The sheer difference between the ads brings it to Douglas’ attention. Laying there on the floor, he sees it played once every ten minutes or so. His vision covers a couple dozen screens and holoprojectors, so the ad isn’t played much. The words ‘GalaxSec saves’ keep attracting his attention. As Douglas lays there, he thinks about things for a bit. His mental faculties are once again slightly upgraded now that he is a full arcane skeleton, but his thoughts still flow at a ponderous pace.
Then Douglas remembers the things he ate. The memory of homogeneous sweetness and crunchy pills melting under his chewing teeth is still rather vivid. Douglas has very few senses, he muses. He is sure that breaking bones is supposed to hurt and that hunger used to be a thing. His sight is rather sharp, but apart from some slight scents as the air quality changes drastically, he has smelled very little. Sound is also rather dim, and everything Douglas has heard so far has led him to believe that hearing things is irritating at best. Taste was the most intense positive thing Douglas has experienced so far.
“Food.”
Douglas freezes as his jaw stops moving. Shifting his burning gaze towards the dark skull hovering over him, he realizes that she has stopped moving too. Douglas tries putting his desire to words once again.
“Food. I want to taste more food.”
His mind made up, Douglas stands. The long legs of his spacesuit flop around as he manoeuvres himself to face the woman. He also finds that his sight level is slightly higher than before. Sensing the mana flowing through his body, he feels that a total of six bones have started regenerating. Two patellas along with pairs of tibia and fibula have started developing slivers of bone. Redirecting the mana flows, he limits it to only both fibula.
Then he looks at the woman. The sheer change in character that has happened does not arouse any of his suspicion. Instead, Douglas nods in satisfaction that she is starting to act like a proper skeleton should. Douglas does a double take as he looks at her neck area. The raw and charred flesh has changed into a smoother surface. The largest piece of charred sinew is gone, replaced by neat stretches of muscle and skin. Her esophagus and all the veins and arteries are closed, the only opening except for her protruding spine being the windpipe.
The two skulls stare at each other for a bit longer. The woman then stands up and starts looking around. Slight sounds of metal scraping and rattling against bone sound out as she swivels her neck. Douglas takes notice of the light that sparkles from the metal skull parts, the shiny reflections catching his gaze.
She starts walking after an indeterminate time of eye socket on eye socket staring. Instead of going back into the mall like Douglas expected, she walks to another of those blank doors with green paint. Douglas starts shuffling after her, his spacesuit legs trailing behind him as the duo walks through the green door. He follows her clumsy walk through the following hallway. Instead of going up the ramp like Douglas expects, she walks up to the back side of the bare, metal space. She pushes against the back wall, shoving another door to the side. Douglas follows her with wide eyes and hanging jaw.
A platform a few metres wide is followed by a lowered track that has a single rail running through it. Instead of the entire ceiling glowing softly, smaller and fiercer lights are arrayed on the ceiling going off into the distance. The woman - Douglas then and there remembers to call her Katare - walks along the platform until she reaches a place where the platform wall has turned into rows of colourful buttons instead of blank metal. She raises her pale hand and randomly presses on glowing rectangles. The buttons flash, her hand glowing red in response, and a small table appears from the wall. This table is then filled with all kinds of odd items.
Having studied the scene for a decent amount of time, Douglas walks up to Katare. He grabs one of the items he recognizes, a wrapped bar, and smashes it against his visor with confidence. Douglas is sure that he feels no shame, but standing there while rubbing the food on his helm makes him feel like he really should. One long process of taking off the helmet later, Douglas eats the bar, wrapper and all. The intense stare coming from Katare as he shows her his bony cranium for the first time is completely ignored. The taste is flat at first until his teeth bite through the thin material, and the bar’s contents squeeze into his mouth.
