Here's the latest version of my story.
[ Spoiler ]
Lunch With the Streets by emo samurai
I am reminded by my current situation of a story of an experiment conducted on a pack of captive monkeys involving stairs, a banana, and a water hose.
Whenever a monkey would climb the stairs to grab the banana, a man would spray the monkey and the rest of his pack with water for minutes on end. The man stopped hosing the monkeys once the pack learned to pull down any monkeys that attempted to climb the stairs to grab the banana. This behavior would continue until no monkeys attempted to grab the banana.
They began to introduce new monkeys to the group, and the pack behaved as it learned to behave, even though no deluge was forthcoming. The parallels between the monkeys and the human condition are obvious.
I mused on all of this while watching the sprawled form of the boy who shot at me. A quickened spell deflected the bullet. I had responded by levitating the boy 20 feet into the air and dropping him on a pile of trash, much of which, by my reckoning, was broken and sharp. People, with all their banal predictability, still interest me, so instead of allowing the child to die from his wounds, I decided to heal him.
The boy was about 3'9" tall, just below average for a dwarf, and was decorated with crudely tattoed symbols from nearly every gang in the Barrens that would admit a dwarf. It was probable that none of the tattoos were drawn by the gangs themselves; the only reason the gangs spared him for this slight was most likely a mixture of sympathy and a grudging admiration of his exhuberance. I imagined that they paid others to create false meetings for him to attend to avoid disheartening him. Across his forehead was tattooed the word “Toady.” No self-respecting gang would call themselves the “Toadies,” and every gang had to at least feign self-respect, so I supposed that to be his name.
When he woke up to find that his ghost had not left him, his first act was to reach for his holster. When that proved futile, he resignedly decided to listen to what I had to say.
“Why did you shoot me?” I didn’t know of any gangs that I’d angered, but I don't presume to understand gangs.
“Mostly for money. Word is you’ve got a lot of it, and it’s fragging hard to get you in that apartment of yours.” Reasonable.
“Do you want some lunch? I will pay for your share, if you'd like.”
“S-s--sure, I guess. My name’s-”
“‘Toady, I know.”
***
I eventually decided to go to Tetsuo’s Folly, a sushi palace that served fish that were genetically modified to fall into a coma within minutes of when they reached the prime age for harvesting. The modification was the product of an attempt to make sure that the fish never developed beyond when their meat was the mosts succulent. Since the fish floated to the top when they became comatose, they could be harvested by a large metal plate moving constantly across the surface of the water like a stirrer in a cheese lactation vat; it was the most effective way the geneticists could think of to mark the fish as ready for harvesting. It worked, it simply had a few... side effects. The fish were born... wrong, for lack of a better term. What the farmers had was a batch of fish with extra eyes and fins that were very, very good to eat. They also made most hardened fishermen and hatchery owners regurgitate when they saw the fish for the first time. The formula was never perfected because the only real problems were cosmetic.
We sat in the prix-fix section of Tetsuo's folly, meaning that for 40% off of the normal menu, we could sit away from the bustle and the posturing of the executives who were busy making deals and talking to "contacts." Executives loved to seem as rich as possible, so taking a discount on anything was not an option for them.
“So..." he paused, narrowing one eye and widening the other as he stared at his food, "Are they supposed to look–”
I cut him off, curtly and offhandedly for the second time. Pehaps I was developing a pattern. “Yes.”
“Um... Okay." He seemed unconvinced.
“We should begin with the most basic aspects of our situation. Why did you attack me? You obviously knew that I was a mage of some power.”
He seemed to think that I was foolish for asking. "Whad'ya think? I didn't have anything t'eat, and you do.”
“Before that.”
“So you want a life story?" He eyed me with the same expression that he used on the fish. He was obviously loathe to reveal anything.
“Yes.”
“You’re a weird guy.”
“Yes. So what happened to you? What led up to the shooting? What turned you into
‘Toady, Biter of More Than He Can Chew’?” I feigned a bit of smugness to goad him into speaking. Of course, I drew little, if any, real pride from the situation; does one feel proud defying a light breeze?
“Fuck off.”
“Answer my question.” The air darkened around me a few shades of black, casting a light shadow over everything. Simply a small illusion spell to gently frighten the child. If anger would not force him to speak, then perhaps fear would.
“It started with being born."
"In a gutter, I suppose."
He seemed to take me seriously and derived no offense from it. "Nah, my mom was a secretary. She was nice enough, until she found that I was a dwarf. Then she hit the Wiz and lost her job.”
“Sounds terrible...”
“Nah, I’m okay. I’m pretty safe for an urchin; all the gangs look after me ‘cause I’m so small, and corp life was drek. Corp this, corp that, blah blah blah blah blah...”
“What happened to your mother?”
"She snuffed even more after losing her job. She stopped scanning me after about a month. The Ancients took me in, thinking that they should ‘look after their lessers’ or some drek like that. The fact that I’m an orphan helps.”
