The Rotting World

Left; right; left; right. Alex weaves through the crowd like a minnow swimming upstream as she pulls Jackson along with her. When they are out of the fray, she slams her leg into the brick, hard and fast enough to send a crack splintering through the wall. Jackson winces.

"That was cool, what you did back there." Alex leans in. "But for the sake of every mercenary in the tunnels? Don't do it again."

He lets out a delirious laugh. “What do you mean, “don’t do it again?” I’ve been waiting ages to pull something like that—and the best part? It. Worked.” His gestures are wild and not wholly contained. The whites of his eyes gleam in the dark.

It dawns on Alex then. “That was… your first kill. Wasn’t he?”

Jackson breaths are shallow and quick. He holds up a hand. “Give me a moment.”

Alex folds her arms. The boy slips a hand into the pockets of his hoodie and retrieves his phone—Alex can’t help but frown. Now that she knows the untold horrors of exactly what Jackson can do to her body, she’d rather see his phone snapped in half and thrown to the gutters. She manages to stay her hand.

“This,” he says between gulps of air, “should have everything we need from the mercenary.”

“Please don’t tell me you managed to get his number during all of that,” Alex says.

“Oh, but I have. I’ve got his number and so, so much more.” He swipes an intricate unlock pattern into his screen. “Cirsium prosthetics use brain impulses to function, meaning every single juicy tidbit of data streams right through the metal. My app basically takes all of that data and changes just some of that data—meaning I can read all of it. Like so.”

He swipes upwards on his screen, and a hologram of nonsense projects from his phone into the air. Alex raises an eyebrow.

“Don’t worry, you haven’t turned illiterate,” he assures her. “What I’ve got here is essentially brain juice in its purest form—’cuz everyone’s got their own twisted way of thinking, yeah? And advanced thought processes—like what our girl’s up to—are a whole lot more complex than telling an arm to move. I’ll need to manually decode it.”

“And that’ll take… how long?”

A smirk. “Only the better half of a day.”

“...Can you do that while we walk? Because we need to catch up to that said girl before she heads off to who-knows-where.”

“Can the little hacker boy use his phone while he walks, she asks!”

Something stirs in Jackson’s dark eyes—a fine mist of mania. Alex places a hand on his shoulder and gives him a reassuring squeeze. “I’m not asking if you can use your phone while you walk. I’m asking if you’ll be… able to concentrate. If you’ll be fine.”

“That obvious?” He smiles, but his lips are wobbly. He shrugs off Alex’s grip. “Maths is in my blood, dude. If it keeps me alive, it’ll keep me sane. Don’t worry about me, yeah?”

She watches the boy amble off, deeper into the alleyway, until the deep blues of his hoodie have turned black. Gritting her teeth, she follows him.

“Lots of things keep you alive,” she mutters. “Not all of them are good for you.”

—

Alex cranes her neck upwards and scans the unforgiving walls that separate the tunnels from the outskirts. They’re not too tall—someone with the right prosthetics and mindset could scale them without prior training—but they do their job well. Only the Ancestry Hall towers above the wall, and all the other so-called sky-scrapers are either of equal height or stand lower.

So no one can see over, she realises. Better to stare at a concrete eyesore than the ruins of past centuries. She can't imagine a mountain of rubble doing anything good for worker morale.

"I'm going to tear that wall down," Lukas had once said as he'd gazed out of the windows in his office. "Someone has to do it."

"It's worse out there than it is in here," Alex had replied.

And with a smile both equal parts deadly and gentle, he'd said, "And I'd rather die facing the firing squad than put the blindfold on."

At this point, she would not be surprised if it was her he wanted to put in front of the firing squad.

Beside her, Jackson murmurs to himself, his fingers flying as numbers dart by on his screen. Alex pulls him towards her by the shoulder just as he's about to walk into a large man. Though the man scowls, one look from the Hare is enough to make him look the other way.

She does not tell Jackson to cut it out like she’d used to. Instead, she hands over their passports to the man in the booth and waits patiently as he thumbs through them. Saturated as New England may be in technology, Alex is glad that the passports are the exception, glad for the feel of coarse paper under her fingertips.

Maybe she should just suck it up and join the Tongue-Settlers.

The man hands their passports back. “All set, looks like you’re good to go.”

“Just like that?” Alex asks. “No background checks?”

He shrugs, and his jaw moves as if he is chewing on something. “Personally, if dangerous men walked up to me and asked to pass, I’d let them go through, passports be damned. I’m not getting my ass beat just to get paid minimum. Besides—” The man in the booth presses a button, and a section of the wall begins to lift off the ground. “—The dogs’ll get you, if they really wanted to. Lots more of them patrolling around the outskirts these days.”

