Slumrat Rising

Vol. 4 Chap. 31 Suburban Guerilla

An inexplicable outbreak of altruism broke out across suburban Gamphe. It spread, seemingly without reason, along stale residential streets and through mall parking lots. It climbed over overflowing sinks and under subfloor heating. It even, unprovoked, helped a little old lady cross a street, got a cat down from a tree and returned a toy thrown out of a pram.

When the sweating, swearing, miserable band of intelligence analysts eventually isolated the source of the chain reaction, they dubbed it “SFO #982” filed their reports and got on with their day. Which, depending on what shift they were on, consisted of either dropping a sedative in a shot of whiskey, necking it and going to bed, or amphetamines in their double large coffee. It was not a good time to be an analyst.

Truth might have taken some vicarious satisfaction in their suffering. By the time he delivered “Puddin Face,” eight kilos of feline degeneracy, from the bending tree branch to the loving arms of her owner, he was entirely done with the random acts of kindness schtick.

How? How do people live like this? I would say… maybe one person was really thankful for my help today, and that was the granny at the restaurant.

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Kind of screws my big idea, though. If the big forbidden idea is a kind of universal empathy-

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Then going around doing randomly kind things should have an outsized impact. It should be shocking to people.

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Ah. Right. Yes.

Truth kicked a can, neatly ricocheting it off a lamp post and into a trash bin. It wasn’t a well thought out plan. It just seemed like… spreading the idea of helping strangers. That had to be a good thing, right? In moderation? Not to some self harming level.

Except that you needed the other half. Someone needed to stick out their hand, and the other person needed to appreciate the hand-sticking. Not expecting it, or just taking advantage of it, appreciating it.

Truth couldn’t even muster the energy to sigh. It would be like Earth Folding Step or Cup and Knife. He would have to play around with it some more, and learn about how it worked. He had spent most of his day on this nonsense. Time to leave Gamphe, for now.

He started strolling down the highway, spotted a southbound bus, and hopped onto the roof. Next stop, Confen. A town he had vaguely heard of, and couldn’t name a single thing about. It would do.

As he watched the countryside go past, he had the strangest niggling sort of feeling. As though he were on the edge of something, or trying to feel something through a curtain. There was some idea there that he was missing.

He was field testing different strategies- self interest that serves a kind of public good was what he was pitching to the Sung. Random acts of charity with the general populace. Just being a cheerful and positive person around service workers.

Truth kind of felt like he was a company trialing slightly different products in different markets, just to see what would stick. Like a corporation with a basically okay but not amazing product, the results were, so far, unsatisfactory. And like the CEO of a corporation with a meh product, he had to keep reassuring himself that the product wasn’t inherently bad, he just hadn’t found the right market, and the right pitch.

It was a tenuous sort of idea- he wasn’t going to win the ratfucking game. The big boys were just too big, and too practiced at both fucking rats, fucking in the manner of rats, and leaving people in the condition of having been, metaphorically and occasionally literally, fucked by rats. He didn’t have the instincts, the skills, or the experience.

So he would have to do something else to change how the apocalypse would land on this planet. Improve the condition for “his” people, while tearing down those setting up as future god-kings of the wasteland. Just for the chance of seeing something new. Something that wasn’t the same old misery.

He picked at it for a while, never coming to a satisfactory conclusion.

The bus pulled up next to a concrete block with the words “Confen Transit Center” on the side of it. Hard to be sure, but at a guess, this was Confen. Truth hopped off the bus and looked around.

I have to admit, I’m impressed. I’m standing here, in Confen, and I still don’t know anything about Confen. This is the single most generic place I have ever seen. Every shop is a chain store. And not even interesting chain stores at that.

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He looked left and right down the street. There were two Happy Happy Marts within three blocks of each other. Two sandwich places from the same chain. Two fast-casual restaurants that were different brands, but owned by the same parent company. The cars were all made by the top three manufacturers- no exceptions. Not even a rare or limited time colorway.

He looked up at the street lights. Yep. Brand-spanking-new “five year service life” talismans, same as they ever were.

The thing was, though, while no one looked happy, they didn’t look oppressed and miserable either. They just looked like people stressed by life. Hard to be happy with rationing starting to kick in and with a giant war going on, but they were doing their best.

The houses weren’t quite the same factory produced clones he saw in Onis, but now that he was looking for it, the housing was eerily standardized. He saw a cluster of three apartment blocks together, each a shortened L shape. They had different color facades, and were oriented differently, so you might be forgiven for not immediately seeing the similarities. But once you stepped back and really looked- same building, three times.

