Chapter I - Sword and Shield
Posted: Mon Jun 03, 2013 3:28 am
December 2024
Thirty years without incident.
Not everyone kept a calendar or a countdown, but some people in Hope thought there was some amusement, or even some level of scientific interest, in keeping track of the length of the periods of slumber the local Nexus exuded. Some did it just for fun. For Mayor Wallace Doherty, this wasn't fun. It was a ritual sacrifice of sorts; another year of peace slain at the altar of mundane existence. Almost without fail, end-of-year celebrations tended to end with the local newscasters and personalities wishing everyone a happy new year, as well as another “good” one.
Implying, of course, that those years that saw new potential arise in previously mundane DNA and that allowed undead to stir and the Fae to cross the city's thresholds in greater numbers were somehow bad.
Generally, the Centennial Tree slept in full bursts. The previous one hadn't been disturbed by little hiccups or burps of power, but the last year had shown minute signs of increase in the city's via coverage. The Tree had been tossing and turning, in essence. The residents of the reservations outside of town, the descendents of the local Wampanoag, tended to think that the Tree was dreaming up new superhumans and singing lullabies to the sleeping vampires. The old shaman of legend, Samoset, had drawn on the region's pool of arcane energies to power the Buck family's curse. With the Tree asleep, the curse had lessened for the time being. Zeb Buck could hold onto more energy without needing to discharge excess levels, while Silas Robertson used peacetime as an occasion to work a pleasing mundane craft and pursue his own research in relative peace. The existing mages fell back onto theory and research, and for these three decades, the world belonged to the industrial and technological pioneers.
Thirty years. An entire lifetime for some, a ripple in the pool of Time to others. A lot had happened, no matter what your perspective was. Doherty had to contend with dragons, now, vampires and theriomorphs. Most of everyone still said Shape-shifter, but biology had shown that there were about forty different ways Nature and Magic had found to go from a humanoid form to an animal one. It was largely inaccurate, so people fell back onto individual labels. Words like selkie, mermaid, finperson, werewolf, werebear and many others.
Elysium and the Vienna Accords had changed everything. Before Matthias d'Aubignier and his shocking televized confession, however, there had been the dissolution of the Romanov line and the twilight of the British Empire. Even before the Strange and the Weird had stopped being weird and strange, there had been aliens and people whose souls were supported by mechanical constructs. No matter if the latest models employed cutting-edge robotics technologies and electronic assistance, people still called them Clanks. Clattering and pinging men and women of steel, iron, wood and copper who'd taken a plunge with the world's first commercially available shot at immortality.
Even in the most tranquil of all mundane years, there were callbacks to the Strange, the Weird. To whatever it was that Wallace's old colleagues couldn't face on their own. For a long while, frenzying vampires of the live persuasion couldn't be reasoned with. They were shot down; killed like rabid dogs. The mundane years did bring about the first few tentative forms of human augmentation, however, with powered suits first being developed. With the urging of the Karthian refugees, implants followed shortly thereafter. Neil Armstrong's year had been quickly shadowed by alien technology being allowed to bolster native progress. From the one small step for man to Armstrong Station, only twenty years had been necessary. Jim Morrisson hadn't even died that the International Space Station was up and running.
An entire lifetime.
Wallace's biggest surprise had been finding people who could relate with his sense of time, even if their age numbered in the thousands of years. Old Faustus, who still insisted on being called Cordatus, had been able to look at the first trip to Gilese with that long, knowing, and yet completely amazed look he himself so often had when considering the world. The old dragon could look at Challenger blowing up and shake his head, the high count of his years seemingly meaning nothing to his poignant sense of humanity. For every immortal that confirmed all the stereotypes about power-players and pathological schemers, he'd found there were dozens who went through their eternities one day at a time. People who would live to maybe see the next phase in continental drift but who still cursed in the morning, when their alarm clock didn't go off on time and left them scrambling to reach their train.
In some ways, Gregory Rendell could be credited for bringing about a rebirth of sorts. Before Elysium, technological and social developments had slowed to a crawl. The Russians had given up everything they had. Every scrap of tech, every technique. In the end, Earth's newest batch of refugees – the Drifters – would end up providing more than last-minute offensive power and defensive capabilities. Their disparate and slap-dash technical know-how quickened Terran industry, nearly calcified hydroponic, engineering and cybernetics knowledge bases plundered for all their worth by hungry – nay, starving – minds who still had so many problems to solve...
Deserts bloomed in these thirty years. Shantytowns turned into corporate campuses for the lifelong employees of the Indian and Taiwanese subsidiaries of the world's largest powers in biotech. Habitats that were considered lost began to see hope once more. Ion seeding and geothermal management had both been used to keep Paradise's forests growing, and on Earth, they turned the blasted wastes of Gobi and Atacama into a faint shade of green. Floating neighbourhoods became moored to the shores of places like San Francisco and the Japanese coast; the Jewel of the Yangtze saw other cities being raised from nothing along the river's streams. The largest holes in the ozone layer were healed.
If you talked to certain people, you had the sense that the world had evolved in a pleasantly slow manner, two hundred years ago. There used to be a time where the strangest thing you could expect to see involved a flotilla of balloon-assisted air carriers or maybe spring-operated machines shaped like men – but now, everything could be changed. The genetic code could he rearranged and rewritten the way a clumsy novelist's botched attempt could be hacked apart, and DNA itself now resided in thumb drivers that could double as heavy-load content servers. From 2015 to 2022, the computing industry had gone past the terabyte mark and released teraflop hard drives. There was so much data to the Web that this non-space had almost turned organic – alive, in a sense. Content was pushed to you even before you'd decide whatever it was you desired. There was a genie in the Web's bottle, so to speak, and many were advocating for the right to research this further. Twenty years ago, the Web had been a space where his cousins' children browsed for memes and cat pictures. Now it was an information-based sludge made up of the absolute best and worst of Humanity's total creative and intellectual endeavours. A protein soup made up of ones and zeroes, quickned into shape with every search query, every added page, every message sent and email received.
