Chapter 2: “The Scry”
Taciturn doesn’t remember falling asleep, and he is already cursing himself as he cautiously opens his eyes. The fire’s dying embers cast a crimson glow across the room, but it takes a few moments to make visual sense of anything.
When he finally spots the creature, every muscle in his body tenses up; James overrides his fight-or-flight instinct to react, but just barely.
The Scry, it seems, has taken the form of a young woman, not much older than 19 or 20. Large brown eyes study him from behind dark bangs. A dirty, camouflage hoodie obscures most of its figure, but slim legs dangle off the side of the rundown counter it sits perched on. Unsure why the creature isn’t moving, he inches his hand towards the pistol he desperately hopes is still tucked within his sleeping bag.
Then the Scry speaks. Whatever James might have expected the creature’s voice to sound like, this isn’t that.
“Whoa, Taciturn. Pump the breaks a sec. There’s no need to jump into this guns blazing.”
The creature tilts its head and smiles.
Dumbstruck, James tries to process the unfolding situation. The creature hasn’t attacked him, despite having the upper hand. He sits up slowly, all the while continually gauging the distance between the Scry and his weapon.
“I’m still breathing, so you clearly want something, monster. What?”
The question is blunt, and he doesn’t expect the Scry to answer truthfully. It’s solely to buy him time. A brief scan of his internal systems shows the firewalls and defensive software intact. Taciturn continues to look for any other breaches but the search reveals nothing out of place. His uneasiness intensifies as the creature smiles again. Like most Scry, it has a beautiful smile – a powerful weapon used to disarm its prey.
“Hmm… well, that is an interesting question. I guess I really don’t know. Of all the people sent to kill me lately, you definitely seem the most interesting.”
The creature swings its legs back and forth, still casually perched on the counter.
“And that scene you caused, at the bar? That was pretty hilarious. Walking out on them like that? I know your back was turned, but you should have seen their faces.”
The Scry casually surveys the room. There isn’t much to survey.
“So… I don’t know… you seem smart enough to understand when you’re being an idiot, James.”
The monster raises an eyebrow.
“It is James, right? Or do you prefer Jim?”
Before James can answer, the creature beams with sudden, gleeful inspiration.
“Oh, I know – I’ll call you Jimbo!”
This prospect catches James off guard, and his hand momentarily stops inching toward his sleeping bag.
“No, don’t call me that. Look, what the hell—?”
He listens to himself speaking and goes cold inside. He’s taken the bait and become over-invested with the conversation already.
James takes a deep breath to calm himself. When he opens his mouth and speaks, it is finally in the voice of a Taciturn.
“What do you want?”
The Scry rolls its eyes, taking special care to exaggerate the effect.
“Jeez, dude, where are your manners? Nice to meet you too, Taciturn. I’m Matilda, by the way.”
It raises both hands, revealing no weapons – no obvious ones, at any rate. Using one hand the Scry points towards the floor, slides off the counter, and lands gently on its feet.
“All I want is for you to think back to when you were first approached for this job. Did anything seem off to you? Like, you know, sketchy?”
Taciturn is reluctant to follow any of the Scry’s leads at this point, no matter how seemingly-innocuous – but something has been nagging at him ever since his conversation with Oliver. He mimics the Scry’s raised-hand gesture, then slowly points to his chest pocket. With the creature’s nod of approval, he pulls out a crumpled pack of cigarettes with thumb and forefinger, carefully removes one cigarette and lights it. He wracks his brain, trying to figure out if there was some detail he missed when accepting this contract. It’s becoming more apparent that no one from this town actually hired him – but who else would be concerned for the well-being of such a remote settlement?
He starts with the simplest likely answer: The farmers in this town generate resources for somebody, so it isn’t unreasonable to assume that someone simply hired him to protect their investment. However, the more he now mulls over the clandestine nature of the contract, the shadier it starts to feel.
In the Cyberside, farmers spend their time turning processing power into consumables such as food, construction materials, or other items essential to the System’s economic structure – a straightforward-enough scheme, originally designed to reward the early adopters and first-wave pioneers who set out to establish the digital world. The System placed a premium value on those doing the heavy lifting, and the design worked well enough until successive throngs of settlers arrived in network-significant numbers. Unfortunately, as with the majority of mass migrations throughout recorded history, ideals were frequently sacrificed at the altar of greed. As the habitability of the physical world waned in the wake of cumulative ecological and radiobiological calamities, ever-greater numbers started transferring their consciousnesses into the Cyberside. When the wealthy elite eventually surrendered their physical bodies, they had no intention of sacrificing their wealth and power. As they entered the network, the System’s economic routines faltered. Hacks imposed a feudalistic hierarchy on the Cyberside, with the workers suddenly plummeting to the bottom. What could have been a bold, new world quickly devolved into a decidedly familiar one.
James looks at his cigarette. A long cylinder of ash clings to a burned-down end. The Scry continues to watch him, not saying anything.
In a slow dawn of logic, James finds himself focusing less on the Scry and more on the details of the contract. Poring over the data, he notices the single, glaring detail he can hardly believe he missed. The masking was so conventional, a measure most Taciturns wouldn’t even give two consecutive glances. The contract’s indexation was masked to mimic Locale 26-5, but its actual point of origin is a far more dangerous quarter of the Cyberside, with which James is all too familiar.
The name escapes him like an expletive. “Babylon.”
He angrily flicks his cigarette away into the gloom. The Scry beams and claps its hands, just slowly enough, the impudence fine-tuned to the point of mastery.
“Aha! So, the wheels are finally turning in there, huh? Maybe if you hadn’t been so eager to fight another Monster you would have seen it earlier, Jimmy.”
The Scry doesn’t wait for him to interject.
“Look, I get it. You’re a mercenary that likes to deal with glitches… let’s say, directly. But it’s also pretty clear you’ve got a paragon-complex thing going on. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gotten yourself wrapped up in that Bakersfield Incident. Hell, you were willing to come out all this way just to help this little town. But have you ever stopped to actually think about what you were doing?”
James continues listening to the Scry – ‘Matilda’ with mounting unease. With each word, each new byte of information, he’s becoming more invested. He hears his own words of warning, back in the Homestead saloon – and yet, he can’t seem to break his own fixation on the creature before him. But everything the Scry says has the ring of truth.
Matilda raises an eyebrow, and the captivating smile reappears. Her eyes pierce into his own.