The Wyrms of &alon

If anyone ever asks you what’s the point in treating a murderer, tell them it’s so that the victims might have a chance of getting justice.

Aicken’s condition snowballed rapidly. We were lucky that there just happened to be a surgeon walking by the very moment I’d put in the Code Orange. I don’t think I would have noticed the shooter was bleeding internally until it was too late, nor did I have the steely pluck needed to act on a guess when I knew that being wrong meant death. While the expert surgeons got to work stabilizing Mr. Aicken Wognivitch, I did the courtesy of giving Commissioner Holbrook exactly the kind of official statement he’d been looking for. He happened to have a recorder on hand, and I happened to know my way around superstitious types.

I made sure to emphasize that any “demons” inhabiting Mr. Wognivitch’s body were only of the metaphorical kind. For good measure, I drew from some of my childhood Sessions School lessons to make my case: Aicken did not have a spaded tail; sunlight didn’t make him howl in pain and give off smoke; his tongue did not drip with the dark ink of lies—at least, not literally so. Aside from some remnants of a bit of a sun-tan, his skin tone was also too white for him to be a demon. Granted, racial nationalists would argue that Aicken’s tan made him “darkly skinned” enough to count as a demon, but they were racial nationalists; there was no dissuading one of their lot once they got an idea in their head and decided it was the truth. The point was, in this country—unless you were an outlier—you either believed scripture was at least in part the infallible word of God, or you interacted with one or more such persons on a daily basis.

Yes, it was bad—and depressing; no, there was no chance of it getting fixed anytime soon. It was the Prelatory’s parting gift to us. If you were a government in exile, a cadre of Munine special-ops sniper ninjas and their bandoliers of incendiary grenades were great for blowing off the head of an authoritarian theocracy. Unfortunately, generations of indoctrination were not so easily undone. There was still a sizable group of people who took the prophetic reading of “They come when the pure land burns” to mean that every crisis since then just had to mark the start of the apocalypse. People who believed the end of the world was just one dark day ahead of them were not easily persuaded to invest in the present, let alone the future—but… I digress.

The rest of my day played out with all the drama you’d expect. Most of it was drudgery of the soul-crushing variety, and so, for once, I was looking forward to finishing my shift ASAP. Apparently, fate had decided the morning’s fiasco with Merritt—the whole deceiving her into thinking I’d agreed to kill her bit—was sufficiently grievous of a sin to merit (pun!) releasing the twelve tides of judgment directly over me. I had counseling and therapy sessions scheduled throughout the next few weeks. Kurt was to be held overnight to ensure that he was not a threat to others or himself before being discharged. By the end of the day, I was so drained that I skipped clean over working on research papers or fiddling (clarinetting?) with my sonata and decided to head straight home.

Bad puns helped lessen the misery.

Since the height of our Second Empire, Elpeck had been a city of castles. The Imperial Palace atop Capitol Hill was opulent in its triumph and triumphant in its opulence. Once upon an age, it rose above a sea of brick and stone, rivaled only by the mansions of industry’s captains: the railroads, shipping, silver, and steel. Time’s passage taught those old castles humility. Now, they groveled in the shadows of shimmering skyscrapers, where they clutched tenderly to their splendid eccentricities—their rotundas, their columns, their oriel windows. If the Imperial Palace had kept its fair share of its prestige of old, it was only thanks to its proximity to the city center and—more importantly—the benefits of National Park-hood and ravenous tourism.

Compared to the Templar Hospital of old, though, those palaces were little more than striplings. The venerable hospital had watched our palaces rise and fall; it had seen the transit of the Crusades and our two Empires across the face of history. It had always a place of healing, even as healing itself evolved. With the passing of time, our empires were (briefly) forgotten—Capitol Hill became the Civic Center—medicine rebuilt itself under an empirical model, and the Templar Hospital along with it. From the very outset of the Second Empire, the Templar Hospital was already well on its way to becoming what was now the ancient core of West Elpeck Medical Center. But the building’s storied heritage was as patient as it was stubborn. It kept on growing over the millennia, puffing itself up bit by bit to keep up with the times, expanding its sprawl. It had even gotten itself a courtyard—the Central Gardens—beneath which stretched the tile-floored tunnels of the Garden Galleria, and—beneath that—the uppermost level of the parking garage to end all parking garages.