Throughout all of this, however, Wallace remembered one of the pillars of the Fae community expressing concern. Sir Percival of Evergloam sensed tension in the night air, some dark undercurrent that ran in the wake of all the enthusiasm, the hopes and dreams, the opportunities of migrant workers turning into native and appreciated taxpayers and idea merchants.
Some said the Fae would one day be freed of the Bane. Others said Humanity would soon be free to exist in an emancipated state, freed of all the needs and wants of the mortal condition. Implants would soon eliminate hunger, banish thirst and death, heal wounds faster than they could be created – or so Raymond Kurzweil's disciples thought.
The concept of the Universal Constructor was partly a Karthian and human one – a man or woman with the power to reshape the entire world according to their unique whims. A man-made god in flesh and blood. Some people saw this technologically prophesized being coming in the near future, others pushed it into the far-flung future of Earth existing as merely one planet across a galaxy-spanning empire.
The One Percent now counted vampires and dragons in its midst, even with the restrictive measures put in place by the Accords. Greedy bankers never quite learning from the past crashes, the industry attempted to feed off these millennial fortunes. The middle and lower classes were left eating crow in the housing department. Retirement packages became worthless. Understandably, people lashed out. Anonymous now routinely tried to bring down places like Tanner and Associates and Wyvern Securities. If you were antediluvian, rich, powerful and influential, people hated you and sometimes went as far as to try and kill you.
The people Wallace had spent his years defending and representing occasionally suffered for it. They also sometimes benefited from it. Not every immortal was a craven bastard out to acquire more for the sake of having more. Hope would come to know of a few cases like this – immortals with a fortune in compassion and millions in acquired gratitude.
Still, for every silver lining, the dark clouds still loomed overhead. Hope's own Viscount looked back to the mainland the way only he could, peering back into Faerie while still being in the mortal plane. Over there, across the Hillard, an inky and cold blackness amassed behind the watchtowers. Mab's forces were on the move, and Lady Eirean could sense that the world's trepidation wasn't just giddy hope for the future given flesh and blood – it was an unconscious act of preparedness. The city's arcane immune system was coaxing the right minds along, Sophia being the only one privy to the surges of gentle urging and concern ebbing and flowing from the Tree's roots. It knew what was coming, and it was sending its silent voice out through via and inspiration. To the mayor, that tension and that sense of urgency were both difficult to ignore.
There was only one question remaining in the minds of most of those who were concerned.
When would the Tree awaken?
* * *
May 3rd, 2025
“Alvarez, six o' clock! SIX O' CLOCK, AL; SIX!”
No answer, except the sound of his own bullets ripping into flesh that was impossibly located right behind him. He'd aimed at the bearded and blind Afghan man, only to find that his bullets went nowhere. Nowhere, it turned out, except right around him and into Carlos Alvarez's vest, pushed into a speed sufficient to treat the suit's Kevlar like cheesecloth.
Heat. Sunlight. The odd, wavering shadows of some of the empty-eyed villagers. The gaping maw of the hillside caverns. Rocks and dust and orange-red soil. Blood. Fluids that were too dark to be blood, too. He faintly recalled one of the villagers bleeding green, crème de menthe spilling out onto the sand.
Anger and fear seizing him in an iron grasp. His lungs are seized and he sees red. The old man's boulder is stopped and hurled back at him as he screams at the top of his lungs. Blood gushes out of his nostrils and his head pounds like a marching band. Akira. He briefly remembers a Japanese animated movie he'd seen as a kid; Tetsuo's power twisting him, his arm turning monstrous.
In the dream, Aidan reaches for the back of his head as a soft, squishing sound follows the sensation of ripping flesh. A spider made out of brain matter scuttles down onto the back of his hand, tiny human eyes on top of stalks looking out to him. A voice buzzes in his head, but he can't make out what it says. All he knows is he is afraid. Terrified. If he doesn't scream now, if he doesn't breathe now, he'll die.
If he doesn't -
The shrill beeps of the alarm clock put an end to terror and rob him of the chance to scream. He's never gone that far, but it doesn't stop Aidan Drake from drenching his covers in sweat. He feels a dull throb at the base of his neck that spiders out into the crevices at the front of his mind. Dehydrated again.
7:30 AM. There's work to be done. Aidan scuttles downstairs quick as can be, not even sparing a quick hello to his sister and parents. The thirst comes first. A water bottle is snagged as Dawn Drake drops French toast into Sarah's plate, giving her eldest a look of concern.
“You having those dreams again?
- Ugh, yeah. It's probably nothing. Gus dragged me out for a pizza slice after our shift yesterday, and he figured he'd make a malt shake out of it, too. Vanilla and peperroni just don't mix, but it's not like he gives a shit, right? He's a Clank.
- He could still think he's got a stomach ache,” suggested Aidan's mother. “I kinda agree, though; it's not exactly fair. I mean, I have to tough it out at the health club four times a week just to fight back our hamburger nights on Fridays, and you've got folks with brass bellies who just pig out until their ghost of a liver decides it's had enough. When it does.”
Sarah looked up from her tablet and briefly wrinkled her nose. “Don't be too harsh on Aidan's boss, mom. If anything, the only thing his being a Clank means is the city saves on one retirement plan. Gus basically is a walking hedge trimmer, so there's like, zero upkeep needed. It's not like his armature was designed with all the lifelike bells and whistles. Plus, Goliath redoes whatever parts he'd break on the cheap. If he can't pay for that, it isn't like we don't all know someone with a Maker Bot and some molten plastic, right?
