Copyright © 2014 by Michael John Grist
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No part of this publication my be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.
Cover art by Matias Trabold Rehren.
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CONTENTS
11 YEARS LATER
MOVEMENT 1. MOLTEN CORE
RITRY GOLIGH A ME A
CARROLLA B MOLTEN CORE B
SHARK ARENA C GIANT'S PLAYSET C
POWER D BONDLESS D
THE DON E LA E
AETHERIC BRIDGE F ROTATIONAL MAZE F
GODSHIP G SUBLAVIC G
MOVEMENT 2. SOLID CORE
ABANDONED A LAG A
SKULK 47 B VEN B
ORICIPULIS C YOUNG RITRY C
CANDYLAND D NEW LIFE D
10 YEARS LATER E BONDS E
SKULK 12 F BLASTOCYTE F
THE TOWER G CANDLEBOMB G
MOVEMENT 3. THRENODY
TONE CLUSTER A – G
CODA
Letter to the Reader
Acknowledgements
About the Author
EXTRAS
King Ruin (excerpt)
11 YEARS LATER
I'm finally leaving.
The Wall-line train roars into the station like percussive wind, thunderously loud, and people pour out. They flow either side of me like molten rock, filling up the spaces, so hot I can feel the energy burning off them.
Things have been changing for me. I see things differently now. People are memories and the Lag at once. They are all the same, and none of them are like me.
I fold into the carriage. A man with a jaw like a toad looks at me, then back to his paper. I turn, look out the glass as the doors hiss shut, and some of the groaning engine sound is cocooned away. The train gets underway, the lights of Calico Central station rush by, and then darkness. In the blackness outside the speeding train capsule I look at my reflection.
Do I look different now? It's hard to know. I wonder at the calm I'm feeling inside, and I look at the faces of the other denizens of this train capsule in reflection. They're tapping on nodes, staring vacantly up at the rack-ads, picking at their cuticles. All living their lives, going from their places to their places, all with their little bits of complexity, their little bits of wonder and misery.
I could pull them apart at the seams. I could become just like Mr. Ruins if I wanted, crack them open like eggs for the taste. But I'm not just like him, I'm me.
Ritry Goligh.
My face looks different in the glass. Thinner and older. It is a year since I cared to see a mirror. I wonder if my family saw me now, would they even recognize me?
The train hisses in to another station, disgorges, and I hang from my strap as a new population fills the capsule. They're all like murky waters, I can read them by their memories, and I wonder how much it would take to push one of them over the edge. How much tinkering under the hood would be needed to turn them into creatures like Mr. Ruins, to kill their own children and wash themselves in the blood?
How would that feel, I wonder. How would it taste?
The train pulls out, then into another station and I am vomited out by the press of bodies. Already my brand new suit clings to my skin. I feel the humidity soaking in like alcohol, trying to fog my mind. I move through the press. Somebody strikes me in the shoulder as he goes by, and I feel his scorn. He is a cruel and angry man, a bully.
I have time enough for this. I catch up to him through the flow and step round to face him. He's taller than me, thick with muscle as I once was, with sandy hair that slides either side of his face. He seems momentarily surprised, then he recognizes me and the scorn comes back.
"Having a bad day?" I ask, and jam Mei-An's new node into his crotch. He gasps and doubles over. This is not a skulk and I am not beyond the law, but I don't care. I can't be stopped. I grab the back of his head and for a moment imagine ramming the node into his unprotected face five times, cracking his jaw, knocking three teeth loose, maybe imploding an eyeball. It's the kind of thing I might once have done.
Instead I push the node up into his throat and squeeze his windpipe. He's about to start struggling but as the edge of the metal digs into his throat I feel his body go slack. He thinks I have a knife. I lean in over him, whisper in his ear.
"I should kill you. What do people like you bring to the world? What's the point of you? We'd all be better off with you buried in the fucking dirt."
These are barely even words meant for him, I know it as I say them. But this is the most visceral I can be.
I feel his mind recoil. He is full of fear now, the scorn gone. I feel his miserable, small life, and the cruelty he indulges in when he can. He is a bully, and I hate nothing more than bullies.
I Lag him. Perhaps I am the bully, to do this. I take every bit of pleasure he ever gained from cruelty, and leave only the sour guilt that remained afterward. He is clay in my hands, and I am changing things now, finally.
On his knees he begins to sob, as the unmitigated weight of all he has done crumples down upon him. He is now a lost man, as I have been for so long. Perhaps it will be a new start.
I leave him there, and return to the Wall line. I feel Mr. Ruins' delight at what I have done.
The train rises up through the tsunami wall to the Overskulk array, where many people alight for shopping and sightseeing the Allatanc ocean. The train's rhythm steadies out. Clack clack, clack clack, clack clack, along this string of walled cities that make up Calico. From Calico Central to Tenbridge Wulls, from Tenbridge Wulls to Saunderston, all the way to the edge. At the edge we descend gradually, as the off-wall ramp drops down to the natural coast. I get off the express and wait at a dim station for the tram-line to the Brink.
