Slumrat Rising

Truth spent the morning doing moving cultivation. He had the space now, and just sitting around had never felt right to him. Every few hours he checked the scry- lockdown still in effect. It turned out that people were being allowed out to buy things, but you had a fixed time of day to do it at, based on your tax ID. And if that time happened to be three in the morning, too bad for you. The cops were out, and were checking. Had to be playing hell with the economy, but these days, what wasn’t?

Around lunchtime (theoretical lunchtime, there really wasn’t anything to eat in the apartment) the news announced that the lockdown would end at six in the morning the next day. Truth was quietly confident that the old man who lived here would not be back by then. Truth didn’t bother to switch on any lights, and kept the running water to a minimum. From the outside, the apartment appeared to be empty.

Three times during the day, Truth felt diviners sweep through the apartment. Each time, the search was steady and patient. These were diviners who fully accepted that this was their job, and weren’t going to rush it. Truth was a little vague on the finer details of how divining worked. He was more familiar with how to defeat surveillance than how to do it. It sure seemed like this batch was well trained and well equipped. At a guess, Level Three power. Which, for apartment sweeps that he would have normally expected to be done by Level One’s, was kind of nuts.

They were rare highlights of the day. Each sweep revealed a happy truth- they knew, roughly, what he was up to, they just couldn’t counter it effectively. He could practically hear them walking through the logic-

“He can use Incisive and it seems he has some means to make himself invisible or undetectable, so he probably just hides out wherever he wants. Which means he isn’t using a specific safehouse. Which means we have to look everywhere.”

“In Harban. Every apartment and home in Harban.”

“Well, what if we locked down the city first?”

“Search every home. In Harban.”

“With diviners. Give them top notch tools, Hell, have Demons or Angels powering the search. Not like we have a budget cap for this.”

“We will probably have to check a few times, because he clearly knows how to defeat surveillance.”

*Beatings ensue.*

It wasn’t dumb, exactly. Just, what else could they do? He was sure they would have those watcher-things posted up in far, far more places than before. Certainly every route out of Harban would be coated in them. Aggressive police sweeps. Aggressive checks of sigils. Constant pressure on the basis that he would have to succeed every time, but they only had to succeed once. It wasn’t dumb, exactly. Just very inefficient, and not very effective.

They must be using him as a hat, he reckoned. This was most likely aimed at known agitators. Maybe opposition political forces, or people who would be considered obstacles to the new order when it came in. That sounded a lot more likely than dumping all this money on just finding him. He would bet there was a specialist team chasing him. All decently high level, with plenty of grunts for leg work.

Waste all the money you want. Waste all the time you want. Because all those horrible things I did were for this. And you know it. And you can’t do anything about it.

It was the one-two combo of terrorism. You had the impact of the atrocity itself, but that was really just the set up for the finisher- the reaction to the atrocity. No sane terrorist thought that a bombing or an assassination would result in instant victory. It was always about provoking a reaction.

Make the much bigger, more powerful target waste their strength and money chasing you down. Make them commit their own atrocities. Make them burn through public support, tear down their moral high ground, strain or destroy alliances, waste their lives. Because they might kill you, but you were on the side of righteousness. Your life, your time wasn’t being wasted. You would live in glory forever, in the Kingdom of God. And soon enough, the unrighteous would eat themselves, collapsing inward as everything that made them strong vanishes.

Truth tried to work in body weight exercises. He opted for speed and muscle isolation as a way to build enough fatigue to do something useful. It was eye opening. After the one hundredth one-pinky handstand pushup in a minute, he concluded that this was a losing game. He needed a Hell of a lot more resistance than his body weight could provide, and if he wanted cardio, it wasn’t going to happen in a tiny apartment.

On the one hand, hooray for body cultivation. On the other hand, he was no more immune to boredom than the apartment’s former occupant. He could feel the walls closing in. Feel boredom as a sort of physical pain, spirling quickly towards depression. The cultivation and meditation helped, but they couldn’t do it all on their own.

He would cheerfully kill for a book. The former occupant wasn’t a reader. Because of the sweeps by the diviners, he didn’t like having the scry on. Just the empty apartment. A void in space, deprived of purpose, if not meaning.

Truth found himself daydreaming. He tried to imagine his better world, the one he hoped to find somewhere with Etenesh, or perhaps build here. A world where people got food and a house just for being human. What would that be like, he wondered. How would that change things?

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Jobs would definitely change.

What, I’m fired? Ok. Guess I'll go home early then. Hmm. I’m thinking of fried chicken for dinner.

When you got right down to it, how many jobs actually needed a human being doing them? With all the advances in demonology and talisman design, not that many, surely. So long as there was magic, food production shouldn’t be a problem. Same with places to live. They might not be very nice, but just having a place no one could take away from you would be huge. No rent to pay. No mortgage. Just yours.