- Right. Like that Olsen boy? The one who made you that torus paperweight two years ago?”
Sarah grimaced lightly. “Uh, yeah. I mean, he was kinda nice but – you've got Karthians in your classes, right, mom?
- I do,” agreed Dawn,“but the purebloods aren't really subscribing for the sake of exploring their bodies or natural inclinations towards dance or gymnastics. They're all more interested in the kinetics of it all, how force and inertia are transferred from limb to limb while you're moving. They don't see choreographies as things that have meaning, they're things that have to be maximized, tailored to carry the maximum impact in the smallest time frame.”
Gavin looked up from his newspaper feed. “So, no Grayskin Billy Elliots, I take it?”
That seemed to brighten Aidan's mood a bit, enough for him to laugh aloud. The idea of a dancing Karthian practically didn't make sense. Practically. Three remembered his father talking about a fundraiser from a few years back in which he'd operated as a security consultant. Anastasius Romanov had surprised just about no-one with how he'd monopolized the Greenvale's dance floor during a tango routine, taking the comparatively small Eirean McHale into a surprisingly well executed routine. Maybe being able to feel was somehow a requirement – being able to process beats as something more than measures to be matched with movements from the body.
The son looked to his father after guzzling his bottle of spring water. “What's up for today, dad?
- Nothing much,” replied Gavin, “Tomorrow's going to be the week's motherlode. I'm reviewing plans for the collection's unveiling at the Firebird with Nigel today, going over transportation arrangements with WySec's guys. If I come back looking pissed off, that's because Spearhead's going to be my vis-à-vis.”
Gavin sighed. “I hate that guy.
- Why?
- As much good as he's done for the Chimeras with the Governor, that guy has a stick in his ass something fierce. The Elysium freaks coded him so he'd be all about pride and honor and righteousness and all that crap, when he isn't much more than a security guy for some kind of – militarized financial investment portfolio with claws and scales who goes against any schmoe with two centuries over the statistical average.”
Three shrugged. “Yeah, mister Griffin's talked about him, but he seemed pretty confident.
- Sure, he would,” replied Gavin, a bit of a sarcastic and vaguely fond smile playing on his lips. “I mean, he's been my boss for the last thirteen years, for one. Second, the guy's freaking invisible. Hong Kong's old Spec Ops Aug nutcases could raid Grif's office like it's Elysium all over again that they wouldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
- I thought he couldn't cheat thermoptics,” replied Aidan with a frown, taking his father's joke too literally. That prompted a loving scoff and an eye roll from his father. The point obviously was that there wasn't much Spearhead would be able to do to the Drake family's main source of income, no matter if his high-strung sensibilities took offence at the idea of collaborating with a former thief.
An angel passed. “You sure you don't want me to give Nigel a call, Aid? I could get you to keep an eye on the techs in one of the divisions, you know. The pay's good and you'd give Grif a good impression. Considering how Command shafted you, I think you should try and garnish your resume pretty quickly. You're not that same fresh-faced young twentysomething that left home for some hellhole. A track record like yours looks sketchy once you hit thirty without much in the way of previous job experiences-”
Three rolled his eyes and grunted. “I told you Dad, I'm fed up of being someone else's watch dog. I was for a full tour of duty and that's it. I'm done. I'm back in college starting September, I've got this landscaping thing going on even though yes, the boss hates my fucking ass, and I'm not laying about around the house like back when most of the shit went down in the press. House arrest, this is not.
- Well, you kept talking about finding a chance to prove the world wrong. I'm giving you one. You're being remembered for a tour of duty in Afghanistan, kid. Do you really think burying yourself in seeds and fertilizer and talking sports and literature with the local dryad is really going to change that? You're turtling. You need to pick something solid, son. Something decisive. The city won't forgive you – unlike us – if you don't try and live up to your claims of innocence by doing something right.”
That seemed to light dark little fires in Three's eyes. “So it's about forgiveness, now? I have to crawl on my belly and lick Nigel's feet so the country thinks I'm not some dodgy freak who jumped sideways when the train to Chimera Row came calling?! Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad! This is exactly why I'd rather plant ferns with a boozy old Clank who spends half his shifts asleep in the minivan. This is exactly why I'd rather survive right past minimum wage and not give Andrew Maley the esteemed honor of pasting my face on another edition by virtue of staying off the social grid. This is exactly why I'd rather fade into your average mass of college kids and baby mages!”
Sarah tensed as she ate her French toast. “Yay, morning funtimes at Swiss Family Drake...” she muttered, deciding she'd better stare at her congealing blobs of maple syrup than risk looking at her brother.
Three shook his head. “Forget it, you never really understood, anyway.”
That made Gavin sputter and look well and truly away from his newspaper, eyes wide. “How the Hell am I supposed to understand my son sprouting TK abilities while on a Kabul tour, huh?! How am I supposed to understand that you lifted a five hundred-pound boulder with your mind and that you crushed some old guy with it because he was driving your entire squad insane? You could have come up with a dozen explanations about those scars on your neck that would have made sense! You could tell the truth-!”
Three's hairs stood up almost literally. His forearms produced little pops of audible static electricity – and everyone's plates, utensils and dispensed foods very gently rose off from the table. Anger and frustration rolled off of him in waves, the metal utensils soon quivering ominously for all of five seconds...
A single pearl of blood peeked out from one of Three's nostrils, only to be sniffed back in. That marked the end of the TK display. Everything clattered back against the table in a noisy and slightly messy manner.
Three's voice was white by now. Tired, emotionally exhausted. “How many times will I need to tell you, Dad? I'm telling the truth. Every day and all damn day, for every second since I've been back here – I'm telling the fucking truth. You've seen the shrink reports and the tests. You've seen it all. I'm sane, Dad. I'm sane, and I'd rather be batshit crazy than have to endure another day like this. But I keep going. How, I don't even fucking know. I just do.”