Douglas freezes again, the intense sensation of the taste explosion overwhelming the skeleton’s mental capacities. Then the taste disappears when the bar is gone. Paying no heed to where the food disappears to, Douglas starts stuffing the other items into his mouth. Some of them are easily opened by his teeth. The rest of the wrapped bars is devoured quickly, and the bags of snacks follow suit. The first bottle he picks up gives him some trouble. Then his sharp incisor catches on the cap as he wiggles it around, causing the carbonated contents to explode into his mouth. Douglas freezes again.
All the bottles forcefully devoured, he starts in on the cans. Ten minutes of fruitless gnawing passes before he studies the mangled item carefully. His bony fingers find the place to open it after only fifteen minutes of intense reading. The more complex wrapping materials follow after all the cans are drained. The voidproof containers are emptied after the quick heating meals are consumed. Douglas especially likes the expando tabs. The packaging keeps telling him to submerge them in whatever liquid is native to his species, but eating the crunchy items gives him the most intense flavour sensation yet.
Then Douglas is looking at the table as it retracts into the wall. The trash surrounding the duo has been disappearing at a steady rate. Only now, he spots the small, bug-like drones that take the empty packaging materials with them, vanishing into the wall. Douglas then stares at Katare with flaming eyes once again.
“More food.”
His dry voice resounds from somewhere around his mouth as he makes his desire for more edible items known. Katare just starts pressing the wall at random again. Looking at her actions and the resulting food dropping from the wall, Douglas starts pressing random items too. Where the pretty colours flash whenever the woman does it, the wall ignores all of Douglas’ ministrations. He tears into the appeared snack again with fervour, this time making note of which things taste the best and pointing at the buttons in turn.
He pauses long enough to look at Katare halfway through his two hundredth snack. The skeletal woman has obediently done as he asked, and he feels like some form of thanks should be given. So Douglas grabs a bar, unwraps it with care, and presses into the other skull’s face. It takes a while before she opens her jaw and he manages to shove it in. The food slowly disappears in a smouldering blue flame, and Katare's eyes seem to glow brightly in shock. Douglas grins at her and waves at the piles of snacks on the table. She also joins him in chowing down, only stopping long enough to press the wall to get more food.
And so the two skeletal beings spend many hours eating, using up the little power and scant few resources the space station still has in stock by gorging on food they don’t need at all.
Chapter Nine – And Influence People
An ordinary old man wakes from his slumber, opening his sleep-crusted eyes as he rises from his small but luxurious bed. Like every morning, he looks around in dazed confusion until the reality of his current situation comes back to him. His slightly wrinkled face then turns from an unemotional blankness to a solemn visage that knows a secret joke, a hidden twinkle of humour playing the role of a spark in his eyes. He stands up, puts on the same clothes as yesterday, and walks out of his bedroom. The blue haze hanging in the doorframe automatically disintegrates all his night sweat and any grime on his body as he steps through.
Entering his small living room, he waves at the curtained windows, causing them to slide open. A blank wall is the only view available to him, and he stares out of it for a few seconds. Stretching his popping spine a bit, he walks through his front door. The dispenser in his hall drops a few spheres in his hand, which he eats slowly.
Blinking against the early morning light, he observes the street just outside his home. High above, th
e air is filled with thousands of flying vehicles. Massive space-bound constructs are visible through the blue atmosphere as they hug the planet. Ships dozens of kilometres long dock in space stations thousands of kilometres in diameter, their shine reflecting light down on the busy world.
In the far distance, nearly hidden through the smoggy atmosphere, massive structures tower into the sky. Even here in the suburbs, the buildings rise up dozens of stories. The old man looks out from his balcony, taking in the view. He sees dirty buildings, grimy streets, and abandoned vehicles accompanied by the occasional wild mutant or engineered pet. He stops looking rather quickly.
Walking down the stairs with a measured gait, the old man avoids all the stinking lowlifes and beggars present in this part of town. Tall, blank-faced buildings surround the relatively empty streets, any architectural style forgone for lower building costs. Small heaps of trash litter the concrete roads, proof that even the efficient, automated cleaning services are no match for the enormous amount of sapient scum living in these parts.