It rattles near, and I board and ride it alone. These rails are old, over 200 years, once along a ridge and now skirting a coast. I watch my reflection in the glass windows, see it sometimes spiked by the light of shored hydrate tankers unloading at the off-wall pumps, whaling cadaver rigs out mining the waves, searchlight boats out on the dark gray Allatanc ocean.
This place I'm going isn't my home. I left that behind a long time ago. There's nothing out there for me but darkness, and ruin.
It's nearly midnight by the final station, the Brink. The night porter walks by holding his ticket ticker.
"Here for the Mass lights?" he asks.
I shake my head. He points out the window, and I see colored fairy lights dancing in long lines over the small station outbuildings, up the rain-shelter frame, around the curved spine of the single bench.
"No," I say, getting to my feet. "I'm visiting friends."
He gives me an odd look, but takes the ticket from my hand and punches a hole through it.
"Well, then," he says, "you best hurry, they'll be closing down the line soon." He carries on to
the carriage end.
The doors open and I leave the tram behind.
The little town of the Brink has only a few hundred inhabitants. I heard once it's actually part of proto-Calico, a kind of skulk on land. Really it's just another space left behind, outside the protection of Calico's walls.
Looking out over the water, I see the first point of light on the horizon. One of the intermittent Arctic rigs we fought so hard for, sucking hydrates out of the ancient ocean bed, once covered by ice. Now they float across the whole Allatanc, like my old skulk on the waves, sucking the last rotting succor out of the bodies of dead dinosaurs buried far down below.
We are everywhere now, and every place is known. There are no more unbroken stretches of darkness, no dark spots on the map but the ones we've left behind.
I walk through the little town of Brink. Shuttered windows and doors pass by on either side of me. The air smells saccharine, hot tar and brown sugar, more heightened than any time I've passed this way before. They boil sweets in the refinery all day and all night. Here and there I catch patches of tinny music leaking from lit second floor bars, warblings of voices that liven up the night. Once that was my life too.
I emerge out of the little town, leaving the last of the lights behind me. Ahead is one gray patch at the map's edge, where I will make my final stand. I cross an old wooden bridge, and catch the scent of decaying whalemeat out to sea. They caught another carcass.
The cloying scent of candy gathers up a fresh undertone of seeping vegetation. This place was a theme park once, with tall ferris wheels and gravity towers. CANDYLAND. Its rollercoasters dominated the skyline, and the cries of delighted children would echo all around.
I came here with my wife Loralena, when it was already a ruin, and we imagined the life it once held. I came here with my children Art and Mem. I came here a different man, filled with hope and hubris, enough to bring me snapping back like an unbreakable elastic bond.
I pass the shell of an old bus stop. It's only a frame now, the glass shattered out by nu-rockers a generation ago, its metal posts slowly wilting in the steady blast of the sun.
I walk the empty car park with memories bubbling up around me. We came here together and all held hands. The park was already dead, but still we'd come to play. I step over regimented lines for parking spaces scrawled over the tarmac like crazy paving, in places erased by time, soil accretion, creeping moss. Cracks have lifted sections, dropped others into the ocean, driven by the rising tide.
A different life.
It grows very dark close to the entrance, and I can see nothing but a faint glow from the distant satellite-lights overhead. Barbed wire rustles in my hair as I clamber over the turnstile. In and through, I see boulderlike shapes lying around in the shadows. I touch them as I pass, and feel the heat of the sun still buzzing within their lifeless frames. They are toppled fishing boats. Once upon a time the waters tipped them up and left their undersides showing for the vultures to pick clean.
Down the main promenade there is jungle to either side of me. I still smell the refining sugar, but it is fading. Instead my mind tells me I smell caramel popcorn, the acrid burn of fireworks exploding overhead, the flowery shampoo smell of Mem's hair as she pulls me down to whisper in my ear:
"This is wonderful, Daddy."
The memory of a memory. None of us saw this place alive.
I walk up the steep wooden rollercoaster tracks to the apex of the dive, rising far above the land below. Here is my tower, standing at the turning point, complete and thick with bonds. No crows have dislodged its turrets or parapets. No shelving units have been hung up by the homeless.
It is only my Tower. I am the only one who ever saw it, and built it with everything I had, bricks chipped away from other buildings, bits of rail-line gleaned rusting in the weeds, cement powder I scraped from the undersides of ceramic sinks. I bonded it with all my memories. Atop the coaster it stands as tall as the Calico wall.
I enter the Tower through the one entrance, and begin the slow ascent up the circling staircase. As I move up, I let the backs of my fingers trace the wall. The surface is rough, unpolished, like granular stucco. For a month I wattle-framed it, heaping on thick handfuls of liquid plaster, dusting in every memento I had.
