Morning, kid. Sleep okay? Oh, what am I even asking, you look like a feral dog. You ready to talk yet? No? That’s okay, I’ll get a word or two out of you in time. Yeah, you think you’re smarter than me, but you’re not. Guards get you something to eat yet? Well, either way, I brought some eggs for you, best fuckin’ eggs you’ll ever taste in your life. You drink coffee? No? Suit yourself, I guess. Now let’s go over what happened yesterday.

Ten AM: This was when you made your way to the palace. Jeans and a t-shirt, just absolutely drenched, walked all the way here from Condouth’s outer ring, got here at twelve. Stood here uninterrupted from twelve to five twenty-four. Five and a half hours kid. Fuck, you’ve got some commitment. You were tense the whole time, too; your biostats over the course of that - shit, dude, five and a half hours - aren’t looking too pretty. Just seething with untempered rage. When you saw that guy exit the south end of the palace nothing really changed. Yeah, your eyes followed him briefly, but you didn’t give a single thing away. So either it was a spontaneous decision to pull that knife on him a split second before he passed you or you’re just really, really good at hiding your intentions. No increase in heart rate, no anything.

Guess that’s why my spell didn’t catch it and send you here until after it happened, which makes you pretty damn clever. So thanks for the intel, I’ll get around to patching that up. Anyway, you just scratched him, you didn’t do any serious damage, but do you know who he was? A surgeon. Yeah, a surgeon who worked on cancer, brain tumors, that kinda shit. Believe it or not, we don’t put chips in people’s heads anymore, that’s not how I operate; I’ve seen enough of that in my time, and there are more efficient ways of doing everything you need to do magically. You know, he wrote a couple of the spells that detect malignant tissue. Real jack-of-all-trades type. I know you didn’t intend to kill him; you meant to send a message, but I’m just letting you know: you weren’t striking out against the iron fist of your oppressors or whatever you like to believe; you were hurting someone who devotes his life to the betterment of society.

So what kind of point were you trying to prove, huh? Little shit like you? Everyone you see around you is doing volunteer work; money is a thing of the past, so you can’t claim that anyone’s doing any of this for personal gain. People believe in what we’ve made of the world, what I’ve made of it. And you just come marching in thinking that the palace is some kinda bunker full of misanthropes who do the few less savory tasks that need to be done for - what - shits and giggles? Your life is perfect. And I don’t have to have this conversation with you; I can just string a few runes together and suddenly you don’t hate me anymore. This happens, you go home with a big fuckin’ grin on your face and I never see you again. But I don’t, and you know why? Because I respect you. But I’m not gonna let you go around shitting on everyone else.

Whatever. Maybe I’ll put you to work while you’re in here, teach you a thing or two about sequencing runes, get you to whip up a few spells. It’s not that hard, especially if you’re working with just a few prepackaged runes, like they used to have for jobs like . . . like whatever I was doing back when; I don’t know if there’s really a job title for it. The bassist in my band knew this guy who lived in the nice part of Derdian - like there ever was such a thing until recently - and this guy, Morji was his name, needed someone who knew their way around runes, albeit to a limited degree, to fulfill orders for pedals for those guitars with the chips in them. Rich hipsters with magical guitars that cost two thousand bits, they wanted all these custom effects pedals. And the only way to interface with the guitars was through magic, ‘cause fuck amps and shit.

So my job was to sit down with a rune tablet - a shitty one, mind you, one of the recalled models they made like a billion of before they decided they weren’t good enough for philosophers and released them to the public on a conditional basis; and you had to put in an order to get them to unlock a very limited selection of pre-manufactured runes, these composite modules that were easy as shit to use but locked tight by default - so I would sit down with the tablet and figure out using like sixteen runes how to make all these effects these hipsters wanted. Then Morji would take the tablet to the embassy to get a chip printed and he’d install it in the pedal and get it to the client. Real pain in the ass for him, since the embassy was on the far side of Methulum but hey, King only wanted to spread his forces so thin and some small time effects pedals manufacturer from Derdian was the least of his worries.

