CW: drugs (fictional), overdose, withdrawal, magical thinking, hallucination, dehumanized demographic (fictional), police equivalent
(Σ)
VERSE 5
NEONATE
Chére wakes up freezing, clothes soaked, a broken choker bleeding trauma into her brain. Her skin is still numb, her blood starting to thaw and flow. There’s a staying dream in her eyes, a clinging whisper in her head.
She picks herself up, webs her halo of hair as neat as she can, her black tee draped over goose-bumped skin paling with cold. They say the latest Holic Chokers have temp stabilization, but you should only need that if...
If, she thinks, they get you.
People notice, she thinks, when your heart is that much colder; no mellow in the world can help that out. If that much had happened, if it hadn't been trauma tripping, she'd been tripping with the Ghouls. With them she’d intersected with a simulation. A simulated alter.
She’s found herself alone.
She needs to get this shit off and get dry. She emerges from her Habitexa into the waiting Post-Sprawl. It's late-day, the grid laden with auto-cars and passerby, hot steam rising from the nabeyaki being served by the bowl by two wizened crones banded beneath hair, over skin in spirals, straining vapour and scent into their own private trips.
She thinks for the price of some nabeyaki she could get in their good graces. Hot food. Even from here the scent of burnt foam attacks her nostrils.
Chére reads the crones. She thinks there would be anger there, insult, hidden. Anger in the lines at time’s furrows stored from before the Machine Gun Nukes were deployed.
"Poor thing," the crone beside her says. "She's been frost-burnt.”
The other makes a tsk sound.
“Just look at her. Put it on the house.” She vanishes into the back. "She wants our steam," the first crone calls out to her.
"Of course she does."
Chére palms her credit-chip and wonders how much she's got left. The first crone shows her behind the counter. In the steam of the kitchen her heart skips a few beats. The steam here is all broth from cradled pots, the second crone flitting from pot to pot like a moth with attention-deficit. Lances of halogen bathe the kitchen in a dim glow.
She tries to keep her distance. From far enough away they might not be able to tell she’s overloaded. That her Choker is broken.
In the haze of the broth steam and the pounding of ultra chemical massage time is skipped, spliced. The two crones are facing her. They're on either side of her, holding her up. Through the sounds of the Post-Sprawl faded out she pictures it now, structured through hard-format networks stacked one on top of the other. The surface and below and heaven and hell on top of that.
Though the warmth carpets her a distilled fever remains. She'll wake up broken for them to see, if she passes out now. They shepherd her towards where they sleep. A mattress made up so she can only tell when she's beneath the blankets that it's worn in, grooved. Firm against her back and what light reaches her here aches.
She shuts her eyes against it.
PALLAS
When Chére wakes she’s alone again. Light hangs from a tireless dawn through a slanted window. The room is grey EZ-Crete but made up with shrines on either side, candles burning vigil to half-smiling portraits.
She smells singed air and thinks it's from the candles until she gets that it's steam from the hot pots close by. Just beyond the room she's in. Thin current trails hang in the streak of dawn-light.
She pushes the blankets aside. She's in new clothes now, a robe, sleeping pants. Grotesque cooking pads lay by the mattress, askew to each other.
She pulls them on and heads towards the kitchen, where she halts by the door. A crone, maybe the first, maybe the second, she isn't sure, stirs the pot, humming a soft song that breaks off the moment she stops.
"Where are my clothes?" she says.
"Pinned out back," the crone in the kitchen says. She looksChére over, her gaze as if falling like snow across the white of Chére's cloth. "What's your name?"
She lowers her head in acknowledgement. "I'mChére."
"I'm Miho," the crone says. "Out front is Yuka. Your stuff's probably dry by now."
Chére nods.
"If anything kills you," Miho says, "it'll be that thing around your neck. That thing's not under license." Miho gestures from her shoulder with her left arm, her right still stirring the pot, tracing loose crescents and spiralling the steam.
"Make sure your stuff's okay. Always make sure."
She forces herself through the kitchen. The floor is smooth. Lacquered or varnished. Her cooking pads clunk over it. The smell of pork and beef broth makes her decide to ask Yuka what happened to her order.
The astralogic trip descends, strung on sleep beams that still poke holes of trauma corrosion into her sight. Her heart sinks. With a broken Choker it's a clincher that she'll pick the worst option.
Still she runs it through anyway. Right hand path: under the sign of Ares, claim food as spoils of experience. Left hand path: under the sign of Pallas Athene, get your armour before the battle begins.
In the trauma holic overload she gropes in vain for some semblance of a tether to each choice. Finds in the dance of blood to the song of her heart white blood cells murmuring against the knits of her platelets. But in her dream she'd heard the same murmur, turned up, and she could hear what it was saying.
