chapter nine
The benches of this ruined metro were dusty and falling apart, the best I could tell, there was a cold wind that swept through. I traced around the walls and saw old, tattered posters beyond readability anymore. I remembered that Flant had said back in chapter three that they had built a new afterward on top of the old one to seal away the Nexus (E3kHatena, afterward 15), so maybe this was that? I needed a light source if I wanted to see where I was going. Wait, Memmi had said I was becoming a metamancer, maybe I can just do that myself?
“I have a flashlight!” I said, holding my left hand out as absolutely zero flashlights appeared in my palm.
No luck. I thought about the really nice flashlight I was definitely holding, it was made of metal and used an LED and was super bright and had a long battery life, it was a great flashlight, just one of the best. Nothing was still filling my hand. I sighed. I felt lost, worried, maybe that's just not how it works? I mean, you'd think someone with built-in night vision would be capable of metamancy of this degree but... why am I even bothering trying to make this work, this seemed hopeless. I figured I should just go wait for another train, hope I didn't end up back down here again.
Just then, a beam of brilliant white light spilled into the room. Did I actually do it? Was that what I had been asking for? I quickly took in as many of the sights as I could. On the wall I was just at were a few ruined paper signs and a plaque that read “what happens afterward?” with a man on it. In the center of the room was a wooden octagonal display full of papers now illegible, and along the other wall was a picture of the guy on the back of dosh. Was it dosh, or Dosh? What was his name, Tyler Tile? Harvey Hardwood? Something like that, I was a bit too worried to think.
The light suddenly shifted closer. It was someone walking towards me. “Hello?” I asked.
“████ ███” it replied.
Oh no.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“███ ██████ ████ ███ ███ █████ ████ █████”
“I don't get it! I can't understand! Oh no.”
“███ ██ █████ ███ ██████ ███████████”
I backed up and hid behind a thing (there was no time to be specific) and hoped for another silver train. I was apparently behind a bench, as thanks to the light, I could see one of the metro tokens beneath it. I picked it up.
“█████ ████ ██████” the person shouted.
I could make out every sound. None of them were right, I couldn't understand him, was it speech? I can't even describe it, just think of the most incorrect sound you can. Make it worse. Another silver train then pulled into the station. I ran for the doors the instant they opened.
“███ ████ █████ ██████ ███ █████”
I slammed the token into the slot, hoping Memmi was wrong about them not working, maybe that the force of jamming it in there would clear up the jam inside. I heard a click, the doors opened, and I rushed in and threw them shut. As soon as I did that, the doors on the outside of the train began to close.
“█████ ███ ███ ██████”
The person was right in front of the train now, and reached his hand in. As the doors closed, it took off his hand, which looked to be made some purple-gray stuff as it fell to the ground. It kind of had the texture of sand or maybe really awfully-made tater tots, just a bunch of little bits held together through hope and dreams.
The train returned into the light of day, and I took a deep sigh. My hand slid into the gap between the seats, and touched something. “Oh goodness, what's this,” I said to myself.
I pulled the thing out. It was a D20 bill! I stuck it in my pocket, then had a kind of mean idea. I checked between every seat and found handfuls of bills, which I kept filling my pockets with. Eventually I had well over D200. I had no idea how much rent is, or why all this money was left on the train, but hey, if nobody had claimed it, then surely I was allowed to take it!
I got off at the afterward station, sticking my hands in my pockets to ram the money further down so people wouldn't know I was stealing, and headed home. If a train ride costs D5, and if I had enough for 40 train rides now, surely rent didn't cost as much as 40 train rides. As I walked into the Green Tower, I stopped at the desk. “Oh, Flant! You're back!” I said.
“Yeah, what's goin' on?” He asked.
“I was just wondering, how much is rent?”
“Uh... let's see, room 808? Uh... that's one of the Linoleum suites, eh... D180--”
I started pulling out handful after handful of the bills and setting them on his counter. After I emptied every pocket, I grabbed D20 from the pile and stuck it in my pocket. “That should be enough!” I declared.
Flant was looking at me like a man about to have a heart attack, stroke, and aneurysm at the same time. He grabbed each bill, one at a time, writing down what it was on a scrap of paper before straightening it out on the edge of the counter. “Five... ten, thirty, fifty, sixty, sixty-five...”
