I watched as Luo tightened the strap of a scavenger inventory. The rusted support beam I was leaning on pulled the fake inner city clothes I wore. The air smelled of those rough power lines I went to as a kid, watching my father cut ribbons, paving the way to a future no one wanted in the end.
A single flickering light hung over us and I grabbed at it trying to figure out why it kept glowing but all the other lights that surrounded it didn't. The scene, a tunnel with cracked tiles and stagnant water overlaid as if a decorative thing was to me a dungeon to test our mettle.
We were heroes and there was no way about it. I remember from those old info-capsules that contained more propaganda about the corpos that the actual subject matter that in places like this, abandoned before the advent of psychological warping, everything could kill you.
The glass that protected the bulb from the wind and protected the people it shone on from its heat could shatter at once and break us apart through shrapnel, especially with the unstable sources of power in the all-too-ancient time it was made in.
The stagnant water probably contained some horrible, horrible pathogen or amoeba that could destroy every part of my nervous system and my cyber ware, though I didn't have any. In a world where everyone's super, the only person alive without superpowers was the special one.
These thoughts were comforting.
Our hands shook, mine from uncertainty, his from rage.
A silence overcame the both of us. We were friends. It was weeks since our first meeting and ever since then I had a taste of the world I was going to rule later on.
That silence broke once again, like all those times. It was him speaking. It always felt like I was the receiving end. Like he was the subject matter and I was just useless propaganda. The adverbs and adjectives that described the subject and verb. Of course they helped, but it's not like they were the focus of the product.
He died for nothing. They had his name scrubbed from every record. One snap and all the world has of him is his family's memories and the power of the sun in his son's palm. That was the gist of what he said. It just went on and on like all those other days and I was tired of trying to dissuade him from taking on a "heroic" slate to his life.
I didn't just stand there. But what could I do? You know nothing about me and I know all about you. That's supposed to be my fault? Said I, condescendingly.
He spat on the water beneath us.
Same thing, again and again. You just love putting yourself on the high pedestal but we're the ones carrying you. We survive but we don't live at all.
I looked away, feigning shame, but in truth, I was feeling out our surroundings. There was no soul to conquer or take on in two-mile-radius. The city's veins were all that's left.
In a story like this, the city was a character too.
I broke the silence that came creeping again.
"Vengeance would just force them to lay waste to what remains of his life's work. You're shitting on your father's grave more than they did by removing every trace of him on this earth." I didn't want to keep saying wishy-washy promises of dreamy mouse-men no more. No more 'vengeance won't bring him back' because that much was obvious.
The words land heavy but they just pass through.
"Then I'll just get to them before they do that. Simple."
"Then what? They get your house, your food, your clothes, your mom. I, of all people, should know just how much power my family has." It was a threat. I didn't want him to do anything without me.
"That won't happen with me in the equation." He turned away, walking down the tunnel. If he actually goes through with something like this, I might regret not taking the capsule from him earlier.
The boy's silhouette fades into the dim, dim night. I exhaled, then followed. Modern humans don't do that because they could just push through with gamma-aminobutyric acid and serotonin and endorphins. I feel most genuine when I do things in spite of the status quo.
We passed through the tunnel and rode on chain-drive trotters propelled with lowlift anti-grav mechanisms. We tinkered on this system when we fed what could've been the last cat in this city protein slop from his mother's shop. It was the first time the both of us fed the cat and the strange creature just snuggled up on the both of us.
We didn't know what that meant at all and I wasn't going to go back home to find out what that meant so we got ourselves wet a dozen times to make sure there was no curse or pathogen or pheromone that might lead to severe injury by feline contact
My mind dozed off as my hands got to work.
I woke up in a smoky place. Fluorescent lights pre-psychosplices caved down, down, down on us. The stalls it lit on were owned by traders shouting and bellowing and arguing in five different dialects. There was no insult here made in good fun. Everything smelled like oil; rotor, vehicle, or cooking, I didn't want to know.
Luo threaded through the crowd as I said my hellos to the people I met before. We dived into the concrete underground, deeper into the earth. The surfaces inside were strange too, as the walls and ceilings and floors were uniform in the sense that it wasn't. It was rough and callous like human hands all-around. Different jobs, different lives, different callouses.
At cockroach sight and hearing level, both of us waded through the horrors that deserved to be sealed way, way underground. People were dancing naked, showing off scars of war as if they were animals to look at. They fight for their country and they end up fighting for scraps against other exotic animals. Animals like giraffes and elephants turned out to be way more common than cats here. Day-by-day, I realize I know less about this city than I do. People were cheering and cheering in some drug-addled daze.
The fact that Luo knows about this is appalling.
It was warm psychedelic horror. Horror, I remember, was something that evoked an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust. All the beasts in the menagerie that entertained the select masses here in the underground were benign. So there was no factor of fear. But there was shock, and there was disgust.
It was a true cosmic evil that took place here. Every single thing in my mind drowned under the weight of the question: why do people like this? It was clear to me this unending space of cellars filled with 'people' wasn't made to evoke those feelings, it was meant to entertain.
We ended up in a quiet chamber.
Luo shared a look with me that meant, even I never got this far down. He was scared. I was too.
That missing factor of fear aligned itself in a frequency that we could hear. It was blaring and ringing in our ear canals.
"This is the city's real face," Luo said, "the rest is just skin stretched tight over this."
"They built this. Your people." I can't help but take offense to that.
