Abyss

Call it the good old classic of conceit.

Everyone likes to think they know what’s what, how it all works, just how the gears turn. Just how shit’s really done round here. Think that their perception, vision of reality is the only true one, that they’ve got a handle on it all – or not – and that everyone else, well now, they’re just a whole buncha fools stumbling around the dark room, hands outstretched but they just can’t find the god damned light switch. And you know what? I didn’t blame them at all for thinking that way. Not unless I wanted to be fucking hypocrite, and we all know what we think of those types.

Told you, conceit. Maybe hubris, if you’re some sweater wearing literature major in a cafe with half a dozen ocular augs for myopia stuck in your eye sockets. Or pride, arrogance, for all the rest of us.

Others though, ‘specially those psychologists or whatever, dig-around-in-your-head-with-words types, maybe they’d call it a defense mechanism or something. Some kind of protection for the mind and soul to go around thinking that you’re the only house down the whole street with the lights on in the windows. Something to use to put up a wall around you and the outside, where within you might not always believe that everything will be just fine – but at least you could believe that when the bad times come knocking and the shit comes raining down you’ll be ready for it.

In most ways I’m pretty much no different from anyone else – would be a fool to say otherwise. I thought I knew what’s what too, thought I had known and seen it all when I really hadn’t. But just because you’re self-aware don’t mean jack-shit if you don’t do anything about it. No point knowing something if you never bother to do a damn thing about it. Guess the only thing I could tell that was different about me – and even then sure as hell I wasn’t as unique in that department as my ego would have liked me to believe – was what we used that conviction for. Like I said most people – far as I know from my own experiences anyway, and I’m hardly an authority considering most of my social interaction with my fellow living beings consists of shooting them or being a rude asshole – they want it as a sort of comfort, a crutch they can lean on. Maybe even a protection, if you will. Something to hold on to when the going gets real tough, to cling on like a piece of driftwood when the waves start rolling in rough and the thunderheads above come roiling in with a vengeance.

Me though, plain goddamned opposite.

Me, it was everything I needed, just about everything I could ever want to keep myself down, mired in misery, writhing at the bottom of the well as my convictions closed the only way out over me, the circle of light growing steadily smaller and smaller like a crescent moon, closing me off forever from the surface I would never reach, the wind I would never feel and the distant snow-capped mountains over the horizon that I knew would never be mine.

Call it some sort of masochistic desire, maybe some primal instinct for annihilation that superseded every other fight-or-flight that had supposedly been ingrained into out very genes. Or maybe the just desserts of some dumb-as-fuck ram too stubborn to ever change his mind about anything. After all who gives a damn about changing a thing when of course you know Just How Things Work?

That was it, in the end. That was the way things were, weren’t they now. And not a damned thing anyone could do to make it any different. I was doomed. Done, dusted and damned. Right on the brink right from the start.

Can’t even remember the last time I tried to make a change, tried to do things a little different from how I’d always done them. Life was the same, all around. Work – and god damn do I hate the things I have to do to keep the fridge stocked and make rent – then nothing. Work then fucking nothing. Only difference was that my job was a little lower on the scale of morals and satisfaction then most other people. The kind that gets you a one-way ticket straight to a shitty death in some gutter, ditch or mass grave somewhere, and boy did you have it coming.

On and on, again and again, with barely a thing in between – a thing worth mentioning, anyway. Wondering when it would ever end, but I was as usual too goddamned chickenshit, too much of coward to end myself. Wondering when I could finally get someone else to do the honors for me, wondering when I would finally catch the magic bullet that would end it all, believing to the last moment that I hadn’t been the one to do it.

And even then, there was nothing past that either. Nothing I believed in, anyway. No heaven to welcome me – like they would ever want some son of a bitch like me – or a hell where I could maybe believe that I could finally make some forced progress into atoning for the things I’d done. No, nothing. Just the black and red, unchanging road of the life of someone like me, right to the cliff and the endless dark beyond. And nothing to hope for beyond that, nothing to look forward to, no road sign pointing in another direction.

