Welcome to Gaia! ::

It’s a little played out to describe a city as a living thing. The metaphor has been worn out in the hands of writers across the spectrum of competency.

Still.

Joy meandered through the dark streets and thought about white blood cells swallowing up infections, wondering if the cytokine storm was in some way imminent, her ideas fed by a string of conversations and encounters that had her more convinced than ever that while she was on the right side, it was not the winning one. But the idea was interrupted by the manifestation of one of those same viruses - bacteriophages - parasites - whatever they were: a little flaring to life of a signal at the edge of her perception, which she turned towards with the inexorable instinct of the lymphocyte she was reluctantly compelled to be.

She had gotten a little better at playing Marco Polo with the echoes in her head, and soon enough she was trailing him, bloodhound style, and watching him. But he was not working, whatever he was doing: he strolled along the sidewalk with one hand in his pocket and the other smoking three cigarettes in a row while she watched, wrinkling her nose. Maybe the Negaverse gave them supernatural protection against lung disease, too. It would be an appropriate irony and in keeping with her general idea of their advantages.

She had just decided to go - still uncertain whether he had even perceived her - when he lifted his voice suddenly, without turning to her.

“Kinda creepy to just follow me around,” he pointed out. “You can’t be scared of me, surely.”

“No, but you look like bait,” she said bluntly.

“Shitty bait, if that’s the case. I could be doing something to get your attention, if I wanted. We’ve passed - what - ten people so far? And two of them were already asleep.”

“Well, maybe not bait, then. Maybe just making a mental note for later, after I was gone.”

It was unsettling to speak to the man’s back as he continued to walk away from her, looking strange in his somehow-childish uniform. But she did not draw any nearer, just in case this, too, was some sort of bait.

“Makes you paranoid, doesn’t it?” he said conversationally, stooping to put his cigarette out in an empty flowerbed. She bit back an urge to reprimand him for this obvious littering, but scooped it up as she herself passed, holding it in her hands until they could pass a trash can, wrinkling her nose in disgust at handling not just a cigarette butt but someone else’s cigarette butt. “Gets exhausting being sharp-eared and sharp-eyed all the ******** time.”

She was then forced to resist the urge to throw the cigarette butt at the back of his head. She’d probably miss, and it’d defeat the point of cleaning up after his littering. “Paranoia is for those who can’t defend themselves,” she said. “You might have that problem, but I sure as s**t don’t.”

“Don’t you? You’re only so safe,” he said. “If the right person - the wrong person? - showed up he could close his hand around your soul and whisk you off to a lifetime of bureaucracy and murder.”

“And a salary, as I understand it,” she said mildly, dropping the butt into a trash can as they passed it. “But no, I guess that’s true. But it’s all - risk math, right? Like smoking.”

“Yeah. The math kinda sucks.” He paused, a hitch in his step before continuing.

“For smoking, or for -” she left it hanging.

“Both, I guess. But one of them makes you look cool and the other one makes you look like an a*****e.”

“Which one?” she asked, somewhat warily.

“Yes.”

This, despite herself, almost made her laugh. She hated these reminders that these people were, in fact, not parasites to be eradicated but people. But it was a short-lived sympathy. “I don’t know what the recruitment is like. But I know if I got conscripted into doing the s**t you guys do I’d be finding a way to ******** things up.” She said this with a sort of smug pride, feeling he required reminding of his own inadequacies.

“Yeah. Worse when it wasn’t even a conscription. Sign on the dotted line totally cognizant of what you’re doing. Or at least you think you are.”

“And yet you’re still doing it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, you’re out here in uniform. My understanding is that it’s a bad time for you if you’re not doing it.”

“It is,” he said, and he turned at last, to let her catch up to him despite the fact that she kept her wary distance. He had one of those unplaceable faces that could have been fourteen or forty - that affectation of facial hair that might only have been a childish attempt to undo the babyfat contours of his face which could be equally applicable to a teenager trying to be taken seriously and a grown man tired of being mistaken for a child. And he looked at her, then, with an expression that was worn thin, exhausted, almost terrified, and she saw clearly that he could not have been younger than herself, and was possibly older.

She had always been a little bit weak for a man who looked at her like she could hold his fate in her hands and do whatever she wanted with it. She hesitated, and then said nothing.

“You look important,” he said at last, gesturing at her general grandeur.

