A trail of curdled spittle ran across Thomas' cheek. Acid fought to climb out of his esophagus. Muscles, once intimate work partners with his body and mind, lay sewn up in a crusty bag of nausea. He was still drunk, he realized, and would be for a couple more hours. The instigator sat atop his half-rotted dresser: a wide, brown-green bottle wrapped in faded yellow paper which read Tim Hartley's. No description necessary. No matter where you were, no matter how miserable the economy, it was 100 dо̄ a bottle, a day laborer's wage. Thomas swore they kept the price down by making the bottle smaller. A bottle of Timmy used to last him three nights. Now it emptied in two.
Somewhere deep in his bowels, last night's chitterlings waged a war of liberation, protesting at the gates to his shit factory. He could fight the reflux, but the bottom half of his body was sovereign authority. Pushing through dizziness, Thomas rolled off his bed and reached for his chamber pot and instead bumped it, sending stale urine across the floor and onto a pile of old clothes. He dove for his burgundy grenadier's jacket, the only thing worth saving.
Outside, blaring sirens echoed in every direction across wide, dirty streets, soot-covered shingles, wrought iron fences, and coarse red brick, whining, screeching sirens warning of the descending Shroud. The warning wasn't meant for him, nor any other Æfrian living on the plains. It was for the silk dressed Kaihonjin foremen and electrical workers in charge of the factories. For everyone else, it was the herald of the unavoidable Shroud descending.
It always felt the same. A great hollowing out, or like a shroud of false normalcy lifting. Things had always been pointless. Hopeless. Meaningless. Gods a lie, happiness fleeting, and nothingness a comfort from dreary Real. The feeling that things could return to normal, or that there could be a worthy struggle for "better" did not—and could not—co-exist with the Shroud. They feasted on the same brain chemistry. In short, The Shroud was an invisible, soul-depriving field that constituted the price for limitless electrical energy.
Outside his tenement, industrial chemicals clung to fetid air and tinted the world tan. At the end of the alley, electric trucks and motorcycles hummed along, transporting their Kaihonjin clients. In their midst, a cable car line ripped with electric sparks, bursting out of the chemical haze like glowing sapphires. Towards the cable car station Thomas marched, the mechanical rat warren of the Genji Heavy Industries steel mill bathing him in shadow.
The station was nothing but raised concrete and a wrought-iron bench on which lay a woman wrapped in a stained wool blanket. Her hair was white and brittle, lips slick with spit from a lolling brown tongue, a puddle of gritty vomit below her. Thomas looked to her, waiting to see if her glazed eyes would find him, but they didn't. He pinched four fingers together, pinkie dangling below, and pressed the fingers to his forehead, mouth, heart, and naval, delivering the sign of Heáhrodor, god of the sky, progress, logic, and hope. Thomas was an atheist, but the gesture was for him, not the woman, and not any imaginary god.
He only recognized it as a vow after he'd made the sign. His mind for the past year or so had turned on why exactly he was living, keeping on under the Shroud, on and on. He stood forever at attention like the good veteran he was for a world that gave him no orders. So the vow, which he could not have put into words if he wanted to, was something like: "If I don't find a find a reason to live today, then I'll stop living." And because these things demand a sacrifice, he placed his last 100 dо̄ coin in the diseased woman's hand so Tim Hartley couldn't tempt him another day on.
The trolley car's ring pierced the sanctity. The car was full of Æfrian men and women in mass-produced cotton affecting the air of being more than their compatriots, but the sulfurous tint clinging to their clothes gave them away. At best they were petty clerks, assistant foremen, small-time shop owners. Or they did the kind of ugly, violent work Thomas did. When his emotions weren't sucked from him by the Shroud, Thomas took pride in his grenadier's jacket, as vibrantly burgundy as the day it was issued. The sole consolation for his service to the Kaihon Empire.
"Ticket, please," the conductor said.
Meat above his belt suggested the conductor was well paid, never running afoul of the Suigenkyō Municipal Railway Company, whose logo of a train emerging from the Kaihongo symbol for water oversaw the man's work from above the controls. Thomas made sure to have his ticket ready. Everyone was trying to get by. And he had his own fierce loyalty to a job, the weight of the semi-automatic pistol in his jacket a reminder.