She leaves Yuka unhassled and follows the light out back. She finds a small yard enclosed by walls like carapaces of tread tanks minus the treads. Here the grass is pale, shaded by an overhang slab. But enough sun has made it through to dry the damp from her clothes. She takes in the view; a small fountain at the end of the yard, carved into the far wall. Watercress strings the rippling pool.
In the gloom beneath the slab the water is like murk.
She dresses by it. Hearing its ebb and gurgle. A few strewn coins glint beneath the surface, the light scarring the surface film as she sweeps her gaze over it. As she dresses her body moves and her brain keeps track, beneath the pumping holic the two conduits lightyears from each other.
She begins to retreat from the gloom when she hears the fountain moan. That same ragged timbre, more gasp and throat than sound.
She finds Miho again.
"You're housing Ghouls out there," she says. Rubbing her neck, her choker, and chewing her lip.
Miho squints. For a moment even takes her eyes off the hot pot to cradle them onChére's own. "I'm sure you're here to lecture me on the dangers of Ghouls."
She isn't sure what to say. Not legal, sure, but she isn't about to narc. "They're bad news. Forgotten children of the Frost. We shun them for a reason." Gripping the frame of her choker as if she could tear it away from her then and there. They led me to those that made them.
Miho shakes her head. "Insincerity is an unkind trait, child." As if waiting forChére to tell her all of it but she doesn't. After some silence, she shakes it again. "Go see Yuka out front. She'll tell you the terms of repayment."
"I was getting,"Chére says, "around to it." She fights off a second shrug and bows instead. Then she wanders to the counter, taking her time, slow measured steps against the sudden sieve of dawnlight.
Outside the street is sluggish. People sparse the street, most elders out for a morning walk, blinking into the sun. In the nukeworld frontiers the dogs stretch, she thinks, set off for scavenge. Yuka isn't dealing with anyone. She stands with a palm to her chin, elbow planted to the counter.
"I grabbed my clothes,"Chére says.
"You had clothes already," Yuka says. "You needed food."
Chere sighs. "Let me guess—"
"It's gone. The guy who took off with it, you could smell from space. Even through the steamstrain."
"That was fucked,"Chére says. "She told me..." But she trails off. A lesson here, she thinks, if I can learn it. People will say things that could mean anything.
Yuka nods. An absent motion that wavers her cradle arm slightly, the cloth of her loose sleeve falling, wristbones gnashing the dry air. She says, "you got a plan? To deal with your problem?"
The countertop is a glazed grey, with the specials displayed via hanging poster from above in twin languages.Chére thinks about edging around, reading them, ordering again.
"It's not fair," she says.
Yuka grins. "Fair would be another frostburnt valley doll found hypo'd in the press. That's fair to everyone. It's supposed to happen."
"So you know,"Chére says. "People aren't gonna hang with a doll that could wig out. I need something else."
The crone regards her. "You can work here, if you want. Miho and I could use the help. We can rig your choker up in exchange." BeforeChére can respond she shakes her head. "Don't you have friends?"
Sure, she wants to say. The voice of my coma. The ghost I could hear when the Giants were doing their thing. My coma friend. For the silence in her head is stark now, the signal severed, the source DOA.
"I'm not sure," she says.
In the light Yuka’s face is polished paler, for this moment a blank slate, like the sun washing over marble sculpture, despite the weathering composed, vibing to all and sundry forever.
Chere looks away.
Yuka’s voice is soft, spinning out to her, reaching her, at all other points dissolving to phantom space. The words you hear, and then they go, and you go,Chére thinks. But they are alive where they were never heard. Telling her to go to the back and pester Miho about the rig-up. All she can do through the holics is string life from contact point to contact point.
The fire from that beyond life, that charred imprint of her, the knowledge she's fucked up somewhere. Who knows what shit you can pick up scraping against the Forest for too long? The seeds she laid there will blossom through her astralogic choices.
She goes, her stomach growling.
TO ANY WHO WOULD EVER PERISH
So Miho and Yuka are to her right and left but together, equidistant from her, Chére can't remember who was which. Miho, she labels the one to her left, Yuka the one to her right. All three tuning their steam strains but of course she’s the most desperate. They'd modded the choker into a MK II. Flex Band, but without guidance she sees her success rate down the astrological line as 0%. They’re ladling out front, dosing the Holics from the invoked steam, the sanctified noodle broth a byproduct of the invocation ritual. The crones tell her the path of the Steam-Strainer comes with both peril and reward. The peril is total dissolution into the void’s negative. The reward, she's told, has something to do with her immortal soul. Straining information from the crones is practice for sifting through the steam itself.
She stirs in an absent mind. A couple is sloping their way to the stand, eyes vitro-dyed lilac and violet, as if made for each other. When they talk to her first and not Yuka or Miho, it intrudes; she's confused for a second. They want to split a large bowl. It’s all comfy, she thinks. Their structure, she’s learned, is commensalist: it doesn’t harm the larger Belly.
