Slumrat Rising

Jank is a formidable power. It is also, regrettably, unreliable, inefficient and prone to breaking. These are known problems, and, Truth felt, entirely acceptable shortcomings provided you followed the cardinal rule of improvisation: “Whenever possible, experiment with someone else's stuff.”

The hallway was, most of the time. Sometimes, it was not. Truth struggled to hang on to some semblance of stability. It wasn’t easy. Just to the left of the door, something was scraping a furrow in the hallway. Always the same width, always the same stroke along the same channel, always scraping in the same direction. The furrow in the cement was about three meters long and ten centimeters wide. He could hear the cement crumbling and moving, but he couldn’t see what it was.

Letting his vision stretch beyond the mundane revealed a cube, slowly spinning and twisting in the air. The furrow was made by one corner dragging along the floor. Then he was suddenly struck by the feeling of looking at several cubes, then two dimensional squares, all twisting and folding into and over each other in a way he couldn’t comprehend. He could see but not understand and his brain was desperately trying to make sense of it all. The image collapsed back into a cube that gently turned in space, and the cube dragged a corner along the ground and dug a furrow in the concrete. And then there was nothing but the hole in space.

Truth had to suppress a wave of nausea. The dark cathedral flickered in and out of perception. The shifts were so violent, Truth wondered if ordinary people could see it. People who weren’t clinging with their fingertips to the cliffs of sanity. Wondering if he would fly up into the stormy sky or down in the crashing sea when his grip finally slipped.

The curse had blown out of the ritual chamber and into the base, consuming people as it went. Truth was pretty sure the rags and ruins of flesh that he passed had been people. Some of them were still recognizably wearing boots. Some human looking teeth were scattered around. He wasn’t sure what had happened, exactly. The curse moved like a consuming storm as much as it moved like a pack of infernal hounds.

Truth didn’t mind the torn apart bodies so much as the torn apart clothes. Why? Why were they shredded, along with the light talismans on the walls and the lock talismans on the door? They were notionally manufactured by Starbrite, sure, but so what? The concrete used throughout the base was manufactured by Starbrite too.

It can’t be a good thing. Not caring about the bodies. I should care. This is pretty fucked up. How damaged must I be to look at all these shredded people and wonder why their shoes were destroyed but not the ground under the shoes. For all I know, that was someone I worked with in the PMC. Or not. Maybe it was a complete stranger. Maybe they cheated on their husband with their boss but never quite got that promotion they were promised and wound up getting transferred here. It doesn’t matter. They were human, lived as best they could, and died ugly. I should feel bad about that. I don’t.

It took him a few minutes of cautious exploration, but he eventually figured out his emotions. The dead weren’t a threat anymore, but there might be a hidden danger hinted at by the exploded light talismans and shredded clothing. Mourning could happen later, if ever. Pity, grief, disgust, all these empathetic emotions, should be set aside for now. So he set them aside.

The hallways had once been liminal tubes. Gray holes poked in space, with inexplicable, anonymous doors gently pressed into the walls at irregular intervals. The doors would flicker in and out of existence, replaced by sheets of fire, or grief. Sometimes they wouldn’t be there at all, and neither would the rooms behind them. What remained was a void, a hungry emptiness and a terrible stillness. He moved past those rooms with his back flush against the opposite wall. He didn’t know what was in that darkness, and had no interest in finding out.

Incisive was, for once, practically no help. Everything was dangerous. Everything was fatally dangerous. Sure, it was obvious when you saw tumor-spirits growing out of the ruined flesh of some working stiff, but having a literal Earl of Hell tell you the entire situation was cursed… Well. It added a certain terrifying something.

His eyes stuck on one particular corpse. There was nothing special about it. Maybe they really were ‘somebody,’ but here and now? Meat. They were just meat. For some reason he saw Dr. Sun’s leering face, his eyes glowing with hate and his voice warm with contempt. Truth didn’t remember exactly what he said, but he remembered the gist. For someone who loudly despised Jeon’s elites, Truth had barely laid hands on them. Hundreds of their employees, on the other hand, were left without intact corpses.

It was an immediacy thing. The bastard shooting you was right here, shooting you, right this moment. The system that put him there, gave him a needer and convinced him that you needed to be shot? That was a lot harder to find. How do you exterminate a system? How do you behead a process that has made so many, so rich? Should you even try? But if you don’t do something, everyone dies. Just not right this second.

Someone with a needler might kill a few dozen people. Someone deciding which lowest-cost bid on construction materials to accept could kill hundreds or thousands. Someone setting trade policy or negotiating water purity regulations might kill millions, over time.

How much responsibility does Starbrite’s tea lady bear for the plight of the slumrats? It can’t be zero, she’s participating and profiting from the system. But she’s a victim too.

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So many victims. And even the people notionally at the top were victims. Victims he might not waste any tears on, but they were as blind as all the rest. They had every opportunity to look up, and they still kept their eyes firmly fixed on any bastards after their cheese.