According to urban legend, if you drove down deep enough, you’d find people from centuries in the past wandering around, still looking for the exit. This was important, because it was the basis for one of my favorite TV shows: The Garage of Time. The show’s premise was that there were portals into the past hidden in the columns of the garage’s depths, and the titular Guardians were a secret order of time-traveling civil servants who used the garage to repair deviations in the timeline, and the best part was that the Guardians were drawn from different periods of time. Gallstrom was their communications expert; Verdinset drew sketches of suspects, and so on and so forth. The main characters were an EMT from the present day, a samurai from the Munine Colonial Period, and a feisty doctoral student in history from the tail end of the Second Empire—one of the first generation of women allowed to earn advanced degrees. Season Four of The Garage of Time would be premiering next month, and—obviously—I could hardly wait!

As I made my way to my car, I could have taken the escalator, but—as usual—I needed the exercise, so I took the (marginally) longer route, crossing the antique pitched-stone street and clip-clopping down the stairs in the Central Gardens, bypassing the Galleria in favor of the lot below, the uppermost layer of the garage. Earlier in the year, The Garage of Time had been filming on location, and I’d managed to get a photograph of myself with the cast. Ever since, I’d proudly employed the image as the background for my console’s Home screen, in all its nerdy glory.

Even if the garage hadn’t been featured in a critically and popularly acclaimed time-travel science fantasy television program, the hospital paid good money to keep it clean, both inside and out, as it did for the rest of its grounds; The Garage of Time was far from the only show that filmed on the premises. And to the management’s credit, the parking garage was no exception. The walls were tiled by the sea. Mosaics depicted fish, waves, and swaying seaweeds in blues, whites, and greens and gleaming enamel. The floor was a collage of crawling critters: asteroids, prickly urchins, creeping cephalopods and the noblest of crabs. The garage’s structural columns bore translucent light fixtures up on high, shaped like seashells. Late at night, you’d think the mosaics were alive—especially if you had the assistance of booze or drugs. The mosaics shone beneath the dappled glow. It even sounded like the sea. The waves were the echoes of car wheels rolling on pavement. Traffic’s ebb and flow mimicked the changing tides.

As usual, the medley of vehicles that filled the garage spanned such a range of color and profiles that you’d have thought you’d stumbled across a display in some hobbyists’ shop rather than something you’d see day-in and day-out. This was normal. For better and for worse, the world was now shiny. Everything was a commodity, and if it wasn’t, it would soon be commoditized. Coupled with the technological advancement of it all, the omnipresent glitz and glamor made it easy for people to take modern luxuries for granted. I tried not to. I’d like to think I did a pretty decent job at it overall, but, I’d be the first to admit that there were several areas where I was guilty of guzzling down creature comforts as bourgeoisly as could be. One of these areas was manga. Another, video games.

A third? My car.

You know those kids who bond with animal companions and go on to have life-defining experiences with them?—the ones that teach dogs to play basketball; that raise a baby raccoon that they found near-death, abandoned in the woods; that hatch a dragon egg and fight alongside said dragon to defeat the Demon Lord?—those kids?

I was not one of them.

I did not have a pet as a kid. I had an ornamental cactus, given to me by my favorite elementary school teacher. The poor sap managed to survive for two and a half miserable years before it finally gave up the ghost and went to go live in the great big greenhouse in the sky. These and other aspects of my childhood resulted in the formation of a void in my soul; a primal void, one that would remain unfilled until the day I finally got my L85 Rescue.

At the risk of sounding like a jock: I really liked my car. I’d worked my darndest to get it, too. It had taken years for me to save up the money for it, but—hot dog!—it had been worth every penny. I knew I needed an L85 Rescue in my life ever since I first laid eyes on an advertisement for it blinking into existence on a digital billboard while I was walking back from Beauregard’s Laundromat on 22nd Street with a bag of clean laundry behind me and a night’s worth of cramming for my sophomore year organic chem final ahead of me. The billboard showed a sumptuous specimen of the L85 Rescue car model driving down the magnetic levitation expressway that, back then, had only just been installed along the bends of the old Highway 1. The L85 was like a stealth bomber, only without the wide, sweeping wings. Its spacious, deep-set cabin had the curves of a cockpit, and the whole thing was painted a brash, bold red that glowed, fire-like, in the light of the billboard’s sunset, glistening the waves in the ad’s backdrop. The driver in the ad had his hair slicked back with an arm around his lover: a woman in a white, sleeveless dress whose blond hair trailed out through the open window, frayed by the seaside winds. I vividly remembered the thought that passed through my head as I stared: gosh darn it, both of them are living the dream.