Truth sat on the curb and started trying to really see what he was seeing, not what he thought he was seeing. Yes, it was all boring and mass produced, but it wasn’t actually bad. Confen was probably considered a pretty okay place to live.

He walked down the main street, looking into buildings and storefronts. A grocery store- part of an international chain. Pharmacies, all offshoots of the big Alchemist Towers based in Harban. A stationary and office supply store, part of another international chain. All chain stores, all the same safe variations on the same few ideas.

Boring, but hardly terrible, right? Since when was “safe” a bad thing? These days, “safe” was a dream. He drummed his fingers on a veneer covered plywood side table in a chain coffee shop. Dreams. Dreams belonging to, at a guess, the lowest tier citizen and, once upon a time, even the better off denizens.

Well, he was seeing a lot of C and D tiers around. The “new citizen,” he assumed. So where were the Denizens? He glanced over at the kid working behind the counter… except it wasn’t a kid, was it? It was an adult woman. And a D Tier citizen at that.

Interesting, interesting. Were there Denizens anywhere on this street? A bit of high speed investigation revealed exactly two- a floor mopper at the supermarket, and a pair of laborers hauling sacks of cement around a building site. Must have been a hell of a bribe to get that building permitted- he’d bet cash that cement was a rationed good.

So the Denizens were here in Confen, but deliberately made invisible. Shunted into the absolute least wanted, lowest status jobs. And what qualified as “wanted” was rapidly expanding. Five years ago, it would have been a denizen working behind the counter at the coffee shop. They certainly would be stacking shelves in the stores.

Guess they couldn’t be trusted around something so valuable as food, these days. It might be worth your life to steal a loaf of bread.

But where were they sleeping? Truth started going out to the fringes of the town, hunting for the densest, least pleasant housing blocks. They actually took some hunting to find- they were stuck at the end of the local bus lines, almost an hour from downtown in this big town.

They weren’t the towers he remembered from growing up in Harban. They brought him straight home anyway.

Raw concrete, turned gray by time and weather, pockmarked with jet black windows. A privacy measure, he had always been told. And an easy way to help keep the heat in. Then there were the layers of graffiti, periodically cleaned with indifferent care by underpaid municipal workers, or painted over by rival artists or gangs. The shallow holes etched by thousands of bladders-worth of urine, the acid-water etching its way into the nests of the very rats pissing it out.

And speaking of rats- here they were, in all their miserable splendor. Gangsters hung out around street corners, nakedly evaluating whether it would be better to sell you your drug of choice, or just rob you. No street walkers- nobody would be insane to troll around here. No, they would be in the towers, waiting for their pimps to send customers their way.

Plenty of people just sitting out. Battered folding chairs, sofas abandoned and left to rot on the curb, scavenged armchairs from a dump, or the home of someone who might as well have been living in a dump. Just sitting. Watching. Splitting cheap beer and cheaper schnapps. Someone would have a battered scry ball out, or some music playing. Nobody was partying or anything, they were just sitting. Waiting. For what, even they didn’t know.

Truth crouched next to one particularly vile looking young man. There was blood on his shoes. His eyes were bloodshot. Torn up, bloody knuckles, too. Those would get infected in a big hurry unless he did something. And Truth knew perfectly damn well this little rat wasn’t going to do something. He was going to wait here until he got hungry again. Then he would stir out, hunt one of his fellow rats, feast (or die) and then come back here to wait.

The horrible thing was, the little rat wasn’t dead to the world. He was hyper aware, tracking every bit of movement around him. Keeping track of who was talking to who. Because this wasn’t a safe place. It might be where he came to rest, but it wasn’t safe. He knew damn well every rat around him was another predator. Just waiting for him to slip.

“You know this is dumb, right?” Truth kept his voice conversational. “You see how broke, sick and starving all these people are, but you are picking your victims from this bunch anyway. Because they are nearby. Because nobody cares what happens to them, so long as they aren’t in a gang. And maybe not even then.”

The little rat’s head was nodding along. Nobody noticed or cared. Lots of drugs made you nod like that. Maybe this little rat would be their next meal.

“Thing is though, you have seen the cops these days. The cops don’t care about nobody anymore, except maybe those B and A tier pricks. All kinds of nice apartment buildings just one or two stops down from here. How hard would it be to kill someone in one of those units? Sleep somewhere safe tonight, eat a good meal, lots and lots to steal.”

The head started moving faster now. “Plus, I bet they have better booze than this shit.” The rat stood up and started walking towards the bus stop. Truth followed along behind him.

He had found his market. Now he just had to refine the pitch. Empathy would have to come later. For now, he would have to teach the rats how to think.