Slumrat Rising

Truth returned to the Hanging Orchid Hotel. The Grand Deluxe Supreme Diamond Suite remained unused. Inexplicably, it seemed that luxury business travel had completely fallen off. The hotel’s guests, while all dressed neatly in business clothes, had a certain tightness of the eye and stiffness in the shoulders. The bar was doing a brisk trade. Very brisk. Truth had seen people drinking to get drunk often enough that he didn’t have to guess why.

He took a shower, scrubbed thoroughly, and went to sleep. It would take time for things to cook. Though the police could move fast with sufficient motivation. An armed assault on a major local employer should be pretty damn motivating. He was faintly curious to see what the news would say about it if anything.

The message carved on the side of the overpass would be hidden soon enough and removed entirely not long after. That was fine. So long as the Starbrite PMC team saw it.

Truth woke early and, having nowhere in particular to rush off to, decided to explore the amenities of an extremely luxurious hotel room. Which rapidly turned out to be anti-climactic. An enormous bed, a plush sofa, basically an entire, small, luxury apartment. Nothing beyond that. It was dull. The bathroom was shiny, quite literally. Every surface was oiled and polished to a mirror finish.

The centerpiece of the bathroom was the gargantuan bathtub. It was roughly oval-shaped, free-standing, and made of some lustrous light tan wood. It had been gently curved and formed to allow one to lay back, soak and relax in utterly decadent comfort, either looking out across the square from the floor-to-ceiling one-way window or just throwing on some scry. It also came with a variety of knobs and buttons to play with. Truth poked at them. It turned out there were water jets. Interesting. He filled it up, got in, and continued his experimentation while he watched the news from the tub.

The news was disappointing, as expected. A small group of criminals broke in and were killed by security, but managed to badly damage the loading bay and severely slow down the operation of the site. The police had issued a call for information about any of the criminals, as they likely had accomplices. Truth vaguely recognized some of the pictures. He really didn’t give a damn about the thugs, then or now.

No mention of De’Ponte, though, or the One-Legged Bird Ring. Had they not traced that far up? Did somebody get paid off? Dangling bait for bigger fish? Fingers crossed for the last one.

Oh, some of the jets were aimed at his neck and had a pulsing function. Kind of like a massage? Not that it was strong enough to do anything. A tub that could massage him would kill most people on this planet. Truth smiled softly. He’d bet Etenesh would love this tub. She would love being in the tub with him. Though some of the jets were aimed at his ass. Product defect? Investigate later. He let himself drift off into daydreams of Etenesh as the big heating enchantments kept the tub at the perfect temperature for poaching eggs.

“These are scary times. You know that. Big changes coming too, for everyone.” The ad blared from the scry ball. There was a montage of one-second images- a construction worker, a natural philosopher, an alchemist. All looking serious, though not scared. “Well, you know how to handle big changes. You get ready, and you get tough. RackemTough!”

The image cut over to an eight-legged golem. Inky black, with an outer skin that was both rubbery and alarmingly soft looking. A matte, wet sheen, like ever-flowing tar. “Our Champion line of golems cannot be beat on performance, reliability, or versatility.” The golem scampered with eerie smoothness over rugged terrain, picked up a box larger than itself, then proceeded to climb up the side of a building.

“For the RT-Champion, we pulled out all the stops. Military-grade steel skeleton. Military-grade control talismans, not to mention our state-of-the-art Z-Pro stability, grip, and traction control. Or our DreamCoat protection technology that will protect your Champion for years to come, just like it will protect you. That’s something no other company can offer. Or compete with.” Two of the golems were racing back and forth through burning rubble, tossing cinderblocks at each other.

“Security isn’t a concern when you have the RT-Champion. You can sleep easy, knowing that its fully customizable security settings come automatically keyed to your citizenship level. You will never, ever, have to worry about not having enough golem for the job.” There was footage of a golem running down a fleeing burglar, pouncing on them, and starting to… disarm them. The camera cut away before anything was really shown.

“Tested on the battlefield. Safe for your home. Great with kids too.” The six-legged jet black horror, with its human-like trio of fingers on each leg, offered a balloon to a laughing child, who perched a little party hat on top of it. “Financing available for qualified buyers, and for a limited time only, take an extra five percent off if you pay in Credits.” Loud music played while the golem posed on top of a rock and the sun set behind it. “Get your RT-Champion TODAY! Only available from authorized RackemTough dealers, terms and conditions may vary, RackemTough is a proud member of the Starbrite Family of companies.”

Had ads gotten a lot better, or had he just gotten a lot more susceptible? Because that sounded strangely good to him. Truth gave his cheeks two quick slaps. Must have caught him half napping. It had been a tiring few days. Although it did bring up an unpleasant point.

Truth was very competent at violence. He was very incompetent at propaganda. The slogan on the side of the bridge was about the best he could manage. He could probably delegate the sloganeering to Thrush, but that seemed unnecessarily dangerous. He needed that propaganda push regardless. Less to create unrest and more to create the appearance of unrest. The more he sold his non-existent mastermind, the harder they would hunt for him. Eventually, they would be thin enough on the ground that he could start trying to trace the kidnapped Shattervoid girl.

He hadn’t forgotten about her. He just didn’t have a good way to help. Which wasn’t fun at all. Truth lay there in the tub, trying to think it through. Merkovah didn’t have a good way to find her either.