He transferred his eyes to Dawn. “Don't bother packing breakfast for me, I'll hit some donut spot with Gus.”
He stormed back upstairs, presumably to get changed in the green jumpsuit his job required.
Precinct 24
The buzzing sounds of the recharging module's Jacob's Ladder could be heard in the room located farthest from the cell blocks. Inside, Mike Callahan was plugged in, his head lightly shaking as his consciousness emerged from the night's sleep. As his sleek and slightly scratched metal eyelids parted, the buzzing stopped.
He was a Tesla Clank, assembled in the thirties after Alfonzo Bizzi's last living heist. He'd had the honor of landing the killing blow that had ended the career of the Sicilian capo's reign, with the cost of his own life. Thinking back on his re-emergence and rehab, it was hard for him not to think of Archibald Holden, who'd more or less been the go-to Clank for any and all new armature owners.
He'd been a Mickey, much like everyone else from Renton who'd grown up in Jimmy Winters' shadow. Where his playmates and classmates gyrated around the elderly practitioner, he'd always preferred the safety of having a badge. Winters' boys sometimes landed tough talk about how all Sons of Erin had to stick together, but Michael hadn't been brought up to think of his background's storied famines and historically significant sufferings as an excuse to defy the law. He wasn't dumb, either. The HPD had needed someone with personal connections “on the inside”, but he'd proved to be too much of a cop to be suited for undercover work. If anything, his Irish temperament had made one Hell of a stubborn cop out of him.
After dying, he'd spent weeks heckling Seamus Mac Loch, getting the water dragon to understand that he wasn't ready to stop just yet. He'd fallen in love with the beat, the occasional peals of danger and the pleasant evenings spent slurping coffee with honest folk. In the end, Mertown's captain had needed to hire a Diviner to make sure that Renton's best cop in the midst of the Roaring Twenties and Thirties was really at the other end of the line, and that he was up for what was ahead.
Impatient, Mike had retorted by driving all of the typewriters in Mertown's police station crazy, all of them typing YES over and over. You could say he couldn't have been faulted for being unclear as a ghost.
From the bony and freckled face he'd shown and the arrogant shock of red hair, he found himself looking at an Art Deco cousin to Archie's armature in the mirror. He was all polished steel and chrome now, with Leyendecker-worthy facial features and tighter facial joints that left his expressions flowing faster and with more precision than what the celebrated British Clank could produce. From the browns and greens he'd worn as a member of the living, blacks, charcoals, slate greys, reds and blacks now made up most of his wardrobe, the perfectly sculpted suggestion of parted hair always perfectly peeking out from underneath his carefully angled fedora. He was literally the only cop in town who could still get away with two-tone dress shoes and zoot suits – and he never failed to make the most of it.
He stuck closer to the criminal underworld than most other DTs, to the point where he'd insisted for his recharging station to be set down in the basement, near the pokeys – as he still called them. The useful part of it all was that three nights out of five, he fell asleep to the conspiratorial whispers of the schmoes in Lockup, which sometimes allowed him to pick up a few interesting tidbits. What was troubling, lately, was how the Commission didn't seem to be aware of what its smaller members were doing. Goons and previously laid-back muscle who'd lacked ambition were negotiating the purchase and sale of various Fae and terrestrial artifacts, accumulating impressive power stores little by little.
He wasn't a mage, but he knew that even the smallest amounts of stored via could eventually amount to a lot. A magicked thimble here, taken from Evangeline Buck's former belongings. An old set of Amazo's cufflinks, soaked through with residual arcane power there. Shoes that once had belonged to the Voice, Hope's celebrated gentleman thief.
Individually, these objects amounted to nothing. Move trinkets around in sufficient volumes, however, and a picture starts to form. Someone is requiring power for the express purpose of selling it back. He'd been on the case for three weeks, now, and still had no idea who that might be. With some of the elements from Nigel Griffin's Mirror Gallery being exposed at the Firebird – essentially out in public – for the first time in decades, he was convinced the perps would try and seize this golden opportunity. The Voice had stolen dangerous artifacts from contentious would-be practitioners several times before, already. Some had been entrusted to Amazo's Shadow Gallery, others had been kept with the invisible man's own stash.
He'd gone over half of the collection, last night, before his battery alarm and his own sense of tiredness had driven him back downstairs. All he knew is that Wyvern had been tapped for security and that Griffin had one of his own men he could depend on. Gavin Drake, a former USMC Major, had recycled himself as a security consultant after retiring. The guy looked solid, that much was obvious. Family man, storied ties to the city – the Drakes were maybe one or two marriages short of belonging in with the Winters gang, but their heritage had always been more Norse than Irish.
They were Celts, that much was obvious, but not in the same sense that Mike had Celtic roots. He was Irish; the Drakes had more in common with the Picts that had once existed on the other side of Hadrian's Wall. They'd followed along during the Potato Famine, but alleigiances to the Isle or to Albion meant nothing to them. The Drakes were loyal to wherever their home stood, and their home had been Hope for the last five generations.
Of course, there was one recent blemish in the family tree. Aidan, troubled son of Gavin Drake, who'd come back from a stint in Afghanistan with tall tales that would have made him salivate if he'd still been a teenager reading Weird Tales compulsively. The kid was surviving, not exactly looking to maximize his resume – could he have snapped and figured out that petty theft was a good way to ply the skills he'd learned? If that was an angle Mike intended to pursue, a lot of ground work still had to be done. The locals still liked to tsk whenever the Drake boy was brought up as a conversation piece, but the fact was that no tangible evidence had ever been brought up to suggest homicidal or criminal behavior.
The Clank nodded hello to a few other plainclothes officers and headed for the coffee maker. Nope, this was just another case of the shoe fitting eerily well even if it hadn't ever been worn...