And the brakes don’t fucking work either. Work those pedals baby, but turns out they don’t do shit. So sit back, relax, and enjoy your cruise and the descent. Can’t promise you’ll love it, but this ride don’t stop for the likes of you.

So that was all it was. Some miserable drifter and wanderer going back and forth, place to place without really giving a damn what happened along the way whenever I was on the hunt for the only kind of work that I could do. Outside of that it was just around the streets of whatever city I’d decided to make my temporary home in – and if it wasn’t that, then it was Luminal City, the only place I had put down what could vaguely be called roots if you squinted hard, the only place I could say I felt like I belonged a little more than all the others.

The only place I could walk about the streets like I was doing and feel like I was home, if only in the most bizarre and twisted mutilation of the word.

See, that’s what it is about the whole damn planet of Luminal and it’s capital city with the same name – they always name the first colony on the planet after the planet itself, tends to make things confusing – and it’s a fucking stereotype of all the stuff that’s supposed to appeal to miserable assholes like me. And you know what? I played into it all the same. ‘Cause it was true. It really did appeal to me, suited my mood all the damned time. And I probably wasn’t the only one.

Thing about folks from Luminal, especially the capital who’ve been here a long time or since birth – Luminal Lifers people call them, as if the planet were some correctional facility and it sometimes feels like that isn’t too far off the mark – is that everyone else in the Dominion, especially those from planets a lot more mild and welcoming like maybe Atriarchus, Blackveil or Evenfall and definitely those arrogant motherfuckers from Kindred, the ones who think they’re better than everyone else because they sucked up enough of daddy’s money to buy some island house at bikini, beaches and bitches central, they all think that we’re the most miserable, depressed, suicidal, and whatever other adjective you can come up with for constantly feeling like shit, breed of Dominion citizenry out there. And if you looked at the place we live in I wouldn’t blame you at all for coming to that kind of conclusion. It’s not as if it’s complete shithole like Templemark, rubbish on the streets ‘cause the sanitation agencies are too corrupt to get anything done, corpses in the middle of the pavement that no one gives a damn about except to rifle through the pockets, monstrous things coming out of the sewers at night, all that good shit. But it’s up there. Even one look out of your cabin window in your passenger-carrier from orbit waiting for landing clearance and you can already tell. Place sucks the life out of anyone.

First colonial expedition here, they crashed their lander carrying the first batch of colonists into the side of a cliff at high speed. No survivors. All of those pioneers, all probably high on the rush of some grand adventure of bringing Gaian civilization to the depths of space and exploring the furthest reaches of the galaxy, all of that optimistically turgid shit they spout on the street holoads, turned into chunky red paste on a chunk of granite, fucking Gaian minestrone. Now that’s an auspicious start. Really sets the tone for all the rest of it.

You hardly ever see a planet anyone considers habitable where the clouds from orbit are so thick you can barely see any of the land masses. Luminal was like that, gray and black, roiling. And there was the ominous flashes in the midst of them too, flickering back and forth, and as a whole that ominous green glow like some aurora out from Ossentia, the one we liked to call the Luminal Stagelights. One look at that should tell you just about what you should expect from a planet like this. But we didn’t listen. Too pumped up on all of the Brave and Intrepid Civilizers bullshit to see that not every place you can civilize is worth it.

Luminal City’s a good two hundred or so years old now from when the first expedition arrived and did their monumental high-speed fuckup, and even now it’s just about as much of a pit as you’d think. I’ve been here many times over the years – plenty of work here for me – and stayed here longer than most of my other sojourns into civilization and city life. It’s all megascrapers with endless incandescent holobanners scrolling down the sides now, the huge cock the corporates like to swing around and smack the lowlife peons in the muzzle with like they do in the porn flicks. Holoads, fuck load of ‘em swirling about at the street level, drones, streams of aerocars weaving in between the cocks in long lines like convoys of flying ants, and all of it punctuated by the green glow of the Stagelights, that atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena only Luminal had, the endless rain of fat drops, twisting black clouds that block out all sunlight and the relentless flash of lightning punctuating everything every few minutes in a ghostly white.