Alex sucks air through her teeth and nudges Jackson along. “Right. Any idea why?”

The man shrugs again. “Just don’t bump into them while they’re on their break.” He waves at a group of Tongues behind them, signalling the end of the conversation.

Once the wall has fully risen, Alex swallows as she takes in the sight before her. A skeleton of what used to be a high rise office stands in her way, its body mangled by what appears to be splotches of pale, peeling paint. She pulls Jackson through. "Come on. The sooner we find our girl, the sooner we get to leave."

Jackson mutters something Alex can't quite make sense of—a string of equations and numbers, haphazardly thrown together by a brilliant mind under duress.

It reminds her of a certain someone. A certain slimy man, sipping wine from the glass in his high rise office, watching the walls he would one day knock down.

Let’s see why you want these walls smashed down then, pretty boy, Alex muses to herself.

Lining the other side of the wall are plastic carts, each one only large enough to sit three people and perhaps a small child. When they board one such cart, Alex observes the apparatus at the front. The cart is driven by an AI, and the touchscreen doesn’t quite respond properly to Alex’s inputs. She taps it one, two, three more times, each tap more forceful than the last.

“WHERE T-O?” the AI asks, its voice crackling from dusty speakers.

“Give me manual control, please,” she hisses.

“UNDER-ST-O-O-D.”

“Toggle voice to mute.”

The AI gives a slow whirr, then ceases to speak. Then the engines rumble to life, and the landscape begins to trot by. She sees exactly what she'd expected. The hills are formed from metal scraps, and the gutters overflow with oil and leftovers from a bygone era. It's like looking into a cracked reflection of the tunnels. She shudders and turns to address Jackson again.

"Figured out where we're going yet?" she asks.

His answer is swift. "Lympheria Research Centre."

She chews on the insides of her cheeks. "So she's not in the outskirts?"

"No. She is. Definitely is." Jackson finally looks up from his phone and scans the horizon. "And woah. This place is a dump. Not a surprise."

"Is this Lympheria place an actual research facility, or is it more Tongue slang that I'm gonna have to wrap my head around?"

"Wait, wait. I'm transcribing it for you." He taps once, twice. “Aaand…”

Alex watches him with bated breath.

He scowls. “What? It’s hard doing shit on a phone, okay? Look at how tiny the screen is, it’s like I’m a giant playing with ants. Okay. Okay. I’m done. Sending it over.”

Her own phone bleeps. She scans the transcript once, then twice. Her eyes widen. The hair on the back of her neck stands at attention. Words blur into each other like mixing pigments, their meanings lost then found in the same line of thought. A project named Blumenfäule. An AI named FERN, capable of manipulating life. The research centre lies somewhere to the far east, where two rusty fences forge a path through rubble and…

“...The fuck is this?” she says.

Jackson says nothing.

She squints at the transcript to make sure she’s read it properly. Plant life.

“The transcript’s got the directions to this FERN thing too.” Jackson’s smile wobbles, and his eyes shine. “I mean—could you imagine? An AI, a totally digital being—capable of changing biomatter on a fucking whim! What kind of science fiction shit is that?”

“But why would the girl be there?”

“Transcript doesn’t say, but the guy seemed pretty adamant that Iris was going to be there. And, considering that he’s one of the Bank’s, I’d say we follow this lead.”

“Right.” Alex whirls the cart around. The wheels screech against the asphalt, and she heads for the eastern ruins.

Where the cities have long crumbled, and the sky thrums grey.

—

Once they are at the research centre—which had proven itself to be no more than a dingy cave covered in old greenery and other strange bits of flora—Alex shoves her way through a particularly dense net of vines. The sudden introduction of various flourishing plant life had quickly worn out its welcome when she’d realised that plants here were either sticky, slippery, or smelled like garbage. She grumbles as her prosthetics splash against ankle deep water; Jackson complains about the hem of his trousers getting wet.

And then suddenly, the cave ends. They come face to face with a wall, and several blocks of smashed concrete. Alex bends down, wipes a finger against the rough edges of one such block. White dust comes off her fingertips. This damage is recent.

Instantly her muscles tense. She scans the cave for any would-be attackers, but everything is so dark; a perfect place for an ambush. Several breaths pass. Nothing has moved.

And then the greenery on the cave walls lights up. Alex stifles a shout—and Jackson actually screams. He clutches onto Alex’s arm, his fingers digging into her skin for dear life. When he realises that there is no danger, he sheepishly lets go and steps away from her.

The moss begins to glow. Jackson shouts and hops back towards Alex. A voice—soft, yet broken—echoes around the cave.