Thirty years without incident.
Not everyone kept a calendar or a countdown, but some people in Hope thought there was some amusement, or even some level of scientific interest, in keeping track of the length of the periods of slumber the local Nexus exuded. Some did it just for fun. For Mayor Wallace Doherty, this wasn't fun. It was a ritual sacrifice of sorts; another year of peace slain at the altar of mundane existence. Almost without fail, end-of-year celebrations tended to end with the local newscasters and personalities wishing everyone a happy new year, as well as another “good” one.
Implying, of course, that those years that saw new potential arise in previously mundane DNA and that allowed undead to stir and the Fae to cross the city's thresholds in greater numbers were somehow bad.
Generally, the Centennial Tree slept in full bursts. The previous one hadn't been disturbed by little hiccups or burps of power, but the last year had shown minute signs of increase in the city's via coverage. The Tree had been tossing and turning, in essence. The residents of the reservations outside of town, the descendents of the local Wampanoag, tended to think that the Tree was dreaming up new superhumans and singing lullabies to the sleeping vampires. The old shaman of legend, Samoset, had drawn on the region's pool of arcane energies to power the Buck family's curse. With the Tree asleep, the curse had lessened for the time being. Zeb Buck could hold onto more energy without needing to discharge excess levels, while Silas Robertson used peacetime as an occasion to work a pleasing mundane craft and pursue his own research in relative peace. The existing mages fell back onto theory and research, and for these three decades, the world belonged to the industrial and technological pioneers.
Thirty years. An entire lifetime for some, a ripple in the pool of Time to others. A lot had happened, no matter what your perspective was. Doherty had to contend with dragons, now, vampires and theriomorphs. Most of everyone still said Shape-shifter, but biology had shown that there were about forty different ways Nature and Magic had found to go from a humanoid form to an animal one. It was largely inaccurate, so people fell back onto individual labels. Words like selkie, mermaid, finperson, werewolf, werebear and many others.
Elysium and the Vienna Accords had changed everything. Before Matthias d'Aubignier and his shocking televized confession, however, there had been the dissolution of the Romanov line and the twilight of the British Empire. Even before the Strange and the Weird had stopped being weird and strange, there had been aliens and people whose souls were supported by mechanical constructs. No matter if the latest models employed cutting-edge robotics technologies and electronic assistance, people still called them Clanks. Clattering and pinging men and women of steel, iron, wood and copper who'd taken a plunge with the world's first commercially available shot at immortality.
Even in the most tranquil of all mundane years, there were callbacks to the Strange, the Weird. To whatever it was that Wallace's old colleagues couldn't face on their own. For a long while, frenzying vampires of the live persuasion couldn't be reasoned with. They were shot down; killed like rabid dogs. The mundane years did bring about the first few tentative forms of human augmentation, however, with powered suits first being developed. With the urging of the Karthian refugees, implants followed shortly thereafter. Neil Armstrong's year had been quickly shadowed by alien technology being allowed to bolster native progress. From the one small step for man to Armstrong Station, only twenty years had been necessary. Jim Morrisson hadn't even died that the International Space Station was up and running.
An entire lifetime.
Wallace's biggest surprise had been finding people who could relate with his sense of time, even if their age numbered in the thousands of years. Old Faustus, who still insisted on being called Cordatus, had been able to look at the first trip to Gilese with that long, knowing, and yet completely amazed look he himself so often had when considering the world. The old dragon could look at Challenger blowing up and shake his head, the high count of his years seemingly meaning nothing to his poignant sense of humanity. For every immortal that confirmed all the stereotypes about power-players and pathological schemers, he'd found there were dozens who went through their eternities one day at a time. People who would live to maybe see the next phase in continental drift but who still cursed in the morning, when their alarm clock didn't go off on time and left them scrambling to reach their train.
In some ways, Gregory Rendell could be credited for bringing about a rebirth of sorts. Before Elysium, technological and social developments had slowed to a crawl. The Russians had given up everything they had. Every scrap of tech, every technique. In the end, Earth's newest batch of refugees – the Drifters – would end up providing more than last-minute offensive power and defensive capabilities. Their disparate and slap-dash technical know-how quickened Terran industry, nearly calcified hydroponic, engineering and cybernetics knowledge bases plundered for all their worth by hungry – nay, starving – minds who still had so many problems to solve...
Deserts bloomed in these thirty years. Shantytowns turned into corporate campuses for the lifelong employees of the Indian and Taiwanese subsidiaries of the world's largest powers in biotech. Habitats that were considered lost began to see hope once more. Ion seeding and geothermal management had both been used to keep Paradise's forests growing, and on Earth, they turned the blasted wastes of Gobi and Atacama into a faint shade of green. Floating neighbourhoods became moored to the shores of places like San Francisco and the Japanese coast; the Jewel of the Yangtze saw other cities being raised from nothing along the river's streams. The largest holes in the ozone layer were healed.
If you talked to certain people, you had the sense that the world had evolved in a pleasantly slow manner, two hundred years ago. There used to be a time where the strangest thing you could expect to see involved a flotilla of balloon-assisted air carriers or maybe spring-operated machines shaped like men – but now, everything could be changed. The genetic code could he rearranged and rewritten the way a clumsy novelist's botched attempt could be hacked apart, and DNA itself now resided in thumb drivers that could double as heavy-load content servers. From 2015 to 2022, the computing industry had gone past the terabyte mark and released teraflop hard drives. There was so much data to the Web that this non-space had almost turned organic – alive, in a sense. Content was pushed to you even before you'd decide whatever it was you desired. There was a genie in the Web's bottle, so to speak, and many were advocating for the right to research this further. Twenty years ago, the Web had been a space where his cousins' children browsed for memes and cat pictures. Now it was an information-based sludge made up of the absolute best and worst of Humanity's total creative and intellectual endeavours. A protein soup made up of ones and zeroes, quickned into shape with every search query, every added page, every message sent and email received.