The old man doesn’t even look at the many alien lifeforms that are lying on the streets. Some seem to be dead while the majority are just too inebriated on all kinds of illegal and high-tech mood enhancers to move from their spots. A few large blobs of atmosphere-suited slime patrol here and there, obviously enforcers for whatever crime syndicate has this area of the capital planet in its grasp.
Everyone treats the old man like he treats them, both parties ignoring each other completely. The amount of working-class sapients down on their luck is low, but the few honest people that do live here are largely ignored. It’s only when they start becoming addicted and in debt that the tough guys start paying attention to them.
The old man carefully makes his way over to the nearest pipe booth. This transport system is one of the oldest still working public transport systems in place. Even the poorest of beggars can earn more than enough money to call for a flying cab, but the old man likes the anonymity of the pipes. He steps inside the booth and sees that the payment system is vandalised once again.
“Central Bureau,” the old man speaks. The floor drops from under him, and he falls into a metre wide pipe. Faint rings of light swish past his vision as he is sucked away to his destination. The fact that he doesn’t need to pay today puts a smile on his lips, one that the smell of vomit, sweat, and other chemical excretions fails to remove. The tunnels are only used by sapients that have no other options, and personal hygiene is not often a priority for that target audience. The pipes are made from a rather hardy material, and removing them would cost more than any potential gains.
The old man flies through the stinking, underground pipes with speed, arriving at his destination only minutes later. The small pipe booth stands in a dark corner of the planet’s central city centre. The floor snaps closed under him, and he steps through the decontamination field into the open air again.
Skyscrapers tens of kilometres high connected through a maze of flexible tunnels and large vertical promenades tower above him. A sea of hurrying sapients of all kinds and sizes shuffles through the dark streets. The sun barely manages to pierce through the layer of buildings kilometres thick. The old man walks through the busy throngs, making his way over to the biggest and tallest building of them all. He shuffles into the street level entrance, his hand lighting up briefly while entering the dark building.
He separates from the main flow of sapients and enters a small elevator instead of the main elevation tubes that ferry sapients to the many, many floors above and below. The small cabin shoots downwards, the gravity repulsors working hard to reduce the crushing gravitational forces to a barely felt lurch. He steps out of the small box only seconds later, now many kilometres below the planet’s surface. Cramped hallways and rows of office cubicles greet the man. He walks through the main reception area for the building’s post room, hoping to avoid the daily ritual for once.
“Hey, it’s Solan! I was wondering what smelled. Go fetch me a dark glucose,” says one of the pretty reception sapients behind the large desk.
“Don’t be mean. He doesn’t smell that much today. Creme caff for me,” says a man covered in scales.
“You’re five seconds late. I’m withholding a full hour, and give me the usual,” an office door opens, and a suited sapient shouts at Solan.
Keeping the slight smile on his face, Solan immediately turns around in a practised manoeuvre and stands in the small elevator again. Another extremely short trip later, he exits and walks over to a kiosk in the building’s entrance. He waits a few minutes until it's his turn, quickly rattles off a large list of drinks, and waits until they are prepared by the many-tentacled worker. His hand flashes as he pays, and he’s barely able to carry the small tower of drinks as he returns to the elevator.
“Now you’re five minutes late. Two hours subtracted,” is the first thing Solan hears as he enters the post room reception again, his hands full with steaming or half frozen drinks. A small rush of people and absolutely no comments of thanks later, he is left with just a single cup. Solan then walks on, moving towards a small office that’s in the furthest and darkest corner of the floor. Ignored by everyone, he enters the nondescript room and sits in his office chair. A simple desk and a single screen are all the furnishings inside the small space. His face transforms from bullied serenity into a genuine smile as he relaxes.