The plan, if you could call it a plan, was for Truth to insert into Jeon and be the best lone-wolf shit-stirrer he could be. No ties to trace, no chance of getting burned by a traitor or being given up during an interrogation. Make enough trouble, draw enough attention, and cracks should start to show.

He wouldn’t be the only one doing this. Siphios was inserting other agents, along with the ones they already had in place. Every other damn country was doing the same. As Merkovah pointed out (swearing only a little bit in the process), everybody and their aunt knew Starbrite was responsible. It’s just that no one could prove it, let alone do anything about it. Messages to the Shattervoid had been ignored, as promised. The Shattervoid wanted results, not accusations.

Truth squeezed his hand under the water and watched the water jet up a meter into the air. Fun. He did it again. Still fun. Break the System Astrologica, and all the Starbrite systems collapse double-quick. The girl is revealed to the world- everyone races to “rescue” the princess and cash her in for a ticket off-world for you and ten thousand of your closest friends and relatives. All this revolution business was just “step one.”

So how to spread the good word? These demon cultists were a good start, but there were many better options. Truth stared up at the ceiling. His trainers had identified roughly three categories of relevant groups that could be hijacked- the Runners, the Holdouts, and the Suicidal.

The Runners were those who wanted to tear down Starbrite so they could get the girl and get off the planet. This group included pretty much the entire planet, organized variously, excluding the Holdouts and the Suicidal. It would certainly include Merkovah and whatever office he held in Siphios. There would be many, many others on ops in Jeon right now.

The Holdouts figured there was no chance that they were getting off-world, so they wanted to grab all they could now and get ready to ride out whatever came next. Maybe position their families to be the new rulers of this world when the magic returned. A lot of old money behind these groups, apparently. A shocking number of elites had prepared doomsday bunkers long before the Black Ships arrived.

The Suicidal could be equally termed the Homicidal, or the Euthanasiasts. The world deserved to die. Humanity deserved to die. Whether it went peacefully or violently, it had to go. Most, naturally, concluded that violence was a regretable necessity. For example, the demon incubating cult that impregnated Mr. Heulle. The Anti-Theists would also fall under this umbrella. It was a politics of despair, of the peace of non-being.

Which did lead to a somewhat pressing problem- Truth didn’t know the first damn thing about politics. He knew Siphios had a king, and he was pretty sure Jeon had both a president and a prime minister. Maybe eighty percent sure. Beyond that, he didn’t know a damn thing about how the country worked. Starbrite was twenty percent of the economy, and it was the twenty percent that mattered- that’s what he knew. Everything else was irrelevant to him, a position his teachers heartily agreed with.

When he thought about it, he really didn’t know what a “good” government looked like. People shouldn’t live in slums. Kids shouldn’t be hungry. Actually, nobody should be hungry. Jobs? Truth groped around in his mind. Cops shouldn’t be allowed to just fuck with you for no reason, he was one hundred percent certain on that one. Nobody should be allowed to touch your cash, even if they were your Mom. Medicine? Maybe? Or cultivation resources? Education should be available for everyone.

He gave up. He knew how to look after himself and his sibs. How to look after a whole damn country? No idea.

So if he didn’t really know what he was for, what was he against? A long and detailed list came to mind. It started with every detail of life in the slums and went from there. He could work with that. Just tell people what you are against, and blame Starbrite.

There was an unpleasant feel to the mental recitation of his grievances. As though he were flicking at a barely clotted wound. Picking at something manifestly not healed yet. The tub was suddenly uncomfortable. The whole country was a cruel con, a scam run by an old monster. And once he got the country in too deep to quit, he leveraged that scam on the whole rest of the world. And now people were, slowly, barely, some of them, starting to realize that maybe they had been the suckers all along.

He unaccountably thought of Mom, evil thing that she was. She was a little microcosm of the Great Scam. She truly believed that if she just worked hard enough, sold enough of her phony goods, stole from enough people, and convinced them to steal for her, then she too could live in luxury apartments and enjoy fancy stand-alone bathtubs with water jets. Hell, she probably sold dozens of varieties of herbal soaks over the years. Did she ever get the chance to really try any of them?

He could kind of imagine her filling the tub in a cheap motel and soaking in one of them, either right before or after “networking” some crown product ambassador, or diamond promotor or… oh God, didn’t she once claim to have “played” with a Triple Achiever? The title stuck in Truth’s mind. Of all the scummy, scammy titles, Triple Achiever was certainly one of them. It was only memorable for being so half-assed.

Truth laughed darkly. Mom was getting screwed in every sense of the word, and she knew it. And she took it out on her kids and her scumbag husband and never once figured out that the Triple Achievers were also getting screwed. She just figured they were better at screwing and followed their example. This was it, wasn’t it? This was the scam.

The promise of success, but for only those who most devotedly served their betters and oppressed their lessers. And with every step you went up the ladder, there was a higher tier. A Quadruple Achiever, or Global Representative, or some damn thing. You compared what you got to what they got, and suddenly you had shit. Everything you hustled for was trash. Only the Global Reps had it good. Not realizing that there were Crown Reps above them, and so on, forever. You would never be truly rich. Never be truly free to enjoy what your cruelty bought.

Tuth laughed and laughed and laughed, seeing it now. Seeing the Hell his Mom lived in. What a petty little demon she became, living there. But she would be the key to his whole strategy. Screw finding revolutionaries, and screw trying to make them. He was going to delegate to the real experts in creating anger. And if they did very, very, well, he might just promote them to Silver Tier.

Truth smiled, stretched, and stepped out of the tub. Time for dinner. The revolution marches on its belly.

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