We retrieved our equipment of choice. The usual activity goes like this. We ask someone from either side; Luo's or mine, to prepare a crate of stuff we need for us. Then we get to business. Whether that be taking down a slavery ring or corrupt Gu officer, we inched ever closer to a place where we could reform the city. Make it a better place for me to rule later and for Luo's family to live.
We were labeled anarchists. Revolutionaries.
Reformists. Symbols of hope or symbols of apathy. We were the child soldiers of our time, tragic hero-kings in an ancient Greek tragedy. We were the spark to set alight the heap of dry timber that is the city.
But in the end, I was in it for the enjoyment. Those nightmares of a future hell stopped when I didn't sleep anymore. Of course I did sleep, though it was polyphasic. I dipped into the dreamscapes and souls of others to replenish my strength if the situation required it.
I was in it for the escape, and he was in it for the money. The sheer amount of moolah that came out of busting and sifting through key ledgers of big players in the city could sustain the both of us for a lifetime. Sick Robin Hoods that stole from the rich and pocketed the spoils.
Wolves of Wall Street.
The targets from before were all contained spaces, expanses within the peaks of the city's towers. It was the height of depravity, the highest point of lust and greed and every cancerous thing with the rich. All courtesy of Luo's circle of sympathizers and my own 'followers' in the company.
Now we dive into the lowest points of human experience.
We wore our masks and hurried into the gates of the darker underground. We bent down to our knees and jumped through vents our cabal informed us of. We shot through the dirt and the pulsing bedrock into the night palace's royal chambers.
It smelled of pre-psychosplice age whiskey and sex and carnality. The grime that stuck on my garments on the way was overtaken by the sweet, sweet lustful aroma that surrounded us. The sensual violence. The desire and allure. What a diseased place.
People here are not people. People here are product placements with arteries.
I recognized the paunchy man beating on the cherry blossom prostitute. One of my father's associates. A secretary of inner-city public relations. Blowing off steam, I see.
Luo's gone cold and sweating when I send my consciousness outward. Get the background of the situation. Luo's doubtful of my living without cybernetics. The succubae were contractors, specific courtesans from pleasure-houses around the city and the cities that surrounded it. The man was a staunch defender of 'sin' businesses; casinos, taverns, slavery rings, alcohol, illegal chemmies, and so on. This was his way of seeing the product.
When a guy makes it big, rises to a point where he has money to blow but he still wants more, he invests. Startups, coalitions, societies, you name it, it needs funding. But in a world where everyone's trying to start their own business or become an entrepreneur, how does one rich guy decide which startup to pick? How does one rich man pick a startup in a city that sells its children's birthdays for spare parts?
He doesn't pick. He smells. He sniffs for blood that can be monetized, for scarcity to be weaponized, for appetites he can prime and then capitalize. There is a certain science, a certain theoretical paragon to follow when one succumbs to the greed only privy to the higher echelons of society.
This man mastered that. Indeed, how heartless of me to admire him. Every man has his own redeemer.
I nudged Luo to the side, making sure to not alert the fatty. We slowly melted into the shadowy parts behind the steel pillars that surrounded his below-the-floor bed. I counted to three in hand-sign, and we both threw little canisters of primitive, highly-specialized versions of pre-psychosplice age dread gas that deployed when Luo wanted it to.
The man took a gasping breath then dropped down. So did the concubine. They both will have nightmares in their dreams, and no one will continue theirs in the waking world. We cut off both of his balls and cut them both in separate parts.
One for the Times and one for the Associated Press. I left a letter I wrote in company code. That would make sure it doesn't lead to the public, but it would spread the message to our sleepers.
We left the concubine in another bed. We'll take down the rest of this place first.
We masked ourselves in the perfume of this place, natural predators.
We got to work, lacing every end of every fuse in old-age dynamite. No one here deserved to live.
Luo tied the last loop. He nodded, and there was something like resolve in his face now, but it was laced with the same tiredness you see on small mothers who've been robbed of sleep and dignity for so long and they can't tell the difference between the two. Though both are privileges only meant for the destined few.
How poetic was that?
We went back in separate ways, mine in the back stairwell, his in the cascading vent structure we came out from.
The hissing sound of the burning fuse got louder and louder as it started burning all of the plastics and cloth and everything flammable inside, killing everyone in fumes.
In a fire, the smoke kills you first before the flames itself. The stuff that makes up buildings nowadays are all poisonous and toxic and cancerous when burned. Their 'ashes' were some of the greatest common poisons known to man.
The fire starts by eating every particle of available oxygen. The smoke it generates replaces the breathable air and chokes everyone present. The smoke starts clogging their airways and burning their flesh from the inside as their other orifices start replacing oxygen with super toxic and superheated and scalding coal-black smoke. They die of CO2 poisoning first. But in this case, probably from narcotic inhalant poisoning.
I thought of the pain and the suffering I caused today. If the ghost was here to see me now, I don't know. There was no justification for this.
As I ran back up to the surface, I saw Luo from another overcast awning. We ran and ran and sprinted towards the exit.
At the alley's mouth, Luo stopped. He turned to me, and for the first time since we met, he looked younger than his worry. "You could still walk away," he said. It was the first major thing we did. The first feat meant to end up in the headlines. Half of the city's hierarchy would be in shambles with the amount of important people that would die today.
The safest thing you could say to someone about to start a war is to offer them the exit.
"We both know you're lying."
We got on our trotters and dipped. A few seconds later, the underground shriveled up and died as smoke rose from the dirt. The explosion was contained. The only stuff there that would survive are the psychosplices and the data leylines. The letter we left would correspond to the one we would send the balls we divorced from the human monster's shaft.