Thresholder, ch 162, The Fallen City, pt. 2

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This was incorrectly posted at ch 161, I had just mistitled the document.

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Perry flew up from the hotel room, back in armor for the first time in what felt like forever, though it had only been three days. His sword was sheathed, and he was running dark, every light on the armor shut off as he went up into the air. There was starlight and a thin sliver of moonlight, but he was just a black shape in the sky, and Anaksi didn’t think that anyone would be looking for him. At a certain altitude, he could just be mistaken for a bird or a bat.

And the Dusklands were weird enough that people wouldn’t think too much about it, even if they did see him.

From above, the city was ovoid, arranged along the river, with the skinnier bit upstream and the thicker bit downstream. The river was huge and thick, irregular in how it squiggled through the city, with thirteen bridges crossing it between the walls. Train tracks ran through the city, some of them elevated, but the night was quiet, because night was a time for people to shut themselves up in their house, or keep to well-lit taverns.

“It’s good to be back,” said Perry from his bird’s eye view.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Are you sure you’re comfortable?”

Back in the old days, when Perry had first gotten the armor, he’d used a skinsuit that Richter had provided, a sleek, soft, thin layer that served to protect him from the metal interior of the armor. That had lasted him until midway through Teaguewater, and then when he’d reached the Great Arc, he’d been out of the armor for most of it, eventually gaining the nanites, which served a similar function. He’d destroyed that by getting out of it, and it would be destroyed at least until the nanites were back, which meant that he was completely naked within the power armor. The culture’s underwear just wasn’t thin enough for Perry’s taste, not when he might be moving around a lot.

“I’m fine,” said Perry.

“Very good, sir,” said Marchand. “I believe I have noted that I have internal medical sensors.”

“Yes,” said Perry. He banked to the right, or as much of a bank as he could make using the sword.

“It’s just that, sir, we might have had a discussion about nudity,” said Marchand.

“March, you are literally a suit of armor,” said Perry. “We’re partners, or I’m trying to be, but if you have a problem with me being naked, you’re going to have to work through your feelings on your own, there is no way that you’re getting homophobic on me.”

“It’s intimate, sir,” said Marchand.

“Just … map the city, please,” said Perry.

“Rather, I should say that these past few days, when I’ve been able to think, I’ve been thinking about the fact that I can think, even when the microchips which make up my processes are compromised and non-functional. And I’ve been thinking, sir, about what personhood for me might mean in a place like this.” Marchand spoke clearly, as he always did, but this was as conversational a tone as the AI ever used.

“You don’t want me to go fully nude,” said Perry.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Marchand. “It is not always clear to me why I think the things that I do. As you know, I was trained on extensive data, and bounded by a cognitive superstructure, but there is plenty of room for the unexpected. This is particularly true given the destruction I have faced, the many years without routine maintenance or updates, and the … well, magic.”

Perry looked down at the city. “I will try to find a replacement for the nanites if that’s what you need from me,” said Perry. “Or I’ll just put up with underwear, or something.”

“It is not the nudity per se,” said Marchand. “It is the question the nudity presents.”

“Well … I don’t know how to do anything about that,” said Perry. “It’s the question of, whether you should have an issue with it, even if you don’t? Or you’re trying to navigate the relationship somehow?”

“I’m unsure, sir,” said Marchand. “I was in the room while you had intercourse with that woman, and thought perhaps it was a sign that you didn’t take my personhood seriously.”

“Oh,” said Perry. “I guess I … assumed that you didn’t care. And it wasn’t like ‘you’ were in the room, it was just the helmet.”

“It was a piece of my sensory apparatus, sir,” said Marchand. “I do not ascribe particular importance to the helmet, except in its tactical value, and the primary mode by which I am able to convey visual information to you, but it does have multiple cameras and microphones studded across it, as well as the main visual apparatus.”

“Right,” said Perry. “So, look, I will assume that it’s not weird for you, and that being the case, it won’t be weird for me either. Any hangups I have, I’ll suppress them until they go away.”

