On Tuesday they turn off Wall Street. The end! Badass traders like Jethro have to get Main Street jobs instead.
“Twenty bucks says I’m the fastest stockboy here,” smirks Jethro.
His new coworkers laugh, then stock. Jethro checks his Blackberry.
“Pay up!”
“One sec,” says Jethro, “I bet Enoch ten grand I’d lose that bet.”
“What?”
“Just expressing my view of the market.”
“I don’t have any money,” shrugs Enoch.
“Whoops, that bet was too big!” Jethro tells their boss. “Front me eight Gs?”
The boss fires him via mouth-punch.
“Why did you do that?” cries Jethro. “That was mean!”
The old man’s not moving, but his beast still hums.
The problem with genius, Rhodes thinks as he straps himself in, is that it rarely concentrates on user-friendship. He thinks he knows where the triggers are, and the gravdamp’s kicking in, but his hud’s a mess. Bootup babble scrolls over his reticle. Something’s yelling at him about failures in block ASCII caps, but a line right under that says to ignore it. Hacker UI.
But Rhodes kicks off and the armor’s with him, huge and strong and beautiful. Bare metal, said the old man, is the only way to ride.
Tengra knows you die if they cut your silver cord; of meat and self, neither survives without the other. Not many things can do it (magic swords, petawatt lasers). But what if the cord frays? What if it parts? What if you just find it trailing behind you in the gray astral dust?
Tengra shivers, holding it, though out here there’s no such thing as cold. Time is weird, too. How long has she been wandering bodiless? Since loneliness; since exhaustion. Since she fled the prison of matter and friction, worn thin as an old hawser against a mooring of stone.
Upon the gears. Upon the levers.
Sara hasn’t slept in long enough that, she notices, she’s not prioritizing well. She’s indulged her baser urges plenty this week, yet she can’t keep herself from sending a squad of bright young terrors out on the hunt for that idiot boy. She can’t spare them. She can rely on so few of these people. But she does it, and gets back to work.
Zach isn’t allowed to sleep because of his head, which hurts a lot by the way, and also they took away his bulletproof vest because this hospital is full of dicks.
The humming needle pauses. “You sure you want me to do this part?” asks Ursula.
Ariel inhales, exhales and flexes her toes. Her legs throb from the long session, and the tattooist’s towel shades pink to red.
“It’s going to hurt to walk,” says Ursula, “and it really won’t last longer than a month.”
Ariel nods, and even smiles a little.
The humming resumes; Ursula draws the fishscale pattern over her heels and onto the soles of her feet. Ariel breathes. Her tears are seafoam. You can always walk back into the ocean, they said; and all it costs is blood.
There is this about getting poisoned: it causes you to look at the remainder of your life with intense scrutiny.
Things keep bubbling into Silhouine’s head. The ratios of the mortarless stones in the corridor speak to her; sounds have fluid tastes and something keeps trying to tell her about numbers. She’s almost certain she can see in the dark.
She’s aware of a distant nausea. Her heartbeat tastes like blood. There’s got to be something at the bottom of all this, she thinks, feeling more than a little guilty for running ahead of Yael. But she’s got so little time.
School never ends.
That is to say, the process of schooling continues for others after you graduate: but education never stops stalking you, either. Central to the neuroses of every educated human is the fear, deep and real, that school will someday be back to get you.
You’ll be caught unclothed and unprepared, and you will be tested. You will fail, because you are meant to fail. This is what we all secretly knew about school: it claims to offer the keys to agency, yet it is designed for subjugation.
Anyway, this is why Withers usually reads naked on the bus.
“I think he’s either the figurative judgment of a vengeful Gaia for our abuse of the planet,” says Kelvin, “or the figurative judgment of a vengeful God for not abusing the planet enough.”
“I think he just hates buildings,” says Lindy.
“Maybe that’s it!” says Kelvin. “He’s angry about undocumented construction crews. So if we can just deport enough of them–”
Lindy’s leery. “You think that’s the place to attack this problem?”
“No construction, no buildings.” Kelvin is drafting the new city plan with vim. “No buildings, no kaiju! Solved!”
Later on it turns out Garmegula also likes destroying makeshift huts.