A dumb monkey-like teenager in ill-fitting medieval cosplay stared slack-jawed at the woman in front of him. She had appeared in a flash of light in the The Citadel of Serabourg. She had told the nasally, ill-translated robot voice that she had no preference as to where she would be sent.

– Select a city and kingdom you want to start.

“Anywhere.”

– Please select a city and kingdom you want to start.

She glared at the void of nothingness speaking to her. It sounded like a People’s Republic of Russian actor imitating an American accent on a gramophone.

– Please select a city…

“Choose one now or I will find a video game that will.”

She was dressed only in a plain white shirt and pants. Her clothes hadn’t come over with her. She had been wearing a uniform indescribably suited for both hard work on railroads and intense professionalism in railroads. Her rigidly structured blazer only accentuated her figure, such as it was. It had fit her immaculately. All the clothes she tried on did. When she was twelve, she had spent time with Francisco d’Anconia in a particularly well-bred clothing store. “Why do you admire me?”, she had asked him.

“Because of that,” he said, pointing at a Bossi Annunzio blazer.

“That’s not my suit.”

“I admire you because I know it will be.”

Dagny felt like she had lost something for the first time in her life, as she reached for those blazer’s pockets and found them missing. She resolved never to need a coat again, and she never did.

She paid no heed to the moocher ogling her and instead started to walk down the hill. The city was enormous, filled with anonymous people who had never done anything to merit her attention, their faces oozing to blend into each other. Wooden advertisements for the businesses shot upward into the sky, pre-industrial obelisks to invention. She realized that she had been wishing for some time now that the businesses, not the pedestrians, were the ones jostling her as she took the long walk toward the Training Hall. It was there that she would find the titans of industry that she sought, people not content to wait for the developers to give them a chance, but who would work tirelessly, without sleep, to make chances of their own.

She reached the training hall, filled with scarecrows, assembled by hand by men who worked from dawn to dusk bundling them together. Those scarecrows, she thought, were better company than most of the gamers here. There was no one she truly hated except people who refused to work in video games.

Every scarecrow was presently in use. She saw a hunched-back man-gremlin with his brainless friends, limply beating a scarecrow with a pristine wooden sword he probably received through affirmative action. He complained to his drones about the effort it took to become good at something.

“God, this is so hard,” he said, spitting the greasy sweat that dripped down his face to speak. She walked up to him briskly, assertively, without a hint of self-consciousness. Dagny had never been self-conscious. When she was a child, she once thought, amused, that it should be everyone else who was self-conscious. If they were not going to be ashamed of who they were, she absolutely should not.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“If you are not the coward that I think you are, you will trade me for the scarecrow.”

“You have literally nothing to trade.”

The miserable little thing could not understand the value of a hard day’s work, and she saw no reason to trade her labor, her very life, to satisfy him.

“I’ll give you my clothes,” she said unhesitatingly.

The lout stared at her blankly, and his eyes looked to her like a pregnant cow’s.

“You’d give me your clothes for a chance to hit a scarecrow?”

“Of course. You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s insane. You have no other clothes.”

The deal was quickly pushed through. Even when she was nude, one never thought of Dagny Taggart’s body. Except her bone structure; her angular bone structure.

She picked out a wooden sword that looked like it could have belonged to Nathaniel Taggart, her ancestor and the founder of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. Nat Taggart was a penniless journeyman who became unfathomably rich because of his refusal to take no for an answer. It was said that in the backroads of Oregon, he beat an engineer who did not think his railroad design was plausible to death with a wooden sword. Dagny despised the idea of family, but she still felt a certain affection for Nat Taggart’s pluck.

She savagely beat the scarecrow over and over, her muscle fibers literally breaking apart with the force of her blows. She attacked it mercilessly, like it was a family-owned competitor, driving it into the ground so that she might have complete control over the scarecrow. She could not even feel her pain, feeling only sudden stabs that made her aware of some part of her body. Mostly her jaw.

She heard a swarm of locusts, or gamers, starting to buzz from their mouths as though to say something. They all seemed enraptured by a disturbance happening somewhere in particular.

“This guy’s definitely got iron guts.”

“He’s freaking tough.”

“I wonder why he’s not a VP of a railroad company.”

She saw a dwarf-like man dealing unfathomable damage to a scarecrow, which was shredding before his might. The sweat rolled off his biceps as he struck the scarecrow, one blow after another, with his wooden sword. She watched for hours, thinking to herself that this was the sort of person that discouraged her from running her trains right through the city square.

After eight hours of striking the scarecrow, the formidable man took a break, eating a lunch consisting of nutrition only, taking pride in his work and not his stomach. Dagny strode up to him, unclothed, feeling for the first time a flutter of awareness of her own body. She asked him, like a friend would ask about a vacation, what his name was.”

“Tell me who you are.”

He did not make eye contact with her as he told her his name, his voice breathless and quiet.

“Weed.”