"What happened to her?"
"Threw her out, said she was 'unworthy,' whatever that means. Don't know much else." He was surprisingly nonchalant about this, reporting it much the way one would report walking from one room to the next. “Speaking of the Ancients, didya know that they’ve got this gimongous weapons stash? They're gonna go down to Glow City and totally...” Excitement. Mildly unsettling, but not the least bit unexpected.
“Yes, very interesting... So how do you survive? You obviously can't do so attacking magicians.”
He collapsed to the back of his chair. "Look, I said I was sorry."
"That's beside the point. What do you do?"
He leaned forward a few inches and took a sip of his soykaf. “I bum food and drink off of my friends and sheep. Like I said, helps I’m an orphan.”
“I’m sure. How do you like your sushi?”
He thought for a moment. “‘s good, I guess. A bit slimy.”
“Of course. Eating them raw preserves a sort of... life, if one can call it that without realizing the irony of doing so, that eating them cooked them simply does not.”
“Well... thanks. I don't scan what you said, but I guess it means it's good." I made a mental note purchase a comlink and teachsofts for the boy. "So... why you live in the Barrens? Ya got money.”
I gazed out the window as I spoke, unconsciously ignoring the passing cars and garishly festooned pedestrians. "The tale is... complex. I was born before the Awakening, and as a child, I was... different. I was as you see me now, an elf. I was happy then; the villagers had the mixture of back-country superstition and 21st century tolerance necessary to accept my condition. My parents were descended from nobility in the far past before communism, and they seemed content to leave their lineage in the far past. The only family heirloom they had was a book with the family tree in it, which I thought they kept more out of sentiment than pride.
"When the Awakening came, the Manchurian revolutionaries took power and officially elevated my family to noble status, granting us money and political power. By virtue of my position more than my intellect, I became a sort of village "wise man," giving advice, magical services and, many times, money, to those in need.
"By day, I played the part of the stolid Confucian as much as I could stomach it, taking my attention away from the villagers to periodically entertain undeserving guests from among the nobility. But at night, whenever true love would bloom in my village like a beautiful flower in cracked, stark-white pavement, I would help lovers escape and begin lives by themselves, naming contacts in faraway villages and giving out the money I never spent. It was those moments that sustained me, that kept me from running away from the life I knew.
"Those moments passed; I later took an extended leave to visit the villages to which I directed the star-crossed lovers. Not a one of these pairings had survived; sometimes, it was the test of parenthood that they failed, others, the test of fidelity. The only part of my life that I had deemed true wasn't. I had no reason to stay; the government would continue to support my parents and village, the toil of modernization would be subcontracted to Wuxing, and my absence would be explained to be a spiritual journey.
"I fled here, for reasons I do not yet know. Perhaps to find myself, perhaps to seek a new people to take under my wing, perhaps to find out how I failed.
"This land seems well-suited to all three. It expands upon everything sycophantic and self-serving about my people's culture. It's not the fact of this age that I'm worried about so much as the soul of it. I believe we are in the age of Nietzsche's last man, clothed in a suit expensive enough to feed the country that made it. All things are now done for mere prudence and profit; anything human and truly great has been trampled under the immaculately polished 2000 :nuyen: shoe of corporate power. Despite all the advances in magic and science, I can't bring myself to do anything but hate this land. It is here that I find sin, and perhaps it is here that I will find enlightenment."
I looked back, and Toady was gone. I explained to the waiter that I would pay for his bill and gave his food to the first beggar I saw.
***
Toady was waiting for me at the door outside my Barrens apartment. I had paid contractors to reinforce the rotting floors and walls with plasteel. There was a palmlock on the front door. There was a water elemental bound with standing orders to drown all intruders. All of which did nothing to protect me from his knife. He managed to lodge it in my thigh; if I had prepared for it, I would not have fallen the way I did, clutching at my wound and yelling.
His expression was both encouraging and infuriating. His eyes belied an obvious horror; wide open and round, they were in the classic look of fear and unexpected remorse. That was encouraging. His mouth, though... his mouth was also open, but closed just enough to betray complete incomprehension. Incomprehension is to me the most basic human fallacy, and to show it at a moment like that...
I pulled out the knife and healed myself. Not with the "laying on hands" gesture of magician serials, but with apparently spontaneous self-healing. I could always target myself with my own spells. To academics and magicians this makes sense, but to any normal person, as I was quickly realizing, the vision was horrific, like some awful cacodemon regenerating himself after being slashed with a brave knight's sword. He ran and screamed like any simpleton in his position would, and like any angry self-appointed guardian in my position would, I levitated him onto my apartment’s rooftop. I would feed him in a day or two.
Perhaps.
What do you think of my philosophy in the beginning? I changed it from the homebrewed "Competition is bad, mkay?" opening I originally had.
My first SR fiction., It's about Shen.
Nov 6 2006, 05:06 AM
