Have you ever had to decide between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing? Maybe you have. Or maybe you’re one of those secret saints with good programming, and the reward chemicals in your head fire a squirt when you do things that line up with morality and justice, instead of whatever personally benefits you.

I’m on the train again. Again. I’m not used to traveling this much. Usually I’m satisfied with doing odd jobs in my own backyard when they come up. But once again, the times demand that I go outside of my own preferences.

After burning two of my rapidly diminishing supply of days and being forced to confront a frankly suspicious number of moral quandaries, I think it’s time to call a full halt and do something else. Take my mind off things, go talk to some real humans, get some perspective. Okay, she’s only mostly human, but so am I. Being one-hundred percent human is kind of passe these days anyway.

I don’t have many friends. I realize this may come as something of a shock to you. But even if I weren’t an aberration, as Mr. Corundum so emphatically put it, I still probably wouldn’t be what you’d call a social butterfly. I’ve just never been great at maintaining relationships. It’s a lot of effort, and God knows I’m nothing if not lazy. I was always kind of a shy kid, and my inherent aversion to work didn’t do anything but compound and interlock with that fear of others. And, of course, turning into a hulking pile of sin didn’t make matters easier either. I figure I’m doing people a service by not trying to box them into being friends with a creature that’s half metal and half scar tissue.

Humor me and pretend all of these aren’t just excuses, alright? I’ve had a hard day.

I do have one friend, though. I think of her as one, at least, and I think she thinks the same of me. Or, if she doesn’t, she’s done a good job of pretending this last decade or so. She’s younger than me, but also way, way smarter than I am, so I seek her advice on the few occasions when I think my incomparable brainpower isn’t enough to see my own life clearly.

The train is taking me in the same direction as Lt. Deepwell’s precinct, but I’ll be stopping further south, in Sector Eleven. I’m kind of just now realizing that if you’ve never been to Wellspring City, it might be hard to visualize all this going back and forth I’ve been doing lately. I’d draw you a map, but I left my stationery at home. Tell you what, I’m stuck on public transportation, so I’ll just describe it to you. It’s not like you have anything better to do either, or you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

Imagine a donut. Sure, fatty, you can put some chocolate glaze on it if you want, it doesn’t really affect the metaphor. Actually, you know what, yeah, the glaze can represent the general oily filth all over the place. Great. Now put that donut inside a bigger donut. Try to contain your excitement. That’s basically what Wellspring City looks like.

On the very outside is the city wall, sometimes referred to as the Wall, for those that like to use capital letters to make things seem more significant. Or, if you’ve got the same sense of aesthetic drama that most historians have, there’s its proper name, the Wall of Primordial Iron. In this case it might be justified, though, depending on your view of things. Get a drink or something, because I’m bored and gearing up for a bunch of historical exposition. If you’re not into that kind of thing just uh… skip ahead. I’ll try to spruce it up a bit, but you’re not gonna hurt my feelings or anything if you’d rather not.

So, the whole deal is called Wellspring City because of the, uh, Wellspring. Say what you want about the place, whoever’s in charge of naming things isn’t beating around the bush. This is a desert, specifically the Everwind Desert, which takes up a pretty enormous portion of the interior of the continent. That continent being called Almarest. If you’re, uh… from somewhere else, and... didn’t already know that? Wait. If you’re not from Almarest, where the fuck did you come from?

Alright, we’re getting a bit off topic, I can think about the mysterious vagaries of world geography later. Anyway, the legends go that travelers moving through the desert found the Wellspring, the biggest oasis in the world, and decided to plop a town on top of it. The timeline here is a bit hazy. Some people say that this would have to have been in the Primordial era, even further back than recorded history. That would make Wellspring City, or whatever it was called back when it was a few huts around a puddle, incredibly ancient. Almarest has a lot of history. We’re talking tens of thousands of years, making Wellspring City far and away the oldest settlement in existence.

Of course, the official histories (i.e., propaganda) hold that Wellspring City would have been founded by humans. But looking at how humanity was basically food for the various magical predators for millennia, any multicellular organism can come to the realization that this is almost certainly not the case. Being somewhere in the middle of the food chain overall, humanity mostly kept to the northern and southern mountains, and likely wouldn’t have been able to cross the desert without being eaten by a passing giant or dragon or something. The City was probably originally founded by either elves or dustfolk, and humanity took it over about a thousand years ago once technology had progressed to the point where we could actually put up a fight and conquer something for a change.

There’s also the Wall, which kind of destroys the whole oasis narrative by itself, even though no one wants to acknowledge it for whatever reason.

You won’t find much record of it publicly available, but from what radical archaeologists and researchers have told me (either through hard-to-find books or in person), the Wall has always been here. I’m not being poetic; it’s always been here, in the exact middle of the desert, for more thousands of years than anyone can fathom. Humanity might have stolen the lives of all the other thinking races, but we also stole their records, and some of them are a lot older than ours.

The trolls had carvings of the Wall in their snowy mountain temples, which we tore down. The elves wrote poems and songs about it in their forest libraries, which we burned. For a while we thought the dustfolk, the most ancient of all the races, were the ones that built the Wall. But then we decrypted and translated the spilled mechanical guts of their walking archive golems (which we killed and melted down), and found that even they had merely discovered the Wall when the world was young, and apparently worshiped it as some kind of holy site.

