jutting from the smooth sea to support all civilization on man-made artifice.
Passing through the band of construction, true Stonework soon loomed overhead.
The boat came to a stop. They gazed up at crowding men overhead, and the laborers gazed down in return, grinning and calling out at the uncommon arrival. The three hesitated for a long moment.
“…here we are,” the old boatman stated.
“Right,” Og replied, steeling himself with a glance to each of his colleagues.
Helpful hands reached down, assisting his climb up the Edge and into civilization.
Eager hands grasped at Elizabeth’s raised arm, pulling her up into the crowd.
No hands remained.
The boat rocked with the sudden lighter load. Retreating anxiously to the strongest room in his mental keep, he considered the pillar at hand, judging the best way to climb up unaided. The thick support ran wide enough to approximate flatness from any given angle, but its surface had been purposely left rough enough to scale alone.
Glancing up at half-seen peripheral movement, he found one calloused hand lowered toward him in offered aid. Warily, he accepted, ready for a sudden unkind release - but the surprisingly strong arm actually lifted him up, bringing him safely to his feet on the Stonework proper.
While the rest of the laborers focused on his colleagues, he faced his helper, confused.
The powerfully muscled man towered two heads taller than most around, and would still have had a head - at the very least - over Og. His face bore no readily identifiable features of any particular culture, and his eyes…
Locking eyes, the two stood in a shared moment of veiled surprise, battling through unspoken mutual scrutiny.
The dreamer instinctively pulled his adversary’s lifelog, finding the file uncommonly short - and impossibly sparse.
The unusual giant had never spoken a single word.
“Here, have some,” Og said to his gathered crowd, pulling bread from his satchel.
The dreamer pulled away from the anomalous man, filing away a dark sense of unease. He could feel those masked eyes - as lying as his own - watching his departure with wary curiosity. He stopped for a brief moment and turned back. “Thanks,” he said, referring to the assistance that nobody else would have offered.
His word of gratitude elicited an almost imperceptible acknowledgement from the giant; a subtle relaxation around his eyes, and a small parting nod.
“Sure, here,” Og continued, his tone compassionate.
The dreamer pressed through the crowd of sweaty, exhausted men, finding his lanky colleague doing exactly what he’d unhappily suspected.
Breaking a loaf of cricket bread into chunks, Og handed the pieces out to hungry laborers. They laughed, jostled, and cheered in response, genuinely grateful. For a few moments, he was their unexpected hero. They scarfed down the charitable treasure with eager abandon.
The moment the food was all gone, the crowd returned to work, leaving the three quite abruptly on their own.
“What?” the smiling young man asked, noticing his companions’ reactions.
Elizabeth set her jaw for a moment.
“Oh… I didn’t think.” His eyebrows furrowed. “I’m sorry. We can get more food when we get to the Rails… they just seem like they need it more than we do.”
She gave a begrudged sigh, followed shortly by a dismissive shrug.
The dreamer kept his face neutral, hanging back in his mind, unsure he had any place to comment. Realizing that Og was waiting for a response to the apology, he also gave a shrug.
The young man’s smile returned.
Turning to the towering maze of stone buildings ahead, the three faced the prospect of entering the thicker crowds of civilization. The open sea had been a rare experience, and, for as long as they managed to live, they would likely never again be so alone.
Og eyed a gap between a massive azure chem-complex and a madly sandwiched habitation patterned unevenly by emerald and dotted with neon red. The crowd in the shadows seemed permissive, and the route ran more directly to the Rails than other potential passages. Various musical strains beat loudly from each gap in the maze, though the rhythms ran deeper from their prospective path. “Are you ready, Rolf?”
He blinked, unused to his own name. Alone in his castle, he had no name for himself - he simply existed. From a high window in his keep, he gazed out through neutral eyes, wondering why his colleague had asked that particular question in that particular manner. “Yes,” he lied.
The three pushed through the crowd, heading for a rapidly moving flow on their visual map of the area.
It took him a few minutes to readjust to the map's incredible mass of red dots and motion, but years of practice soon highlighted the greater patterns in his awareness.