The well-yard out back still isn't maintained. The Ghouls they host hate cropped growth the way they hated themselves to let themselves decay in the first place. The kitchenware is low-line; stainless steel they're careful with, boiler cores off-shelf some Hap-Mart. They know their way around their strainer bands, so she figures one-time fee or DIY'd. They could be storing up credit for some crisis.
She's never seen them paranoid. In fact she thinks they don't worry enough. The yard opens to the sky and is hemmed in by low structure. Any mapgrid archive would have scanned the grounds. Waiting for some archive surfer to notice, and after that waiting for another to care. Two short steps down the line. If she saw that in her trip she'd have a shit-fit.
Miho tells her to get some more from the kitchen. As she passes there the chatter between the couple and the crones fades but doesn't break. Follows her as she makes her way through the short hall of rebar-enforced EZ-Crete, the makeshift entrance part of the facade that they have painted a gloss black and furling from the Belly that the crones have scrabbled their dwelling into. They are not off its main brocade into the grid; this is a side street, and those who approach them are Cluster locals. A Belly is named for the bell effect that blurs together slews and slews of zoning program permits into mounds like moss bubbles on the grid-line. Silhouetted like some giant bug's nest sac. So in this way it’s like EZ-creting yourself to a giant whale. What is to the symbiote in the water a huge mass of warmth. Churning warmth, centre mass. As she winds to the kitchen she gets closer, then further away.
She hears faint murmurs from the backyard well. That pocket that is a thin sliver into space. Up high enough they are separated from the nuke-world frontiers by force field barriers spewed by arching emitters. But the angle cuts off the emitters; all you can see from the backyard would be a ripple in the sky were the force field to adjust its frequency. From where she is that would be a short walk but she thinks if she doesn't listen to Miho and Yuka she'll lose it. Find herself scrambled into the Belly or worse into the greater grid with its stacked layers and dimensions. The Frost that gets in despite every frequency update has already gotten to her. The dust of a nuclear winter swept in from the frontiers settles in you until you are seeing them, fearing them through the glass. When enough have seen them they are talked about, studied, and some had chosen to atrophy to Ghouls.
She hated the Holic Choker but reworked into a Steam-Strainer Band it's not so bad. Still she thinks what had snapped it had been the Death Forest getting closer, in a new guise—in the world of the Ghouls and how they have dissipated to union with the decay, how they can live in water, in any area wet or fetid. She knew that when she was past the golden light, knew she was water then.
The golden light was a transubstantiation. When she had been water she had reached out and she had talked to a second presence.
She hopes on the right dose of strained holics she can do it again.
She retrieves the noodle from the pot which still burns a little to the touch. Leaves a small white mark on her fingertip. Later it goes and she forgets it but she studies it now. A slim bolt of white parallel to her fingernail's edge. She now pairs her Valley Doll fit with the grotesque cooking pads. She's flipped the fit's black hologram to silver-grey, a purple logo of a thrash-core band that had probably been image ganked from the first cloud it found. She shrugs, dons mitts, and brings the ladled bowls out one by one while back there Miho and Yuka shoot the shit. When she's done she gives a lazy wave and is met with two single raised eyebrows, flashed one after the other by the crones while never breaking from their talk. She doesn't care.
She's going to the well.
In the late afternoon the sky patched through where the EZ-Crete graft splits for it is nacreous and grey, the air in the cloistered yard still. Cobbles of stone are arranged since she's been here like a garden but the weeds that crawl into vine and throttle the sides are untamed, strong. She pokes through them, careful of barbs. She can hear the sound of the grid beyond the walls, the dusk-life primed this time of day and if she strains, echoes chambered within the Belly. Footsteps, sounds of people moving shit around. She hears these as she draws near the well but from the well itself she hears nothing. Where before she'd heard movement, the water rippling from deep in the font, even in the leavening air.
"Hello?" she says to the gulf. That presence, she thinks, is in the water, past the golden light.
Silence greets her. The well could be dead, she decides. She could have heard anything while her Choker was on overload.
Still the crones didn't deny it when she asked them.
She lingers there, in the fading light. The gloom is a pall like a curse of silence before Miho and Yuka break it up, the one she'd named Miho holding a small paper lantern. As it washes over the well the light sweeps out each crook in stonework, each vein of grimed paste and shadow, where the weeds have grown to clamber up and curl over into abyss. The dusk-life has hushed, and from within the Belly all is quiet. The one she'd named Miho is grinning, the one she'd named Yuka pensive, lips flat, neutral. Both are hooded as if cold. Ancient Steam-Strainer lore: keep the heat in. So they say.
She says, "you haven't taught me the good shit yet."