I stood there, a little excited about paying rent, for some reason I had this gut feeling I wasn't supposed to be excited about rent. “One seventy eight, one seventy nine, one-eighty. Huh. Ya actually did it. And you had about... fifty Dosh extra. Huh.”
“Yep!”503Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡC8Ke5LmBUu
“Mind tellin' me where you learned to fold bills like that?”
“Oh, I just... kinda did it that way.”
“I can tell. Look, this is neat and all, but... where the heck did you find money this old?”
“Oh, uh...”
“Because these look like some of the money we used in the old afterward!”
“Oh, so that's what that metro station was!”
“Wh... no, you took the silver train, the Evacuation Express? Huh, and I thought Shim was a maniac. You willingly stepped onto a train that should have been certain doom.”
“Oh, it was an accident.”
“Yeah, but your death woulda been on purpose if it went wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Th... that? Down there? That's the Nexus.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Somewhere in all that mess is the active host, the husk the Nexus cleaned out and took over to wield those powers. The silver trains won't let it make its way up here, but it can get out. That's how it got out in the afterward before that one, and the one before that one as well, and every other afterward all the way down to the very bottom.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Honestly? We already starting building another afterward. Keeping everything going is getting to be dangerous, the core of all of this used to be cooled off with just water, not anymore, and if we build another afterward, then...”
“Then what? What happens afterwards?”
“I-- eh, did you just...”
“I thought it was cute and clever.”
“It... really wasn't. It was pretty painful. But really, the afterward will probably melt down unless we opt for a stronger coolant, and by that point it won't be drinkable. Well, I guess it would be, but just the one time, though.”
“But you're not going to fight the Nexus?”
“He's corrupted everything else in his path, he won't just stop if we shoot him or whatever. Not only would you need to destroy the Nexus' active host, but also the heart of the Nexus itself, and there's no way to know what that could even be anymore.”
“How long have you been running?”
“Me? Like 30 years.”
“30 years...”
“Yeah, we first moved at the start of the century to a new afterward we built on top of the old one, and just every time after that we would all get to work on the next one after that.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah , we all went through a lot of changes to get here, but now we're kind of a... a bit of a different group than the first afterward. In a lot of ways.”
“Oh.”
“Well, look at me rambling! You've paid the rent for the month, I hope you got a real source of income because scrounging around for what the Nexus has claimed ain't a living worth livin'.”
“Alright. Thanks, Flant!” I said, heading for the lift.
“Ain't nothin' to it!” He said.
As I entered the room, Constantine shot out of the bag and quickly assembled together. “Hello... human! You've paid D180 for your first month's rent! In 30 days, you owe D180. You have rented this property for: 1 month!”
“You too, Constantine,” I said, hoping ignoring his stock phrases was the answer.
There was a knock on the door, and when I opened up I saw there was a bag sitting at the door. I grabbed it and carried it to a table in the room, and unpacked it. Inside was a big book that said “Linoleum Suites Insurance, Terms, and Conditions of Use” that I set away, a plaque that congratulated me on paying the rest, and another packet of the red food. I figured I could end today the same way I began it, heading to Shim's.
“So you ended up in the Lower Afterward?” she said, holding me against her as I opened the packet of food in their back room.
“Yeah, I didn't think I did, but I guess I did.”
“Did ya run into anything down there?” Jev asked.
“There was a guy, he was approaching me and talking like—hold on, it was like, '▒▒▒▒▒'... wait, no, that's not right...”
“Whoa, where'd you learn to do that?” Jev replied.
“I dunno, I'm just trying to mimic the sound of--”
“Okay, but no, look at what you put on the page up there. Like, what the heck is—can I hold her?”
“Oh, uh, sure, that alright with you, Tams?” Shim replied.
“Sure,” I said.
Jev leaned in, grabbed me like a disgruntled cat, and held me firmly. “Sorry, um, anyways, how'd you actually put those symbols on the page? Like, those are special characters, those aren't on a keyboard.”
“I dunno, I guess it's that metamancer thing Shaw was telling me about when I saw her earlier today.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Shim said, looking over at Shaw, sprawled out asleep on the couch as to give the author some rest, so they don't have to dig up their full-width text generator.