It was not generally to her taste to make people think otherwise. She might, under other circumstances, have smugly let him keep the impression - since she was, after all, important, at least under certain definitions and to certain audiences which most notably included herself. But she shook her head. “Not really.”

“Maybe you don’t have to be,” he said. And then, bluntly, he turned on her a word that she was always weak to in the mouth of a man: “Please.”

“Please what?”

“Help,” he said simply. “I don’t know where else to go. I don’t know who to ask. I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

She backed away a step or two then, the certainty that this was some sort of trap rising, given that the bait certainly seemed tailored to her. “I can’t help you,” she said warily.

“But you know someone who can. Right? You have - you have connections. Please,” he repeated, and all his exhausted pretense was abruptly abandoned for genuine pleading. “Don’t make me keep looking for someone else now that I finally nutted up and asked. I need out. I gotta get out like yesterday. I can’t keep doing this.” He took the same steps back towards her, and looked for a moment as if he might reach out to her and seize her arm, except that he stopped, thrusting his hands into his pockets as if to stifle the urge.

She waited for the shoe to drop, for the trigger to be sprung. Nothing happened, during the long time that she looked at him in nervous anticipation.

“If someone heard me saying this my a** would be on the line,” he pointed out, but she already knew it, was already thinking it.

“Or maybe you’ve got someone lurking in an alley ready to spring a trap and squeeze my soul right into that lifetime of salary and murder as payment for me taking pity on your sad-sack a**,” she pointed out sharply.

“God,” he said, with sudden fervor. “It really does suck, doesn’t it? The being paranoid thing.” And then, abruptly, he changed before her, without any ceremony at all.

He looked smaller, somehow, in his civilian clothes. The childlike aspect of his uniform had served to make him look taller somehow, by sheer juxtaposition, but this hipster ******** before her with his skinny ankles looked like a man she could have snapped in two even without powering up. He looked at her with pale grey eyes that were watery, pink-rimmed; eyes that gave the impression of having freshly wept despite his doing nothing of the sort. His desperation, however, was palpable even without tears.

“My name is Sawyer Mackenzie Madison,” he said, speaking rapidly and very quietly, with urgency. “And they called me Bornite. Now you know who I am. I have ******** useful information to give. I’m just a cog. You could do anything with me now. My cards are on the ******** table. I need out of this. Even if you can’t, you must know someone who can. Please help me.”

She hesitated again, but this time she lifted her ring up before her, dispatching a message briefly without removing her eyes from him.



Relief poured him into him in a visible wave, and he reached out a hand towards her that she backed away from, still too leery to take it. She had learned too often that things were not what they seemed; that even this soft little former twink might be harboring some powerful secret. He nodded in a resigned, inward way as she did so, suddenly folding up to sit down on the edge of a raised flowerbed before one of the dark shop windows.

“Why me?” she asked, watching him, feeling a wretched twinge of guilt, such as one might feel for not petting a dog that might or might not be dangerous, but who was clearly starved for the touch anyway.

“Because you were there,” he said flatly, running his hands through his hair before leaning on them, pressing them to his forehead. “And you stayed there while I walked around getting the balls together to ask. Kinda how it works, isn’t it?”

She was silent again. “How long have you been waiting for someone to be there?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Six months. Two hours. Ten years. Define what you mean by waiting.”

She did not, however, define it, and they stood in mutual silence awaiting a reply, listening to the distant night noise.



She inwardly sighed a bit as she read this, the congratulations feeling a little hollow given his having just told her that she’d had no merit beyond that of being in the right place at the right time - or the wrong place, possibly, at the wrong time.

“All right,” she said, closing her eyes briefly as she made the decision to commit. “I guess you’re my stray cat for the day, but don’t expect me to take you home. I’m dropping you off at the goddamned shelter.”

“That works,” he said with exhausted resignation as he rose. And then: “Can I be a dog, though? I ******** hate cats.”

“You’re going to have a bad time, then,” she said grimly. “But yeah. Gotta say I prefer a man like a dog myself. Let’s go.”

But Joy learned something that night, which she’d think of often, afterwards. She learned that certain things in the Universe could hear a cry for mercy, if it was made loudly enough in the language of the soul. Whatever was in this man cried out loud enough to be heard, not just by her, but by someone who could give him relief that she could not.