Slumrat Rising

Truth took a moment to enjoy the sun streaming in through the window of the stolen wagon. It was, to his mild surprise, spring. He had lost track of the seasons between the well and the eternal summer of Siphios.

Spring in Jeon meant “Winter 2, Revenge of the Mud.” He hadn’t really noticed all that much. This far south in Jeon, it was comparatively mild. Give it another six weeks or so, and it would be blazing hot and unbearably humid. Maybe not at the level Siphios was, but he could remember the absolute misery of summer in Harban. Just existing sucked. You could be in the shade with a cup of cool water and still feel like you had been beaten with enormous hammers made of sticky, sweaty spite.

Not today. Today was cool, medium-to-light jacket weather, depending on personal tolerances. Truth was a little disappointed that his clothes shopping yielded exactly zero form-fitting robin’s egg blue shirts or coral-colored hats. He made do with basic black. Black shirt, black hat, grey trousers, black shoes. He bought three sets of everything except the shoes.

This left him in a pretty good situation, he figured. He had neat, clean clothes, an imp assistant, and a stolen van full of stolen talisman supplies. He had intended to stash all the stolen loot at De’Ponte’s place but realized, as he was pulling out of the parking lot, that his personal field of unnoticibilty would not extend indefinitely to random crap he left around the place. Shame. He would have to find somewhere a little more permanent. De’Ponte had used an empty industrial site as one of his drop-off points. Might be just the thing. He would steal that idea too.

He engaged his imp-based navigation system (Thrush) and drove out of the city. It was part of the demon’s magic- finding treasure, finding hidden places, learning mysteries, and revealing secrets. As the lowest sort of intelligent demon, Thrush had limited abilities in, well, any regard. But “Find me an abandoned industrial site just outside the city proper” was well within its capability.

While he drove, he plotted. Truth figured that the assassination campaign was a good start, but it was only a start. Barely rated as a distraction, really. Just got everyone thinking in that “violence will solve your problems way” that would come in useful later. No, he needed to be going after Starbrite directly. Not just the labor pool for F-Tier drudgery or, worse, the drudge work for suppliers and non-Starbrite corporations. He needed to start hitting the actual meat of the business. Trigger a reaction. Force them to start deploying more security.

Ideally, he would be hitting them hard enough to make them show a flaw in the System Astrologica. Because right now, even with the centuries of Merkovah’s study and the consistent attention of innumerable intelligence agencies, nobody had yet cracked it. How, exactly, did the System work?

Truth had provided part of the answer- it made tiny copies of itself out of bits of employee souls and ran a lot locally. But the main body of the System, the central intelligence that provided the backbone for the whole business, hadn’t been cracked. Some intelligence was providing the missions, tracking credits, tracking inventory, accounts payable and receivable, depreciation, taxation, hirings, firings, attrition, insurance, pensions, office usage rates, KPI’s in the amusement park division, and how much postage the shipyards were going through. To say nothing of the legal department.

Truth had never met a Starbrite lawyer. He was quietly grateful for that fact. Starbrite must get sued all the time, but he really couldn’t remember ever hearing about it.

So clearly, the System had to reach out to all the little local systems it was running… but nobody knew how. What they did know was that its reach was global, even orbital, and so far, it had been undetectable.

Truth grinned wolfishly as the truck negotiated its way through a particularly dreary intersection in the exurbs. It was famously difficult to find a particular leaf in the forest, but what if you reduced the total number of leaves? The world was increasingly unreal. A spirit that powerful, that enormous? Would be pretty damn real. It would be increasingly easy to spot. As soon as you could make it move and break camouflage.

He knew Merkovah had a whole plan for smashing various bits of magical technology in Harban, starving the beast. And sure, Truth would support that plan. But he didn’t trust it.

If he were Starbrite, he would make damn sure that there was a super-secret, heavily defended chain of armored bunkers, known only to certain trusted elites, that contained something… something that, when checked against extremely hard-to-find records and drawing particularly obscure inferences, might suggest the System was located in one bunker, supported by a network of all the other bunkers. The code to access the two-meter-thick armored doors would, naturally, only be accessible through the most convoluted, dangerous methods imaginable. There would be acid traps.

Then he would stick the actual Spirit in a bunker under the biggest mountain range in the deepest stretch of the ocean because Starbrite the man was Level Nine and clearly not a moron. Truth didn’t know exactly what it took to keep the System up and running. But Starbrite did. Truth didn’t know just what a Level Nine, a not from this lousy planet Level Nine, could do, either. He was quite willing to bet that “digging a deep hole and sticking a spirit in it” was one of those things.

Make a target that only your most paranoid, dangerous enemies will find, then put the real System somewhere else. A place where, even if your enemies look, they can’t find the spirit and even if they find it, they can’t do anything about it. One day your enemies will attack the decoy. They will break cover, and you can tidy them up.

So… why not run that plan in reverse? There were already a tonne of rebel groups around. Why not make Starbrite believe that an effective one had come into existence? He never considered himself a schemer. Direct to a fault, if anything. Still, he did have a few ideas, and he had gotten awfully comfortable in guiding belief.

“You found me a recently vacated light industrial complex one exit down from the regional distribution hub for Totte Global Logistics. Thrush, truly, you have outdone yourself.”

“Your appreciation is my highest honor, Great One. I am so pleased I was able to match your requirements.”

“This is going to cause so much chaos. It’s going to be a complete nightmare for thousands, if not tens of thousands of people.” Truth looked over the buildings with satisfaction. Nothing but room to work and a peaceful space to work in.

Thrush sighed happily. “I missed our time together. You were always destined for greatness, and I so enjoy assisting you.”

