Ruin a book by adding a word: Brave New Disney World

I see the dozens of void-globes that hold the City aloft, and wonder briefly what it would take to pop each one. I turn up the gain on my audio feed and use the code my system snooped during the trainers’ outbursts to override their feed and send my voice out to my flightmates.

I use the confusion to zoom up, flying too fast, too close to the Stalk, threading through cables and wires and production grids, past copcopters too slow to react, until I shoot out the top.

Some shoot each other, some crash, the rest suddenly decide the ground is their target and accelerate towards it at ten times terminal velocity.

I hear the whine as the drones’ projectiles crisscross around me. My jailbroken onboard system moves me out of the way almost too fast for the eye to follow, weaving a pattern designed to confuse their AI.

A stream in my top-left vision shows me how I look. I spin faster and my figure blurs, but I set my forerarms to glow crimson in synch with the turns—the X is steady and pulsing in four directions. “Shoot her down!”

watching the X which is Fuck You except much more so, at the City, the Proctors, the Bosses and Trainers, the Council, and, most of all, the Prime. “We can’t kill an Angel in view of the entire City!”

I spin around my vertical axis, slowly at first, knowing that hundreds of cameras, real and virtual, official and pirate, are watching me,

My forearms come together, fists clenched, crossing to make an X. It’s not a middle finger, it’s much more obscene and not what you expect from a heavenly, inhumanly perfect, virtuous Angel. “Send the drones!”

“I don’t care, she’s making a mockery of the Prime's nameday celebration!” The loud ping in my left ear. My servos and electroskeins react, or try to. My will is stronger.

I was special, one in a generation, scouts loudly exclaiming that I was an orphan and that exotic skin color! What better proof of the openness and fairness of the City than to have a brown-skinned Angel of unknown parentage?

Mothers dream of their daughters becoming Angels, a life of beauty and grace and honor. They count coins to pay for lessons, agents, entrance exams. Almost every mother’s dreams puncture and die. “She’ll fall!”

We are beautiful, my fellow Angels and I. We have to be. Otherwise, it’s the gas-barges, the slop- and flop-houses, the fate of most girls—not pretty enough, not symmetrical, too loud, smart, fat, thin. “Send the shutoff!”

And me, flapping my wings slowly, steady, hovering in place, my face calm, my arms loose by my sides.

My flightmates in the air near me, turning and swooping, flashing the sun on their chrome wings, smiling at our trainers’ command, all in perfect synch with uplifting music about the Prime Councilor. “It’s not working!”

My fellow CityAngels, proof that anybody, no matter their birth, can be raised up to great heights, taking flight as a living symbol of the Hope that the City and its Council holds for All Humankind. “Send the override signal to 13. Now!”

the lumps where the under-maintained systems glitch and hundreds of people wait cheek to cheek, stomach to stomach as some mid-level tech finishes his break. “13!”

People moving up and down. The VIPs in private floats, eating food with colors and smells, looking out AR-windows that hide the umbilical tubes pushing workers along with peristaltic motions,