Slumrat Rising

Vol. 3 Chap. 52 Fragile Bubbles

Truth alternated between sitting cultivation, his least favorite sort, and trying to remember how his body worked. Everything hurt or felt wrong, or hurt while feeling wrong. In a brief moment of lucidity, he decided that “wrong” was unacceptably imprecise. If an elbow could feel nauseous, it would feel like this. And he had to remember that blood needed to pump and the lungs needed to inflate and deflate, and it all needed to happen without his conscious involvement, thank you very much! Because right now, his body was operating on manual controls, and that just wasn’t going to work.

He also needed every scrap, every tiny particle of cosmic energy he could grasp because he was a hair, a wispy, thin hair, from being totally empty. And that meant he was seconds from having his apertures start to collapse. It wasn't normal to test your reserves this way. The one time he overdrew himself in the PMC, he got serious medical attention and an even more serious chewing out by Sergeant Murthey. “Dumfuck Medici” was his formal name and rank for the purposes of that discussion.

It was the universe’s way of hinting that he was doing it wrong. That he was brute-forcing it, instead of using his brain. Truth could see that plainly. He just didn’t know how he could do it better. Every time he pushed himself to the limit and lived, he lived. If he hadn’t pushed as hard, he wouldn’t have lived. He would, therefore, have to deal with the pain.

His gamble worked, but he couldn’t do it a second time. Not today, at any rate, and probably not tomorrow. On the other hand, he didn’t want to ditch the wagon and go to ground. He was finally making good time going north, certainly faster and more directly than he could run over such a long distance. So he cultivated like mad, hauling in every bit of energy he could, trying to keep his lungs going without his reminding them, and squinting out the windows for any hint of roadblocks.

He did not enjoy his ride in the wagon. He had lost track of time somewhere- it was the middle of the night or creeping towards dawn. The horizon hadn’t lightened yet, and spring was rolling into summer… he would go with “so late, he really wished he was asleep.” His driver, Joarle, agreed. They didn’t run into a checkpoint, but they did pull into a rest stop. A brilliant bubble of bleach-white lights shone down on gray and gold trimmed corporate livery. A sprawling complex engineered to quickly empty what’s full and fill what's empty.

They both got out of the wagon at speed. Both went for a shower. Both went for coffee, which Truth had one sip of and flung violently into the trash. Joarle’s palate wasn’t so refined. He chased his tall coffee with a couple of pills from over the counter at the convenience store and settled on an outdoor bench to smoke a quick bowl of something energizing.

Truth opted for a big bag of chips, two liters of fruit juice (“Guaranteed 5% real fruit flavor!”), and a big sack of crispy, sesame-flavored seaweed. He would have gone for the jerky, but it was now being kept behind the counter and under glass. Meat was getting very expensive, very fast. The little bench, fake-cherry-flavor red and made of metal, was at the edge of the bubble of light surrounding the rest stop. More bubbles of light shone down from the towering lights over the parking lot, giving the wagons their star turn for the spotlight as they pulled up.

They recharged in companionable silence, for all that only one of them knew he had a companion in the dark. But the life of a trucker is a lonely one, and companionship, like the showers, was rentable at the rest stop. She had put on heels and a skirt as short as the money that bought it. A top that stretched nicely over nothing much. She didn’t saunter, she just walked over on aching feet. “Hey Joarle. Got a hit of that for me?”

“Sure Marcy. Here, finish the bowl.” He offered it over with easy familiarity. Truth stepped away from the bench so they could sit together, and wound up leaning against the lamppost. She took the glass pipe casually and dragged deep, taking the edge off, but only just. The tired was ground in deep.

“Doing all right?” Joarle asked.

“Been better. Tommy’s got a bad cough.”

“Must be really bad if you’re mentioning it.”

“Some kind of fungal thing. I always think it sounds like mushrooms growing inside of him, but it’s not. His body just can’t fight it off like with a cold. You can get a charm for it, but it costs. Well. You know how it is.”

“Yeah. Suppose I do. Different when it’s your kid, though.”

She sighed. “Not as much as you would think. Always been me and him since he was born. Not saying none of it’s been for me- I gotta eat and pay rent too. But it’s been for him, mostly. Cause without him, what even am I?”

“I have Bresla and Nadi’s pictures up in my cab. Every long haul I make, I look at them.”

They fell back into silence. Marcy took a hopeful drag on the pipe, but it was cashed. She sighed and put it down between them, letting the glass cool. Joarle offered some chips. She took a couple.

“Sleeping here?”

“Can’t. Got stopped by a checkpoint over near Harban. The goddamn penalty clauses kick in if I’m late, and with everything-”

“You can’t be late.” Marcy leaned back, trying to relax her shoulders and rest her tired feet.

“Can’t be late. Sorry.” They lapsed into silence. Each just existing, trying to float in their fragile bubble of light, seeing the cold dark around them. Trying to be brave.

Joarle took a look at his watch and did some math. “I’m here another ten minutes. I can spend them on this bench or in my bunk.”

“You’re a good guy. Sorry about laying the sob story on you.”

“Only story anybody’s got these days.”

