Corporate Dominion

All of the world was behind the thick curtain of the drops. They filled the air with a barrier, a great filter of sound and light. All was muffled by it. The distant sounds of the highway. The light of the flickering neon lantern. The laughter, crying, and empty silence of the people that had decided to just survive. The thrumming of the portal above.

‘What is this all for?’ he asked himself.

His body hurt all over, his ribs most of all. He was a bundle of loathing and misery, curled up in a dark alleyway between buildings of concrete, glass and steel. Squeaks came from a nearby heap of trash, five bags high. The local rats were approaching. He had to gather all of his power just to raise a hand. It was enough to send the rodents back into the night – for now.

The young man held his hand there. It was all he could do. The idea of putting it on the bare concrete and pushing himself up felt distant and vague. Water pearled from his skin, gathering on a fingertip. When it dripped, it took another precious bit of his fleeting body heat with it.

‘Killed by droplets… a thousand little, inconsequent weights… fitting…’

His mind returned to the hours, indeed his entire life, prior.

______________________________________________________________________

One parent was a miner, travelling under corporate guidance through the gateways, extracting what value there was, and getting back out. The other parent was a courier, running letters from one building to another that no one wanted to entrust to wire or mages. Neither made any real money. Neither could afford Echo.

With such humble progenitors, Eldred attended a kindergarten with the other poor children of Iridescia. He then attended a school where he learned what people were expected to learn.

“There are only two kinds of people: those who live big and those that survive. You and I are firmly in the latter category.”

Eldred’s father often said that. It was a grounding of expectations in the City at the Interstice. It prevented him from dreaming big, as others had. It prevented him from reaching for stars that would burn his hand.

His father died during an excursion, torn apart by some beast on the world they were mining.

His mother died because she carried the wrong person’s messages.

Eldred took a training position in a local supermarket. He worked there. The most exciting thing since then was getting fired for a lack of enthusiasm when interacting with customers. He hadn’t needed the job. Iridescia was the city of plenty. A request at the local charity every month was enough to survive.

‘That is all that matters, right?’ he said to himself, frequently.

Every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year – he said that to himself.

At 24 years old, Eldred’s life could be summarized as: nothing much. He lived alone in a tiny flat in the Ever-Rain district. A portal hung above the apartment blocks, endlessly allowing the clouds of an ocean world to drift across. It kept them all constantly under a grey curtain of monotony.

The clicks of his mouse were every bit as predictable as the rainfall. Charity paid for the electricity and the runes that projected the screen. Charity had provided him with the mouse and keyboard that sat on a desk made of two metal boxes and a wooden board. He sat on the floor, a cheap cushion separating his ass from the dirty carpet.

Eldred stared at the screen and clicked around, trying to find anything at all that would make the next minutes of his existence bearable.

There was nothing wrong with his body. The food he got was of high quality and he did not overindulge. He was thin, but not horrendously so. He was unimpressive, dull as the rain. He knew this. He did not want to think about it. The lack of anything new on his feed left room for the question.

‘What is this all for?’

As soon as the question bubbled up from his subconscious, he fell back. The distance between the computer and his bed was twenty centimetres of carpet. His head hit the mattress. He stared at the ceiling. The bit of fancy wallpaper he had once bought was poorly glued to it. Still, the winding pattern of flowers was something to look at.

‘When is the last time I saw a flower in person?’

The thought gnawed at his soul. All of this gnawed at his soul. He was surviving, wasn’t that enough?

‘It isn’t, is it?’

It wasn’t the first time that he had that thought. It was the first time he acted on it. Eldred rolled off the bed, grabbed his shoes, and was out of the house within the minute. The rain drummed on the hood of his rain jacket. He started walking. Just… walking. To anywhere that wasn’t the same apartment with the same screen and the same smell.

The neon lanterns burned bright. They had to in order to compete with the thick rain. It was the middle of the night, Eldred realized only now. It was colder than he would have thought. He refused to turn around already.

‘Flowers,’ he thought. ‘That is my goal… flowers.’

A sound gripped his attention. He turned his head right and, through the thick rain, picked up the sweet fragrance of a meadow. It felt impossible. All that the district should have smelled like was uncollected trash.

Excited steps took him across the street.

“Cough it up already!”

The rough voice was only one reason why he suddenly stopped. Three figures were in the dark alleyway. One was a big, burly man, covered in the scars left from fighting beasts even larger than he was. The other was short, a dwarf, who was somehow even broader than the first guy. Together, they boxed in the other figure, the source of the sweet scent.

“Pretty young thing like you has to have something valuable on you!” the big guy growled.

The dwarf glanced in Eldred’s direction. He did a double take, as if he couldn’t believe anyone was standing there. “The fuck is your problem, huh?”

Eldred did not know what to say to that. He did not know what to do at all. What was he supposed to do?

“Move along, moron,” the big man provided an answer for him. “This isn’t your problem.”