And the cold. Not even the good kind either. The wet kind, that comes in that perfect band of bullshit between normal cool weather and snow, that pierces straight to the bones and makes sure you’ll never be dry and comfortable for as long as you’re outside. Now that’s the full Luminal experience package. I think there’s folks alive in that place who’ve never gone offworld and thus have never seen sunlight, because with all that cloud and rain even the middle of the afternoon would have been nearly night anywhere else, and the actual nights are even worse.
Dark, wet and cold. And whatever light you see and have, it’s either the frightening flashes of lightning, the ominous green glow that gave Luminal it’s name, or the piercing migraine-food of the holobanners, ads and news blurbs, stark in the artificiality of its cheerfulness.

Templemark might be hell, Kindred the epitome of transient superficiality, but Luminal? Fucking purgatory. And not even the good kind either. Here, there’s no expropriation of sin from the sinner, like the priests love to talk about in their holy places and certainly no purification for your shot at getting to some tired old paradise. Here, you were mired in the muck, gasping and flailing as it poured down your throat and overtook you, until you finally either left offworld – and not everyone can do that – or you put a bullet in your head to end it all. Or you could just die all the little deaths people get round these parts all the time, in the bars, back alleys and the haze of Spinerette or the high of White Frost. And if you could do none of those, whether out of a flaccid bank statement, meaningless morals or just some misguided sense of belonging – and trust me, the colonial authorities back on Great Gaia absolutely love it when you choke that shit down and swallow – then you were stuck until you were rotting under the hard granite of Luminal through the progress of time.

And even then that was no escape. Just the abyss, the true blackness, no matter what the preachers say, and not even the light of some hoload for a new line of toothbrushes or whatever to keep it at bay then. Luminal’s just the god damned appetizer, a sample of the real deal like the ones they hand out on toothpicks at your local Super Saver’s grocery megamart. Take it when it’s offered and chow down. Delicious. Want to buy a box?

Maybe that was why I was so attached to Luminal City – sure as hell wouldn’t call it love though, in any sense of the word – and why I felt like in some way I was meant for that place. It was that conceit, thinking I knew everything about the way things worked. Knowing where I was destined to go, in the end. Might as well get started with the closest thing I could find in the real world, the closest thing to what I knew waited for me on the other side. An abyss. Dark, cold, empty and hollow.

Wasn’t like I was really trapped in this place, as some people living here actually were. I didn’t always have the easy solites to get a ticket onto some passenger-carrier offworld – turns out being a fucking interstellar hobo is actually not that cheap - but a long time immersed in The Business in so many places and here most of all had made me some connections, strings I could tug, free tickets onto carriers I could nab for a favor given or used, or maybe just a little bit of illicit private space at the bottom of a freighter’s cargo bay bound someplace while most of the crew pretended not to notice me there because their boss said so. But something kept calling me back, back into the damp and cold of Luminal City and all its meager charms. Some knowledge that this was the only place that I could truly be, a taste of the only fate of wretches like me. I was meant for this place, and just as trapped as all the others who could never afford to leave.

Take it in, then. Take it all in. This was meant to be. This is your fate.

This is the only way things could have gone.

