A boy opened his eyes in a dimly lit room.

All around, hundreds of monitors were slowly coming to life, showing progress bars, pie charts, and various gauges, which the boys drunk in hungrily, his eyes darting back and forth. The room grew brighter by the second, and suddenly, the room was filled by sharp, sterile brightness as the central display turned on, and the boy focused his gaze on it.

A pale girl stared back at him, unmoving, eternal. She smiled, winked and raised her hands, pressing her fingers against the glass. The boy in turn stuck out his tongue but also pressed his fingers against the screen. Simultaneously, they pulled back, and from each of the boy's fingertips hundreds of nearly invisible strings softly glistened.

As he spread his arms, the girl in front of him sat back and yawned, covering it up with the back of the hand, then waved him off as her background was growing dimmer and dimmer. Finally, the entire central display was overtaken by the image of a sun, rising over a metropolis. The city grew abstract, overlaid with a diagram, another one, ten, fifty, hundreds, each connected by a transparent string to the boy's fingertips. Power lines, water works, utility, traffic.

Puppets.