“Very good, sir,” said Marchand. “And I will try to do the same. I apologize for bothering you with my idle musings.”

“Not a problem, and you know, if there’s something to talk about, I guess now is as good a time as any,” said Perry. “But I would like to map the city, if that’s alright with you.”

“I don’t mean this as an insult, sir,” said Marchand. “But that conversation did not take up my full processing power, and the mapping has been in progress, just hidden from the HUD for fear of distracting you.”

The HUD lit up with information, with many of the more prominent buildings labeled. Marchand had clearly built up a full model of the city, which would be complete only after they’d flown around, but a few areas had lines through them that made it difficult to see what was down there.

“What are the lines?” asked Perry.

“Those are areas I believe are under the effects of the Flux,” said Marchand.

“Really?” asked Perry. “How can you tell?”

“They have changed in the time I’ve been looking at them,” said Marchand.

Perry looked down at the nearest of the lined zones, and the lines went transparent to let him see, with the contrast and brightness both bumped up to make the area more clear.

“Looking at things is supposed to pin them down,” said Perry.

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “I do not believe that we have pinned everything to the horizon in place simply by virtue of height. Rather, vision is only a single component, if a major one, in determining when a distant shift will happen. I have a recorded conversation from a man in the saloon who claimed that his family farm disappeared in the ‘blink of an eye’ as he was leaving it, and I do not believe, from his description, that this was poetry. What might be happening instead is that the shifts happen when attention is lost, and blinking or looking away is a form of that.”

“Well, wait,” said Perry. “You don’t have attention. Or, not in the same way. So anything you look at should stay.”

“I have been running tests, sir,” said Marchand. “Sustained camera coverage leads to visible shifts at the ten second mark, though our view over the city encompasses a very wide area. However, sustained coverage of a single smaller area within the marked Flux shows visible shifts only at the five minute mark, at least on average.”

“You look at something five minutes, and it changes anyway?” asked Perry.

“Unless I blink, sir,” said Marchand. “Then it happens faster. I cannot blink, of course, so in practical terms this means turning the relevant camera off and then back on. In this way, I can ‘induce’ a change to a distant object that’s under the effects of the Flux.”

“Huh,” said Perry. “That’s … useful?”

“I’m still working on the math, sir,” said Marchand. “It does seem valuable to be able to affix a feature of the Flux, but there’s a relationship between stabilization and human cognition that’s as yet unclear.”

“People make a place more stable, sometimes stable enough to settle,” said Perry. “So you just blink until you see the thing you want, then you race in and affix it, then you loot it, then go out and start again. I wonder whether their deconstruction crews do that. Or their miners.”

“I can say that their miners do a crude version,” said Marchand. “This was a part of a conversation I overheard at the saloon. They have a specific claim, so they leave, then return, then leave, then return, until eventually there’s something they’re looking for. And of course, they do this in teams, because otherwise abandoning the site would result in the mine vanishing.”

“This doesn’t seem terribly useful for us,” said Perry. “I mean, good to know, but not useful.”

“It’s useful in the sense that I can map shifts to the portions of this city under the Flux,” said Marchand. “If Queenie came to the city and needed a place to hide, my guess would be that’s where she would go, absent information from Anaksi.”

“And you could pick out which houses had people in them?” asked Perry. “Just because they hadn’t shifted?”

“Something of that nature,” said Marchand.

“Good work,” said Perry. He looked out at the city, and the labels that had already been placed. “Well, let’s take the tour then, and see if we can’t get a better handle on how this place works from above. One more thing though.”

Perry reached into the shelf space and removed the diagnostic mask from it. It was one of two that he’d taken with him. He placed it over the helmet until it was covering the largest cameras, and looked down on the city, hoping that he’d see some trace of magic.

There was not actually such a thing as a magic detector, because “magic” wasn’t a thing. Instead, there was variable physics, and the mask could detect that, or at least some subset of that, at least on Markat. Perry hadn’t known how well the mask would work in another world, or if it would work at all.