Some apparition, a restless spirit. Drifting about the streets at 2 in the morning Gaian Standard without a damned thing to do, the same old routine whenever I was out of work or on vacation, if you could call it that. I didn’t even have on one of those long Wet-Weave coats that were a favorite of all the Lifers – the one article of clothing you could never do without out on the streets of Luminal City if you wanted to keep dry and comfortable. Don’t know why I didn’t put mine on on the way out – wasn’t even like I didn’t have one. Maybe it was just some masochistic desire to feel the relentless damp cold, some sensation in the abyss no matter how unpleasant it was. Something was always better than nothing, or so the theory went.
Even the people who did have it on didn’t look any less uncomfortable than I was, when I could see their faces at all. The general gloom, punctuated only by the regular pulsing of the street-level holoads and shaded by the greenish glow of the Luminal Stagelights meant that just about everything you saw was cast in intermittent shadow, dark and erratic enough that even the best oculars, top-of-the-line stuff that you could only get if you were a spook or had serious connections with the undermarket would probably have had trouble calibrating themselves to pick out a single damned thing in detail. To me, and the mid-grade shit stuck in my eyeballs, they were all like walking shadows, faceless and black as they walked hastily back home from their corporate mandated crunch-time OT or from whatever dive they’d been drinking and fucking half the night away back to a slap from the pissed off old ball and chain. Was probably all folks on Luminal did ninety percent of the time, I’ve been here long enough to make a reasonable guess. Suited the look then, their faces cast in shadow so that I could barely see a single feature but an occasional glistening nose at the end of a muzzle, wrapped up so tight in those long coats – and of course black’s the most popular color here, ‘cause it shows moisture the least – that they were pretty much like ghosts. In look and life, as the saying goes, and all of ‘em soulless and shallow, walking quickly in an imitation of purpose but adrift like me all the same.

Some of the rainwater ran down into my nose, down my nostrils and throat with that burning sensation that meant something was entering the wrong way. I sneezed, hard and loud, and hacked a gob of snot out my mouth and onto the running water of the street. No one even turned their head at the sound.

Shit man, it’s cold. Real cold. Need to get something in me. What the fuck am I doing?

Can’t answer that man. There ain’t one. Even you don’t know either.

As if it had somehow guessed my thoughts, another of those street level holoads drifted past me, close enough that I could feel the slight tingling at the ends of my arm fur as it brushed past the display field. The front of it was clear at least, probably the most legible thing I’d seen all day in the crappy Luminal City ambiance. Of course the god damned ads were the clearest shit you could see most of the time – they all probably had an army of customer-relations, ad specialists and technicians working day in and out just so all the folks on the ground knew just what was on sale. I don’t want no mistakes folks, there’s profits at stake here.

Couldn’t lie though. The hi-def coffee in the holo looked pretty fucking inviting. You could see every brown bubble at the edges, the smoothness of the surface cream. Not one damned pixel out of place in this beauty, the only perfect thing in the place.

The lithe female voice was perfect too, like something you’d hear in your ear after a fantastic one-night stand. Long day? Longer hours and all the same tomorrow? You need a little something to keep on. There was a pause that made me imagine that that the woman was licking her muzzle, a slow sinuous motion. And of course, here it is, hot and ready for you. Keep on with Caf-ON!

“Fuck you, bitch.” The mutter was almost involuntary. And of course the ad cohesion protocols picked up even that faint response, ran it through viewer reaction analysis and spat it right back out at me, with that same perfect voice. Had a hard day? Hard times? Need something to keep that mood up? And of course, here it is, hot and ready for you. Keep up and keep on with Caf-ON!

I bit back my retort. Like the thing gave a shit. You could rail on it for hours, shout and scream and go on whatever tirade you wanted and the only thing you’d get in response was some more tailored advertising to soothe that bad mood for the synchronized customer experience or whatever the fuck some marketing department exec came up with out their ass. Those things were everywhere in the city. Best thing people found was to shut the fuck up and walk away as fast as you could whenever one of those things drifted up next to you. They could never float very fast or far.

Perfect coffee my ass. Whatever desire I had for it had been stripped away in an instant. Wasn’t even like it was bad to look at or I was somehow bothered about the hoload’s harassment – think just about everyone everywhere has dealt with that shit more times than they have strands of fur. It was more about the coffee. It was too good, too well done.