“Let’s see how things are going then.” At his comment, the entire office blooms to life. Holographic panels appear from every single bit of empty wall and floor as the ceiling turns into a galactic map. Lists of holdings, market analytics, and loads of metadata become available to his old eyes. He spends the next few minutes keeping track of what happened throughout the night while he slept. His businesses are doing well, same for the new planetary mining operations he set up.
He also spares a few minutes to check on the job he is supposed to be doing. Some packages that arrive on this planet are not labelled correctly, and it's his job to find out their intended recipients. This is a rather tedious task, and the only reason it exists is because of some obscure and long forgotten regulation that was put in place ages ago by politicians forgotten in the acrid mists of time.
Had any of the condescending office people been present inside the small room, they would probably have fled in terror or just killed themselves right then and there. The readouts that Solan goes through with practised speed implies that a good fifth of the entire galaxy is in his hands. Then again, they likely would have dismissed it as a training simulator. Probably merely some sad attempt for a lowly office clerk to feel important.
Then Solan notices something odd. One of his long-term projects has come online years before scheduled. He taps the odd notification with an aged finger and looks at the summary. One of his anchors that he stored in a remote facility had become overrun with Histaff some time back. This, in and of itself, is not a problem; the Histaff cleaning crews would have gotten to the rim system before long. The fact that someone managed to open the storage pod prematurely is a problem.
Requesting the relevant data, he checks on the project to refresh his memory. Reading over the summary, he confirms that all is well. He then accesses the backup data of the module. Oddly enough, the system is still working even now. What’s even odder is that the current connection is still functioning but the amount of data being recovered is only a fraction of normal operation.
Now frowning - Solan never likes it when something or someone touches his toys - he opens the video feed. All screens in front of him vanish, and the small office turns into a dark, long-term storage unit. The perspective from which the video is recorded then stands up, bringing a sitting form into focus.
Solan’s eye twitches as he looks at the white and black spacesuit. There are a lot of things Solan has a begrudging kind of respect for, and the company called Berry is one of them. The way they employed a marketing campaign that stretched on for millennia is not that noteworthy. The fact that they managed to
convince the entire galaxy that wearing an expired nWear autoSuit is something even the scum of society doesn’t do is - in contrast - rather impressive. Even the old man hasn’t escaped their successful brainwashing campaign, the black stripes on the space suit making him immediately assume the small, sitting figure is truly trash.
Solan mutes the sound the moment he hears his perspective speaking. The woman is still the same even after all this time, he wryly thinks. Instead, he calls up the auto-transcribed subtitles on a screen to the side while filtering the irritating voice from the audio recording. The spacesuit-clad figure then stands, causing Solan to study the form. The spacesuit seems melted on one of the hands of the being while the other arm hangs loose and empty. The legs are also odd, the folds of cheap composite folding in weird ways as the being shuffles towards the door.
The next few scenes are kind of baffling to Solan. The fact that the woman he is viewing these events through is not immediately dissolved by the Histaff amalgamation is interesting but not unheard of. Solan tries a couple of filter options on the video formation, but nothing manages to penetrate the cheaply mass-produced spacesuit helmet. The only thing visible behind the reflective material are two blue pinpricks of light. He does study the bony hand in detail, realising that it’s the skeletal structure of a baseline human without any modifications. Although not super common nowadays, natural humans used to be the most recurring sapient in the universe at some point, so it’s not that unusual. The way the bones seem to hang in the air without any supporting structure or nanos is odd, though.
Solan is so captivated by the weird happenings playing out in front of him, that he forgets that he is supposed to be a low ranked clerk in the post room. Not a single person checks up on him as the rest of his colleagues go off to lunch. Not all the species working the office need to eat, but the planet’s bureaucracy has reached such levels that equal rights are enforced in spite of individual needs. So everyone, even the mechanical sapients, energy bound constructs, and higher dimensional beings, leave the office for their mandatory lunch break.
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