“Wh, wait, I thought ‘not even a railgun shot away’ meant we were walking,” Ruvle said, hurriedly, her hands balled up at her clavicles while Chain stepped onto the big electrode platform.
“Nah, it’s not crazy far, but you still gotta have a ride.”
“I didn’t bring minirail shoes.” She blinked a few times, calming herself, focusing inward. No fear. “I thought you were wearing yours for protection!”
“Nope, we’re mini-ing!”
“But I can’t ride.”
He extended his arms down towards her, palms up, flapping his fingers. “So I’ll carry you!”
The minirail system was what let people get around Stepwise quickly and efficiently, and Ruvle did not like it. Chain stood upon a big circular platform of chrome and iron, singed and discolored in voltaic blotches from bad electrical arcs, resembling the rainbow slicks of oil on water. Structural steel spokes around the platform held up snakes of copper-inset cables, each of them sailing off into the distance overhead, above the surrounding buildings in swooping trails above the skyline. In the center, a rod with multi-stepped insulating disks crackled with electricity, protected from the exploratory fingers of children by a ring of chain-link fence, and square bins of steel helmets lined the outside of the platform.
Ruvle took his hands in her own and let him heave her up onto the electrode; he stumbled back under her weight and she found her footing immediately. “Phew,” Chain said, and snatched up one of the helmets; it looked like an upside-down colander if one weren’t paying attention. “Not a fan of mini?”
“Ch...no, I, I rode once as a kid and it was a disaster,” Ruvle explained, watching. “I had the wrong boot size because I was growing so fast, and one of my feet slipped out and I was dangling and crying the whole way.”
“Oh, sucks, doing feet tricks is the fun part of minirail.”
She huffed. “My parents got really condescending that I didn’t think through what would happen with loose shoes. There are bad experiences and then there are bad experiences that you get yelled at for…”
“Good thing I’m not gonna do that. Hop back in my arms.”
“I’m not...ready for you to slip and let go and have me fall.”
“You’re a lot tougher than you were when you were a kid, right?” Chain scooped her up in his arms once more, her thighs on one bicep and her shoulders across the other. “You’ll land on your feet if anything happens.”
“R...right.” She put her hand on her fez, for what came next.
“’cause you’re a hexagon now, Coarse.”
Chain trotted to the edge of the electrode platform past the rest of the personal transport crowd, and with a running jump, hopped up onto one of the cables. A shower of sparks roared with voltage behind his boots, like a firecracker’s fuse burning, and Chain rocketed off, propelled along the cable with the spectacle of electromagnetism. Magnetic field lines banked him around a sharp bend on the cable on his way up, around, to the skyline, and soon they were free of ground-level obstruction, sailing along the iron path, arcs crackling behind them.
Electrical power was so cheap that M.A.D. work had made old modes of personal transport obsolete. All one needed was to wear right-sized boots to grind the rail—which were of so many sizes that it didn’t make municipal sense to provide them—grab a one-size-fits-all helmet so that the electromagnetic field lines worked out to actually keep one upon the rail, and step on. Modern alloys were very good at holding cable rigid for the entire way. Chain’s arms should have felt far less secure than the high-tech electro-hardened metal beneath them, but…
...it was hard to worry with the view from up here. The patchwork mix of building heights, from district to district, from street to pedestrian street, stood out like the stepped edges of raw, uncut crystals mined from the earth. Nests of cables, be they power or minirail, connected glass-and-steel skyscrapers with ground-level brick shacks. On the horizon, the mountainous edges of the crater blocked the post-sunset sky, outlined by the deep reds and oranges of the celestial transition to night, fading down to let the stars come out to play. In a gap between two skyscrapers, she could even see Mount Radius, the peak in the quasi-lake at the center of the crater. The red fires of an aluminum foundry roared in the middle of a district of brick housing. Liquid oxygen poured from the eyeholes of a skull-shaped M.A.D. lab, leaving rippling distortions that twinkled the gibbous moon above.
“Not so bad, is it?” Chain asked, grinning.
“I have some nerves about it,” Ruvle said, taking off her fez and holding it tight in her now-dangling hand.
“I don’t blame ya. I did spring this on you.”
“Well, you didn’t know…”
He shrugged; she shifted and settled in his arms. “Gotta get to know you for real at some point, not just blather on the textwork. Meeting for real was a year late, I say.”
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Ruvle chuckled. She let her head dangle back.
“We got a guy coming, so we’re banking. Don’t mean to scare ya, I’ve still got you.”
On the same cable, two people rode in the opposite direction. Head-on collisions were rare on minirail; using automatic quirks of repulsion and the dance between magnetism and electricity, Chain rotated clockwise along the cable automatically the closer they came—as did the others. They whizzed past each other, diametrically opposite, sliding sideways as if defying gravity. Only the field lines from their helmets to their feet stopped them from falling—except for Ruvle, who wrapped her arms tightly around Chain’s shoulders, him holding her equally securely. Her hair dangled down, her heart pumping fast—and then they were upright again.