Cost a fortune to get those chips printed but our clientele could always more than cover it. It was decent money - at least compared to what I was used to - and Morji let me stay in his place for free ‘cause I was actually saving him a ton of hassle trying to find someone who knew runes and wasn’t caught up in Cypher’s bullshit. It was easy too, I mean if you ask me it was Morji getting the short end of the stick. Well until I decided to try unlocking one of the runes manually and I fucked myself over that way.

Basically it went like this: I was on my way back from the bar, you know, the one I told you about yesterday, and I was crying my eyes out. Nobody could hear me, thank god, ‘cause my bike was loud as shit and I was just barreling through this shortcut I’d memorized through the prefab slums, where there was nothing but flat dirt and bent slabs of plastic that used to be walls or shelves or whatever. I hadn’t even bothered to tie my hair up and it was hitting me in the face, stinging my eyes, getting all up in my mouth. And the air was cold as fuck here, it was like getting bitten by wasps but all over my face, couldn’t feel a thing otherwise.

I was numb when I got to Morji’s place. This little cubist black building, used to be some tiny-ass artsy theater or something, still got rigs for stage lights hanging from the ceiling. I parked my bike and opened the heavy double doors and went straight to the couch, a ragged thing full of cat hair sitting right at the back of the hall, where you could see all the holes in the floor from where they pulled out all the chairs forever ago. But not the rigs up above, couldn’t tell you why. Anyway, I picked up my tablet from the coffee table and got right to work. Easier that way.

“Got a request from a client up in Sanctis,” Morji called from the women’s bathroom, which had been converted to a kitchen. He was cooking something nasty in there, smoking something nasty too. Smelled like cheap Jonk he got off one of Cypher’s kids. Wouldn’t work with them but he didn’t mind buying off them. “I dunno what this guy wants, take a look, will ya?”

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Could hear him roll up a piece of paper and saw it arc out the door followed by a lazy tendril of smoke. Picked it up, unfolded it, read the scrawled notes. Something like, “Resonant frequency . . . audio tail, see tape . . . distinct echo but not delay . . . post-rock vibe.”

“This all you got?” I shouted to the kitchen. “Fuck does he mean?”

I could see Morji’s heavy shrug in my mind’s eye. “Yeah, I dunno. Just wrote that down, said a buncha shit like ‘resonant frequency,’ don’t think ‘e knows what ‘e wants. Oh, and ‘e gave me this.” A cassette tape slid along the floor and landed at my feet, where Myashu rushed to investigate. Oh, yeah, Myashu was Morji’s cat, miss that fat little bastard.

I gave Myashu a couple scratches before picking up the tape and brushing all the shit off the coffee table, papers and loose pieces of plastic and tangled wires. “What, like he wants a simulated space with a certain resonant frequency or whatever?” I put the tape in.

“Nah, I think ‘e just liked the sound o’ what ‘e was saying.” Pressed play. God, what a nightmare, some dissonant fuckin’ chord out of left court played on a dirty-ass synth. Couldn’t hardly make out the notes. Like there’s tasteful dissonance and then there’s guys who just think you’re cool if you sound bad. “Hah! Fuck’s that?”

“Don’t know, but I guess this is what I have to work with. Think he wants me to filter the guitar sound through whatever this is somehow.”

“Well try ya best, lemme know what happens.” ‘Nother puff of smoke from the women’s bathroom. It pissed me off just a little, this order. I’d already dealt with enough shit that day. But I did try my best, maybe a little too hard. See, there was this rune that does some basic reverb, thought the best way to get vaguely at whatever this client wanted was to take that and substitute the recording of the hall it used for this sound on the tape. But that meant unlocking the reverb’s component runes, instead of using them as a package like you’re s’posed to, which required getting way into the Source, which no’one ever does, mostly ‘cause no’one knows what the fuck happens under the hood with tablets and secondly ‘cause it’s illegal.

