Beware the Well Fed Man
Chris Capps
Part One
It's true I've never been baptized, but I did see the Plexis Shopping Center the morning after it landed in a field of burned wheat. High as I was on a rocky cliff, I could feel the purity as if it was radiation. It was pouring from the ivory building even through the trembling scope of my hunting rifle. I didn't understand what it was then, but I remember watching the pumpkin red flames beating at its walls to no effect - and I knew the roads that would be beaten under heel to its doors.
Crassus started running first. He pushed me over onto my side playfully and skimmed with his patchwork shoes down the rolling dust hill into the burning fields. He was laughing like he had when we were children. I cursed at him and then resolved to give him a good knuckle to the back of his head when we reached the wall. And in seconds it was forgotten. We were both laughing now, ready to crack this marvelous treasure chest that had landed less than a mile from our campsite. Of course we wouldn't be the only ones to see it. There would soon be others closing in on the enigma. We didn't know what to expect as we closed in.
Is this how we will find Death? Or is it something new?
Spend three nightmares cowering beneath burned sheet metal to the tune of ripper dog howls and you'll understand our madness. Crassus and I had been wandering too long without a home.
The building was like a white pill resting on its side with windows stacked on top of one another - leading up thirty stories. And as impossibly tall as it was from bottom to dizzying top, it was at least double that in width. During the long run down into the valley, even Crassus had to stop twice to gain his breath.
Two years prior, we had discovered a walking city lying on its side filled with skeletons and ashes and very little in the way of food. Yet we saw no legs on the Plexis. Surely it must have either sprouted up from the ground like an elephant skull, or fallen from the heavens like so many regional gods of legend.
When we reached the front, we found a glass entrance. There were two doors, which parted and spoke,
"Please enjoy your stay at the Plexis Shopping Center."
At the entrance hall, there was already a group of twenty men sitting at a long table. They were laughing and quickly devouring a display of food that rivaled my most ludicrous dreams. Foods I could identify mingled with those I could not on metal trays adorned with paperwood utensils. We entered to a tremendous cheer from our new tribe. Yes, they had arrived just as we had. Like Crassus and me, these were scouts without a tribe prospecting an unforgiving landscape looking for a home. Now in this citadel of wonders they had found it, and each other.
There was gentle music piping from the ceiling, and laughter, and hard even floors that squeaked underneath our muddy dew-clad shoes. Brilliant lights buzzed down hallways, bouncing off rows of tan doors that held the promise of still further wonder.
Being able to read was a significant advantage for me. As the day wore on, I was able to decipher hints of the various functions the rooms held even as I took those timid first steps into our new home. There were symbols here, too. Symbols I recognized from corporate houses long since destroyed. Only they weren't covered in rust. They were new, glowing. Aside from the food, there was a map of further thrills deeper within the belly of the Plexis. And there would be time to explore it all later. For now, we sat and ate. And we told stories of who we were.
Even now I can't imagine anyone having a better day than that. We had been raptured from the ripper dogs, the meltstock, and the constant threat of blighted storms. We sat intoxicated by sugary drinks and the fastest of food. Our revelry went long into the night, and we slept in the food court telling stories from under long fur blankets. Soon enough we would begin unlocking where our home had come from, and how it arrived. Soon enough. That night our only concern was how to sleep without the constant threat of death.
Who I was before doesn’t matter. In truth, I was as close to nothing a breathing human can be. In the primordial days I was Ebon the Waste - a man without rank, and without a tribe save for my brother Crassus. And then the Plexis changed me. I found myself adept at drawing plans for furniture in chalk on the ground. I read signs, and guided my companions into the massive labyrinth. Words without meaning contextualized themselves with time. Before the Plexus I could never have dreamed of actually reading new things every day. Short of a cannibal I was the lowliest sort of man. A vagrant scavenger.
After the Plexis I was a ranking builder, and one of the highly respected discoverers of the new world.
My brother too quickly made a name for himself. Crassus, a boy who used to cry whenever the sun went down on an empty stomach was selected in those early days to unlock the secrets of the Plexis. He had so many questions. The only real source of information we could find were terminals located throughout the massive building's hallways. Each night I would go out and find him standing at the information kiosks reading quietly. Each morning I heard him recite what he had learned. It was quiet, solemn, almost like prayer,
“Where is the light coming from? It comes from the metal egg. From where did the Plexis come? It came from the sky. What is our mission? To learn from the Plexis.”
The metal egg was what he referred to in those days when he was talking about the mysterious nuclear core of the facility. By February, when the pulping drones started producing heart shaped papers to put on display in windows, it was Crassus who first consulted with the information terminals, who learned of the holiday cycle. It was very similar to our own calendar. I came home that evening to him sitting in his room, calmly speaking to himself,
“Where does the light come from? It comes from the FNF style Radioisotope Generator located within the nuclear core. This generator was assembled largely in space. It is due for delivery of a replacement in an estimated 211 years via satellite drop. Where did the Plexis come from? It came from the drone legion constructed in space from the asteroid belt located between the planets Mars and Jupiter. In 2091 the first drone was released to harvest materials, and construct the next. Two and a half centuries later the drones completed the first Plexis model shopping center. They sent it back to Earth. The drones are automatically scheduled to cycle through and construct decorations annually to coincide with commercial holidays. The cost of the project was an estimated nine-hundred and seven million dollars in adjusted currency. By 2391 the total yield of the project in pre-collapse currency would have outpaced inflation estimates and yielded a net of sixty-five billion dollars. In two more centuries that number was projected to supplant all other primary commercial - and several industrial outlets.”
