Only the scariest henchman assignments required people to stand there and do nothing. Accompanying a true citizen on their endeavors normally involved navigating the city-states of the crater, observing business transactions, and most importantly, protecting them from the common man—to hench was to insulate between true citizens and the substrate of society, the background humanity that allowed reality to function as it should. The woman in the black visor and matching button-down suit sipped straight from her glass bottle of crinkle tree fruit soda, calming her nerves.
The boss, Fygra, had brought them to these eroded stone flatlands, solid expanses of impact-metamorphosed rock on the west-northwest side of the crater, where civilization seldom transited. Railgun shots high through the sky, usually from down in Stepwise, hardly counted. In the mid-evening dimness of the sun low in the sky, shadows of stray pebbles grew long over the breccia stone—the miscellaneous bin of geology, every loose mineral flash-melted and compressed together so long ago. Besides the distant mountain ranges of the rim of the crater and the always-present central feature of Mount Radius, the flatlands were featureless to the untrained eye. Only stone, cracks, and cracked stone.
She and her coworker had been plucked out of Fygra’s halls so quickly that there wasn’t time to get chairs, even, so there they stood, as the only points in the blank stonescape to look upon—save, of course, the boss. Fygra stood far enough away that her face became a dot and her limbs blurred together, towards the machine a hundred steps away–a thirty-story-tall juggernaut of geodesic crystal, superalloy metal shielding, at least six railguns visible from here (complete with crackling blue-white electricity along horizontally-laid copper columns directed straight at the boss). A colossal central feature resembled the engines on the back of Fygra’s personal jet, far larger and in ominous burning blue. The henchwoman took another sip. Her feet were getting tired.
A sonic quake pulsed through the ground, far enough for her to feel it from here. The machine was starting. They were probably too close for safety, but this is where Fygra told them to stand and watch.
She looked to her compatriot in arms, practically a mirror image of herself—blonde, broad-shouldered, wearing an identical visor and identical suit. An important rule of henching was to not stand out, so that one couldn’t be identified by the same rabble-rouser the next time they met. Anonymity prevented work from bleeding back into your personal life. Even Fygra likely did not care. She suspected that they were a skeleton crew to tell wanderers to go away instead of gawking, if anyone ever showed up, which they wouldn’t.
“Sometimes I wish I was strong like the boss,” her coworker said, watching the standoff.
“Don’t bother,” the woman with the bottle said, and drank some more. Tart, sweet and faintly bitter, the way she liked it. “It’s not worth the hassle.”
Her coworker crossed her arms over her chest. “Girl, what makes you say that?”
Fygra punched the ground, and the earth took notice even from here. Birds in the sky honked. Drops spilled from the neck of her drink.
“I had a phase when I was 14.” She grunted. “There’s not a ladder you can climb. Power goes high, but you can’t get there.”
“Pff, I know.” Her coworker kept watching, her head tilted back to view from below her visor. “What’s that old figure? You can work a thousand lifetimes and not make enough money for a true citizen’s breakfast?”
“They were underselling it when they said that,” the woman with the soda bottle said. “If they gave the real figure, no one would listen because it would sound fake.”
They commiserated a laugh together.
The machine’s jet engine fired, a sudden blast of white-hot heat that the two could feel like a second noonday sun, a cored-out borehole through air and stone that the plasma could not tell the difference between, intersecting Fygra directly, the scent of scorch and lava in the air. “That’s only the half of it, you know,” the woman with the soda bottle continued, holding her professional facade of unfazedness. She mentally prepared for receiving a medical injection to deal with the inevitable plasma-sunburn from this far away. “There are only four big ways to become—”
Fygra jumped out of the plasma blast, wreathed in a heavy cloud of green like supercritical steam, every wisp of gas erasing the stone around her and leaving it slag. In a flash, in a jump off the stone so strong that the earth yielded under her feet, she reached the machine.
“Yeah, like that,” she said. “You can absorb an insane amount of Dye. You get stronger, faster, tune your thinker to get skills, more durable, does everything, no one thinks ‘I want power’ and doesn’t think of that.”
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“I’m not a kid; I know what Dye is.”
“I’m saying it so you don’t say I forgot one. You can get lucky with science experiments and be a biology freak, or get science to cyber your body in general, that’s the second one. The one everyone actually settles for is Consolidation, and, like, you know what that does.”
