Slumrat Rising

The bartender, after a brief chat with Truth, had no problem serving him water in the same glasses he served Thom white spirits. Whatever Internal Security wanted, they would get. Including the bartender becoming blind, deaf, and mute. Thom was Level Two, and while the lapel pin was providing some protection against Truth’s influence, Truth knew how to work around it. Slowly, Thom was being ground down. He would never say anything too revealing. The System would prevent that. But the “System” was part of Thom. It could be fooled.

“Grand unified theory of everything?” Truth asked.

“Yeah, kinda. Like… imagine you are looking at a house, ok? And you say, “It’s a yellow bungalow house.” But that’s not all a house is, right? There is all the other stuff. A foundation or whatever. And what if someone painted the other side of the house green? If you want to really describe the house, you gotta go all around it, through it, know every teensy tiny part of it before you can start describing it.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“It absolutely is!” Thom nodded violently. “And that’s just step one! Step two is figuring out how you can combine terms and still accurately describe the house. Like, Can you describe the entire foundation in just a couple of accurate terms? All of it? How the concrete works mechanically, its load-bearing capacity, resistance to shear force, how much hydrostatic pressure it can resist?”

“Well. I can’t.”

“Me either. But that’s the job.”

“Studying cement?”

“Studying stuff. Trying to nail down what “stuff” is in every conceivable meaning of the word “is,” as precisely as we can.” Thom whacked back a shot before flipping the glass over and slamming it down on the bar top. “Let’s get some fried chicken, Senior. My treat. At least I can be pretty sure what the chicken is.”

“Senior…”

“Yeah, yeah, lapel pin, I get it. Let me act like a Senior, damn it.”

“Hahaha. You haven’t changed.” It was amazing. Truth thought. He could see, in real-time, Thom inventing memories of the two of them together in university. It wasn’t Incisive, really. It was a function of the human mind- making up stories to explain reality. Or whatever that mind understood to be reality.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. Business brings out the meanness in a man.” Thom started coughing.

“You haven’t changed.”

“Junior…” Truth said in a warning tone, then laughed helplessly. “Alright, this sounds more interesting than manufacturing the casings on “shoulder massagers.” Why are you measuring the meanings of bananas?”

“Dunno.”

“What?”

“I don’t know why. I spent, and this isn't a secret, don’t worry, I spent eighteen hours yesterday trying to know, as absolutely as possible, a one hundred-gram cube of alchemically pure copper. Weight, dimensions, resilience to cold and heat, how it tastes and smells, and the rate at which a Polianna’s Grape Slug can cross one surface of the cube. A test that had to be modified, as for some reason, the slug died. Then we had to keep repeating the test to determine how much exposure to the cube was required to kill a slug.”

Truth toyed with the glass of water in his hand before knocking it back and flipping it over onto the bar. “No offense Junior, but what with everything, that sounds like a spectacular waste of time. Are you being bullied?”

“Oh no, I have it good. The Natural Science team got off light. The poor bastards getting bullied is the Theology team. They have to provide an ecumenical, universally supported theological definition of the cube.”

Truth felt something grind to a halt in his brain. “Provide a religious definition of a one hundred gram alchemically pure copper cube, including all conceivable definitions of what the cube was, is, and will be, that is true across all known religions?”

“You were paying attention! And I don’t even have tits.” Thom slurred. Matching shots of ethanol to shots of water was a losing game.

“Well, you know what I’m like,” Truth grinned wolfishly.

“As long as you are doing the fucking, it’s all good.” Thom snorted.

Truth blinked at that. That… yeah, ok, that might actually be true. Have to think about that one a bit. Back on track.

“But you must have some idea why. I mean, why does your field exist if all it does is pointlessly measure and define things?”

“Power.”

“Huh?”

“Power.” Thom waved sloppily. “Once you really know what something is, you have a greater degree of power over it. Can control it. Transcend it, even. And the more you understand all the things, the more patterns you see. The more cross-over truth you find. You start piling up all the “what,” and pretty soon, “why” becomes kind of visible. Then you can do stuff.”

“Yeah, to all of that, but… Junior, I’m playing for the world after the collapse. People are going to need to make things, and casting parts is ancient technology. Theoretically, you don’t even need magic to do it. Defining shit? Even for Starbrite-”

“We think it’s how the Black Ships work. Not “we” Starbrite, but “we” the lab guys.”

Waitjustafuckingwhatnow?

Truth glanced over at the bartender, who was standing at the opposite end of the bar, finding the interior of a reach-in refrigerator fascinating.

“They are giant black tubes.”

“Not all the ships, or their weapons or whatever. I think it’s how they travel. I think they can define their own existence and the existence of their environment so perfectly it lets them travel between the stars. Travel faster than light. Faster than dark, even.”

“Who would even be studying that?”

“Consolidation team, directly administered by the Lab Director. But they don’t tell me shit. I’m just licking copper cubes. Did you know I can tell the purity of copper by licking it? My degree has been very useful.”

“Proud of you, Junior. Keep up the good work.”

There was a lull. Truth was itching to sprint back to the lab and break in immediately. He had a target now. He wouldn’t be searching blindly. The time savings were already huge. Was there anything else he should get out of Thom?

“Did you fuck Jai?”

“Gonna have to narrow it down for me, Junior.”

Thom “exploded” off his stool, taking a mighty swing at Truth and smashing into the floor instead. Truth hadn’t bothered to dodge. “Bastard! You knew I loved her!”