Eldred started to turn away. This wasn’t his problem. Nothing was his problem. ‘Maybe that’s what all of this is for,’ the intrusive thought could have been easily ignored. ‘Picking up problems.’

Roaring, he suddenly turned back towards the alley. Fist raised, he charged at the duo. “Fucking moron!” The big man said and hurled his own knuckles at Eldred.

In the nick of time, he dove down, all the way down. He had no illusions that he could tackle a man twice his weight, but if he made a full dive for his ankles…

The big man toppled forwards, landing on top of the dwarf. “Motherf-“ One of them cursed, Eldred didn’t know who. They all were on the ground now, a confused mess of limbs and aggression.

“RUN!” Eldred yelled. The reassuring sound of shoes on concrete faded into the rain. In that brief moment, he felt an elation. Was it the good-natured joy of having helped? Was it the ill-natured glee of having ruined the robbers’ night? Was it the sad reality that he was happy that he had left a mark in anyone’s memory at all?

“FUCKER!” The dwarf’s boot slammed into his temple. All questions or considerations went black, then a hot white. Pain rushed through his brain. The original was immediately followed by another. The burly man picked him up and slammed him against the wall. In a stroke of instinct, he glided out of the rain jacket. He tried to make a run for it, only to be immediately caught by the shoulder. The big man’s arm was an irresistible ****.

Eldred went down again. He laid on the wet concrete. All he could do was curl up while the angry men stomped down on him with their reinforced boots.

“Stop, stop!” the big man suddenly declared. “Fuck, let’s not get hung up with this loser! We can still catch the girl!”

“Right!” the dwarf agreed.

__________________________________________________________________________

Memory ended there. ‘My life flashes before my eyes… and it’s barely enough to fill a few seconds,’ he thought. His lids got heavier and heavier. ‘It was all… for nothing…’

“Stay awake!” the urging female voice barely registered. He hadn’t even seen her shoes beyond his fingertips. “Stay… ke!” the words blurred together.

‘Pretty shoes,’ he thought. ‘Nice shade of red. Cute ribbons. Interesting art deco pattern. Gold always looks good with red.’ The absurdity of contemplating shoes in his final moments didn’t even register.

The feeling of another liquid meeting his skin, however, did. It was as cold as the rain at first, then rapidly warmed. The heat flowed through him. His pulse quickened. The stiff, raised hand twitched. The will to move was getting back into him.

“Stay awake!” she pleaded once more.

“I heard her!” the burly man shouted in the distance.

Panicked, the woman ran. Time passed. Seconds or minutes, Eldred couldn’t say. The men entered the alley again, then shouted and ran again. They left him a second time, caring as little whether he lived or died as the entire world did. He was as alone on the ground as he was in his apartment. No relatives, no friends, no one that relied on him, no problems he called his own.

The heat had spread enough that he could roll onto his stomach. There was still pain, plenty of it, but he managed to get upright. Then, he managed to shamble home. He had found a flower of another name.

Once he pushed open the door to his apartment building, the dreariness of his reality sat back in. Existential dread descended on his soul with every step upwards. Had that been it? Would that be it? He went for a walk and narrowly escaped ****? That had hurt. It had hurt a lot. Could he live with that again?

Eldred hadn’t worked out the answer when he turned the key in the door to his tiny flat. The gnawing emptiness that had made him move out was thrice as intense now. He had finally felt other things than existing.

The door swung inwards. He stepped inside. He looked down. There was an envelope there. A bright, white thing of paper. It hadn’t been there before. It rose from the uncleaned floor with the intensity of a floodlight. Eldred closed the door behind him, then picked it up.

The sender was the government of some district he had never heard of. Mechanical letters printed out the address, each black gathering of ink as impersonal as the next. His address was also on there. It was not here by mistake.

He turned the envelope around. A hooked-under finger tore through glue and paper. Nothing seemed significant after what he had just gone through. Everything was unreal, wrapped in cotton. A thousand questions swam through his head.

Something dropped out of the letter inside when he unfurled it. He ignored it, instead letting his eyes glide over the short and bureaucratic message:

Hello,

After long tracing, you have been found to be the next of kin of Adam Shorn.

You have inherited an office building. Details of the location and condition of the building are on the second page.

That was it. Eldred looked down to see the key that had dropped down. It glinted in the artificial light of the naked bulb overhead. The unusual object in the usual room kicked off a cascade of thought. His breathing accelerated. The elation he had felt earlier suddenly came surging back and he embraced it. He didn’t care where it came from. He was yet to work out where it would go. What he knew, for certain, was that he would take this opportunity to be something, anything, other than nothing.

He snatched the key from the floor, stuffed it and the letter into the pocket of his rain jacket, and went straight out of the door again. Anything to avoid another day in his grey hell. Anything to have problems again. Anything to have something, no, everything in his life be his decision!

‘You were wrong, dad,’ he thought. ‘I don’t care about surviving, I want to thrive!’

And so Eldred marched towards his destiny.