Some part of him felt like that couldn’t possibly work. Could people sell these apartments? No, surely, because then you were right back to a few rich bastards owning all the apartments and renting them out again. So maybe people didn’t own them. Someone else, the government or someone, owned them. But you still got to live in them for as long as you wanted.

He laughed bitterly. He could feel the wrongness of his thoughts. He was missing so many practical problems, he simply didn’t even know where to start. He just knew that people needed a roof. Needed food. Needed doctors when they were sick, needed schools when they were ignorant, needed a way to get around that wasn’t just walking everywhere.

Would you still need money in this world? Maybe? He couldn’t imagine a world without money, but if you didn’t need money for food or clothes or a home, or school, or a doctor… what did you need it for, exactly? Cultivation aids? How would that work? Because if you had enough magic that food and shelter wouldn’t be a problem, then you had enough magic to cultivate. And it’s hard to persuade a person to live small when they are so much bigger than everyone else.

He didn’t know. He didn’t understand enough to see all the things he wasn’t seeing. He just kept pecking at the questions as they came up. Testing out life in the land of make-believe. Letting the hours slip past.

He slept on the floor again that night. He theoretically could have used the bed or one of the chairs, but somehow, he didn’t want to. Like he would soak up some of that drunk old man if he did. It wasn’t rational, but so what? He could do as he pleased, and it pleased him to sleep on the floor.

The System (it still thought of itself that way) observed, for only the second time, Truth dreaming. It was fascinating, in that nothing much seemed to happen. It took a close look over at the spark of fire given by Etenesh. It was blazing brightly, but then, it always was. Something was happening here. Just not on a level it could perceive.

Truth dreamed he was back in the mountains of Siphios. He had been promised a small but thoroughly modern house, and that’s what was in front of him. Plenty of glazing, a good tile roof, airy rooms with high ceilings and lots of light. Easy to clean tile floors, he noticed with approval, though he would bet cash Etenesh would put down rugs. The sofa was fine. It lacked the color and panache of a gangster’s sofa, but it was comfortable enough when he collapsed down on it. Lots of empty bookshelves, just waiting for him to fill them up with paperbacks.

“It’s a bit basic, but I’m prepared to love it,” Etenesh’s voice came through the doorway and made Truth spasm off the couch.

“Basic? It’s the nicest place I have ever lived!” He sputtered.

“When did you live here?” She asked.

“In the future. It’s part of my compensation. If we don’t go off-world, we get a nice little place, very modern, up in the mountains.”

“So it’s the nicest place you are going to live.” She grinned. Her hair was flying wild and free, pushed back from her face with a brilliant yellow scarf. She looked strong, athletic. Beautiful. So, so beautiful.

“You are staring,” she said.

“I am,” He agreed. She snorted and looked away.

“Silly man.”

“You love it.”

“I do.” She nodded, the insecurity sneaking through.

“Me too. I love looking at you and thinking “She didn’t just choose me, she worked hard to catch me.”

“Picked up on that, eh?”

“How could I not?” He laughed. “I have been spending a lot of time in self reflection recently. Trying to figure out the why behind the what.”

“Any big reveals?”

“Other than my sadism seems to be bone deep? Nothing worth sharing yet. I’m scared, Etenesh.” He smiled at her, a fragile, little thing. “Not that I’ll die on the job. If I do, that’s that. I’m scared that when I come back to you, you won’t smile to see me. I won’t be the man you love anymore.”

She rushed across the room and embraced him, squeezing hard. “Just you come back to me. Just you come back to me. I will smile. I will smile even if my heart is breaking. I promise you, I promise you, I promise you. Just so long as you come back to me.”

Truth hugged her back, treasuring the warmth of her. “I’ll do that then. Can I tell you a little secret, my Etenesh?”

“Anything.” Her voice was muffled, her face pressed into his chest.

“I think I found a tiny glimpse of it. I’m puzzling out what I am seeing, bit by bit, but I think I can finally start to see it.”

“What?”

“A human being. I think I can finally see how to live as a human being. Maybe. One day. It will take a lot of thinking and a lot of work.”

She snorted, then started laughing.

“Like a diet. You will start being human tomorrow. Or possibly Monday.”

“Yes. Exactly.” Truth nodded seriously. “You want to start both the week and your new humanity training regime on the best foot.”

“Of course. Will you be selling informational pamphlets on being human, by any chance? Or perhaps a scry recording for people to watch at home?”

“I’m not a business guy. Maybe I’ll give the work to one of my sibs. Unless you want the work?”

“I will be otherwise occupied.” She grinned up at him, then her grin turned a little fierce. “You know this is a dream, right?”

“I figured it was either that or demons attacking with illusions. This is only my second dream, so I’m not sure how this works.”

“Ignoring that last bit. Let me show you something very nice about dreams, Mr. Medici. Right here on the sofa.” She looked up at him with big eyes. “You wouldn’t take advantage of me, would you?”

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