"We told you impatience was unkind," her Yuka says. "You know why?"
"You told me it was insincerity,"Chére says. "So I was sincere. Sincerely slaved my ass away for you two."
Her Miho rasps a giggle. The other chews her lip. Her Miho's hair is shorter, Chére decides, by half an inch. Both modified bucket cuts, lopsided. Her Miho often draws hers back but now it spills into her face, making it hard for Chére to tell the two apart.
"I'm still lost in it," she says, meaning: the astrological trip. She doesn't say it. Because now she hears it is in vogue to turn away; the whole maze a nightmare-mode for life. She had kept her ear to talks like these but never engaged. Listened with one ear cocked like a radar tower through all the holics she was dosing. So instead she gestures to the well. "You haven't told me what's really down there, either."
They stare at her.
“Because you think your time has some secret worth, because it belongs to you. But all time is stolen,” her Miho says, in breath, in whisper. “Borrowed,” the other crone says. “Same thing,” says her Miho.
“I can tell,”Chére says “I know.” Her old life bleeds back into the past and still the cut is raw and open. Still it stretches further back. Like being strapped, she thinks, to the gurney as the ceiling tiles swim by. A mess of faces with requests, demands. Now over. So the well is all that is, with its silence clawing at the stillness and both of them eating away at her. Clinging to the gloom flush with absence but for the three figures engulfed by the weeds.
“What do you hear?” says her Yuka. The question is taunting if still dreamy, muttered out. Metered with emphasis. What. Do. You. Hear. She isn’t sure herself because it’s subjective. The heartbeat of the world, she wants to say, is its stillness, that thuds once an epoch, a back-beat for immortals. To any who would ever perish infinite, nameless silence. That’s what I hear. The heartbeat of the world.
She knows Yuka would tell her she isn’t hearing shit until she learns to listen. The only way out is silence. Long habits and routines. Knowing when to spell gaps of silence matters as much as filling them. Yuka frowns, Miho laughs and she knows she’s won somehow. She names them then, peering into wrinkle patterns, probing with her eyes the banded slopes of their foreheads. To discern them from each other. In the holic ocean, ebbing but still half-alive, where two are more complex than three, one the most incomprehensible of all. Miho. Yuka. She assigns them. Because it doesn’t matter, she thinks, if the coin flips and each is lost behind the other. She couldn’t tell, not when she met them. She was too wigged out.
“Let’s get some sleep,” Miho says. “Tomorrow we go outside.”
AELENCAH
She’s woken early. There’s no light to tell by but the candle flame but she vibes it. Yuka makes her vibe it, the force of her nudging gathering in intensity. Her eyes themselves are half-veiled by sleep.
“What’s the rush?” Chére says. Then she has an insight. “Is it the creeps?” she says, meaning Shin Five Zero. Short for Shinobi Five Zero, the sprawl-funded answer to its technical absence of laws. In the bowels of their gene sequencing vaults Shinobi are coded to directives. They have their conscience backspaced out. Creeps, though, you'd never see coming.
They wouldn’t spare us, she thinks, unless told to.
“Better prices this early,” Yuka says.Chére hears the sound of water boiling, a distant hiss of steam. Not from the kitchen but some room she can’t see and has never made her way to. She thinks it’s where Miho and Yuka sleep now, if they don’t drift the rooms of the Graft, haunt them like ghosts.
“Is that for me?” she says.
Yuka shakes her head.
“What's all this for, really?” Chére says. Pushing the sparse sheet off her, to the side, hoisting herself off the mattress.
Yuka shakes her head again, as if to say it doesn’t matter.
Her shoes are where she’s left them, paired parallel beside the bed. Just staring at the silent well and turning over if she had named the two right had tired her. Because if I haven’t, she thinks, that skews the astrological trip where it concerns them. I started out losing, too.
I would have looked dead in the alley. A vacant body. Behind coma eyes the Giants had shaped themselves from brain channel contours dusted with nuclear residue. Past the golden light with her wires crossed. The Giants we see in glass but the Ghouls are light in water. She shudders, somehow still cold.
She wraps her arms around her shoulders as she paces out of the room and then it hits her.
The Steam-Strainers have taught her. Sift the chem-stuff from deep where its ghost hides in tufts of steam. Where the energy of life has coiled, trenchant; it sleeps as if safe from her. Steam-straining suspends the puppet dance of flesh burning its way to grief or that's what Miho and Yuka tell her. Pushes it far from the soul. The soul enslaved to hunger is furtive, wastes energy trying to hide.
“It’s about the Death Forest,” she says, “isn’t it. The reason I was on holics in the first place. You’ve seen it too.”
She remembers, memories of dreams like petals of flowers picked, the parts you forget all stem. What matters is what sticks with you. She’d let someone down. She made a promise but hunger had pulled her awake.