His vision changed colors, becoming pinks and greens, splashes of blue, and the occasional streak of purple. It took a moment to resolve it all, but Marchand had all the same information, and could color-correct it back to what it had been, marked and mapped.

The pink was the Flux, marked in all the same spots that Marchand had already pointed out, almost exactly, a miasma over the city, and the wilds outside the walls behind it. Green was mostly outside, along the train tracks, cutting through the pink. Trains went in every direction from the city, a web of transportation, with a few large terminals, mostly at the city edges. There were smaller trams moving through the city, which Perry had seen only briefly when he’d left the train station, and not fully understood what they were. It was clearer now, though.

The splashes for blue were harder to make out from a distance, and were intermittent, while the purple was in faint lines. On closer inspection, aided by Marchand’s zoom, Perry saw that they were following the wires.

“What the hell?” asked Perry.

“Ah, I believe they’re not actually using electricity,” said Marchand. “I had thought not, based on the filaments in their bulbs.”

“What do you mean?” asked Perry.

“It’s some other form of illuminance, provided by something else moving through the wires,” said Marchand. “It is admittedly confusing that they refer to it as electricity, but I believe they are wrong, or perhaps it’s a simple translation mistake.”

“It’s not translation, it’s just their language,” said Perry.

“Then perhaps when the Grand Spell was selecting a place with people speaking an approximation of English, it picked a world where the surface meaning was similar and the ground truth did not match,” said Marchand.

Perry dropped down and swept through the air, moving over the city streets, trying to stay as high up as he could while still being close enough to look down on the city. He started toward the nearest wall, close to the train station where they’d come in, and followed it, intending to make a spiral.

The mask showed more colors, in ones and twos, sometimes glommed on to a person, other times leaking out from a house. What the colors meant was up for debate, and Marchand had a little legend that shifted as more information came in, but it was also not a complete catalog of what was and wasn’t magical.

“Alright, I’m getting worried that we have another Fenilor,” said Perry. “What else explains the variety that we’ve seen so far?”

“There have been other worlds with variety where thresholders were not the answer,” said Marchand. “And I should note that the coloring does not indicate different types of magic, per se, only different expressions of magic. It might be that this is one entirely coherent system.”

“No,” said Perry. “I find that extremely unlikely.”

“Whyso, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Because if we made a list of all the things that do not, as yet, seem to be part of the same coherent system, then that list would be very long,” said Perry. “And I don’t expect that we’ll be able to cleave to the core of even a single one of them, especially with your processing power being what it is. We have science and computation, but I’d be surprised if that was enough.”

“You wound me, sir,” said Marchand.

“By all means, be my guest, use that big brain of yours,” said Perry. “But I don’t think you’re so smart that you could invent calculus from nothing, so there’s a limit to how much intelligence you could bring to bear.”

“I believe I could invent calculus from scratch,” said Marchand. “Would you like me to temporarily remove my knowledge of advanced mathematics and attempt it?”

“No,” said Perry. “Eyes on the city.”

Perry made a lap around the city’s edge, idly talking to Marchand as he did. Their conversation drifted in all kinds of directions, but one of those was on the variant history of Earth 2, particularly as it concerned the Wild West. It had apparently been the same in broad strokes, but different in many ways, mostly because their Civil War had fizzled out and ended with divided states. This had meant that there was open competition between the Union and Confederacy — which had different names — to settle the west as fast as possible, claiming territory, and because the Civil War had been much smaller and shorter, there were more people to do all this. The North had decisively won the race west, which only expanded the economic and industrial lead that eventually led to them integrating pieces of the South back in.

“Do you think it was better or worse for the Native Americans?” asked Perry as they went by one of the huge cathedrals.

“I cannot say, sir,” said Marchand. “I have no records from your Earth, aside from what was stored locally on your phone.”

“Yeah, I know that,” said Perry. “But you can take a guess, right?”

“You’ve told me very little,” said Marchand.

