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The metallic snap of wings unfurling. The rush of air cutting off as my drop is arrested, and then silence—my heartbeat louder than the voice in my ear, “Manuever Manifold. Execute. Inform ready state,” in the sing-song voice of people who command others for a living. #microsff #microfiction

Around me, my flightmates’ wings open too, beating as they follow the voice’s orders. “Angel 13 execute and inform ready state.”

New Stalk City sprawls above and beneath me. Cables and aerial tracks. Floating, rainbow-slick bubble-villas where the uber-rich families ignore the ninety-nine percent who don’t so much live as survive in grey, boxy, windowless containers tied to the Stalk.

Copcopters keeping everybody in place. The abandoned, uninhabitable ground an unspoken distance beneath us. “Angel 13: execute and inform!”

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,

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!”

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!”

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!”

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

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!”

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!”

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?

“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.

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!”

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!”

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!”

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.