Outside, innumerable mills and factories rushed by behind a tumult of honking cars and teeming, blank, Shroud-afflicted crowds. All the coming and going, the lifting and dropping, building and destroying, blood, vomit, urine, and steel flowed onward yet never seemed to go anywhere. If there was an endpoint, or a meaning to it all, Thomas didn't know what it was. The Shroud filled the eternities before and after the present moment with meaninglessness. Such was the penetration of the Shroud field that when the sign reading, "no seishin-hatsuden past this point," finally appeared, it roused nothing.
Then the world rushed back into Thomas's soul.
The moment the Shroud lifted was indescribable, but its closest comparison might be coming in from a blizzard to a log fire, complete with sharp, stabbing needles of waking nerves. It wasn't that pleasure rushed in, but the bombarding sensations, good and bad, meant something again.
A young couple on the bench across from him smashed their faces together in a kiss. An older man pulled a pipe from his wool coat and lit it. A middle-aged woman began sketching a landscape on the back of her notebook. Even the conductor cracked a smile and hummed in tune with the purring electric wire. Thomas leaned his head against the glass window and felt moistness in his eyes at the thought of the dying woman. He made the sign of Heáhrodor again to nobody and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his beautiful, burgundy grenadier's jacket. It really was a handsome fucking jacket.
Passing through a working-class Kaihonjin neighborhood, Thomas gazed out at rows of townhouses squeezed together, children playing in the yard, pets, a new set of clothes every day. There were even a few Æfrians. Not all of his kind were too poor to leave the Shroud-polluted plains. A select few had made it. There were no laws discriminating between native Æfrians and the Kaihonjin, after all. Only the laws of the market. As Thomas' Kaihonjin commanding officer had put it to him years ago, the Æfrian colony was experiencing an expedited version of the industrialization process the Kaihon Islands had undergone. The lower class suffered for a time, but eventually prices came down and work became more productive and then everyone was better off.
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As the cable car hurtled the last hill before the craterous plateau of Suigenkyō proper, his stomach lurched. No city in the world looked like the colonial capital of Suigen. In the middle of the plateau's enormous, ten-kilometer-wide caldera, skyscrapers rose like a tiered pedestal towards Lake Yoyane at the center of the city. On its shores lay the tallest building in the world: the Genji Heavy Industries Building, a 105-story octagonal skyscraper of white limestone with two shard-shaped annexes of white-frosted glass winding off it like flaring wings. The intended effect was an egret taking flight.
"Hey there guy, mind if I sit?"
The trolley had made a few stops while Thomas was absorbed in his architecture fixation. Before looking, Thomas pegged the man as Kaihonjin by his accent, a day laborer by his black haori. The trolley cars weren't segregated, as ethnic discrimination was outlawed. Nonetheless, the cars segregated themselves. With seats available next to other Kaihonjin, it was odd for the man to sit next to Thomas.
"Not my place to tell you no," Thomas said.
"Sure guy, but I don't wanna bother anyone who doesn't wanna be bothered," the laborer replied.
Despite his accent, the man had a good command of the Æfrian language. Most Kaihonjin learned either a bluntly functional Æfrian language, or a stilted, archaic dialect spoken by the island's indigenous aristocracy. Bored housewives of upper-class Kaihonjin spoke this dialect as a parlor trick. However, Æfrians learning Kaihongo was discouraged. The most candid answer as to why had come from Thomas’ commanding officer who claimed their language had “too much ideological poison” in it.
"You can sit, but I wanna know where you learned to talk like that," Thomas said.
The man scooted into the seat and tucked his jacket under him before. "I love the frankness of you Æfrians. It's refreshing after dealing with our tedious Kaihonjin social rituals. Drives me up the wall. Name's Jun. Tanaka Jun."
Jun's hand thrust out for a shake, a gesture which leapt the cultural divide. Thomas shook it.
"Thomas Chester. Tom is fine, just not Tommy."
"Pleasure to meet you, Thomas. Now, you were asking how I speak such good Afugo? Tell you the truth, my wife is Æfrian."
Thomas raised an eyebrow. "Can't imagine that's made those rituals any easier."
Jun chuckled. "No, no it has not. My family disowned me. I was heir to my father's jeweler's business, but I decided I wanted a different jewel."
