Slumrat Rising

Vol. 4 Chap. 33 The Bleak Science

Truth tried to sort out the gains and losses for the day. The initial idea- moving the denizens with greed, turning them on their “betters,” was fundamentally viable if he really wanted a bloody revolution. It wouldn’t help bring a better world, though. Neither would rampant do-gooderism. The people he helped would mostly just shrug, say thanks, and feel lucky that they saved a wen.

He kept coming back to the notion of the get-back. What do I “get back” if I do something good for you? Because good feelings only carry you so far. Can’t eat ‘em, for one thing. His running around problem solving was good for the people he helped, but bad for any local maintenance techs looking for work.

Truth sprawled in the back of a bus, watching the city roll past. “City.” Glorified town, really. They were still making an effort at public security. He could feel the periodic sweeps of the bus by diviners, looking for anything that didn’t fit. No traffic stops at the moment, but he had a feeling they would appear in the not-to-distant future.

The Hell Prince was seen just north of here. It would be irresponsible not to at least have a lookout for him.

The bus pulled up to the curb. People came onboard, their identity sigil checked by scanners built into the doorframe. So long as their bus pass was valid, or they had pre-paid the fare to the golem at the bus stop, they could step onboard. If not? A ward snapped down, a bell rang, and you were publicly humiliated as you were ejected from the bus.

Bus driver was getting paid. Bus company, bus manufacturer, bus maintenance company, all getting paid. The passengers were also getting something- you could work in one part of town and live in another, and not have to walk two hours to get from one place to the other. Way cheaper than owning a carriage, assuming it was legal for you to do so in the first place.

There had to be that get-back. That promise that, if you do for me, I’ll do for you. Was it the curse? Or was it something people were just born with?

He looked out the window. Shop after shop. Housing block after housing block. It all seemed utterly human. But where were the edges of the curse? What was that dividing line between imposed from outside and born from within?

It was enough to make you paranoid.

The bus passed a billboard with a picture of a stag on a mountain, which apparently should make him want to buy perfume. It actually made him think of the old Abbot, that deer-headed demon he met outside of Harban.

The demon’s recipe for human happiness was to create a world without unnatural stress, supported by the systems of morals and ethics needed to maintain it. Truth had noticed even then that there was no neat way to separate natural and unnatural stresses.

The examples the Abbot had cited, for example- food and shelter. Both infinitely providable with demonic labor, so long as cosmic rays remained available. It was hypothetically possible to imagine a system where humans provided the resources and labor. But before you even reached the question of practicality- what could be more natural than struggling to find food and shelter?

He watched apartment block after apartment block pass through the bus window. Jeon certainly had its share of slums, shanty towns, and “housing” that was more dangerous to the people inside of it than the weather outside. But they also had a ton of decent housing. The overwhelming majority did have some kind of access to shelter. Homes were made. People got paid. There was that get-back built in.

Food was a trickier topic. Even with the body cultivation and a storage ring full of food, the memory of hungry nights were still enough to make him angry. That was a core memory, right there. Going to bed hungry, waking up hungry, and knowing that today you were going to do whatever it took to not be hungry. Truth didn’t give a damn about all the things he had stolen from grocery stores since he got the Blessing of the Silent Forest. He had been shoplifting to live his whole life.

Shoplifting meant he was cutting people out of the get-back. Most immediately the store owners, but ultimately the farmers. Or… whoever owned the fields. Not the laborers. Probably some company. He was ripping off .00000741 wen per share for each stick of FRYONASE brand Fish Sticks he stole. A pureed log of the scraps of farmed fish, pressed into a narrow sausage, packed with salt and preservatives, sealed in plastic, poached until shelf stable, and sold in slum convenience stores for not much, but still more than Truth had had.

Truly, his heart wept for the poor, deprived shareholders. He would play sad violin music, but regrettably, musical education was not offered in slum schools and he never had time to learn in the afternoons and evenings. Too busy finding food.

Truth felt like he had a lot of pieces of things and he was trying to build a puzzle out of them without knowing what the final picture was supposed to look like. Worse, he wasn’t entirely sure all the pieces came from the same puzzle.

People needed things- food, shelter, safety. Education, ideally. Medicine, definitely. The chance to grow and become more than hungry rats. Or just live, content as they were. That should be fine too. He didn’t like it, but as long as they were contributing to the get-back, right? Although that did sort of leave children, elderly and the disabled coughing loudly by the windows. Couldn’t leave them hanging.

He didn’t realize that he was slowly banging his head against the window. It was just so frustrating. There should be a right answer to all of this. Humans had thousands of years of history, a lot of it spent figuring out how to get people what they needed. So if we know what everyone needs, and we have some good ideas about how to get it to them, is greed really the only barrier?

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Is the get-back the problem here? Because it doesn’t feel like it is. Nobody wants to just do things out of the goodness of their heart. Some people would be okay doing it more than others, but to spend a life laboring for nothing but a thanks and a pat on the back? No chance. You need to know someone’s going to do the same for you, or why do it?