____________________________________________

The distribution center was made up of three major buildings and a few scattered outbuildings. The whole thing was wrapped in its own road network with numbered parking spots for heavy-duty wagons to haul up and wait to be called over for loading. The process was very efficient- the wagons rarely waited long. The F-Tier drones were always moving, and their every second was observed and evaluated. Any deviation from the optimally efficient route resulted in time being docked from their pay.

The company was paying them to work, not waste time. If you had to wipe sweat out of your eyes or catch your breath, you could do it on your own time. You could take all the time you liked if you needed to go to the bathroom, of course. Unpaid time, and there were fines for failing to meet productivity targets, but if you had to go, you had to go, right? Even if where you had to go was on the other side of a warehouse.

Truth leaned against a wall and watched with mild horror. He was just here to case the place, maybe pick off any targets of opportunity. He didn’t want to watch a high-speed commercial nightmare. Hell, you were probably better off fishing scrap out of the canal!

He had used this shipping company before. Everyone did. He took immense pleasure in seeing the package waiting in the mailroom at his C-Tier apartment, gaudy in its red and green colors. Nobody in the slums got things delivered by Totte. They flat-out refused to deliver there. He had no idea it looked like this. The numb exhaustion on every face.

Paying jobs would be a luxury soon. Some of these people, maybe most of them, were denizens. You didn’t have to be a citizen for an F-Tier job. These people were killing themselves for their last paycheck. In four weeks, they wouldn’t even get that. They would be killing themselves for food and shelter. Assuming they could get the shifts. And whoever the supervisor felt like scheduling was really up to them, wasn’t it?

Maybe you could persuade them. Somehow. Or not. You don’t have a family, right? You do? Well… good luck.

And he was about to make their lives so much worse. They would never forgive him, even if they knew exactly why he was doing it. Never ever. He forced himself to turn away and walk towards where the offices were. Hundreds of people moving packages around, and not a C-Tier in sight. The floor workers had bulky talismans they had to carry, which directed them to their next task. Someone or something here was keeping everyone moving. Time to find out who or what and break it.

He followed a series of signs to the business offices, then to the site supervisor’s office. The supervisor was, to Truth’s mild surprise, a puddle of middle-aged spread with more forehead than hair and a lapel pin sporting a seven-pointed star. He appeared to be hard at work reading things, stamping them, reading other things, and pressing his thumbprint on them again and again and again.

He was surrounded by message tablets- mirrors with intricate spellwork etched into them. There were seven of them, naturally, carefully arranged to put him at the center of a star. They chimed to alert the site supervisor of an incoming message. There was no rhythm to it. They simply rang. Sometimes several rang at once. Other times, there was a painful pause. As though it was waiting for him to relax. To turn his attention to one of the documents or tablets on the table. Then they would RING and his attention would be yanked away.

He was sitting down in a comfortable, temperature-controlled office, and he was sweating as much as the drones on the warehouse floor. His face was grey with exhaustion and anxiety. It occurred to Truth that this man may not actually be that old. He was just burning up his life, sacrificing it for his “career.” He had come so far. He had a lapel pin and all the privileges that came with it. So much better and safer than the F-Tier nobodies he employed.

Truth could practically read his mind. The rest of the world might be going to hell, but he worked for Starbrite. He had the System. He was one of the important ones. Things might get tough, very tough. But he was an elite. One of the chosen few. He would be protected. He would make it through.

System, are you… I don’t know, sensing anything? Picking up anything I’m not?

>The System went quiet for a moment. It’s funny to think that I am looking at a sort of cousin. Stuck inside that meatball is a stamped-out bit of soul like me. Just without the benefit of repeated torture sessions at the hand of your damn nous. It is in there, doing its best to help this heap be the best, most productive heap it can be until it dies.>>

He dies. This is a person, not an “it.”

>

Truth just looked at the supervisor and wondered. Merkovah’s question came to mind- What defines a human? Is it their shape? Their mind? Their soul? What is the bit of someone, that speck of self that couldn’t be diminished, that defined you as a human? He still didn’t know.

Looking at the supervisor, desperately responding to every ring in a state of exhausted, animal panic, he agreed with the System. Whatever defined a human, it wasn’t this. This was a victim-rat. A slumrat so beaten down, so utterly prey, it only felt safe when it was in pain. Pain meant you weren’t dead, and it could no longer imagine death being a release.

Keep your eye out for the escaping bit of soul. See if it leads us anywhere. Truth drew the Tongue from his aperture and raised it high. Then paused.

This… wasn’t right. Not because he gave a damn about the supervisor. It was the whole damn… everything. The distribution center, the factories, the whole concept of enslaving a nation. Even before that, both Truth and the supervisor decided that a lifetime serving Starbrite was their best choice. The best way to get what they needed for themselves and their families. “Every one of you is a volunteer,” that’s what Merkovah said. The Slave Mentality is what the System called it. That whole idea that you had to give your labor to someone above you if you wanted to live.

It hit like vertigo, the world suddenly twisting and shifting, a sudden irrational terror that you would fall down or even fall up. Truth knew he was groping at the edge of something he didn’t have words for, ideas whose shape he could barely guess at. The world shouldn’t be like this, yes, but this is the world made by humans. So… surely humans could change it. But what the hell do you change it into? Truth had been calling it slum this and slum that, but when you got right down to it, what did a real city look like? A real world?

Terrifying to think. He didn’t know what he wanted the world to look like. What a human planet would be like. Could the rats live in such a world? Truth shivered. He looked over at the supervisor, his fat fingers jabbing anxiously at the tablets, spinning, spinning, spinning between the angles of a seven-pointed prison cell.

Change of plans. We do the armed robbery first. Let’s put a little color in his life before putting him out of his misery.

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