From his wallet, Jun fished out a photograph of himself standing next to a smiling Æfrian woman with brown hair, blue eyes, and freckles, and a little girl about four or five with her father's black hair and her mother's blue eyes. Thomas choked down a pang of jealousy.
"She's somethin'," Thomas said.
"Her name’s Angela, and the little angel next to her is Emi."
"Hope you're taking good care of them.”
Jun grunted. “It's why I'm bustin’ my ass at this construction job. But I know enough about gem cutting I'm tryin’gto save up and go into business. Low-end stuff is my market niche. Semi-precious stones, white gold, stuff that looks good on your wife's fingers but doesn't break your bank account, y'know?"
Thomas didn't have a bank account, so he didn't.
"Wages are getting high enough there's a market for it now."
Thomas nodded along. He felt both envious and hopeful for the man. "Hope it works out.”
"You and me both, Thomas. How about you? What work are you in?"
"I'm with the Ashio Detective Agency," Thomas replied.
"A detective huh? That's pretty cool! Y'know, there's a comic series I used to love as a kid that was about this private detective. I don't know if you know, it's called—"
"Oh, uh, I don't do investigative work," Thomas said. "Ashio does a lot of things. I mostly work as a security guard." Among other things he declined to mention.
Jun nodded, unaware of Ashio's infamous reputation. The Kaihonjin working class didn't strike or riot much, so Thomas’ gun was almost always pointed at other Æfrians. The thought made Thomas depressed. Or, no, it wasn't the thought. At some point Jun had produced a cigarette and sparked it with the tip of a finger glinting with gold. Taking a puff, he met Thomas' gaze.
"Ah, sorry, Tom. Should've asked first. I know it's rude to do hatsuden without warning, but my buddies and I've gotten into the habit of not asking," Jun said with a nervous laugh.
Seishin-hatsuden.
The Shroud wasn't a single phenomenon, but thousands. At some point, some scientist in Kaihon discovered that extremely thin gold wiring called kinkawa could be surgically implanted under the skin to connect the nervous system with the outside world and generate limitless, clean electrical energy at its user's whim. It was an almost perfect source of energy. Almost, because, for reasons which evaded modern understanding, the energy pulled not from its user, but from the "soul" of people nearby. If tens of thousands of workers used hatsuden all at once, the result was the Shroud. Some preferred the term "neurotransmitters" to "soul," but this sterilized the experience of its dreadfulness.
"Gimme a puff and we're square," Thomas said.
Jun grinned and handed the cigarette over. He really was an odd one. Most Kaihonjin would complain they didn't want their cigarette to taste like pig lard. Thomas took a long drag.
"The gold was a gift from my dad. The fingertip insertion makes precision gem cutting a breeze, and the neurochemical leeching is so minor it doesn't drain anything past a meter. 'Course, the day I told dad about Angela, he got a kitchen knife and said he was gonna cut my finger off and take his gold back."
"Sorry to hear that," Thomas said, taking a second drag and handing the cigarette back.
Jun took it and shrugged. "Eh, my choice. So, do they let you pack a gun?"
"They do," Thomas said, keeping his responses curt.
"Ooh, what kind? Military grade?"
Thomas shook his head. "They wouldn't trust an Æfrian with a semi-auto," he lied.
"Not even a grenadier?"
Thomas looked down at his coat. He wasn't exactly hiding that part of his past, but Æfrians didn't care about the military service it represented and Kaihonjin didn't usually speak to him.
"Not even then. Good eye though. Did you serve at some point?" Thomas asked.
Jun scratched his neck. "Nah, I just went through that phase boys go through where they're interested in military stuff. I thought the colonial grenadiers and ISF were so cool. Charging up hills, amphibious assaults, that kinda stuff! Not to— uh, not to make light of all of that. I'm sure it was… tough."
Eventually, the trolley pulled into a station outside a market square in the shadow of a clocktower and rocked to a halt. Jun stood up and tucked his pack of cigarettes into his jacket.
"Well, my Afujin friend, this has been a pleasant commute. Here's to hoping we catch the same ride again," Jun said.
From the window, Thomas watched his new friend head for the steel skeleton of yet another high-rise. Thomas slumped into his seat, his hangover still pounding in his head. He tried to distract himself by thinking about the Ueichi Innovation Expo he would soon be wandering as a faceless security guard. At least he’d get to see another pretty skyscraper.