There had to be a contract. You do for me, I do for you. You don’t stab me while I sleep, I don’t burn your house down and steal your cows. I mine iron, you smelt it, she hammers out the ingots, he makes a fork, we all eat. We all get back something for our work. And part of the agreement is- what? We all collectively decide to cover the expenses of the people who can’t work?

Sounded good. Very good. He smelled a rat somewhere in there. He was missing something. A heavily tattooed young man sat down on the seat next to Truth, glaring around. He very conspicuously scratched his balls.

Truth gave him a look. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just wear his badge around his neck? He might look like a slum rat, but he didn’t smell like one.

Cops. Did every system need cops?

You needed someone to enforce the contract. Someone to make sure the stab-compromise was honored. You could call it different things, but they would ultimately be cops. And if there was one thing Truth did know, to the very middle part of his bones, it was that the cops were never on your side.

To a cop, you were always, even if you were the victim of a horrible crime, always a problem. You getting stabbed meant that they had to deal with a stabbing. You stabbing someone meant that they had to deal with a stabbing. In either case, their job was “deal with the stabbing.” Which was a problem. Their job was to solve problems and deter future problems by being the link between problems and consequences.

He watched the cop glaring at people. They were well out of the city center now, moving into not-quite-slums. Pretty shortly, he would get off the bus and saunter over to some gangsters. He would be looking for someone, or to score something. He had a problem to solve, and figured it would be easier to solve if no one knew he was a cop.

Truth mentally weighed the odds and mentally put his money on “Gangster who was paying for protection hadn’t paid up recently.” Which did raise the interesting question of how, exactly, cops were collecting their bribes these days. Drugs? Services rendered?

Crime was definitionally a problem because it was defined by the people who got to make definitions about big, society wide things like what constitutes crime. Generally, in his experience, the people with stuff they wanted protected. Which meant powerful people.

You could, hypothetically, kill a Level Five in their sleep. Or maybe, if you were prepared to accept massive casualties, a very well equipped, very well trained team of Level One’s could… theoretically… kill a Level Five. Throw enough explosives in there, especially if they haven’t practiced body cultivation, and you can eventually kill anything.

As a practical matter? Higher Levels were literally and metaphorically on a higher level than Level Ones and Zeros. There was no fighting back allowed. It would be them setting the rules, and their stuff the cops were guarding. High Levels wouldn’t treat their lesser’s problems as equal to their own.

You come back to not enough food, poison homes, limited education, laboring in bad conditions for worse wages, all the problems you had before. Because instead of an even deal where there was a reasonably fair get-back, the deal was a gangster’s promise. “Get me my money every week and you won’t have any problems.”

You needed an even higher level to enforce the deal. To make sure everyone was getting their get-back, without throwing the whole thing out of balance. The government could, theoretically, do it. If you had a rule that everyone over Level Five has to work for the government or something, with strict rules against favoring your own family or interests, enforced by even higher level mages… Nah. Same old problems, just more steps.

The only power the weak had in this situation was to die. To withhold their labor so completely, they would literally rather die than serve. Until the necromancers got involved, and the golem makers, custom spell beast makers, and, say it softly, the demon binders. The same people who could theoretically provide a perfect world for everyone, would ensure that the poor and weak lost their last, tiny, bit of leverage. Their labor.

The poor would be surplus to requirements. An expense to manage. A problem. A crime.

You would have a few powerful people controlling everything- what you ate, where you lived, what you were allowed to learn and do, how you were allowed to breed. If you were allowed to breed. There would be no one defending the poor and weak. Cultivation, theoretically open to everyone, would become the private privilege of the most powerful. There would be no revolution. There would be no chance of toppling the mighty.

It would take the death of magic itself, the end of cultivation, to break the cycle. To clear away enough space for the poor and weak to breath and grow.

“Last Stop! Everyone off!” The bus had reached the end of the line- a depot next to a collection of towers and a single convenience store with more security than some banks.

He stepped off the bus. Derelicts lay collapsed in the corners of the bus shelters, surrounded by empty bottles and cigarette stubs. “Why not?” their faces asked. “Why the Hell not?”

“It comes down to education. You have to make people believe that it’s wrong to screw over those weaker than yourself, and right now, there isn’t a soul that believes that. Strictly speaking, I’m not even sure I believe it.”

Truth sat on one of the spike-covered benches. Not like the rounded points were going to bother him any.

“But that’s the core of it. Until you can persuade people that part of their get-back is others doing well, nothing changes for the better. We keep getting worse and worse until there is just one old bastard left, hugging a barrel of beans and keeping a white-knuckle grip on a needler just in case today’s the day his shadow finally turns on him.”

Truth laughed, a self deprecating little sound.

“You’d have to be a fool to think you could change all that. A fool, or God.”