“Oh, then I definitely did. Still don’t remember her, though.” Truth sighed. Thom had passed out. Truth hoisted Thom over his shoulder and took him out to the carriage. He debated what to do next.

On the one hand, Thom wouldn’t be able to provide a coherent description of him to an interrogator. On the other hand, it would be instantly apparent that he had been put under some kind of glamour. Starbrite would then take greater precautions against mental influence, knowing that there was an op out there who could get around the lapel pin’s glamour wards. And if Thom suddenly vanished, their first thought would be an insider attack. Which should be impossible for a C-Tier. Which would make them even more paranoid.

Starbrite and the cops would have a lot of questions, none of which would lead directly to Truth. But when they interviewed the bartender, and they inevitably would, he would swear blind that a credentialed member of Internal Security had gotten Thom drunk and interrogated him under the influence. The tied up suit from the die maker would finger some local gang or maybe Internal Security too. “Who did it?” “A hired thug. Greasy, missing a tooth.” Another misdirection.

Truth held Thom up by the neck with his left hand. Right hand grabbed the top of Thom’s head. He pulled sharply in opposite directions. The spine snapped clean, the brain stem severed from the body that supported it. Death was instantaneous. Truth put him in the trunk as tidily as he could manage.

“Sleep easy, Junior. You don’t want to be around for what comes next.”

____________________________________________

Truth was, once again, painfully reminded that Starbrite was actually damn good at securing things it actually cared about. For example, while the control gem for the door-locking mechanism on the loading bay employee access door was a standard A07-H, the actual interface was completely reprogrammed and keyed to only open for authorized lapel pins. No firefighter bypass here- Starbrite was content to let everything burn before they would let it get stolen.

Try and spoof a lapel badge? Thanks, he’d pass on that particular idiocy. You couldn’t even steal them. He briefly contemplated waiting until daytime and just… ghosting in behind some employee, but he had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t going to be that simple.

Truth carefully disassembled and re-routed, turning the door lock into something purely decorative for all that it would report as still in use. Truth could practically hear the trainer’s voice from his PMC days- any lock, door, safe, wall, any kind of static barrier to entry, will be defeated. It’s only a matter of time. But the longer someone is hung up on defeating the barrier, the longer you have to catch and nail them. A door lock rated for ten minutes was a very good lock.

It took Truth half a damn hour to get through the smoker’s door. His patience was “rewarded,” however, when he opened the door and was greeted immediately by a golem. It had been built to look like a big friendly dog. It got eerily close to perfection. He didn’t recognize the model. He also knew damn well the golem expected to verify a badge and would raise unholy hell if it didn’t.

Trusting Incisive, Truth called the Tongue to his hand and stabbed forward. The blade slid into the golem’s armored torso, burning out the delicate wires and threads that kept the golem up and moving. A little further and he found the command talisman. It shattered almost instantly. The golem collapsed. So much for an invisible break-in. He didn’t know how long he had before the golem control net for the building noticed that the golem was down and sounded the alarm, but… not long. He shoved the golem into a corner and started running. This actually simplified some things.

He jumped up the stairwell. Literally just stood at the bottom next to the flight of steps and jumped up. Grabbed the railing, stood on it with perfect balance, then did it again. And like that, he was on the top floor. The door was locked. Truth applied the “Sword through the lock” universal key. It worked. An alarm went off. Truth swore but pushed on. He ran through the hallways, looking for signs. Director’s office. How much would be left to the System, and how much would be recorded? He went through the wall. It was way past GO time.

There was a safe in the room “Thrush, clear out any documents or records you find in the office. Everything. Then start obliterating my traces.”

“I obey!”

Truth eyeballed the safe. Warded, of course, and two inches of steel and alchemically treated glass inside. Usually, with some kind of self-destruction mechanism built in if it detects an intrusion attempt. Yeah, fuck all that. “Got everything?”

“Yes, Great One, save for what is in the safe.”

“Retrace my steps, destroy my traces.”

“Yes, Master.”

Truth gave Thrush a moment to scram, then hit the safe with Obliteration. The spells seemed to boil away. It was creepy to watch. He even obliterated the locking spell and its attached alarms and triggers. A very precise lunge with the Tongue, and he had the safe open. He didn’t even look at the contents. He just scraped everything into his backpack, then deliberately triggered the self-destruct. He was already at the stairs and headed down when the safe blew out the wall. Starbrite took “Self-Destruct” seriously. Then, into the carriage and he peeled out of the lot. Alarms were going off outside the building, too, now, sounding like screaming pigs.

Truth hit the highway and drove like a bat out of Hell for ten kilometers, then he pulled into a used carriage lot and parked. Thom could hang out here until someone thought to trace the pin. Picking a direction at random, he took off on foot, up into the stubby mountains. No convenient caves, alas, but there was an overhang next to a stream. It would have to do. Truth stopped and just breathed. In and out. In and out.

He sure hoped he got what he needed. There would be no second shot at that place.

Once he got his breathing under control, he started picking through the loot. He made three piles- correspondence, work files, and “other.” Correspondence he then sorted into points of origin. He would read through them later. Work files were the biggest pile; he didn’t touch those. He would look through them later, of course, but he didn’t know enough about the subject matter to puzzle through them unaided. The “Other” pile got most of his attention. All the random things that get swept into drawers. All the physical crap in the safe, beyond just jade tablets with data recordings or crystals containing who knows what.

He dug through them feverishly, pawing at business cards and takeout menus, sniffing the little metal cubes, eys raking at the messy notes jotted down on a legal pad and shoved into a supposedly securely locked drawer.

“Found you.”

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