to cross a boundary that could not be uncrossed.

When it began, there was no incision she could see, no blood - only Oleg’s body tightening, surprised, his breath at first quick then more steady as it was calmed by the guiding voice of the technician. Afterwards, he had confided that it didn’t feel as if it was added so much, or even placed - more settled, as if the Weave had learned his shape. He was told to rest, that he might feel tired, or hungry, or suddenly very awake, but they didn’t say - no one had said - that the Weave would not leave again, but that it would become so none of the children could really notice where they ended and it began.

Of course, it was a reasonable response for the adults to demand removal of access to the Weave even further. Oleg’s mother logged on to her mini-com and tried to sever the connection. Contractually, she was not allowed to do so until Oleg was 16, and the screen warned her that the danger of disconnection was that her child may suffer dizziness, headaches, confusion, and in some cases, dementia or even heart failure, and that she would have to pay for her child’s previous access to the Weave, to the sum of thousands she could not afford. Surely, she thought, the risk of any side effect is far less than Oleg throwing himself off the South Bridge. She felt sick thinking of him in the water, his beautiful golden hair drifting. He awoke screaming at her: ‘la-la-mi!’, those poor girls, she thought, the poor parents, hearing the names of their dead daughters like this, protest mantras, warnings, holding their parents ransom. How tightly they held to the Weave! How violently! She watched his young, beautiful body contort in agony. She turned it back on.

An answer at last came from the Company: they could alter the Weave remotely, but at a cost. Parents would no longer have access, and responsibility would be with the individual connected to it. They immediately agreed after being reassured that this measure would work. Rather than being connected all day, the children would only have access to the Weave for two hours. This would gratify them, give them opportunity to connect to other children, play their in-Weave games, and the rest of the time they could do what their parents wished - to play outside, to learn an instrument, to spend time with their grandparents. The children would be able to connect to the Weave for longer, should they wish, but that would come at a cost. For every minute over the two hours, they would lose something, something of such consequence that they would not possibly want to be in the Weave for longer.

The parents thought they never wanted to hear the name Lina, Mila, Ella again. One fifteen year old had them tattooed on his arm, a home job with ink and and, poetically, three needles to draw the three girls intertwined, their faces hidden by their hair, wings outstretched, their limbs connected so that you could not tell where which girl was which. It had gone too far. The parents thought of loss in terms of Weave time: less minutes, perhaps, or even something like losing meal credits at school.

It was Oleg’s friend Samla who first refused to disconnect, despite her father slapping her hard in warning. He could see her deep inside the Weave, her eyes sparkling with it, like a drug moving through her veins and bleeding from her eyeballs. She pulled suddenly from the tangle of it, her and all the other children, angry. It had been three minutes. Her father stared at her in shock. She was missing an eye, the empty socket glowering at him. It was there, and then it was gone. He marched her, with an eyepatch, to the Company, who pointed him to the fine print, where indeed it had spelled out that the children would lose something, but the company could not be held responsible for what, and indeed the Weave was so young that nobody could tell what it would do. It was growing quickly though, and the Company did say that might happen, and it was not their fault, as per the contract the parents had originally signed.

Samla did not care that she did not have an eye: the Weave saw for her. It coloured the sky for her, it took away her anxieties, and it even brought her Oleg, who she liked very much, despite the fact that on Friday, he arrived at school on crutches because he was missing a foot, and later in the week, they laughed because they were both looking rather dashing, they thought, with black eyepatches. Most of the children, by the end of the month, were missing body parts, despite their parents begging that they did not go over their allotted hours. Oleg’s mother cried that he would disappear altogether.

But the children learned quickly what could be spared, and what could not. A fingernail, a tooth, a length of hair. The careful ones lasted the longest, and had most of their limbs, because the Weave could not survive in immobile bodies, or indeed dead ones. The Weave learnt quickly that a heart was too much, a left lung tolerable.

The mothers and fathers watched them in horror and eventually despair, and new children were not given to the Company, but watched as carefully as a flock of birds they did not want to fly away. The parents whispered to each other: ‘li-mi-la’, a warning to stay away from the Weave for the sake of their new children, and to let the Weave-children become what they would become, lest they have to bury what was left. They witnessed their children in the evenings, speaking to the others in the Weave, present yet absent. Oleg at first would glance toward her occasionally, as if checking she was still there, but later, he did not.

The children did not leave their rooms as the Company had promised, not unless they needed to, and then only dully obliged their parents an outing, a visit to an Aunt, an exhibition, but did not fully engage in the world again. They seemed to shut down their brains until the two hours were allocated again.

Still, unlike Lina, Mila and Ella, they remained alive, albeit moving through the village in smaller and smaller versions of themselves, with parents who could not interrupt but only watch, and miss those they once loved, a tremendous shared grief perhaps even tighter than the Weave that had stolen their children.

Image by ChatGPT. which I really, really didn't want to use, but such is the hold, such is the hold.