The talk of dollars and dates wasn’t new. The year, for instance, was still widely referred to as 2387, the year of forgiving rains, by farmers and prophets alike. The Gregorian Calendar, while inconvenient, was still the reliable standard for counting time. As for the dollar, its descendant was still used in certain tribes with economies that didn‘t engage in inter-regional trade. Of course it had no inherent value.
After he had completed his ritual, he looked up at me standing in the doorway and smiled,
"This place started with one single massive rocket sent out into space three hundred and eight years ago. Can you imagine? Two and a half times the span between Napoleon's birth and the first Moon Landing. The same amount saw us reduced to nothing, hunted as much as hunters."
I smiled, knowing finally that the rudimentary history I had passed on to him hadn't collapsed beneath the weight of these new things. There was still an interest in the old, an interest that would outlast me at the very least and maybe one day find another generation.
I hefted my work bag on
to the dining table and he helped me produce the ingredients for our night's dinner.
We dined that night on shaped potatoes, black algae noodles, and a flank of meat. The potatoes and algae noodles I had learned were grown in the automated gardens both in the dome at the top and the six floors beneath it under fluorescent LEDs.
I had once asked where the meat came from, but I didn't understand much of what was said. Eventually, Crassus explained that the meat was more woven flora than fauna. It was indistinguishable from the real thing to me. I pictured wild magical things as he explained it. It might be a steak tree, or a flank roast bush hidden somewhere in the rarely visited agricultural sector.
After our meal, we leaned back and lit up a couple of cigarettes, puffing them quietly and making smoke rings so that a thin haze silently began to accumulate near the lights.
"How are your eyes?" he asked.
"Good enough to build," I said, "And I can read signs if I can get close to them. Nearly good enough to shoot - but it's a bit more complicated in the low light."
"Some of the posters have people with things on their eyes," Crassus said, "They're like glasses, but they help with low light as well. And they don't give you that awful headache."
"Where?" I asked, watching one of his smoke rings part the still air in front of it and spread into a thin irregular ghost before losing its substance and disappearing entirely.
"Next to a furniture store," he said, "and another empty space set aside to sell imported goods. We could go tonight. They have a machine there."
A machine. Of course there was a machine. I couldn't help it, and laughed. Across the table a smiling Crassus stubbed out his cigarette and rose,
"How would you like to see the way they used to?"
There was still a thin paper ticker across the caged trellis when we got to Floor 19 Substore 108. Like many of the stores, the printer that made the goods was likely somewhere inside. Unlike the other stores, I could see through the caged glass storefront.
There were a few chairs and a bank of machinery against the wall. It looked strange - like the automated interrogation chambers I had been warned against years ago. But this was the Plexis. Nothing here would harm us. Crassus pulled the tape off the door and stuck it to my forehead, saying, "You'll need to wear this."
I might have believed him, but there was a wry smile to his words.
"I wasn't born yesterday," I said peeling the tape off and letting it fall. Crassus was down at the floor with his thumb pressed against a small glass plate. The caged screen clicked and then rose. Inside, we found hundreds of pairs of glasses arranged on shelves, staring out like sentinels at our approach. I picked up a fetching pair and put them on,
"Nothing's changed."
"That's because there aren't any lenses in it yet," Crassus said poking his fingers through the frames into my eyes. I flinched and threw them off ready to fight, but he was already at a small machine switching it on.
"Hello," a calm echoing voice said from the machine, "My name is John Newlywed. Would you please sit and rest your chin on the blue plate?" The machine was perfectly shaped to accommodate a human face with two holes around the eyes. Where the chin would rest, a small bank of blue LEDs flickered. I sat on the small stool in front of it and placed my head into the device. John Newlywed continued, "Thank you. Now first I need to test your intraocular pressure. This test will be completely painless."
Two puffs of air shot from the recessed darkness in the mask's eyes directly into my own. Calling on old instincts, I leapt from the chair and clattered to the ground holding my eyelids shut with both hands. Strangely, despite the surge of adrenaline, I realized that it hadn't been pain that I was feeling. It wasn't much of anything at all. To the sound of my brother's laughter I sat back in the chair and watched lights trail across my field of vision.
After the tests and a brief frame selection process at a separate kiosk, Crassus leapt behind the whirring counter and picked up the same frame I had been wearing previously, but with lenses.
"Prepare yourself," he said, grinning.
Not only did the glasses improve my ability to see details from a distance, Crassus explained, it had also widened my visual spectrum ever so slightly. Colors that previously would have been more difficult to see in low light were easier to differentiate. The result would mean a world of difference if I ever had to shoot again. That night I slept with the glasses resting on the shelf over my bunk for the first time.