“I don’t want to become one with another person, ever. Having two sets of memories would drive me insane.”
“I wanted to.” Another drink. “Thought better of it when I saw it’s prosecuted the same as murder.”
Fygra slammed into the side of the machine, sending white rippling waves along the unbreaking forcefield.
“Wow, it’s holding. I’ve never seen something stand up to her before…see, this is what true citizens have, the fourth thing. Being rich enough to just buy anything, literally anything that makes them better, even if it’s from one of the shit old ways that people don’t use anymore, until they have everything and can do whatever they want.”
“I could still try to get ahead in one of those four ways,” her coworker said.
“Don’t. Look, I gave it a try. The fact is that everything is just really really fucking hard and you can’t do it, except Consolidation, and even then, how are you gonna get enough Dye to trigger it?”
“There’s raiding.”
“No, no one actually succeeds at that besides other true citizens, and it’s designed that way. What, you think the boss would ever protect her stash with something that people like us could get through?“ She shook her head. “You know those physical training courses at...did you go to the same henching program? I forget.”
“I did, we were just in different rotations.”
“Oh, okay, then we both have the only kind of strength you should bother with. Work out so you can pick up heavy things and aren’t crippled when you’re old.” The forcefield oscillated in the distance under a staccato of their boss’s punches, while the machine boomed with a thunderclap of a railgun. The superheated slug of copper hit their boss’s chest and splashed like water in an uncaring pot; the droplets were still white-hot when they blasted a bird straight out of the sky. “I guess when you strip away all the fluff, I have better things to do than chase power. It’s something that doesn’t want to be chased, anyway. Personally, I think we’re at the end state of what power looks like—it’s just going to be like this, the belonging of true citizens and way too hard or resource-heavy for anyone else to do it, forever. And they have those glint things now, so someone’s going to get enough and redo the laws of reality so it’s permanent that way.”
“You don’t know that.”
“There’s a lot I don’t know.”
The punching stopped, and terra firma rumbled.
Her coworker tilted her visor. “There could be more ways to get strong out there. People can’t have found all of them.”
“Pretty sure we have. We’re stuck with the four big ones because all of the rest got weeded out. They’re too hard and not worth the payoff. Most people don’t even bother to work out; no one keeps old stuff alive that’s harder and kills you slowly. Did you know there’s still ‘magic’ out there, but it breaks your brain? That’s one of the ones that’s holding on. Everything else is either dead or close enough to dead.”
The earth rent in twain. Fygra’s hands pulled apart the sheet of breccia covering the flatlands, opening a ravine the width of her arms, air rushing like a tornado down to fill the chasm—upon which, on opposite sides, the henchwomen stood.
“What the fuck, she can do that now?” the woman with the bottle asked.
Fygra pounded the machine from above, driving it deep into the ravine, splitting and shattering so much of the now-loose stone that the rocks flew around her as dense as spring pollen. The forcefield held like the head of a nail impaling wood. Vibrations inundated the henchwoman’s skin, particles of earthen grit getting into teeth. Her coworker fell back onto her rear while everything roiled below.
“Guess she can do that now,” the woman with the bottle moved her lips to say, but could hear nothing over the cacophony.
She took another drink. Everything had been tried and found wanting; there were no more tricks left to match the scope of true citizens, the qualitative difference between increments of twos and threes and the people whose actions spoke in ordinals. If there were anything left to find in niche side paths that ended up as more work for less power, well, it’d already have been found by now. Every way of training had a master, a person at the end, and none of them ever upended the state of things.
If any crack in the armor existed, it’d have to be in the form of crossing multiple old obscure methods for a combination that nobody had tried before, before all of the old ways died completely, and then that combination would have to be in the hands of someone incredibly driven to make it work. It was never going to happen.
The forcefield finally warped, crumpled, and phased out of existence under Fygra’s barrage, and in moments, she was tearing through superalloy like wet tissue paper, digging down to the fusion reactor core of the machine.
All in all, an average day of two elites showing off their toys at each other.
She finished her soda. Stepwise didn’t have a drinking culture like the east side of the crater (she missed home already). After this, if she didn’t need an injection, she might go blow off steam and hang out for the evening; perhaps she’d find a place to meet people, play games, get some written affirmations of her value as a human being, let her hair down...to feel like someone out there was in charge and cared about her. To mix with society in a neutral, accepting place.
Like a notary office!