Too perfect for a place like this.

Folks would call it ironical or whatever, but that was the truth of it, the one thing I couldn’t stand. That coffee? Too god damned perfect. Too tasty looking, too delicious and too good to be true. And even if that were the case, even if I were to say fuck it and went to the nearest joint to get a cup of Caf-ON – in a Luminal City night like this and a ram too stupid to wear a coat like everyone else that idea didn’t seem too unappealing – and it really did turn out to be that great, well, that made it even worse. That’s all those floating holoads were to me, a glimpse of perfection and the promise of something better in a place like this. A fleeting sight of the light in a mire of black that I knew I could never take as my own. Might as well be taunting me, dangling a glass of the coolest, purest water there is, condensation dripping off the sides in beads right in front of a man clutching at his throat, his every breath a dry gasp.

Rather remain in the dark. Rather not have a look and a taste of those fleeting glimpses no matter how much it might make feel better for a while to take a hold of it. Because you always had to lose your grip, always had to fall back down to the waiting black below, and that feeling of the fall, of losing what you thought you could have had is always the worst of all. At least if you never look up, you always know exactly where you stand.

In the middle of a canyon, a rent all filled with black. And every step you take only takes you down and deeper into the earth.

This is the way things are, this is the way things will be. This is the only way things could ever have gone.

From the moment of your first breath to the moment you take your last, and then beyond. This was inevitable, like everything else with you.

And that was Luminal City to me, just like I had known it always was. Why I always felt like I had been made for this place, belonged right here no matter how far I traveled. It was a reflection of what I knew I was, a reminder of what I knew would be coming, and a taste of what it would be like. Can hardly have anything more stark and monumental than one of the largest cities in the Central Worlds. Every chunk of ‘crete, every length of SilTi that had gone into building this place. Embedded into the very stones and the earth of the planet itself, from it’s highest clouds to it’s lowest valleys. A glimpse of the fate that would be mine, the inexorable descent down and that of all those I was passing on the street, of all those I had met and had yet to meet.

That this, all of it, the gloom and the darkness of the planetary surface and the relentless misery of its unchanging streets and buildings drenched in rain, all of it was a window into the only thing that awaited me at the end of it all, the only way things could be. I had been stuck in it now, wrapped in its cold embrace from the start and just like Luminal City it’s arms were long and never let go.

This is but a taste, a sample, just like the ads would say. You know what’s coming past the finish line when you catch that bullet, trip and fall or somehow make it all the way – lucky you – to that inevitable death by time. No medals, no glory, no pride or satisfaction at something well done. When you close your eyes for the last time and open them again afterwards, this is what you’ll find.

A murk, a blackness I could never escape, wandering about in the dark like I was doing now in the streets, surrounded by all the shadows of the people just like me, in the same place, and all the little sights and samples of the light and the good things and times that I knew could never hold to myself and pretend I could ever have. This was my only path and the only destination, no matter what I had done or did not do, whether I had it coming or not.

The only one thing that could have ever been for someone like me.

As we descended the dark clouds of Luminal, down and down into the empty black, the only thing we found was a barren place, no matter how much we all tried to not make it so. No matter how much we struggled to make even the smallest difference. A land of unchanging nothing, just like it had always been.

An abyss.

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This story is a bit more on the personal side than usual. I went into it just writing away without any previous draft or real structure/plot in mind, which is why this particular one meanders a bit and has less points than a butter knife - but nonetheless I greatly enjoyed writing it all the same! It's fun to let the hair down and write 'wildly', if you will, without any sort of goal in mind. Just putting thoughts to the word processor. High time I had to indulge myself a little!


Another amazing piece by  teragabba~ who, as always, did a fantastic job on this! I love this sort of atmosphere, and she captured it well! Check out her page and commission her!


Art ©  teragabba~
Story and Characters ©  AWandererfromtheEast