Throughout all of this, however, Wallace remembered one of the pillars of the Fae community expressing concern. Sir Percival of Evergloam sensed tension in the night air, some dark undercurrent that ran in the wake of all the enthusiasm, the hopes and dreams, the opportunities of migrant workers turning into native and appreciated taxpayers and idea merchants.
Some said the Fae would one day be freed of the Bane. Others said Humanity would soon be free to exist in an emancipated state, freed of all the needs and wants of the mortal condition. Implants would soon eliminate hunger, banish thirst and death, heal wounds faster than they could be created – or so Raymond Kurzweil's disciples thought.
The concept of the Universal Constructor was partly a Karthian and human one – a man or woman with the power to reshape the entire world according to their unique whims. A man-made god in flesh and blood. Some people saw this technologically prophesized being coming in the near future, others pushed it into the far-flung future of Earth existing as merely one planet across a galaxy-spanning empire.
The One Percent now counted vampires and dragons in its midst, even with the restrictive measures put in place by the Accords. Greedy bankers never quite learning from the past crashes, the industry attempted to feed off these millennial fortunes. The middle and lower classes were left eating crow in the housing department. Retirement packages became worthless. Understandably, people lashed out. Anonymous now routinely tried to bring down places like Tanner and Associates and Wyvern Securities. If you were antediluvian, rich, powerful and influential, people hated you and sometimes went as far as to try and kill you.
The people Wallace had spent his years defending and representing occasionally suffered for it. They also sometimes benefited from it. Not every immortal was a craven bastard out to acquire more for the sake of having more. Hope would come to know of a few cases like this – immortals with a fortune in compassion and millions in acquired gratitude.
Still, for every silver lining, the dark clouds still loomed overhead. Hope's own Viscount looked back to the mainland the way only he could, peering back into Faerie while still being in the mortal plane. Over there, across the Hillard, an inky and cold blackness amassed behind the watchtowers. Mab's forces were on the move, and Lady Eirean could sense that the world's trepidation wasn't just giddy hope for the future given flesh and blood – it was an unconscious act of preparedness. The city's arcane immune system was coaxing the right minds along, Sophia being the only one privy to the surges of gentle urging and concern ebbing and flowing from the Tree's roots. It knew what was coming, and it was sending its silent voice out through via and inspiration. To the mayor, that tension and that sense of urgency were both difficult to ignore.
There was only one question remaining in the minds of most of those who were concerned.
When would the Tree awaken?
* * *
May 3rd, 2025
“Alvarez, six o' clock! SIX O' CLOCK, AL; SIX!”
No answer, except the sound of his own bullets ripping into flesh that was impossibly located right behind him. He'd aimed at the bearded and blind Afghan man, only to find that his bullets went nowhere. Nowhere, it turned out, except right around him and into Carlos Alvarez's vest, pushed into a speed sufficient to treat the suit's Kevlar like cheesecloth.
Heat. Sunlight. The odd, wavering shadows of some of the empty-eyed villagers. The gaping maw of the hillside caverns. Rocks and dust and orange-red soil. Blood. Fluids that were too dark to be blood, too. He faintly recalled one of the villagers bleeding green, crème de menthe spilling out onto the sand.
Anger and fear seizing him in an iron grasp. His lungs are seized and he sees red. The old man's boulder is stopped and hurled back at him as he screams at the top of his lungs. Blood gushes out of his nostrils and his head pounds like a marching band. Akira. He briefly remembers a Japanese animated movie he'd seen as a kid; Tetsuo's power twisting him, his arm turning monstrous.
In the dream, Aidan reaches for the back of his head as a soft, squishing sound follows the sensation of ripping flesh. A spider made out of brain matter scuttles down onto the back of his hand, tiny human eyes on top of stalks looking out to him. A voice buzzes in his head, but he can't make out what it says. All he knows is he is afraid. Terrified. If he doesn't scream now, if he doesn't breathe now, he'll die.
If he doesn't -
The shrill beeps of the alarm clock put an end to terror and rob him of the chance to scream. He's never gone that far, but it doesn't stop Aidan Drake from drenching his covers in sweat. He feels a dull throb at the base of his neck that spiders out into the crevices at the front of his mind. Dehydrated again.
7:30 AM. There's work to be done. Aidan scuttles downstairs quick as can be, not even sparing a quick hello to his sister and parents. The thirst comes first. A water bottle is snagged as Dawn Drake drops French toast into Sarah's plate, giving her eldest a look of concern.
“You having those dreams again?
- Ugh, yeah. It's probably nothing. Gus dragged me out for a pizza slice after our shift yesterday, and he figured he'd make a malt shake out of it, too. Vanilla and peperroni just don't mix, but it's not like he gives a shit, right? He's a Clank.
- He could still think he's got a stomach ache,” suggested Aidan's mother. “I kinda agree, though; it's not exactly fair. I mean, I have to tough it out at the health club four times a week just to fight back our hamburger nights on Fridays, and you've got folks with brass bellies who just pig out until their ghost of a liver decides it's had enough. When it does.”
Sarah looked up from her tablet and briefly wrinkled her nose. “Don't be too harsh on Aidan's boss, mom. If anything, the only thing his being a Clank means is the city saves on one retirement plan. Gus basically is a walking hedge trimmer, so there's like, zero upkeep needed. It's not like his armature was designed with all the lifelike bells and whistles. Plus, Goliath redoes whatever parts he'd break on the cheap. If he can't pay for that, it isn't like we don't all know someone with a Maker Bot and some molten plastic, right?
- Right. Like that Olsen boy? The one who made you that torus paperweight two years ago?”