“She called it the Death Forest,” she hears Yuka say. Miho is humming, her voice threading faint exalt, stirring as if with faith and joy. As if finding a tune for a prayer that’s been running through her head. She pauses then as she exits the room. She’s laden with a satchel bag, in hazel, in the light sallow like bad cream. Yuka emerges a moment later, fussing over her, asking her if she’s got everything. Chére stares at the two.
“We call it Aelencah,” says Miho. She looks at Yuka. Yuka backs off. “It’s metaphysical residue from the MG Nukes. It’s death blooming, we think, death as the magnetic dust between things changing. Corroding. The more you purify your soul, the closer you come to it; the stuff that veils it is gauze, bandage dressing.”
Chére still sees it, pulls it from her memory, picking flowers. Branches swathed with dark leaves. A cold wind through them and the aether clinging to the mattes blotting the sky had blanched furrows with white specks like pollen. The leaf-skin was crisp and had shot underfoot, gouged the silence with a sound like ice cracking.
The ether was a steady drift of hybrid cig smoke, the toxins left deemed inert enough to be of no great concern to the mass dream of the astrological trip. True seekers of the way can avoid them if they want.
In the Post-Sprawl, though, mornings are great clouds of them knotted together by collective exhaustion. Waking up is hard to do. This is something felt by the Post-Sprawl in the bone, in the sleeping depths, and when the sleepers rise they spill it out with themselves into the dawn-light. The rises peak in brambles of steel losing themselves where the irradiated sky has choked off all growth. Back then they were THE Sprawl, the highest population cluster. They were the ones that deployed the MG Nukes. There had been a few seeded here and there at key pop points with the plan they’d plume out, join each other, re-fabric the planet through massing enclaves of hyper-tech.
It didn’t work out.
Now in THE Post-Sprawl that is left over the nuke-world is a place to be charted and mapped. They use Bands, Miho had told her, like theirs; they don’t leave it to Chokers. They corrode too easily, as she’d found out. They know dogs live out there, black dogs with eyes either fiery green or like amber. They’ve met merchants with grey, tattered skin bundled in cloth. The Colo-Refs are half exiles, half public service workers. No one wants to do it but the program is funded so it gets done right. A claustrophobia’s descended over all of them; she’s felt it in the astrological trip, in the choices funnelled to her.
They have yet to encounter a living thing with any real tech. The dogs look well fed, their fur sleek, shining. They don’t attack unless threatened. There’s always one or two around, on their haunches staring with features that would look composed, blase, if not for the glow. They scavenge something, out there in the rad. Over the black vein stretches of the old roads where the desert winds wail with the sound of ghosts. Still all that is far away, and before she was double sequenced far, cloistered in her Habitexa so all that was awful would fade away.
"There's someone you're looking for," Yuka says with a glare that could mask a probing nature. Could mask to anyone but Chére who'd turned pro at social routines. Before Aelencah was a name to her it was closer then. Such people can be curious and bury it under scorn, gouge away at the thing until all is clear. "You mentioned it."
She guesses she had. In the searing Post-Sprawl dawn thoughts are stifled, on usual to narrow to the next holic fix of any kind and where it's coming from. She talked about it with her friends when she had them. When she would rove. With Miho and Yuka she's more cramped. She supposes returns are like this, always bought cheap. Now she stares into Yuka's face, her arched brow. "So?" she says. "Should I expect to find them here?"
She thought Miho was too far to eavesdrop, but the crone breaks in. "In a way."
Yuka grins, a cruel smile. "We'll move faster if we split up."
Miho says, "our girl isn't city-broken yet."
Chére faces both of them.
"I'm fine." Fine because she's happy to be here. Fine because it's all for sale. The Hyper-Mall is more given to crystalline growth than sac-like smoothness. It lurks, like some great beast sleeping, a few corners down, and she can see it from here. The growths where neon signage has worked itself into barbs that hook and serrate the low skyline. Built so that it defines the streets in a steady light like lamplight falling. She sees the signs like she saw the Miho and Yuka's paper lanterns; the light cowers beneath the shade; it trembles there like she trembles in her own skin. Still before she thought this way she'd always seen the Hyper-Mall signage as hidden flame. The neon light hides beneath the halogen, never burns out. As if it's all plugged in and not going anywhere but by now it should be signal. They reside in a cloistered excess and MG Nuked anyone they had to share the energy with. Cables can be tampered with.
"This is the list," Yuka says. "Don't fuck with it." The list rhymes off item by item in sloping font that could be either of them. She goes down the list. Holic polymers. Gluants. Isogel. These three are in heavy print as if traced into again and again. Then: Proteins. For food or something else she isn't sure. Then she realizes she can't stand around all day reading it, not right in front of them.