Not so bad. She sighed in relief.
“So you were saying some stuff earlier about what you couldn’t do,” Chain said.
Ruvle took the chance to think about something that didn’t scare her. “There are things I’ll eventually be able to do when I get better at Exaction. ‘Hypervoluntary’, that just means I’ll have enough nerves that there’s a phase transition and suddenly I’m consciously aware of every single voluntary muscle in my body and exactly what it’s doing. I’m not there yet.”
“Phase transition?”
“Yes.” She put her fez back on, holding it in place. “I have to grow more nerves, way more nerves than Gross-level people have, before I become Fine. The more I do, the more I can control smaller sections of muscles independently and more precisely, and the nerves start talking to each other differently because there’s so many of them. It’s like you’re pressurizing a gas and the molecules bump into each other in new ways. And eventually there’s the last atmosphere of pressure, and the gas molecules are constantly talking to each other so much that they condense out into a liquid.” She nodded. Strands of her hair were rising, floating in the wind as if it were water, buoyed by static electricity. “But for nerves, it’s the way they communicate that phase transitions, not the...physical arrangement of them. So one day I’m going to suddenly have total awareness of every muscle fiber at all times every second of every day.”
“You know the fun part about that? You say it like you’re dead certain it’ll happen.”
“It will, and you’ll have to deal with me being insane for about a week.”
Chain cackled, throwing his head back.
“I have to be hypervoluntary before we worry about any of the other parts.” Ruvle smiled.
Chain bent his knees and leaned in, gaining speed on a gentle downwards slope of the rail before he swung around a skyscraper, sparks scattering over the brick buildings below like disappearing confetti. “Sheesh, tislets are way less strict, I say. I’m not great at this either, but I don’t have to jump through hoops to get the more powerful tools. All I know how to scriven are a couple of physia, and that’s what I’m bringing to this, but if I find all the tislets I need and have a formula, there’s no reason I can’t put up an entire zone.”
He’d mentioned the process of learning tislets and putting them together into powerful effects a few times over the textwork; Ruvle struggled to remember. “And zones are the powerful effects?”
“Yep. Physia are me changing how the scarf works, sujecta are about changing how other junk on the floor works, and zones are changing whole regions of space, in that order of how cool and how complicated they are. I don’t actually know how to do anything without thousands of tislets and this sucker only fits 5,888, though, so you’re getting two. Bright side is, I can spam them, make my scarf have the properties or not when I want to.”
Ruvle nodded. “...can you pick up a sujecta to just, open a hole in the wall we’re trying to get into?”
“I’d love to, but the alcazar sucks and other tislet people are so damn cagey about sharing their tricks, you know? It messes with your head to be in there.”
Ruvle was never clear on what that ‘alcazar’ thing was. At one point she was convinced that it was a community mind palace, and another that it was some parallel plane library with dimensions dwarfing the entire crater, and another that it was an actual mansion somewhere that she could get to if she wanted, and at that point she’d given up.
“Half of me’s betting Thuless is why we don’t get along,” Chain said, voice lowering to a grumble. “Can’t have a collection of people all sharing easy new tools to make the world a better place. So of course that’s an emergent property Thuless would have messed with.” As the city passed by to the suburbs underneath them, buildings receded and spread further apart, opening into the rocky terrain of increasingly-undeveloped crater land. “And now it’s getting out.”
Ruvle shifted in Chain’s clearly-tiring arms, pulling herself around his shoulders and reorienting to ride piggyback. “The glints can’t be as powerful as the entire Thoughtless, can they? I honestly wasn’t sure Thoughtless was real, more like a story, an ideal, the same way we say Thought made everything work together for joy even though we know it’s just a story, so there’s a Thoughtless that broke some of the emergent properties to make it not perfect…”
“Nope, Thoughtless is a real thing, in a real prison, with real tislets. If it has a mind that can hold a grudge, that’s why it targeted tislets specifically, but I think it might just be ‘beep boop maximize misery’ brain nothingness, and no, I’m not taking my chances with glints. It’s not like they can rewrite the four-hundredth-order effects of basic rules like Thoughtless did with crap like...life forms eating each other means they get ahead, so nature is built on murder, or...you can have a gigantic economy and no matter how much food you make, huge amounts of it rot and people still go hungry. Yeah, all that. But the jerks on top have toys to start changing rules as they see fit for them now.”
The cable descended, a gentle slope, heading to another electrode in the distance closing in—simpler, with fewer cables radiating from it. And beyond, a tower rose to the sky—easily twenty stories tall, tapering with spiked spires halfway up, swarming in clouds of drones, clouds swirling at the tip, and a circular metal face of orange-and-green just below that looked for all the world like a high-security vault door.
“So that’s why I care.”
At the end of the cable, electromagnetism slowed Chain to a stop. With sparks no longer flying, he stepped off the cable, and his boots clanked onto the electrode platform. Ruvle straightened her fez.
She tried to focus on what might be in it for her.