“Somebody ought to write a comedy.” Marcy stood. It seemed to take some effort. Joarle got up almost as slowly. “Everybody knows everything is rotten and terrible. Who needs to be told that? But something that makes you laugh, that takes you away from it all for a while? I’d like to see that.”

They walked over to the cab of the wagon. Truth stayed on the bench. Plenty of time to catch up when they were done. He felt very cold without his companions in the light. But he wouldn’t grudge others their little warmth.

The geography of Jeon got more claustrophobic the further north you went. The number and size of human settlements dropped hard forty kilometers north of Harban. The number and size of mountains rose proportionally. They might be stumpy little things in the south, but up north? Some green, some gray, all forbidding. All grudgingly permitting human settlement in the narrow valleys or on the scraped-away tops of foothills. There were mines here and some heavy pollution industries. Some of the more high volume and toxic production lines from the alchemists were set up along railroads through the north. Truth remembered there were PMC offices up here too, and a small training camp.

Joarle drove his wagon through the night and into the dawn. It was because of the law, apparently. The demon bound to the cab did all the actual steering, navigation, braking, signaling, and all that. But, to reassure the public that a multi-ton cargo wagon wasn’t going to freak out and plow through a crowd, each was required to have a driver. The spells would not engage until the driver was in their seat and had one hand on the steering wheel. The wheel wasn’t connected to anything, of course. The steering spells only kicked in if the driver pulled the big red lever on the dash, and they’d better have a DAMN good reason for pulling that because the truck was company property and you would be liable for damaging it.

The truck driver’s job was sitting in the cab, one hand always on the wheel, staring out of the cab. Not moving except during their approved rests. Barely able to nudge the demon into stopping at a rest stop. Trapped in a glass box, watching the most boring parts of the country slip past. Ghosts watching ghosts. They mostly helped with the loading and unloading at their destination. Another tiny component in the great national working: summoning money for Starbrite.

They didn’t run into any more checkpoints. What was there to inspect? Truth focused on cultivation and recovery. He didn’t even want to think about the hit. Well, that and he didn’t actually know where Joarle was taking him, beyond “north” and probably to a Totte distribution center. Where, thanks to him, they would definitely have security. He waited until they were in a good-sized town, then he hopped out of the wagon. There were a few Level Zeros on the street, which made it close enough to empty for his needs. He was still feeling tender. Best to take it easy while keeping in motion. He stretched, looked around, and decided to find coffee before plotting his next steps.

It was at this point that Truth realized he screwed up. Again. This was not a “good-sized town.” This was a very dense cluster of houses next to a train station, giving one the illusion of a good-sized town. What it actually was, was a crummy little mountain village that seemed to exist mostly to house factory workers, miners, and their dependents. There was one convenience store, the train station, and a combination police station/doctor’s office/stationmaster’s office. Truth had a sneaking suspicion that they were all the same person.

The sign on the train station read Yagdok, and while the schedule grudgingly admitted that trains did stop here, it took vindictive pleasure in informing him they did so only twice a day. Freight trains came through all the time, but never stopped. Kilometers long, traveling barely faster than a level one could walk. The worm demon pulling them was a huge, brutal thing. Monstrous even for an earth demon, coated in sigils and spell formations, the lines etched into its form, rods of punishment and control piercing through its head. Rippling along the track, it hauled the carriages behind it.

“I wonder if it even knows it’s out of Hell.” Truth muttered. Thrush watched the earth demon go past, managing to sneer with a beak.

“It knows. The dumb thing may be suffering, but it’s used to that. If anything, it’s happy.” Thrush said.

“That looks happy to you?”

“Our emotions are different to yours, Dread Mage. I’m trying to make the best comparison I can. Perhaps “satisfied to be fulfilling its purpose” would be closer in meaning.”

“Increasing human misery?”

“Master, please! Such is never a demon’s purpose. A necessary byproduct of it, on occasion, but never the purpose itself.”

“Go on then. Why is the bound and tormented worm demon “happy?””

“Because it is useful to a more powerful being. It views suffering as proof of service. And they are so stupid they make no distinction between masters. Time is a meaningless concept to them, so only pain and labor define their existence. To the extent that it is aware of humans at all, it looks at them with as close to approval as it can manage.”

Truth laughed quietly. He dug out his now badly battered road atlas and gingerly hunted through the index. It took an alarmingly long time to find Yagdok, even with the coordinates. A tiny speck of nothing, not interesting enough to be in the middle of nowhere. He was still well southwest of where he needed to be. He traced the rail line running through town. It ran, slowly, from northeast to southwest. He could hop on a northbound train for a while. It would give him time to plot the hit. And rest.

He ran to the convenience store, loaded up on as much junk food and water as he could grab, snagged a tarp, hit the “No Public Toilet” toilet, and zipped back to the station. The same train was still rolling through. He needn’t have rushed. Truth briefly debated about which open-topped bin would be the most comfortable and hopped in. Pea gravel. It could be worse. He could explore the train later, if he felt like it. He buried himself in it, wrapped in his tarp. The weight of it was strangely comforting.

“Thrush, wake me if we approach a town of at least five thousand people, if you see any sort of checkpoint or security inspection, or if the train reaches its destination.”

“Yes, Master.”

And with that, Truth finally slept. Getting closer to murdering a generation’s genius.