Sarah grimaced lightly. “Uh, yeah. I mean, he was kinda nice but – you've got Karthians in your classes, right, mom?
- I do,” agreed Dawn,“but the purebloods aren't really subscribing for the sake of exploring their bodies or natural inclinations towards dance or gymnastics. They're all more interested in the kinetics of it all, how force and inertia are transferred from limb to limb while you're moving. They don't see choreographies as things that have meaning, they're things that have to be maximized, tailored to carry the maximum impact in the smallest time frame.”
Gavin looked up from his newspaper feed. “So, no Grayskin Billy Elliots, I take it?”
That seemed to brighten Aidan's mood a bit, enough for him to laugh aloud. The idea of a dancing Karthian practically didn't make sense. Practically. Three remembered his father talking about a fundraiser from a few years back in which he'd operated as a security consultant. Anastasius Romanov had surprised just about no-one with how he'd monopolized the Greenvale's dance floor during a tango routine, taking the comparatively small Eirean McHale into a surprisingly well executed routine. Maybe being able to feel was somehow a requirement – being able to process beats as something more than measures to be matched with movements from the body.
The son looked to his father after guzzling his bottle of spring water. “What's up for today, dad?
- Nothing much,” replied Gavin, “Tomorrow's going to be the week's motherlode. I'm reviewing plans for the collection's unveiling at the Firebird with Nigel today, going over transportation arrangements with WySec's guys. If I come back looking pissed off, that's because Spearhead's going to be my vis-à-vis.”
Gavin sighed. “I hate that guy.
- Why?
- As much good as he's done for the Chimeras with the Governor, that guy has a stick in his ass something fierce. The Elysium freaks coded him so he'd be all about pride and honor and righteousness and all that crap, when he isn't much more than a security guy for some kind of – militarized financial investment portfolio with claws and scales who goes against any schmoe with two centuries over the statistical average.”
Three shrugged. “Yeah, mister Griffin's talked about him, but he seemed pretty confident.
- Sure, he would,” replied Gavin, a bit of a sarcastic and vaguely fond smile playing on his lips. “I mean, he's been my boss for the last thirteen years, for one. Second, the guy's freaking invisible. Hong Kong's old Spec Ops Aug nutcases could raid Grif's office like it's Elysium all over again that they wouldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
- I thought he couldn't cheat thermoptics,” replied Aidan with a frown, taking his father's joke too literally. That prompted a loving scoff and an eye roll from his father. The point obviously was that there wasn't much Spearhead would be able to do to the Drake family's main source of income, no matter if his high-strung sensibilities took offence at the idea of collaborating with a former thief.
An angel passed. “You sure you don't want me to give Nigel a call, Aid? I could get you to keep an eye on the techs in one of the divisions, you know. The pay's good and you'd give Grif a good impression. Considering how Command shafted you, I think you should try and garnish your resume pretty quickly. You're not that same fresh-faced young twentysomething that left home for some hellhole. A track record like yours looks sketchy once you hit thirty without much in the way of previous job experiences-”
Three rolled his eyes and grunted. “I told you Dad, I'm fed up of being someone else's watch dog. I was for a full tour of duty and that's it. I'm done. I'm back in college starting September, I've got this landscaping thing going on even though yes, the boss hates my fucking ass, and I'm not laying about around the house like back when most of the shit went down in the press. House arrest, this is not.
- Well, you kept talking about finding a chance to prove the world wrong. I'm giving you one. You're being remembered for a tour of duty in Afghanistan, kid. Do you really think burying yourself in seeds and fertilizer and talking sports and literature with the local dryad is really going to change that? You're turtling. You need to pick something solid, son. Something decisive. The city won't forgive you – unlike us – if you don't try and live up to your claims of innocence by doing something right.”
That seemed to light dark little fires in Three's eyes. “So it's about forgiveness, now? I have to crawl on my belly and lick Nigel's feet so the country thinks I'm not some dodgy freak who jumped sideways when the train to Chimera Row came calling?! Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad! This is exactly why I'd rather plant ferns with a boozy old Clank who spends half his shifts asleep in the minivan. This is exactly why I'd rather survive right past minimum wage and not give Andrew Maley the esteemed honor of pasting my face on another edition by virtue of staying off the social grid. This is exactly why I'd rather fade into your average mass of college kids and baby mages!”
Sarah tensed as she ate her French toast. “Yay, morning funtimes at Swiss Family Drake...” she muttered, deciding she'd better stare at her congealing blobs of maple syrup than risk looking at her brother.
Three shook his head. “Forget it, you never really understood, anyway.”
That made Gavin sputter and look well and truly away from his newspaper, eyes wide. “How the Hell am I supposed to understand my son sprouting TK abilities while on a Kabul tour, huh?! How am I supposed to understand that you lifted a five hundred-pound boulder with your mind and that you crushed some old guy with it because he was driving your entire squad insane? You could have come up with a dozen explanations about those scars on your neck that would have made sense! You could tell the truth-!”
Three's hairs stood up almost literally. His forearms produced little pops of audible static electricity – and everyone's plates, utensils and dispensed foods very gently rose off from the table. Anger and frustration rolled off of him in waves, the metal utensils soon quivering ominously for all of five seconds...
A single pearl of blood peeked out from one of Three's nostrils, only to be sniffed back in. That marked the end of the TK display. Everything clattered back against the table in a noisy and slightly messy manner.
Three's voice was white by now. Tired, emotionally exhausted. “How many times will I need to tell you, Dad? I'm telling the truth. Every day and all damn day, for every second since I've been back here – I'm telling the fucking truth. You've seen the shrink reports and the tests. You've seen it all. I'm sane, Dad. I'm sane, and I'd rather be batshit crazy than have to endure another day like this. But I keep going. How, I don't even fucking know. I just do.”
