Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1)
Read Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Online
Authors: Michael John Grist
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Weird
Copyright © 2014 by Michael John Grist
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication my be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.
Cover art by Matias Trabold Rehren.
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CONTENTS
MOVEMENT 1.
MOLTEN CORE
SHARK ARENA C
GIANT'S PLAYSET C
AETHERIC BRIDGE F
ROTATIONAL MAZE F
MOVEMENT 2.
SOLID CORE
MOVEMENT 3.
THRENODY
11 YEARS LATER
I'm finally leaving.
The Wall-line train roars into the station like percussive wind, thunderously loud, and people pour out. They flow either side of me like molten rock, filling up the spaces, so hot I can feel the energy burning off them.
Things have been changing for me. I see things differently now. People are memories and the Lag at once. They are all the same, and none of them are like me.
I fold into the carriage. A man with a jaw like a toad looks at me, then back to his paper. I turn, look out the glass as the doors hiss shut, and some of the groaning engine sound is cocooned away. The train gets underway, the lights of Calico Central station rush by, and then darkness. In the blackness outside the speeding train capsule I look at my reflection.
Do I look different now? It's hard to know. I wonder at the calm I'm feeling inside, and I look at the faces of the other denizens of this train capsule in reflection. They're tapping on nodes, staring vacantly up at the rack-ads, picking at their cuticles. All living their lives, going from their places to their places, all with their little bits of complexity, their little bits of wonder and misery.
I could pull them apart at the seams. I could become just like Mr. Ruins if I wanted, crack them open like eggs for the taste. But I'm not just like him, I'm me.
Ritry Goligh.
My face looks different in the glass. Thinner and older. It is a year since I cared to see a mirror. I wonder if my family saw me now, would they even recognize me?
The train hisses in to another station, disgorges, and I hang from my strap as a new population fills the capsule. They're all like murky waters, I can read them by their memories, and I wonder how much it would take to push one of them over the edge. How much tinkering under the hood would be needed to turn them into creatures like Mr. Ruins, to kill their own children and wash themselves in the blood?
How would that feel, I wonder. How would it taste?
The train pulls out, then into another station and I am vomited out by the press of bodies. Already my brand new suit clings to my skin. I feel the humidity soaking in like alcohol, trying to fog my mind. I move through the press. Somebody strikes me in the shoulder as he goes by, and I feel his scorn. He is a cruel and angry man, a bully.
I have time enough for this. I catch up to him through the flow and step round to face him. He's taller than me, thick with muscle as I once was, with sandy hair that slides either side of his face. He seems momentarily surprised, then he recognizes me and the scorn comes back.
"Having a bad day?" I ask, and jam Mei-An's new node into his crotch. He gasps and doubles over. This is not a skulk and I am not beyond the law, but I don't care. I can't be stopped. I grab the back of his head and for a moment imagine ramming the node into his unprotected face five times, cracking his jaw, knocking three teeth loose, maybe imploding an eyeball. It's the kind of thing I might once have done.
Instead I push the node up into his throat and squeeze his windpipe. He's about to start struggling but as the edge of the metal digs into his throat I feel his body go slack. He thinks I have a knife. I lean in over him, whisper in his ear.
"I should kill you. What do people like you bring to the world? What's the point of you? We'd all be better off with you buried in the fucking dirt."
These are barely even words meant for him, I know it as I say them. But this is the most visceral I can be.
I feel his mind recoil. He is full of fear now, the scorn gone. I feel his miserable, small life, and the cruelty he indulges in when he can. He is a bully, and I hate nothing more than bullies.
I Lag him. Perhaps I am the bully, to do this. I take every bit of pleasure he ever gained from cruelty, and leave only the sour guilt that remained afterward. He is clay in my hands, and I am changing things now, finally.
On his knees he begins to sob, as the unmitigated weight of all he has done crumples down upon him. He is now a lost man, as I have been for so long. Perhaps it will be a new start.
I leave him there, and return to the Wall line. I feel Mr. Ruins' delight at what I have done.
The train rises up through the tsunami wall to the Overskulk array, where many people alight for shopping and sightseeing the Allatanc ocean. The train's rhythm steadies out. Clack clack, clack clack, clack clack, along this string of walled cities that make up Calico. From Calico Central to Tenbridge Wulls, from Tenbridge Wulls to Saunderston, all the way to the edge. At the edge we descend gradually, as the off-wall ramp drops down to the natural coast. I get off the express and wait at a dim station for the tram-line to the Brink.
It rattles near, and I board and ride it alone. These rails are old, over 200 years, once along a ridge and now skirting a coast. I watch my reflection in the glass windows, see it sometimes spiked by the light of shored hydrate tankers unloading at the off-wall pumps, whaling cadaver rigs out mining the waves, searchlight boats out on the dark gray Allatanc ocean.
This place I'm going isn't my home. I left that behind a long time ago. There's nothing out there for me but darkness, and ruin.
It's nearly midnight by the final station, the Brink. The night porter walks by holding his ticket ticker.
"Here for the Mass lights?" he asks.
I shake my head. He points out the window, and I see colored fairy lights dancing in long lines over the small station outbuildings, up the rain-shelter frame, around the curved spine of the single bench.
"No," I say, getting to my feet. "I'm visiting friends."
He gives me an odd look, but takes the ticket from my hand and punches a hole through it.
"Well, then," he says, "you best hurry, they'll be closing down the line soon." He carries on to the carriage end.
The doors open and I leave the tram behind.
The little town of the Brink has only a few hundred inhabitants. I heard once it's actually part of proto-Calico, a kind of skulk on land. Really it's just another space left behind, outside the protection of Calico's walls.
Looking out over the water, I see the first point of light on the horizon. One of the intermittent Arctic rigs we fought so hard for, sucking hydrates out of the ancient ocean bed, once covered by ice. Now they float across the whole Allatanc, like my old skulk on the waves, sucking the last rotting succor out of the bodies of dead dinosaurs buried far down below.
We are everywhere now, and every place is known. There are no more unbroken stretches of darkness, no dark spots on the map but the ones we've left behind.
I walk through the little town of Brink. Shuttered windows and doors pass by on either side of me. The air smells saccharine, hot tar and brown sugar, more heightened than any time I've passed this way before. They boil sweets in the refinery all day and all night. Here and there I catch patches of tinny music leaking from lit second floor bars, warblings of voices that liven up the night. Once that was my life too.
I emerge out of the little town, leaving the last of the lights behind me. Ahead is one gray patch at the map's edge, where I will make my final stand. I cross an old wooden bridge, and catch the scent of decaying whalemeat out to sea. They caught another carcass.
The cloying scent of candy gathers up a fresh undertone of seeping vegetation. This place was a theme park once, with tall ferris wheels and gravity towers. CANDYLAND. Its rollercoasters dominated the skyline, and the cries of delighted children would echo all around.
I came here with my wife Loralena, when it was already a ruin, and we imagined the life it once held. I came here with my children Art and Mem. I came here a different man, filled with hope and hubris, enough to bring me snapping back like an unbreakable elastic bond.