"Sure," she says. "Easy ease." She's walking away. Their eyes are fixed on her, she can tell, by the way her nape-down bristles. The back of her neck faces east, towards the ascending meridian, which a second ago she'd stared into, glowing in fringe around the firm-foam exo-structure of the Belly. Swept away from it as the streets crook. She was swept as sooner or later, she thinks, all of us are funnelled, drawn into tangling crisscross paths, meeting where there is no centre. The neon signage of the Hyper-Mall shines on her too, and for a second, it's a relief. There's always a next time, she thinks, as she slips from view, as the neon channels looped all around her braid, burn cold, steady, sure.
L.A. GODS
The chem shop is embedded within the hypermall and resides in a subsurface layer. The lower you get there are more Ghouls around. Hanging ragtag in scatters of three or four. These now avoid her eyes, she'd think, but isn't sure. She avoids theirs, avoids their bodies gaunt beneath tattered clothes and gauze, so she can't tell. The Hyper-Mall interior isn't EZ-Crete but feels like hard plaster, structure laced with veins of candy coloured glass. The glass itself was molten and spread like butter through the high-grade stuff the pro builders use. It would be a process, she thinks, with policy. When it was everyday to her she never thought about it much.
Now the veins pop from the plaster the way ice shines under a blanching moon. Pops off even more in the streaking light which crashes in from a thousand displays and the in-mall BG is tuned to braise glowing or glinting things and ram them into the prefrontal. A gloom that would be sombre, a dying daylight, if it didn't bring to flame all the branding she could handle. So that she reaches in her jeans for the list which a moment ago she'd thought of tossing. Chucking anywhere to watch it be engulfed. Impossible to litter in Hell, she thinks. Too much fire.
Deeper underground the lights shine as if infused with fresh energy wired from the heart of the earth. The layout is a maze of hallways that shift with each new choice the Hyper-Mall's Omnarchitect makes. Omnarchitects are ever-present; rumour has it they are dug in to the Hyper-Mall foundry and left there like vacant bodies. Local area gods. They run the LAN and can re-sequence the corridors that are modded with Grey-Gloop. What matters isn't where they are but how they control the network. Her makeshift holic band has reserves built up while she was standing still, straining, just breathing. They aren't infinite.
When the spliced Crete sets it's as if the ever-glow of the brand franchising is baking it into a stillness, a moment of veneration ruined by its next re-sequence. These breather moments replicate the feel of ancient malls but astrological tripping within one is a severe crime with severe comeback. They can't punish you with fines because tripping within the Hyper-Mall will put you in the red. Blood from a stone then. So instead to deal with the astralogics they mandate shifting halls; not life-threatening as all halls lead to safety in the end, but blurring out the astrological trip. Blurring out what they've all come to think of as a little technicolor mixed in with the greys of post-MG Nuke-life.
With Steam-Straining comes some threading, a meta-spell that works like the rope of Theseus. She hasn't had time to master this. Still she envisions a vague semblance of a you-are-here. Lines congruent, spots flicker in and out, representing spaces she can get to with a good chance of housing the chem shop. A shifting mind-map is the best she can do. The hall re-sequencing could be a bored Omnarchitect hammering the switch in their brain that says action. If she gets lucky they could get bored of being bored.
The chem shop is more a sterile room like the inside of an asylum than something that looks legit. A few sparse displays imply the good shit is in the back. She's used to this. Anyone and everyone is if they need the white market. Walk into the store and see vials, glass; but what's in them could be talcum or high-grade baking soda. This puts the fixer in the mood for action while at the same time puts it further away from them. Makes them desperate but there's no law against it and she wonders who would step up to the Omnarchitects to enforce it if there was. Within the Hyper-Mall's shifting grey facets no one can touch them. Post-MG we savour every word. She's used up some reserve charting the halls which were changing the way people change their minds. Omnarchitects are prone to mood swings. She would be, too, if the rumours are true.
There's a girl here but she looks half-asleep. Fine eyebrows glint through shellac white glasses. She's slumped, nesting a chin in one arm, elbow planted on the stainless steel counter-top. As Chére comes in the girl peers at her, her chin slipping at first from her palm with a careless grace as she tilts her head. Chére figures she knows the list by heart now and is thinking about the crash later. The girl stares at her, the words who are you and what the hell are you doing here freezing on her lips and left unsaid. They attack Chére still from the girl's bespectacled eyes before the girl comes out of it. Instead she says, "Uh, yeah. Can I get you anything or are you just looking?"
Chére almost lets it all go. Breezes right back out of there. The fierce lighting begins to hurt her eyes. In here it clumps like the sprawl, nowhere to run from it. Then she decides she needs a reason to be here and figures what the hell. She gropes for the list and comes out with it. It catches there in a beam of deep blue light tinted with fuchsia, one of many which strobe the room, coming in through where the facade is glass for the entrance and its frame. Caught in the beam the paper is translucent like parchment.
