Slumrat Rising

Vol. 3 Chap. 16 Smash and Grab

The involuntary revolutionaries smashed through the gate. The hinges had been cut; the heavy wagons rolled right over it. The metal shrieked and rumbled under the wheels of progress. The revolutionaries were coming up from an access road, bypassing the queue of wagons waiting to load and unload into the distribution center. This was a high-speed operation. Lines were for honest folk.

Truth was perched on the top of the lead wagon, waiting as Thrush led the column across a wide parking lot and directly at the wall of the warehouse. They roared forward, never daring to slow as they charged. They knew the consequences of disobedience. The feeling of the blade at their throat hadn’t eased for a second.

At the last possible instant, Truth tossed two charms at the warehouse wall. Two tall lines formed from brilliant, horrible blue-white light burst into existence. A triangle five meters tall at its highest point was cut into the wall as the lead wagon smashed through the corrugated steel siding.

They were in. The workers were reeling, falling back from the explosive noise and the sudden presence of three wagons inside the warehouse. From out the back of the wagons came the hired goons, waving thoroughly illegal firebolt fetishes and needlers. The old national service training had been forgotten. They were shooting at anything that moved and a hell of a lot of things that didn’t.

Truth ran in behind them, having hopped off before the wagon hit. Thrush would lead the marauders through the warehouse, maximizing the havoc while leading them to the “best loot.” Truth had another job to do.

Having scouted the way before, he rushed over to the Site Supervisor’s office. The supervisor was still in his little cage- seven tablets surrounding him and shrieking alarms. He was screaming right back- giving orders, calling for reports, for security, for somebody to make the craziness stop. Truth thought he was all the way gone yesterday. Apparently, there was still a little bit of rationality left to lose. Now the supervisor was all the way gone. There was nothing human here- just an animal. Scared, lashing out. Wanting to run, but trapped.

Truth popped one of his modified talismans, turning something that should have had a five-year service life into a three-minute charm. The tablets stilled. The alarms went silent. There was noise and panic outside, but for the first time in… who knows how long… the Supervisor had peace. It terrified him. Truth could smell the fear stink over the ashtray full of Gold Bat butts. The Supervisor had been tortured by the alarms and messages, but he understood them. He didn’t know how to live without them.

“They must have used a jammer. This isn’t some fuckup. This is an attack.” Truth poured poison into the supervisor’s ear. Would the internal System trigger something? What about the System Astrologica? Truth watched the supervisor's eyes. All the system messages were in your head, pure hallucinations, but the body was fooled. The eyes moved around the hovering messages as though the letters were in front of them.

There! Truth spotted it. The minuscule flicks of the eye. He was getting a message. A mission. The Supervisor started walking towards the door. Truth smiled grimly. Time to add fuel to the fire.

“This is a hit. An attack. Terrorists. Security is a joke. A bad joke. You know what they are like. It’s going to be up to you. You have to take charge. You always knew you would have to. You will have to solve this yourself.”

The Supervisor dithered. Jerking back and forth. A new alarm sounded in the hallway. Fire. His face firmed up. He walked back to his desk and jerked open the bottom drawer. A standard Jeon Army issue needler was there, next to a bottle of schnapps and some pills.

“Not who I thought I was going to be using this on.” The Supervisor muttered with grim humor. “Any mission-critical spells available? No, of course not. Praeger, watch over me.” The Supervisor had a rough, raw voice. Needler in hand, he walked out the door. Back straight. Ready for anything. A real Starbrite man.

Truth gave the room a quick once-over and didn’t find anything important. There was almost nothing at all. All the usual paperwork that would clutter other offices did not exist here. All handled by the System. Things that didn’t rate the System’s attention were run through the enchanted tablets. Short-term messages, Truth guessed, and automated messages from the arrays and devices that supported the operation of the distribution center.

There wasn’t a hint of the Supervisor’s identity or personality anywhere visible in the office. No picture of his family on the desk or his name on the door. Not even a little plaque on a stand on his desk proclaiming his elevated identity. Just “Site Supervisor” on a mass-produced plastic sign glued to the wall next to the door. He quickly searched his desk. The only things he could say for sure about the Supervisor were that they smoked Gold Bats, drank Huntsman, used Soma to take the edge off, and could lay hands on a needler.

That was it. The sum total of a life. The mind reduced to reflexive pain responses. The System deliberately hurting him, training him not to think, only respond and obey. The supervisor’s identity reduced to function, its personality reduced to pain management. Everything it was outside of the job fit in the bottom drawer of a mass-produced desk with room to spare.

The back of the office chair was a little broken. Not badly, still usable. It rested at a slight tilt to the right. Truth tried to straighten it up. It immediately listed back to the right. A chair like that couldn’t cost more than a couple of points in the System Shop. Truth shook his head and caught up to the Supervisor. It hadn’t managed to get far.

Security was swarming towards the warehouse now. The brutal morons conducting the raid had set fires as they went, blowing up servitors and smashing what they couldn’t steal. Some inspired vandal figured out how to topple the towering shelves, despite the heavy steel frames being bolted to the floor. From what security was saying, they had found a pallet of professional-grade cutting tools, and one of the thugs actually knew a Sharp spell. Level one, obviously, but it was apparently good enough.