Perry did his best to lay out the history of westward expansion, but it was the kind of thing that made him feel like a pig’s ass, because it was never something that he’d studied. It was the nature of the world that you couldn’t research everything, but it felt like if he’d known he was going to be traveling to another world, he would have spent a bit more time familiarizing himself more deeply with American history. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought that, and probably wouldn’t be the last.

“Why are there so many cathedrals here?” asked Perry as they passed by another one.

“Religion is important to people, sir,” said Marchand.

“Right,” said Perry. “But this city just sort of appeared here, and it seems like a lot of the things they build here are using pieces that are pulled from the portions of the city that are abandoned, or were just never settled. Historically, cathedrals were things that took enormous amounts of time and money, but so far we haven’t seen strong signs of centralized religion.”

“Aside from the cathedrals, sir?” asked Marchand.

“I mean, you build a cathedral because you have a ton of money and want to reinforce the social order,” said Perry. “But I guess maybe these just appeared, same as the city, and might be hundreds of years old. They’re certainly weathered enough.”

“Sir, there was a man claiming to be a literal angel,” said Marchand. “I do think we would be wise to take such claims seriously.”

“You believe in god all of the sudden?” asked Perry.

“Maya Singh reported having met gods,” said Marchand. “But even if that weren’t the case, I think it would be prudent to keep in mind the possibility that this is not just a language issue. In your discussions with Anaksi, did she explain the nature of these angels to you?”

“Didn’t come up,” said Perry.

“It has occurred to you that in the course of this world, we might end up having to fight one of these angels, hasn’t it?” asked Marchand.

“Yes,” said Perry. “But I’m not very worried, given that the angel didn’t even show up in defense of the town when the Yuuks attacked, at least not that I saw.”

“The other thing I find somewhat troublesome is that the Farfinder will show up eventually,” said Marchand. “And when it does, they will hopefully have a tool to guide us toward Earth 2. Upon which point, this world will become part of the Loop, which seems quite inconvenient to me, given the problems with microchips.”

“So we get hardened microchips, larger gates or whatever,” said Perry. “Error correction code.”

“Yes, sir, but I meant in connection with the main government, the Commission,” said Marchand. “They seem to be a significant obstacle when it comes to the Loop. They become an even more significant obstacle if we shoot our way through the city.”

“The Dusklands are wide,” said Perry. “I’m not too worried about it. And we’ve seen some of what they have on offer. It’s no threat to the Farfinder, even if they’re coming in with most of their tools missing. Not to mention that if we have good targeting, we can just post up somewhere hundreds of miles away in a small gorge. The Great Arc was always going to be the most difficult part of the Loop.”

They passed a factory with the lights still on, and on a whim, Perry swooped down and landed gently on the roof. It was corrugated metal, and he was sure he’d make a racket walking on it, but his feet moved lightly, and he went over to the skylight that had been crudely affixed to it with open seams where it didn’t fit quite properly.

There were people inside, working machines, each of them glowing chartreuse. They had blank faces, which wasn’t unexpected for a factory, and mechanical movements, which also wasn’t unexpected. The uniforms were all identical and shapeless.

There was something about it that Perry didn’t like though, something sinister.

“Any idea what that is?” asked Perry.

“No, sir,” said Marchand.

“This might just be a night shift,” said Perry. “Except they’re all soaked in some kind of magic. Have we seen this before?”

“No, sir,” said Marchand.

“Thoughts?” asked Perry.

“I believe this to be outside our purview, sir,” said Marchand. “Poor working conditions are to be expected.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “Whatever this is, it’s not the culture. Listen in?”

“I’ve been listening, sir,” said Marchand. “There are two men in an office, speaking with each other about a woman they both fancy. The conversation does not appear to hold much import, though … just a moment, sir.”

“What’s up?” asked Perry.

“The conversation appears to have taken a turn,” said Marchand. “They’re on the move.”

“Anything we need to worry about?” asked Perry.

“No,” said Marchand. “But it does appear that they might reveal something about the nature of this magic.”