He transferred his eyes to Dawn. “Don't bother packing breakfast for me, I'll hit some donut spot with Gus.”
He stormed back upstairs, presumably to get changed in the green jumpsuit his job required.
Precinct 24
The buzzing sounds of the recharging module's Jacob's Ladder could be heard in the room located farthest from the cell blocks. Inside, Mike Callahan was plugged in, his head lightly shaking as his consciousness emerged from the night's sleep. As his sleek and slightly scratched metal eyelids parted, the buzzing stopped.
He was a Tesla Clank, assembled in the thirties after Alfonzo Bizzi's last living heist. He'd had the honor of landing the killing blow that had ended the career of the Sicilian capo's reign, with the cost of his own life. Thinking back on his re-emergence and rehab, it was hard for him not to think of Archibald Holden, who'd more or less been the go-to Clank for any and all new armature owners.
He'd been a Mickey, much like everyone else from Renton who'd grown up in Jimmy Winters' shadow. Where his playmates and classmates gyrated around the elderly practitioner, he'd always preferred the safety of having a badge. Winters' boys sometimes landed tough talk about how all Sons of Erin had to stick together, but Michael hadn't been brought up to think of his background's storied famines and historically significant sufferings as an excuse to defy the law. He wasn't dumb, either. The HPD had needed someone with personal connections “on the inside”, but he'd proved to be too much of a cop to be suited for undercover work. If anything, his Irish temperament had made one Hell of a stubborn cop out of him.
After dying, he'd spent weeks heckling Seamus Mac Loch, getting the water dragon to understand that he wasn't ready to stop just yet. He'd fallen in love with the beat, the occasional peals of danger and the pleasant evenings spent slurping coffee with honest folk. In the end, Mertown's captain had needed to hire a Diviner to make sure that Renton's best cop in the midst of the Roaring Twenties and Thirties was really at the other end of the line, and that he was up for what was ahead.
Impatient, Mike had retorted by driving all of the typewriters in Mertown's police station crazy, all of them typing YES over and over. You could say he couldn't have been faulted for being unclear as a ghost.
From the bony and freckled face he'd shown and the arrogant shock of red hair, he found himself looking at an Art Deco cousin to Archie's armature in the mirror. He was all polished steel and chrome now, with Leyendecker-worthy facial features and tighter facial joints that left his expressions flowing faster and with more precision than what the celebrated British Clank could produce. From the browns and greens he'd worn as a member of the living, blacks, charcoals, slate greys, reds and blacks now made up most of his wardrobe, the perfectly sculpted suggestion of parted hair always perfectly peeking out from underneath his carefully angled fedora. He was literally the only cop in town who could still get away with two-tone dress shoes and zoot suits – and he never failed to make the most of it.
He stuck closer to the criminal underworld than most other DTs, to the point where he'd insisted for his recharging station to be set down in the basement, near the pokeys – as he still called them. The useful part of it all was that three nights out of five, he fell asleep to the conspiratorial whispers of the schmoes in Lockup, which sometimes allowed him to pick up a few interesting tidbits. What was troubling, lately, was how the Commission didn't seem to be aware of what its smaller members were doing. Goons and previously laid-back muscle who'd lacked ambition were negotiating the purchase and sale of various Fae and terrestrial artifacts, accumulating impressive power stores little by little.
He wasn't a mage, but he knew that even the smallest amounts of stored via could eventually amount to a lot. A magicked thimble here, taken from Evangeline Buck's former belongings. An old set of Amazo's cufflinks, soaked through with residual arcane power there. Shoes that once had belonged to the Voice, Hope's celebrated gentleman thief.
Individually, these objects amounted to nothing. Move trinkets around in sufficient volumes, however, and a picture starts to form. Someone is requiring power for the express purpose of selling it back. He'd been on the case for three weeks, now, and still had no idea who that might be. With some of the elements from Nigel Griffin's Mirror Gallery being exposed at the Firebird – essentially out in public – for the first time in decades, he was convinced the perps would try and seize this golden opportunity. The Voice had stolen dangerous artifacts from contentious would-be practitioners several times before, already. Some had been entrusted to Amazo's Shadow Gallery, others had been kept with the invisible man's own stash.
He'd gone over half of the collection, last night, before his battery alarm and his own sense of tiredness had driven him back downstairs. All he knew is that Wyvern had been tapped for security and that Griffin had one of his own men he could depend on. Gavin Drake, a former USMC Major, had recycled himself as a security consultant after retiring. The guy looked solid, that much was obvious. Family man, storied ties to the city – the Drakes were maybe one or two marriages short of belonging in with the Winters gang, but their heritage had always been more Norse than Irish.
They were Celts, that much was obvious, but not in the same sense that Mike had Celtic roots. He was Irish; the Drakes had more in common with the Picts that had once existed on the other side of Hadrian's Wall. They'd followed along during the Potato Famine, but alleigiances to the Isle or to Albion meant nothing to them. The Drakes were loyal to wherever their home stood, and their home had been Hope for the last five generations.
Of course, there was one recent blemish in the family tree. Aidan, troubled son of Gavin Drake, who'd come back from a stint in Afghanistan with tall tales that would have made him salivate if he'd still been a teenager reading Weird Tales compulsively. The kid was surviving, not exactly looking to maximize his resume – could he have snapped and figured out that petty theft was a good way to ply the skills he'd learned? If that was an angle Mike intended to pursue, a lot of ground work still had to be done. The locals still liked to tsk whenever the Drake boy was brought up as a conversation piece, but the fact was that no tangible evidence had ever been brought up to suggest homicidal or criminal behavior.
The Clank nodded hello to a few other plainclothes officers and headed for the coffee maker. Nope, this was just another case of the shoe fitting eerily well even if it hadn't ever been worn...