You gotta do this sequence upon booting up the tablet that takes you there, or at least you used to. Can’t even get to the Source anymore, not with the tablets you use nowadays, and I guess you’ve got me to thank for that. And hell, everyone who wants a tablet can get one, it’s not like it was in my day where the only people who had them were philosophers and those willing to sift through a stack of paperwork a mile high to prove they needed them for a job. Dunno how Morji got his hands on this one, guess he must’ve been pretty good at sucking up to the assholes at the embassy.

But yeah, getting into that reverb module was the hard part; getting the sound from the tape onto the tablet was pretty simple. So for every spell you’ve gotta define a point of contact, right? Well, as soon as you bring the pedal, or the tablet if it’s a work in progress, within two feet of a guitar then “boom,” point of contact’s right above the pickup. All the sound comes out that way, outta thin air. And it stays that way until you bring a different guitar right up to the pedal. The spells are talking, you know? Point of contact from the pedal is the chip in the guitar, point of contact from the guitar is the pickup. Well, when I erased the hall sound used to make the reverb, the spell didn’t know what to do ‘cause the recorded sound was gone, and when you’ve got an incomplete spell like that it finds ways of filling in the gaps. Can get dangerous depending on what kinda spell you’re working with. It sort of assumes that whatever’s happening at the point of contact is the missing part of the spell; ‘s like, “Oh, yeah, I guess that’s what I’m supposed to be doing,” and it just sorta uses whatever data it can find to fill the hole. So all I had to do was run the spell and put the tape player right up to the guitar to make it think that was the sound I’d just deleted.

Yeah, unconventional way of going about it, but it worked. With the Source, though, I was just poking around in there, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I mean the tablet doesn’t tell the King’s guys if you go into the Source right away, not if you’re careful, but I wasn’t careful. But shit, it’s not like it notifies you when it alerts the whole fuckin’ mage army to your presence in the source, and I was successful in hijacking that rune so I was pretty proud of myself, gotta say. Shame Morji wasn’t there standing over my shoulder; he’s a smart enough guy to know that I shouldn’t’ve been doing that and he would’ve set me straight.

But when Morji emerged from the kitchen, holding his pot of stew - he was a big guy, like 6’4” with a tangle of long red hair and a beard to match - when he came out of the kitchen I had already finished, and it’s not like I told him how I did it, I just gave him the tablet and said it was done.

“Hey, when you take the tablet to the embassy, do they look to see what’s on it?”

“Nah,” he said, setting out bowls for us and shoveling stew into them. Myashu shot up onto the coffee table, nose swerving to follow the ladle; I picked her up and it took a few moments but I got her to stop scrambling for the food. “How many people walk into the embassy a day to get chips printed, tablets fixed, whatever? All their technicians are busy fixin’ up people’s broken shit, it’s not like they’re gonna check every individual job. And if someone’s up to something, they’re gonna know anyway; ya don’t own that thing you’re holding, never gonna own that thing, ‘cause they do, and they know what ya do with it.”

“So they don’t even know what they’re printing?” I didn’t like it when he talked like that.

“They know me, they know if it’s for me it’s prolly somethin’ guitar related. Other than that, nah. Why, you put some mage shit on this, fireballs or whatever?” It was a joke, he knew it wasn’t conventionally possible.

“Yeah, first guy to use this pedal is just gonna get fuckin’ gibbed.” Morji cracked up, and I felt a little better about it all. About what I’d seen back at the bar, about Kar waving his dick around and the guy I couldn’t help, I just felt better.

But I shouldn’t’ve felt better, because I’d just done something incredibly stupid, hurting myself and the people around me. Just like you. You think you’re the shit, you think you’re some kind of revolutionary, but you’re not. Right now, you’re just a delinquent in a cage, and that’s all you’re ever gonna be if you don’t open your damn mouth and let me know you understand why that shit you pulled was futile. Look, I’ve gotta go. But we’ll talk again tomorrow, okay?