Guys Like That

‘Sir—HNNNNNNNNGGGHHH—‘

Uh. Not good. For the first time Rinako hoped the comms were still malfunctioning. She was hunched over breathing heavily. The world came back to her one raindrop at a time, like a million little fingertips drumming on her senses. It was chucking down now, the distant rumbles of a data-storm being born somewhere up above.

She looked up with a sudden realisation. The alleys had become much larger. This should have been a reason for cheer but she couldnt help feeling it was to accommodate something else much larger.

She wiped her mouth. The blue light of the holo-map fluttered in the distance, Kurama’s form beneath it. Like a giant glowing moth it shot to the left and disappeared again, him with it.

Uhhhh.

She slumped back down.

… it’s the most important thing in the world, moonbeam. They look out for you, and you look out for them. Always.

The old man’s words rose up at her as though she’d fallen straight into them. She felt the strength returning to her legs, hauled herself up and started toward to the place Kurama had vanished.

Kurama. How come guys like that never have a first name? I mean, his mother gave him a perfectly good one, Sato. I suppose mother’s don’t really name their boys, they name some boy they imagine them becoming, all glowing in sunlight and covered in certificates. Then later on, when it realises it doesn’t belong, the name just withers and falls away, like a fruit without a limb…

She saw it now. The break in the passage. It was only visible when you got up close.

And what was with the lollipop?

And now you mention it that weird doll he kept hanging in the car.

She could have sworn she’d seen him touching it when he thought she wasn’t looking. Just what kind of a guy was this anyway—

She grasped the uneven edge of the corner and pulled herself into the turning.

‘Sir—‘

But there was nothing. She frowned. Rain beat out an idle rhythm on an overturned cardboard box to her side. The passage lit up silently for a moment as lightning flashed above, the walls suddenly alive with running water. But the path ahead was empty. There was a cut-through, this time near enough to see. He must have taken the second turn before she made the first. If she hadn’t been wasting time… never mind that, which way did he go? She walked up to the junction and looked left and right. Both directions looked exactly the same as the one ahead. Nothing to mark them out, no footprints or signs of someone having just charged down them.

Perfect.

Rain seemed to be pelting harder around her now. She became aware of her view rising and falling, the steady rasp of her breathing as she stood thinking.

A clinking noise caught her attention.

She had been staring into the alley straight ahead without really looking at it but now her senses came alive. Rain splattered against every surface on which it fell, highlighting them like the numbers in her visor. It played on edges and corners, exploding like sparks in a hover-car factory. It fell along the rooves, ran down past the overflow which was spilling out across the concrete. Like the sections of some hobo orchestra, it thudded against a stack of wooden crates on one side of the alley, and pinged on the metal lid of a dustcan on the other.

And in the space between them, rising up about three meters into the air, the line of rainfall continued. It was as though it was bouncing off an object, though no object was there.

Rinako frowned. Her mind wriggled, unable to make sense of what she was seeing.

What the drak…

She couldn’t tell if the hiss she was hearing was the open comm-line in her helmet or the rain. Crouching, she leant forward and squinted through her visor. There were no numbers. Nothing to highlight. According to the data there was nothing there. But the rain didn’t seem to have been told that. The little proximity numbers flickered into being around the crates and dustcan as she crept forward, peering through the rain. She wanted to reach out and pull back those gauze curtains. It was definitely there, an outline of raindrops exploding in mid-air.

As she got closer, she could see the line of raindrops shifting slightly along its course. A shape became apparent, and as it did, a shiver went through her—

***

Kagayakatachi 

These are the flashy ones you see on the warning ads with all the lights and coronae and also the most common.

Ekitaikatachi

Far more interesting, closer in nature to a plasma than light and originates at the frequencies of high altitude. Second most common.

Togattakatachi

These resemble the crystalline forms of solid-space and can often be found near power wells. Can be unstable.