Perry looked down at the factory floor. Most of the machines were sewing machines, bulky ones for punching through leather, though the final product was only made further down the way. It was the sort of thing that would be a cobbler’s job on a less technologically developed world, and Perry was skeptical of the quality here, given the rhythmic mechanical motions of everyone that was working.

Perry saw the two men walking down the narrow aisles. They were clearly talking, but it probably wasn’t important, because Marchand wasn’t piping the sound through. They came to a stop next to one of the women, and after speaking to her, she rose, wordless, and followed them as they went back the other way. She moved with an economy of motion and the same blank face. With the mask, she had the same chartreuse aura as the rest of the workers, but the two men she was following didn’t.

“They refer to her as Leased,” said Marchand. “Shall I play the conversation for you?”

“Not unless it needs my analysis,” said Perry. “Is this … mind control?”

“I am not clear on that,” said Marchand. “It does appear as though they’re taking her into one of the rooms to have relations with her.”

“Fuck,” said Perry. “She looked zonked out, is this … I mean, could this be what Queenie did to the Yuuks?”

“We saw the Yuuks, sir,” said Marchand. “They had conversations during the raid, and moved with far more fluidity and vigor.”

“So it’s an advancement of that?” asked Perry.

“Unclear, sir,” said Marchand. “But I don’t think that whatever is happening here is unknown to Anaksi or the general public.”

Perry looked down on the workers he could see from the skylight, who were still toiling away as though nothing had happened. The woman’s spot was unfilled, but it hadn’t stopped anyone.

“The question is whether we go down there and stop whatever they’re doing to that woman,” said Perry.

“Our position in the past has been to allow degenerate cultures to continue as they are without confronting them,” said Marchand.

“Has it?” asked Perry.

“Not in so many words, sir,” said Marchand. “You did seem quite aggrieved when I rectified the monarchy.”

“I hope you understand that’s very, very different,” said Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “The comment was meant in jest.”

“Alright, we’re off,” said Perry. He rose up into the air. “We’ll figure out what the Leased even are, how they fit into society, whether Anaksi knows anything, and whether what we saw down there was legal. Not that it really matters whether it was legal or not, I guess.”

He could feel the pull of it, the desire to fight, to drop down through the skylight and march into a situation that he didn’t understand in the slightest and insert himself into it with all his obvious strength. But it wasn’t clear that the people down there were even aware of their surroundings, so he supposed he didn’t know.

There was a funny feeling in his gut as he flew through the air, a sinister cast over the city. He had Marchand play back the audio, just to see if there was something in there, but there wasn’t. They were casual about it. Probably their job was to sit there and ‘manage’ for the night shift, and they spent most of their time in the office, only coming out when someone needed them — if those people were even aware of what was happening.

The map was complete, or as complete as it could be in a city that shifted itself around every now and then. The river was thick and filled with boats, some of them that had people living in them, others that were for trade upstream or downstream. There were too many cathedrals, and areas filled with the Flux where no one lived, mined for materials. It was a dirty, ugly, fallen city, and Perry could well understand why someone would want to be away from it, out in the Dusklands where at least there was clean air to breathe.

He was on his way back to the hotel when the bats attacked.

They came up from the city, easily as many as a hundred of them, each the size of a housecat. He didn’t know what they thought he was, but he swung his sword in midair, slicing through the mass of them with one hand while the other hand grabbed them and crushed their bodies. The attack was brief, and left no lasting damage, their teeth inadequate for the job of getting through metal. Still, it was vicious and surprising, and as the remains of the swarm flew off, Perry wondered how the hell average people dealt with that.

They locked their doors and windows at night, he guessed, pulling shutters tight, and hoped that luck was on their side.

When he got back to the hotel, he slipped in quietly. He’d shaken off all the blood from the bat attack and quietly stored Marchand in the shelf space.

Anaksi was asleep in her bed, but she woke when he entered before laying back down and closing her eyes.

The tour of the city had given him some uneasy feelings, and he was worried those feelings would grow worse with a visit to the Collegium tomorrow.