A spider with a human face stretched over its back crawled out of the shadows under a body. At first it only had eight legs, but they quickly multiplied into the hundreds, then became uncountable. They flickered and merged and seemed to flow like bubbling tar as the face described precisely how it felt when it realized its marriage was over, and that they were the reason why it all fell apart.

A door shook, and fell off its hinges. Like something inside wanted to escape, or an ingrown hair finally bursting free of its zit. Truth looked inside, but couldn’t see what was so special. The hallway was rapidly filling with more spiders, each reciting litanies of personal failings. Truth went in.

The room looked like a library in a wealthy home. The shelves were made of bones and he somehow knew the books were bound in human skin, but it otherwise felt quite normal. There was nothing of immediate use or interest. He forced his perception back into the realm of the mundane, and pulled a book off the shelf. It looked like a collection of business records. The dissonance between realms of perception was starting to do his head in. Truth knew he was holding reports about something or other, but all he saw was bloody ledgers and weeping runes.

The spell should have been over. The ritual wasn’t designed to run indefinitely, right? Just force me out into the open and wipe out my family in the process. Nothing else. Right?

Regrettably, anyone who might have answered that question for him was now very dead. He tossed the book back on a table and turned to leave the room. He was after Starbrite, not his secrets. He heard the book land with a thud and a muffled yelp. Incisive yelled and Truth spun around, the Tongue ripping through the air. The books had exploded into clouds of gray-black dust. He could feel the poison in it. Feel the dust trying to seep through his sealed skin and rot him from within.

From within that cloud of corpse-poison, he saw shapes appear. Like minnows or octopi fry sweeping through the murk. Bulbous heads with narrow trailing bodies. Black holes for eyes and where the mouth should be. Silently screaming. Swarming. Dozens of them, boiling out of the dark towards him.

The Tongue was an angelic blade, a jank product made by the finest holy blacksmiths in Siphios. Truth had to imagine they labored joyfully, content in the knowledge that it wasn’t their bit of divine junk, and happy that they had something new to experiment with. The Tongue lashed across a ghostly shape, and the blade suggested a bane. Truth agreed, and cut back again. Holy fire incinerated the ghostly shape, and the dust around it.

One down. Seventy-plus to go. But that was fine. He found himself smiling. He had fought a swarm of demonic insects when he first got his hands on the Tongue.

“Just like old times. Old like… less than a year ago? This has been a short life.”

The sword whipped across his body, the fire compressed to a bare shimmer above the blade. No need to waste energy. Who knows how long he would be fighting for? Still, he would use the old trick of using bodies to block bodies, limiting the number of enemies-

He watched dozens of ghosts swarm through each other as they closed in, forming a nearly solid wall as they rushed closer. He wouldn’t be stacking them up. Biting back a curse he went on the offensive instead. After one swift horizontal slash, he nudged the Tongue to change it up a bit. Might as well let the divine flames fly. He really needed to be clearing out a lot of enemies with every move.

The battle was furious, but brief. The ghosts melted like frost under the divine flames, and while some did manage to claw at him, they couldn’t penetrate his skin. They did, however, hurt like Hell and leave a lingering feeling of burning and corrosion where they touched. He dithered a moment, but opted to strip off his shirt and very carefully run the divine flames over himself. In the end, he was scorched but basically whole.

He looked around the ruined room. The human-skin bound books had been destroyed, the tables smashed, everything was in chaos.

“So what did we learn from all that?” Truth asked rhetorically. The howling of the curse through the base didn’t give him a meaningful answer.

“Yes, that’s what I thought. Nothing. I came in for no reason, picked up a thing for no reason, fought something that will probably give me nightmares years from now, and I burned myself. For not one goddamn thing.”

“Well. Not nothing. You did exorcize us, which is a blessing.” Truth jolted, barely getting a hand up before he slammed into the ceiling. It was a shimmer-outline of a face in a pile of dust.

“Books! Books and ledgers! I checked! Just what the Hell-”

“Books and ledgers, yes. The master of this place is not a creative man. Reducing a soul to record keeping appealed to him, I think. There never were many of us. Either he gave up on it or he found a better way.”

The little face was fading away, the voice becoming thinner and thinner.

“Ah, who were you? How did this happen to you? Do you know where Starbrite is, or what he is, or how to kill him?” Truth tried to get all the questions out, desperate to learn something before the face vanished.

“No idea, my records were destroyed. Probably not important. As for what… did you call him Starbrite? Weird name. As for what he is now, he’s a losing gambler. Every time he loses, he bets bigger. He has to. He has debts to pay, and they keep compounding. If we emerged, then he’s lost practically everything else.”

“So what do I have to do to kill him?”

“Not one penny.” The voice was almost gone now.

“Don’t let him win even one penny?”

“Don’t take one.” And the voice was gone.

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