"We don't carry any of that weird shit," the girl says,Chére thinking, what, and then she gives a lingering wink. "Is what they tell me to tell you I'm told to say."
Chere still doesn't get it. Then she looks down.
In the hybrid blue-orange of the light new items have appeared, slashed over the script she could see in the creeping dawn of the Post-Sprawl streets.
serpent slime crystal, powdered
ash bark resin, bloodcharged
palm leaf resin, consecrated
bird feather
incense (caked)
“Oh,”Chére says.
"Right this way," the shopgirl says, and with lean, pale arms, guides her to the back.
ALL THAT REMAINS
The back sprawls into a room larger than the showcase. The light here is softened vanilla and the halogen is arranged in metric sequence, spreading light like cream around the chamber in even measures. "Once shadow enters," she hears the shop-girl say, "this shit can kick off. Its all been hexed and blessed a thousand times, it's clockwork." She figures. The light outside is too jagged. Even refracted through the glass. "People want fast results." Vials are arrayed in legions marching down lengths of paper-thin table boards. Each labelled with a stamp below, engraved, bolted in. To the sides of the room are crates glued shut with plastic sealant, traces of which remain, teardrop scars or half-stars where they have drooled from the sealing.
"What people don't get," the shop-girl is saying to her, in a you-must-know-this-already voice, "is that this stuff can interface if blessed right. Do all sorts of cool shit with tech."
Chére lets herself nod. "Yeah, people don't know a whole lot." She hopes the shop-girl will expand. "We can reach heaven or hell through this," she says, her eyes dulled out behind the lenses in the even glaze of light. So Chére is talking to lips, a bobbing nose, hair tresses, ears buried somewhere beneath.
"Most people don't think about signal. They think they do but they're thinking of contact. That's the death of the signal. It's the signal's lifespan we care about. So much can be done with it."
Great,Chére thinks, a high-language vamp and maybe way into her own holics. It’s either a bonus, or an allotment from her pay. Up in a tower of concepts and coming down to wind back up. Over and over up and down the tower. The thread in her mind-map is bronzed ochre as if with time. The mind-map itself is scarred with blotches of dead pixel blur.
The shop-girl is roving the room. Pacing it, tapping vials, not taking any. Chére watches her, back and forth. She says, "like what?" Her nerves are acting up. Faint flush roots in tandem lines from her forehead, spirals down her chest beneath her holo-tee as the DIY Choker Band compensates with its Steam-Straint reserves. The shop-girl doesn't notice.
"You heard of the death-sims? Back in vogue," she says. Pocket games. Little worlds named with those that disappear. Testament in code of those who were once with... Chére winces. Those games, she used to feel, were for her patrons. Not her. "Yeah," she says. "You mean your holics make the sims better somehow?"
The shop-girl stops. Turns to regard her from behind her table-board, her lenses a white mask. Not glinting in the cream light, but her skin is flaxen with it. She guesses hers is too. "It's obvious you don't know what this stuff is capable of." Her head is skewed. Off-centre her gaze bites at Chére. She's conscious then of the frizzy matted halo of her hair which in the warmth has been stranded to string, itches where it's plastered against her.
"I’ve never seen you before. Did someone send you here?" Now her voice is tense. Chére thinks of the storefront behind her, the shifting grey-gloop halls, the ochre thread winding away. All that seems fragile now, like even the confusion of it might be lost, swept away into space and time. Swept away like dust and then she'll still be here. Trapped. The shop-girl is pacing towards her. "Was it those DIY ladies? They always send people here to deal with me. They hate me, I think."
"That's lame," Chére says. She has a vision of the shop-girl sleeping, waking up, blowing up. Like moment to moment only freaking out counters each sleep. The eyelids unseal and snap shut again, lacing dream through being. It's a holic,Chére realizes, but she doesn't see a choker or band.
"You know," the shop-girl says, "they want to avoid me, sort of thing." The lens of her glasses seem to set them apart, her a tier above, Chére below, a divide between them parting, once razor-thin, yawning into gulf, swallowing. A gap in their limits. Chére's heel brushes against the outwards door, which had thudded shut.
The power cuts, all the vials lost under the blanket of pitch-black. For a second. They come back as they ignite, one by one, like stars twinkling into a velvet sky.
BROKEN MANTRAS
From beneath the lenses, shining octaves brighter, her eyes. Twin halos at first, blossoming as dot to iris a steady spiral outwards to the edges of her eyes. Refracted they are green fire against the frame.
Then it’s gone. “Oh, you're still here? That was Val. We’re linked.”
Pinpricks of flame, the vials summon thin echoes of gloss from the varnish of the table-boards. As if scattered snow, the shining traces.
“Why’d they do that?” Chére says. “I just wanna grab what I need.”