The data was easy - it was the press, the heat of bodies, the smell of sweat, the roar of a dozen conversations, the blanket of competing musics, and the seemingly random colors all around that combined to bombard his mind. His mental castle walls creaked under the intense pressure.
A laughing child to his left flickered her shirt’s virtual colors between cyan and yellow to annoy her mother, and he was forced to look away. A passing bearded Nord glared and went out of his way to roughly bump his shoulder. Loaded with corrugated rods and stone blocks, a heavy flatbed truck eked its way through the press, and they were forced to wait for it to pass.
Overhead, two older women billowed laundry out of opposite windows, drying clothes the old-fashioned way and loudly exchanging neighborhood gossip. Above them, a few layabouts slept on small balconies, enjoying the upper street breezes. Even higher than that, among jutting solar arrays, rambunctious children threw a plastic ball back and forth between the rooftops, dangerously ignoring the irritated shouts of their father from his top-story window.
In the wake of the flatbed's passage, they began walking again. The air in his lungs, formerly light from the open sea, now hung heavy with stench and humidity. All around, buildings virtually colored by no greater pattern than random fancy combined to create patchwork insanity truly painful to behold.
“It’s gonna be great to get home,” Og mused aloud to Elizabeth.
Neither seemed bothered by the sensory assault.
He stopped abruptly as a nearby search returned his name.
A text message followed. "Hey, Scientist, got a quick job for you. Kind of an emergency."
His two colleagues turned in surprise.
He scanned over the linked problem before replying. He was the only one in the area with the proper skillset to fix the problem. "Alright."
"How long?" Og asked.
"A few minutes."
Elizabeth sighed. "We'll wait here."
He gave no reply, leaving them to cross the street's opposing crowdflows on his own. Tracing the map of the area, he angled around a high azure corner, heading for the western entrance of the massive chem-complex they'd been traveling past.
A seasoned older man waited at the opening, standing to the side to let the heavy chemical trucks enter and exit. Dour and impatient, he bore a thinly veiled sneer. "Well come on, let's get a move on. Whole line's held up. We've been down half an hour."
He followed the owner within the labyrinthine building, moving along massive pipes and past rumbling vats. Hundreds of chem-garbed men and women worked the machines, mouths covered by cloth. A horrendous stench seemed to roll and thicken with a life of its own.
The owner led him up grated metal stairs, down a short catwalk, and to a monitoring station. A worried young man fiddled with the controls. He pulled down his mask as they approached. "It's still not working."
"I can see that," the older man grumbled. He indicated the controls with a tilt of his head. "Here we are. Fix it, standard pay for a quick job."
The worker moved aside, and Rolf stepped forward, examining the readouts hanging in the air above the console machines. With flicks of his eyes, he swiped through an immense list of error messages. "T
he system's flagged quite a few problems… looks like there are years of missed maintenance and safety -"
The owner shook his head. "Just get it up and running."
Remaining silent, he grabbed streaming copies of the readouts, bringing them in the corner of his vision as he moved down the catwalk. Kneeling by a junction box, rummaging through his satchel for the right tools, he began testing the corroded workings within.
"What are you doing?" the owner asked, growing slightly annoyed. "Just tell it to stop holding the pipeline locked."
"It's not a software issue," he replied, keeping his tone careful and neutral. "The system was designed to mechanically lockdown when major hazard issues are detected."
"So you're lifting the lockdown?"
"I'm trying to get more data on the hazard -"
"I'm not paying for that," he replied, angry. "I'm paying you to lift the lockdown and get on your way."
The young man at the control station stepped over warily. "Maybe we should see what the problem is. People might get hurt."
"No. You're fired."
"What?"
"This company is about profit. You're obviously not on board with the bottom line. Get out."
"You're serious?"
"Yes. You're fired. Leave."
"But… we're pregnant… we won't have enough calories if I lose this job… my wife will lose the -"
"I don't care. Get out of my sight."
Rolf kept his head down, focusing on the work at hand, hoping the young man wouldn't try to enlist his support.
In the heart of his castle, within his deepest keep, a black silhouette sat at a roughly hewn chrome table and glared,