Back then, the only vehicle I had to my name was the hand-me-down jalopy that Dad had let pass to Dana once the time had come for her to learn to drive. The jalopy remained in Dana’s possession for only a few years before it became clear to us—and, more importantly, to all insurance providers on this side of the Irenic Ocean—that my sister was too much of a liability to get anything close to an affordable premium on auto insurance.

And so, the jalopy had passed to me.

I stopped driving it after Dana died. The memories that came with it were just too potent. I couldn’t sit down in that car without thinking it was time, once again, for Dana to take me out for a burger, soda, and an ice cream pebble cone at O’Malleigh’s, only to have to man up and tell myself through my tears that she was gone and was never coming back. To Dad, though, that was just me being “stubborn and unreasonable”.

Despite the memories—or, maybe, because of them—I’d kept the jalopy all these years. My wife adored it, probably because the classiness differential between her and it got a rise out of her parents without fail. I had no qualms about letting her use it as her own car.

As I walked to my car across the parking garage’s tiled floor, I wept. I could taste the ice-cream pebble cone on my lips, the little liquid-nitrogen-frozen ice cream spherules melting on my tongue in bursts of different flavors—chocolate, mango, caramel, white rose—followed by the sensuous crunch of cone’s waffle sheets, inter-layered with chocolate. My stomach grumbled in hunger.

I shook my head. Something was off. The feelings and sensations were too intense. I took a deep breath—of parking garage air, I reminded myself, as soon as I started coughing.

That brought me back into the moment, as did the silky-smooth, almost slipper touch of cool metal against my hand. I found myself leaning against the side of my car, which was parked in my special reserved space, as it always was.

It wasn’t unusual for my thoughts to wander, but… to feel like I was the one being pulled along, as I just had? That was different. That was strange. I also felt a little sore; then again, I’d been on my feet for hours on end in trying circumstances, so, a little soreness was perfectly par for the course.

Perhaps recent events were getting to me more than I thought.

Stress gnaws away at the human psyche, sometimes without us even noticing it.

The L85 read the data off my implant chip as I waved my hand over the door handle. Clicking, my car unlocked itself. The door opened with a soothing hydraulic hiss, lifting up like a wing. After the arduous day I’d had, the soft yet sturdy support of the driver’s seat and its leather upholstery was a pleasure to sit in. I waved my hand over the ignition; the doors closed on their own as the engine roared to life. Icons lit up all over the dashboard, floating in black space. Pale aquamarine readouts flared to life at the windshield’s edges.

I was about to back up the car when I coughed again, vigorously this time, so much so it left me feeling woozy and a little lightheaded.

Was I coming down with something?

Oh God. Aicken had spat in my face. If he’d been sick with something, I couldn’t think of a surer way of spreading it than that. I did not want to end up with a case of bronchitis; it had barely been two weeks since I’d finally gotten over my previous infection.

I made a mental note to have a glass of orange juice after dinner. Hopefully, that would help me feel like myself again.

Backing up the car, I drove out of the garage, up the winding flights of ramps that let out onto the streets.

From a distance, all you could see of the city of Elpeck were the dreams of yesterday’s future. Only when you got to know it up close and personal would you see the city for what it truly was: a hodgepodge of old and new. I felt a little lightheaded, but dismissed with a tilt of my head, cracking out tension accumulated over the day.

Of course, it also helped if you knew where to look.

The oldest things—First Empire or earlier; the old old—were few and far between, always columns and stone, and rarely tall. The eldest parts of West Elpeck Medical were probably the most well-known exemplars of the ancient days. Far more numerous were memories of the Second Empire or the Republic; those were the old new. I passed the Chronicle’s headquarters, the (Ex-)Imperial Post Office, the House of the 3rd Circuit Court, a handful of churches as I wound my way out of the inner city, to name a few—all of them old new. The remaining eighty percent of the city was unevenly divided between the new old and the new new. The new old was the leftover baby teeth of the world of tomorrow: diners, delicatessens, wide-glass storefronts, neon signs, decorative tubing, tasteful tiles, complete with lifetime supply of chevrons. The new new, though… you couldn’t miss it even if you tried. New new was architecture on adrenaline, and architects with access to stores of money and technology beyond their predecessors’ wildest dreams.