“It’s too late for that,” the shop-girl says, but there’s a moment of silence. “He had a mood swing. That’s okay. I can swing him back up. But we need to get to him. When this stuff ignited it would have fried any sim or carrier in the area.” She pauses. “All this is burning out. But he can get more. It’s nothing to him.”
She sighs. “Okay,” she says. “I gotta do this first.” She's pushing her way past Chére, where no impact light strobes in. There’s only the gulf of darkness beyond and the crackling reverb drenched scrapings of the greygloop halls.
“Any sim?” Chére says, coming out behind her. Probing the words, trying to find the teeth in them. “Pocket games?”
She makes a look, her eyes creasing. “That’s how I interface with him. You can reach any overlay through any embedded sim and by now physical presence never wandering or leaving has embedded what sim it's got, capiche?"
"That would also," she says, "fry, re-fry I think, all those game-heads who keep them like sigils. They'd be haywire, snowfuzzmoss brains. It'll be like Val to space and let them find us."
Chere thinks of Devon and his games that he'd stressed were like gardens. Cultivation. She'd had another word. Instances. They were not grown; they just were, if flowered of timeless sequence. Time would have no meaning to the straining para-webs that would tangle and knit before they knew to be apart from themselves. To be part of each other, an always-thought, before Chére and she guesses before those before her; what matters is what is contained in you, that you didn't put there, that no one put there.
"You're talking about the carriers," she says, "their carriers. What about the sims?"
"Where does anything go when it is fried," the shop-girl says, "before it comes back." Says it as if the answer to this is both obvious and unknowable. Chére thinks she knows. Steam scouring the charcoal black of the stainless pan. The pan itself was scorched and split when she'd first used it. She'd hurt her finger some. Steam-Straining was like pulling sap from trees to the initiate; to those who know, like the hummingbird guzzles nectar. Between those two points there’s a threshold where a trust is broken, a bond betrayed. Going against, breaking skin.
She follows by default as the girl ambles behind the counter-top. Retrieves from a burrowed desk cavern a sign upon which she makes several crossings and re-crossings with a pen, Chére assumes. Can't only make out the languid snakes that are her elbowed arms moving with the motion, the pales of her arms slivers in the darkness.
She thinks, a status update for anyone who stumbles in here. Like who? A Ghoul?
Are they friend or foe, out there in the dark?
The shop-girl, though, guides her; the shop-girl has more allotted to her mind-map, or maybe, Chére thinks, she’s used to this: the hall straight and clear; the shop-girl stopping her as the Grey-Gloop sludges before them to section off a new corridor.
“Why would the Omnarchitect let them find us?” Chére says. “Is he that big an asshole?”
A long sigh. “Something in the way he’s wired? Something in the way they’ve left him?” The Grey-Gloop has hardened into alabaster and now shifting circuits race signage to draw in neon dance the meme-nexii glyphs and branding seraphic fonts of the hypermall’s motif-patterns, which would correspond to the Omnarchitect’s soul, Chére knows, reaching out. What would he see that he could only translate out of empty promises and become limp wrist, limp flat of hand offered, hand in taking. Lips splitting, asking. The shopgirl’s say: He just crashes, gets real low.
“My friends are gonna wonder,” Chére says, “where the hell I am.”
“Caged bird-ass,” she says, “way of thinking.”
Down the halls they have reached a stairway moving downwards. The greygloop halls have slowed in their sequenced shifts.
Lips splitting to ask, Chére thinks, like everyone asks, but what they ask from you is time, and it’s to replace their own, the time lost in their asking for it, the time lost no matter the reason.
The ossified Grey-Gloop is no longer alabaster but looks like casing steel. Her friend's uncovered a pocket flashlight and sweeps it up and down the turf, though Chére thinks this is for her. The shop-girl never slows when she doesn’t need to, perhaps thinking in a weird way that she’s on the clock. The pocket light is a cold, clear blue. She wants to tell her that the girl exists enslaved and entombed in a Post-Sprawl variant cap-monolith but thinks better of it. The sweeping light picks up grilles in the ceiling, mesh plating patches on the pockmarked floor. Dirt or dust has accrued in mounds like small anthills or films thin as paper. Like steel shavings,Chére thinks, as she stops to show her. “Grey-Gloop leavings,” the shopgirl says. “Ghouls don’t come here.”
“What about feral gamers?”Chére says, eyeing the darkness around them like a wall of mist, the flash-beam hanging loose by the girl’s side, beam drilling into the floor, slicing against it as her wrist flickers back and forth in a manner like nervous habit.
Scuffing sounds in the pitch dark.
She flicks the light off, and she’s gone, and so are the films and mounds of chrome dust, and all there is a series of murmurs from just beyond, in clipped rhythm, like a promise broken before even being said.