Kagekatachi 

The most mysterious of the major forms. Not much is known of their primary characteristics and until recently their existence was only posited. Shortest lifespan.

‘These are the four basic subtypings. In addition to its bright level, a Geist is categorised based on the environment in which it was formed. Then there are the exotic species. These don’t fit into any of the known criteria - each is a species of its own, you could say.’

‘I heard one could swallow an entire city.’

Laughter erupted from the room, and the boy who had spoken shrank back into his seat red-faced.

‘Technically it’s possible.’ Said the speaker. ‘But for that to happen would require a power load several orders of magnitude above that at which the form would normally collapse.’

A silence filled the room for the first time that afternoon.

The seats were thinly padded alu-phitium, the cheap kind they lay out when a venue has been rented out. Not like the heavy wooden ones at the academy. Rinako could feel the state of readiness of the room, like one of those new-prohibition era speakeasies with the tables poised to flip up and hide photo-jack wheels any minute, play the part of an innocuous little cafe or coffee shop. Here, urgency was a state of normality. For the moment it was playing the part of a lecture room for new intake orientation, a quick crash course in how not to get killed in your first week. After that, you were on your own, presumably.

‘I heard they were trees.’ Called out a voice from beside her. ‘What? What?!’ The tangle haired young recruit swiped away the cajoling of a couple of men behind him.

The speaker’s baton stopped in the middle of the display screen. The other speakers had been obviously disinterested, reciting them passages straight from the manual that she’d read twenty times over already. But this one was different. He seemed truly invested in trying to get the concepts through to them, as though they had some meaning to him. That was the difference between the lab officers and beat guys she thought. For them it wasn’t just work. Probably the only time he knocked off was when he fell asleep.

His head moved side to side as though a literal pair of scales was inside weighing what had just been said. ‘Actually, First Ensign Takahara isn’t entirely wrong. Though it’s just a set of nicknames based on appearance, there is some truth in it.’ He said. ‘The interesting thing is,‘ - groans and the screeching of chair legs rose up from the class. One of the things that had surprised her since she’d arrived was the lack of interest in the technicals among the other recruits… except when they’d done the breakers, then they’d been all ears - he tapped the board and the screen divided into four seperate images; each looked like a play on the same theme.

’The amorphous zones‘ - this was the technical name for Geists - ‘do run somewhat like botanical systems. What is a plant? Nothing more than a self-perpetuating system, no different in essence from say an executable program or a traffic bot. Not fully alive yet not entirely unalive—a plant possesses no intelligence… yet compare it to a rock and the concept becomes less defined.’ He pushed his glasses up on his nose. ‘Myself, I’d say a better comparison would be to weather systems, species of cyclones and hurricanes and such… but… there you go…’

Rinako looked at the display. The four images were presented in abstract but you could see what would be the trunk, thick and squat in one, more like a series of wavy stems in another. One was covered in sparkly looking feather type appendages. Another had giant star shaped protuberances scattered throughout.

‘They have developed systems dedicated to functions like defence or motion. In order to sustain yourself, you need the processes to do so. But its important to stress that these biological similarities are just cosmetic.‘

‘Right. But they look like trees?’

The lecturer sighed. ‘Yes, Takahara. They do indeed bear a resemblance to trees.’

He flipped a switch on the baton and the display changed to an image of an enforcer in various states of distress.

‘They are systems of pure hunger. There is no mind-body separation, like that which exists for us.’

He looked at a recruit in the corner who was emptying the dregs of a gyouza carton into his mouth, his shirt covered in crumbs.

‘Well, some of us anyway.’

The recruit froze, glanced around then sat up, brushing his stomach.

‘Their actions are simply the result of their form, and that of their environment.’ He paused. ‘Like a ball rolling down a slope.’