Truth came out onto the floor of the warehouse with the Supervisor and security. The thugs were chanting and screaming. Thrush had whipped them into madness. “SMASH THE SYSTEM, FREE THE PEOPLE!” was cut into the corrugated metal of the wall. The last of the daylight trickled through the cuts, the orange sky making them look etched with fire.

The Site Supervisor didn’t know what the hell was going on, but he hadn’t climbed to the top by letting little details like that slow him down. “Loading Associates! Fire Drill! Evacuate now! Fire Captains, lead your teams. I WANT A HEAD COUNT! Security! Get those animals off my floor!” He started bellowing orders, his needler up and firing into the thugs. They were in melee with his own workers, but that was no reason not to shoot.

Truth touched Thrush’s command medallion. “Have a few of the gangsters cut down this guy, and then it’s time for the heroes to declare victory and retreat with the loot.” He’d give the supervisor a moment. A touch of grace. A chance to die a human.

“As you command.” Three of the gangsters swung their fetishes over and started blasting wildly. Security sensibly took cover. The site supervisor knew it was hero time. He strode boldly forward. Hands steady. Eyes bright.

By fluke or God’s grace, he caught one of the thugs twice in the chest, putting him down. His reward? Two bolts of superheated plasma, one took the side of his ribs, the other his hip. Blood flashed into steam, exploding the charred meat and ruined organs away from the smoking bone tips left in the holes. The shock killed him instantly, dead before he started falling towards the floor.

Truth was watching intensely, extending his full attention to the dead C-Tier. All his senses focused on the body. Merkovah must have killed hundreds under laboratory conditions over the years and never cracked the secret. But what about now, as reality thinned?

System-

>

Really nothing?

>

Shit.

Little tongues of flame burned on the clothes near the edges of the plasma holes. It was the tree silk blended with the cotton, Truth knew. Intensely flammable stuff and the cotton burned well too. The thugs were falling back to their wagons, much fewer of them now, less than half. They would have retreated long ago if not for Thrush’s mental assault on them. They peeled out, heading for the access road and whatever rally point DePonte had set for them.

Truth didn’t bother watching them go. He was sulking. He could admit to himself that he was sulking, but he wasn’t abou to stop doing it. Yes, it was completely unreasonable to expect to find a clue leading directly to the System Astrolgica on the first try. But he had really thought it would work. At least he should see something! Some hint of resonance between his own mutated soul and the Supervisor’s. But… no. Nothing.

>>

I was frigging level one or two!

>

What? I know they died. I saw them die. Not often, thanks to the potions, medics and everything. But it happened.

>

Truth paused. Kofi was pretty indelibly etched into his brain. Keller, Rezepi, Nobu and… fuck.

He… really couldn’t name a single member of the PMC who died after that. In fact, he struggeld to remember a lot of names from his time in the PMC. Faces he vividly remembered. The sergeant, the captain, his squadmates, but beyond that? A lot of faces, and no real details to go with those faces. No life story, no motivations, not even a few character defining quirks. Just people competently doing their jobs.

A whole personality you could fit in a drawer with room to spare. He could remember, vividly, what the System Astrologica told him- “You don’t have a personality, or at least, not one anyone would care about.” Was it… he didn’t know the right words. Was that little shove intended to make him have less of a personality?

He had concluded that it was aimed at hurting his self-esteem and encouraging his isolation, but what if there was another level to it? An ever-tightening spiral of personality, focusing down until all that was left was a burning need to do the job at all costs. Using the soul to destroy the mind, which weakened both body and soul. It extracted the maximum useful labor while the local System worked over its host. Once the soul had been sufficiently broken and processed, the body would collapse, and the soul would be comfortably absorbed by the System Astrologica.

> The System said. I was created, would help you be the best little drone you could be, then return to the System, shorn of memory and personality, once you died. Obliteration of self to ensure easy absorption.>>

The security team was rushing around, not achieving much. The firefighting teams were doing their best, spraying foam and calling showers of water from floating charms. The heavy wagons were piled up outside the distribution center, filling all the parking spots and queueing up on the road. If the queue hadn’t reached the highway yet, they would soon. The Distribution Center had to keep in motion, or, like a heart attack, the blood of commerce wouldn’t flow through the body of the nation. This little corner of the nation, anyway.

The cost of that lack of circulation was not literally incalculable, but it was beyond Truth’s reckoning. All those people waiting for their deliveries, yes, but how about all the businesses that suddenly couldn’t operate? The traffic that wasn’t moving, the contracts unfulfilled? It was probably screwing up the banks somehow, but Truth suspected that, what with everything, the banks might not even notice this little disruption.

And, of course, there were all the dead. He looked around- the bodies hauled to one side by the workers. The ambulances and police had been called but hadn’t reached here yet. Maybe they were stuck in traffic? Thugs and F-Tier nobodies… except to their families. Their friends. To themselves. All of them just doing the best they could in a world they couldn’t possibly understand, let alone affect.

The workers probably wouldn’t have survived the collapse of the world anyway. They probably only died a few months or a year early. But he still killed these strangers. He had to accept the moral weight of the choices that lead him here. Truth laughed. A mad, bubbling noise. He hammered his hands and feet against the floor in frustration, feeling the pain of these pointless deaths pressing down on him. It was Starbrite, again. Starbrite had found a way to hurt him again. Getting at him through his soul.