Jackson relaxes. "That lack of guttural bass and airy larynx vibration… just an AI, thank fuck…"

"FERN." Alex realises.

Somewhere in the rubble, a small, white box glows faintly. "Another visitor today… An auspicious day for piety, isn't it?" The voice stops, as if suddenly in the midst of a calculation, then says, "But I do not sense the scent of metal on you. You aren't here for advice, are you?"

Jackson does not respond to the voice; he instead makes his way over the rubble and picks up the box like a toy. He rotates it in his hand; observes it. "Hm. The casing's old, but I'm sure the electronics inside are just top notch, state of the art, military grade—etcetera. Not sure why it's started playing god, though. You'd think it'd be programmed to not do that kind of thing, else we'd have an AI uprising ages ago."

"..." The AI says nothing.

“Pass that over.” Alex snatches at the box. “Hey. We’re looking for a girl, about nineteen, wears a blue cardigan. She’s missing an arm? Been here recently?”

A salient pause. Then the AI says, “I’ve seen no such individual. Perhaps you are mistaken.”

“Well, shit.” Jackson frowns. “Maybe I mistranslated.”

Alex glares at Jackson. He throws up his hands. “Hey, it’s hard, alright? It’s like reading French that’s been phonetically written out in Japanese, then thrown through the Russian alphabet then back to English again, but ten times worse. Look, I’ll go through the data again, but it’ll take another day—”

She shakes her head and grits her teeth. “No. We don’t have another day. You saw how many of those Bank fuckers had us surrounded. We’re surrounded by hyenas—and hyenas only get more vicious the darker it gets. Another day, and those men will kill her.”

“Well, then what, Alex?” Jackson asks, his face growing redder by the second. “You got anything better?”

“No.” Her fingers clutch at the box. She imagines Lukas’ smile, gentle yet brutal, as precise as a thin stiletto. Disappointing his Lordship would prove incredibly, incredibly disastrous indeed. And yet she has nothing to offer, no more tricks tucked up her sleeves.

She’s reminded of darker times. Of times where her doubt would drown her until her room smelled of blood and liquor. Her blood; her father’s liquor.

She is not that girl anymore.

Instead, she turns her anger outward.

“Okay, Mr. Chavez. Who the fuck walked up to the biggest, baddest mercenary in the street and mocked him? Who had to get bailed out, huh? No, in fact, who did the bailing out? I did. The reason we’re stuck in some—some—” She waves at the moss and rocks around her with her free hand. “—Tongue-cave, is because you couldn’t do the one thing you said you could do! Now they’re going to get to Iris first, and they’re going to do whatever the hell they want to do to her and the rest of this goddamn city!”

Jackson stands there, his eyes wide. Alex’s breaths echo around the cave, hot and malicious.

“She’s going to die, Jackson!” she shouts anyway. “She’s going to die, and it’s your fault!”

And then she feels it.

There’s something shifting behind her, like a swarm of ants crawling across a surface. But she doesn’t have to turn to see what it is—a glow spreads over the walls, over the rocks like oil paint poured over a canvas. The glow is fuzzy. It’s moss. She opens her mouth, then closes it again, because the sight of the moss is so magical that she has forgotten it is simply science at work. Her anger dissipates like smoke.

The AI begins to speak once more. “I was afraid that you meant to harm Iris. But now I know—though you are allied with a corporation, you still wish to save her. That is truly admirable. And I require the assistance of admirable people.”

Alex swallows and turns at last. The words that she wants to say keep dying in her mouth.

It’s Jackson who manages to speak. His voice is strangely cold, tired. “So where’d she go?”

“I’ve sent her on her own mission—and it is imperative that she should complete this. There are things larger than life itself that are at risk here, futures that are so delicate they hang over all of us like a web of glass.” The moss dims its pale green light. “Glass that could shatter at any moment, splintering down. And I’m sure you know better than anyone how easily the human body can break, Alex.”

She grits her teeth again. “Mission this, mission that; where’d she go then, huh?”

“Where else? Where voices go to die.”

Again, it’s Jackson who speaks up. “The Ancestry Hall,” he breathes.

“She’s going back into Fontanelle?” asks Alex.

Neither of them talk at first. Alex remembers the group of Bank soldiers in the tunnels, the dogs patrolling the outskirts, and then she imagines the hoards of Wisteria and Bank and ION mercenaries in the streets themselves, patrolling the roads and questioning everyone and everything with the barrel end of their gunbatons.

The moss glows briefly, as if the AI has tilted its head in query. “Is the situation… more dire than I had anticipated? Should I not have sent Iris back?”

Both Alex and Jackson say the same thing at the same time.

“Shit.”