‘But the important thing for you to remember is that these defence systems, unintentionally or otherwise, are able to cause serious equipment malfunction when in close proximity… and, as everything in light-space is composed of deformities in the same field, technically YOU are equipment. These can take the form of flashbacks, hallucinations, a distorted sense of time, or all of the above. Especially if you have suffered any previous photopsychic trauma. Inspectrs in the forbidden zone have reported strange lights, ghostly buildings and… other things.’ At this, he looked down and began to flip through his notes.

‘Hey, so the guys who got short circuited all got bounced down to finance, right? Because I swear my pay hasn’t come through on time once these last six weeks.’

Laughter filled the room.

The speaker waited for it to die down, and the recruits to turn back toward the display. ‘They were killed.’ He said, and continued to flick through his notes.

Silence descended for the second time that afternoon.

It was only broken several minutes later. ‘Tsshhhh. Those guys creep me out as much as the Geists.’ Takahara again.

‘Don’t worry, Takahara. We’ll protect you.’ The recruits behind him had their hands in his hair but something had drained from their spirits.

‘But arent we just the same, only more sophisticated. Like our forms may be complex but the basic principle is the same, we act according to form. Is there any real difference...?’

Everyone had turned to face her. The recruits with their hands on Takahara’s head had frozen, staring at her, as had Takahara. Rinako felt her face redden. She was as shocked as anyone to hear the sound of her own voice.

I really need to get used to this thinking in my head thing…

‘No, no, no.’

She felt a flood of relief as the speaker came to her rescue. Though the look he gave her wasn’t exactly one she associated with a rescuer.

‘Although what you say is true on a purely theoretical level… the world doesn’t exist in theory, even our world. There are many things in practice, nuances that cannot be captured or modelled. It’s important to remember that the difference may only be one of degrees but that’s the nature of difference… what makes us what we are. And not, what we are not.’

He was staring at her now. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’ She said quickly, and somewhat quietly.

He continued looking at her for a few moments before turning back to the room and glancing at his watch. ‘Alright, then. That’s time for today, I don’t think you have anymore lectures after—‘

As though the school bell had been rung, his voice was drowned out as the recruits stood and bustled toward the door, bags being slung over shoulders, lunch held in mouths...

He raised his voice. ‘I want you up on this before the end of the week. I dont want to hear of anyone here being… bounced down to finance, ok?’

The door was already swinging to, the last of the recruits having barged through it. He let out a long sigh.

Second to last.

‘Rinako, a word.’

***

Suddenly, she snapped back.

Her hand fumbled dumbly with the breaker, like a musician’s after walking home in the snow. She shook it several times.

Drak! Where is he?!

That thing she had been staring at - no! She couldn’t think of it now.

What was it? Lock-lever right and rotate. Or rotate lever and lock right. All the training, all the preparation started to fall through her mind like it had just passed through a shredder.

All that and it had found her when she was alone. On her first call out.

She tried again and again, yanking the lever above the barrel as hard as she could, the rain half blinding her.

AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH

She froze suddenly. There had been a movement ahead. No. It had stopped moving. The line of raindrops that described its outline had become completely still. She closed her eyes.

A reaction is a pattern.

Had it seen… ?

She held her eyes closed for a moment in preparation, then opened them and looked up again, keeping her body perfectly still.

Beneath the curve of raindrops, only a few meters in front of her now, a crown of long hanging limbs, each one pulsing, the whole thing crawling like it was made of thousands of tiny transparent bugs.

How. Did. It. Get. So. Close?

She felt like a rhino was in front of her, that she would feel the breath from its giant nostrils, hot against her skin...

Her thumb slid slowly over the lock-lever.

Rotate right. Pull.

Comeoncomeoncomeon

It slid round. She winced as the tiny click sounded like an earthquake in her mind. It was ok. Nothing had happened. No rhino breath.

Her thumb tightened. But it wouldn’t move. Rain ran along her hand, along the sights of the weapon, as though they were one and the same. Body and mind.

As she thought this, she noticed something on the concrete just ahead.

Was that a lollipop sti—

But before her brain could finish the thought, her body was taken from it.