“Maybe you’ll be able to see them from far away,” Crassus said from the bunk beneath mine, “If the Thakka attack us, I mean.”
In the morning was when the stranger came. He wasn't the first in those few months to visit us. In fact, our tribe had grown from twenty the first day to a little over six hundred over the next few months. Each one was granted membership as there was certainly no shortage of food or space within the Plexis. Newcomers in those days were accepted as friends as long as they could leave the savageries of the wild behind.
And it was not always easy. Of all the treasures the Plexis offered, Trust was not always the most forthcoming. It was a rare, gentle sort of mob rule.
I remember standing outside in the courtyard that morning, enjoying the hot wind as it blew streams of grey ash across the valley. From far off, when he first crested the horizon, I remember thinking that the man and his steed appeared as some nightmare from wartime.
In the early days, after the nations began trading missiles, there was more than just the fire that turned cities to dust. With the spiral drain of civilization uncorked, science too made its last desperate attempts to swim before being dragged like a caged beast down into nothing. In that clawing, screaming moment of desperation, many hastily assembled horrors would first blink and draw in the new world’s uncertain air. Among these, the melthorse.
The melthorse could be easily described with its name. It stands uneasily with wheezing breath and face pulled down as if partially liquidated. Cancerous lesions run all along its body. In some cases bone is exposed. It looks like death. But they're strong - resilient.
As he drew closer I could see that the man was - or at least seemed - perfectly healthy. The melthorse he was on, however, was another matter. It moved as if each step would bring it crashing into a pile of stringy hanging flesh and exposed bone. But it didn’t fall to its death. Not until its rider dismounted at the front door of the Plexis in front of us.
He shot it.
“Good morning,” he said, in the wake of silence following gunfire, “I heard about this place and swore my feet would not touch ground until I arrived.”
He stood like a man caught unarmed in the ravaged wild even as he pocketed his improvised zip gun into an overstuffed paper-insulated coat. There was a strange quality to the man that extended farther than his disregard for the melthorse. Aside from punctuating his intent to stay, it wasn’t unusual to kill a diseased steed to ensure the sickness didn’t spread to local livestock populations. In some regions, turning loose a melthorse was considered taboo, as it was assumed the creature could pass on its ravaged features to others. But we were not in that country. Here, horses meant little anymore.
“Where did you hear about us?” An older man by the name of Thunfir the Broadback asked. Thunfir was a stout man built up by trials into an archetypal frontiersman. Snow grey shaggy hair covered his scalp and braided chin. He held a thick arm out and pointed at the firepit on the hill outside of the slowly growing entrance camp, “Hardly anyone who approaches ever leaves farther than the firepit.”
“Not everyone who sees this place is aware of its nature. Plenty who see it from a distance become convinced that it is yet another construct of the war times. As many stories as there are of the paradise here, there are twice as many telling of a terrifying war machine or an interrogation drone attempting to extract information that no longer is known. There's a small tribe of dog hunters six days travel to the west. T
hey call this place The Torture City.”
To the laughter of my companions, I nodded. It made sense that the majority of the world out there would be hesitant to approach anything that looked new. Only the machines of war seemed to survive the test of time.
My worm eaten rifle was testament enough to that fact.
“I hope you’ll find this place a pleasant surprise,” I said, “I think we’ve each seen terrors that would shame the most ambitious fireside storyteller. And now - thanks to our new home - we have seen marvels that compare. When you see the bounty we have in this place, you’ll understand why people tend to stay.”
“I’m sure,” the stranger said, “And perhaps I will be of some small use to you as well.”
“What do you do, stranger?” Thunfir asked.
“I do math,” said the stranger. It was an odd answer to be sure. There was generally need for bean counting in the name of regional trade, but even that wouldn’t be called math so simply. It would be known as tradework or bookkeeping. What calculations remained to be solved, I certainly didn’t know. I don’t think anyone did.
“Then we will call you Mather,” Thunfir said, “It seems a unique enough profession.”
“Please, I already have a name,” the stranger said chuckling, “Call me Euclid. It has served me well to this point. I‘d like to speak with your leader.”
Thunfir looked to me sideways. The subject of leader had come up before, but always as a distant eventuality. Leaders organized, gave singularity to the collection of voices, and often dispensed justice. By outrageous fortune, none of the situations requiring a leader had - up until this simple formality - ever arisen. A few of the tribesmen had declared that Thunfir should be leader, because he could throw a stone the farthest, drink the most, and yell the loudest. But he was ancient, having passed over sixty winters in the waste. The closest thing to a leader we had at the moment, was the boy who answered questions posed to the Plexis.
That position, such as it was, belonged to my brother Crassus. He was the one generally standing at information terminals asking the same question a hundred different ways until he got an answer. There was a language to it, one part of it English. The other part, nonsense to us, was what Crassus was learning with each passing day. Given that some of the nonsense was numbered, I immediately knew Crassus would want to speak with this Euclid.
And yet, something about the new man troubled me. There was a certainty, unaccompanied by strength, that he seemed to brandish in even the few short sentences between us.