“But you were actually down there. Did you catch what level of the afterward you were in? There's, like, seven right now.”
“Um, no, I... I didn't,” I said, starting to feel the warm, sleepy feeling that comes from the red food whatever.
“And did you get a good look at the person you saw down there?”
“No, I didn't, his eyes were these big blinding lights, made it hard to see him.”
“But there was plenty of light!” Shim cried.
“I, um...”
“No, it's fine, just kiddin' with you.. So what's next, Tams?”
“Um... a nap, probably.”
“I'll say,” Jev replied, “you're fading fast here.”
I leaned back into Jev a little more, and she laid down and rolled over a bit, clutching me like a child would hold a stuffed animal. Shim moved around to face me so I was sandwiched between the two Lizi, and between Jev's embrace and Shim gently playing with my hair, I was out in record time.
“What time is it there?” I asked the man.
“Um... let's see, so it's, uh... 23:33, based on the Horizon Standard Pacific Time, we don't really use that 24-hour measure over here--”
“I didn't ask about that, sir,” I replied, “I am calling you on behalf of a man named Jim, you knew him?”
“Ji... oh, right, I did! The divorced man, let out of jail on good behavior, made his way back to his family to try to make amends, things didn't go right, so he came to live with me and stud--”
“--study the rifts in greater detail, I'm aware of all of that, sir, I don't need your life story. Look, Jim came to me and asked about potentially settling the score with an eldritch evil you two unleashed onto the world.”
“Oh, right, the, uh... the class-X meta-reality data incident, okay.”
“He's offering me five hundred dollars to take care of it. I'm just a vigilante, he wants to tag along, but Jim's a bit up there, I'm just worried for the old man's health, wondering if you'd be willing to use one of your rifts to come back here and we could work together instead.”
“Um, sir, uh...”
“Cal. Cal Riddick.”
“Right, mister Riddick, I'm going to have to decline that offer. I've got family here, I'm finally reunited with them, I've spent decades under oppression and prejudice out there, I don't want to come back. The war was enough reason for me to leave, whether I would have been safe in the civ or not, I'd rather be here, be home. I don't really care how many advances you've made in the past 40 years, I've already gotten over leaving Ashley and the rest of them all behind, I need to say, sir, that I cannot help you any more than I am here.”
“Listen, F████, I don't have time for games, I don't have time for the runaround. I'm not going to take someone's grandfather on a manhunt. Either you come to me or I'll sell your location to your former employers. They just got bought out by Horizon a few years back. They'll be twice as brutal and act thrice as swift.”
“Mister Riddick, you don't know what you're saying. You can't trace my call through the rift phone, you don't know who I am, and even if you rounded us all up, you could never pick me out in a crowd.”
“Then it looks like I'll have to sell you all out.”
“Goodbye, Mister Riddick, never call me again, tell Jim that I feel bad that that he's got to deal with people like this.”
“Wait, I
“Oh, are you okay?” Shim said.
“I... I just had another one of those visions. I was calling this guy, asking him for help, the man who offered me money to kill something is old, this other guy was younger. I was mean to him, he was mean with me...”
“Tams...” Jev said, nearly asleep herself, “you gotta remember that you aren't that person anymore. You're Tammy, you're small and... and you're cute and you've just got so much love in you... so much warmth, too, mmm.”
“I... I'm just worried, like, that was me?”
“It's not you anymore, though.”
“Yeah! Honestly, you could just throw that all away anymore, focus on being Tammy!” Shim said quietly
“But... but I don't think it's right for me to just take this body. Maybe the real Tammy's out there looking for me, I think I should just find my old body, take it back, and make amends.”
“I mean, it's up to you, I guess, but it seems like it's caused you a lot of stress,” Jev replied.
“There's going to be stress either way, no matter what.”
“So what do you wanna do? Find your body, remember who you were, and go back home? Or you could stay here with us. Admit it, you love this.”
“I... I dunno. I'm sorry, I'll figure this out, I've gotta leave.”
“Oh... well, alright, then, Tams, take ca—er, should I call you that still, or...?”
“I don't know,” I replied.
I walked out and headed down to my apartment again, I just had too much to think about right now, I should probably go to bed and think through my options in the morning. This chapter's already almost like 3000 words, let's just start fresh tomorrow.
ns 15.158.61.42da2