He had already shredded all the photographs, and given me the fragments. He had torn up their clothes and their toys, their drawings and their letters, and gave me the pieces. I kept every tiny scrap, and built it into the Tower.
This Tower is made of memory. It is a cast of my life and the life of my family, of Art and Mem and Loralena. It is what remains, and the reason my mind is so clear.
Because I'm going to take my family back.
The hairs on the backs of my fingers tingle in the charged air. I have known this pain for so long. I feel it like static electricity, a wellspring of power, now focused.
I arrive at the top, and look out over the park and the world. It is all in shadow. I look up to the sky and see the endless reams of satellites, most of them fallen silent now, circling across the silent moon. I look across the land and see the twin cities I've forsaken, both Calico and the floating sprawl of proto-Calico hugging the tsunami wall like a shadow. This is all our land, and our swollen seas, and the fragments of life we have left.
I touch the wheel, by which I will steer myself home. It is as large as the wheel on a subglacic, connected to vents and flue shafts all throughout the Tower, and a rope hanging down the stairs. Everything is perfectly balanced.
I am ready, just as I always was as a marine in the Arctic skirmishes, ready to fight for my right to exist. I lay my hands on the smooth wheel's handles and allow myself a brief moment to repeat the terms of the deal I made with Mr. Ruins all that time ago.
If it doesn't work.
That thought doesn't hold fear for me anymore. It is an answer either way. I can't be hurt anymore, and my family can't be hurt any worse if I am gone than if I am alive.
I lift the wheel and it clicks to engage. I feel the wind about me rush to fill in the ventricles the Tower has opened. The cement beneath my feet vibrates. I turn the wheel, and the thumping begins.
I feel the wave rise.
It's beginning.
And I dive.
MOVEMENT 1. MOLTEN CORE
NOW A
Her brain is starting to burn.
We're in the dive-bay on the graysmithy third floor, enclosed by the thumping metal bulk of the Electro-Magnetic Resonance machine, lying face to face like lovers. Her name is Mei-An, a sweet-looking meta-Asiat with black face-framing bangs to die for, and I am Ritry Goligh, graysmith to the floating slums beyond the tsunami wall, ex-marine of the Arctic skirmishes, and all-round un-rooted loner.
I'm working to smooth an Afri-Jarvanese language inject into Mei-An's mind, but it isn't taking well. Her immunity's kicking in, the Lag, and without a deeper dive it'll fry her badly, losing the language inject and along with it a million or so neurons.
"Dopamine's up," my assistant Carrolla calls from behind, barely audible over the whump whump whump of the EMR around us. "Get it calmed Rit."
I'm looking into her eyes, big dark orbs blinking and disoriented, and reading in. I've dived deeper than this a hundred times before, into hostile minds bent backward by chemical interference, searching for troop movements and stock-pile stations in the old deep Arctic floes while the skirmishes were at their peak, but still it never gets any easier, or safer.
I can feel the Lag snapping up at me from within her head.
"Look at me, yes," I say to Mei-An, as I slowly tongue my brain's core-transponders into stronger resonance with her own. "Look at my eyes, Mei-An, that's it."
She tries to nod but I can see she's glitching on motor control too, the motion uneven and jerky. I kick a leg at Carrolla to up the Cerebro Spinal Fluid bath, because if it gets any hotter inside her skull those neurons really will begin to cook, then I slide my wavelength all the way down to match with hers.
A precautionar
y warning pops up across my thoughts and I chew it accepted, opening the file of her mind in my own, glancing through a stream of data that encapsulates billions of individual cells and their action potential state.
Then I dive.
I squeeze her hand and keep my eyes on hers. All this is a formality now, outer layers of data in the cortex before the real mingling begins. A tear leaks down her cheek, and distantly I can feel her terror. This far out, her higher functions like emotion don't resonate well, though soon I'll be in the thick of it, and I won't feel anything so discrete as terror, fear, even love. It'll all be magma.
I dive harder, and columns of numbers flash by me like the Allatanc ocean in tsunami- dopamine counts spiking, the firing rate shooting up, glia beginning to crisp now too, the Brodmann's for speech flipping belly up as unconsciousness dawns.
"Dammit Rit she's slipping," I hear Carrolla faintly from behind.
I plunge through the readouts and deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her basal ganglia, blasting by pyramidal neurons both afferent and efferent, so deep I lose my grip on the world and the sense of my own body flits away. Now I'm beyond the confines of the machine and into the realm where my mind meets hers.
The Molten Core.
All around me is lava, the burning red and orange fire of memory.
It's bright and chaotic with the churning of her thoughts, as the language inject is attacked by the Lag, her mind's engrammic immune system. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by the tidal flows, bound for the Solid Core.
They wouldn't do this kind of thing in Calico. No one does this kind of dive anymore, maybe beyond the wall they don't need to, they have the tech to bypass it completely, but out here it's the only thing that'll save a good chunk of sweet Mei-An's brain.
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 1