Two centuries’ worth of traffic lights and street lamps lit the way as I drove through the darkling evening. The street lamps were just for display, obsolescent remnants from before the world had known the true meaning of the word network. Nowadays, even the streets were hooked up to the grid and the Cloud. The streets’ polymer-metallic pavement lit up with the colors and signals of stop, go and all the rest.

Sliding the mag-lev control to on, I made my way over to the Expressway onramp in short shrift. Repulser strips buzzed and thrummed, warming up on the underside of the car.

Gosh, on-ramps were swell.

The onramps of a mag-lev Expressway were a litmus test for cheerful temperament. Dour, darkened hearts—which is to say, my deceased father-in-law—would fail without fail to be moved by them, just as surely as the young and the young at heart would never tire of them. Wheels just couldn’t compete with mag-lev speed. Of course, people being people, some adventurous folks would have doubtless tried, however, the geniuses who’d designed the onramps had idiot-proofed them to a T. The electrified onramp twisted as it rose up to the level of the elevated expressway. As the onramp made the banked curve from the streets to the expressway, the road turned to be nearly perpendicular to the ground for several hundred feet before leveling off again where it merged with the expressway. There was no hope of crossing it without a hovercar. As an added bonus, the weight of g-forces as they pushed you into your seat while sea and sky tilted sideways helped to keep sleepy drivers on their toes.

I exhaled, but then sputtered as an unexpected cough rocked my throat. I cleared my throat. If Pel had been in the car with me, she might have started getting on my case for being so dedicated to my work that I neglected to keep myself properly hydrated.

I mean, yeah, it had happened—but only twice. I was a responsible adult, but everyone made a mistake from time to time. We’re only human.

I felt the usual rush of blood to my head as I rounded the bend. The barreled roof of tinted glass hanging above the expressway kept most of the sunset’s blinding glare out of my eyes; the digital billboards that lined the sides of the expressway above the railing blocked whatever stray sunbeams the roof had missed. More advertisements encrusted the underside of the roof. The screens played their ads on loop in a potluck of all the family friendly brands—even the ones you’d ever heard of—from the refreshing taste of Junga-Pop on the perfect day at the beach to the latest iteration of Primo’s caped crusaders soon to spring to action at a movie theater near you.

I had to admit, at times, the ads could be cute. Still, I’d always preferred the view. It was at that perfect height, the same as the first few heartbeats of an airliner taking flight. I drank in the view as the L85 skated along its mag-lev cloud. Cars passed by in the streets down below. Night lights had begun to grace the sleek, skyscraper spires. But then—

—Hmm?

I caught a glimpse of something dark on the horizon, like a smudge on the sky.

I turned to look.

Past the lip of the Expressway lay Cascaton Park, with its poetic gardens and shaded footpaths. But something was wrong. The ‘smudge’ was a column of smoke. It rose up next to the lake at the park’s center. A handful of bulky trucks had gathered by the sandy, manicured lakeshore, bearing the insignia of the Elpeck Sanitation Department on their sides, accompanied by two fire trucks.

There was no mistaking a fire truck’s sleek, red curves.

For a moment, I thought it was just an afternoon barbecue gone horribly wrong, but then I noticed fire flash to life by the city’s workers.

They’re burning the trees…

And that’s when I noticed it. Though it was hard to make out through all the smoke and the embers, of what I could see, the trees looked sick. They were stunted and misshapen, twisted in places, like blighted grain or rusted roses.

The city’s parks were usually well-maintained—in the good parts of town, at any rate.

Darn it. I bet it’s the beetles again.

The Lesser Tchwangan Boring Beetle was an infamous invasive species from overseas. As Brand liked to point out whenever he saw an unhappy elm tree, technically the tree-murdering culprit wasn’t the beetle, but rather the symbiotic fungus its larvae used to help them digest the wood. The stuff absolutely devastated local arboriculture. The lush trees that lined the streets of my earliest childhood memories had been stripped bare by the time I’d turned four.

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel.

You can do it, trees!, I thought, sending some good vibes their way..

Whatever it was… I hoped the authorities would be able to keep it under control.