So, basically, no one knows where it came from.

And it’s not giving anything up, either. Twenty miles in diameter, eight hundred feet tall, and a hundred feet thick, the dark metal ring is the biggest single structure that anyone’s ever built. Only the Spire barely peeks over the top of the thing. It casts its shadow all through the city, and no one knows who put it here. So of course people tried to get the Wall to talk over the years, with chisels and picks and drills and lasers and water cutters and hydraulic presses. Nothing. Not so much as a scratch. It’s got no markings, no fasteners, no fixtures of any kind, and it’s completely indestructible as far as anyone can tell. It has a single opening, the Gate in Sector Eleven to the south, but it’s been open for thousands of years and no one’s invented a machine strong enough to close it. That’s it. It’s a big, dumb, immovable mystery, and it’s driven engineers and historians alike completely insane for who knows how long.

Our fair City’s outer shell is a total enigma, but thankfully the inner parts are a lot more comprehensible.

As you walk through the Gate, you’ll be in the Outer Ring, our first donut. It’s cut into a bunch of equal-sized sections by lines that radiate out from the Spire. These are our Sectors. There are twenty in all, all separated by their own man-made walls, and are each distinct enough with their own cultures, loyalties, and purposes that they’re essentially small cities unto themselves at this point. The Outer Ring has sectors Eleven through Twenty, with Eleven at the bottom and Twenty at the top, with the rest staggered in an order that doesn’t make a whole lot of damn sense to me. It’s like, uh… the way these are numbered, it’s basically… ugh. You know what, I am going to draw you a map, because it’ll be way easier to show you than try to explain. Let me see if I can throw together some stupid graphic real quick, hang on.

There, hot off the old mind stove. Not pretty, but you get the point. Like I was saying, I’m not really sure why they’re numbered in that particular order, but I’m not the only one. The same subversive historians from earlier claim that the layout of the city wasn’t actually humanity’s decision at all, it was already like this when we moved in and we just kept it that way out of convenience.

And I guess that makes some amount of sense, with how we’ve used it. The Outer Ring sectors are bigger, so they wound up being more industrial, and correspondingly dirtier and more infested with the wretched poor, like me. Nineteen (where I grew up) is mostly factories and refineries, a polluted mess where people don’t live long. Eighteen is where I live now, and where we keep most of the food vats. Seventeen is a combination graveyard, scrapyard, and recycling facility. These days those three things are all basically the same, what with the Death Mandate and all - if you’re not rich enough to buy your own corpse after you die, you get rendered down into nutrients for the rest of us to enjoy, and Seventeen is the putrefying charnelhouse where that happens.

Et cetera et cetera, I won’t waste your time breaking down every one of them right here, but you get the point. It’s all very organized, very clearly delineated. How much time do I have left? God, fifteen minutes to Eleven. Okay.

Anyone still reading this that isn’t from here is probably curious about how this place is actually run at this point, and I might as well provide some context for that as well, seeing as how neither of us is going anywhere. It’s not that complicated, I promise, but if you’re allergic to informative lectures on municipal government organization like everyone else, again, just skip ahead. I know, I know, learning is exhausting, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.

So, what you’ve got in Wellspring City is basically a town with two sheriffs. Two sheriffs that uh, kind of hate one another, and are almost constantly at odds in different ways. One side is the Dynamic Brotherhood, and the other is… well, basically everyone else, but most importantly the Tribunal of Sector Lords and the Mayor. I’ll do the Brotherhood first because you’ve probably already gleaned a lot about them if you’ve been paying attention so far.

The Brotherhood started as a cult, no matter what any of them says. They’ll try to deny it and hide behind their many thousands of life-saving and life-destroying innovations while insisting that they’re a fraternity of scientists, but they started as a cult and they’re really just a shinier version of it today. They’re something like six hundred and fifty years old, and started with a guy they call the Luminarch. Humanity had and still has a bunch of different religions, some of which still exist, and this guy was fed up with them, because none of the gods we prayed to at the time were apparently listening, which is why our race was so miserable and frequently eaten. So he “had an epiphany” (made some crap up) about a new god, and started preaching about it. It got popular. Really popular.

I won’t dig into all the mythology, but basically this god is supposedly an actual, real machine that really exists on some cosmic level. It’s got a bunch of different names, and apparently wants humanity to join it through the transformative power of technology. Nevermind the fact that this is exactly the kind of god that a delusional guy with an engineering fetish would come up with. It might sound crazy, but these tech fanatics ended up so motivated by this dogma that they eventually became a locus for inventors and engineers all over the world. It got to the point where it became hard to learn or invent anything without the Brotherhood’s collective brain trust. This probably wouldn’t have had much significance in the long run, but then their inventions started turning toward the whole human supremacy thing, and long story short, that’s what they ended up achieving. These are the guys that murdered all the magic in the world. Or most of it, anyway. It took them about five hundred years, but they got what they wanted - a clean, orderly world, where pure humanity is on top and no one else even exists to get in our way.

Now, because they technically made the world a safer place for humans to live in with the (astonishingly effective) combination of faith, blueprints, and guns, they have a lot of clout. The common man knows what the Brotherhood did (because they remind us of it constantly) and probably wants to join them, but can’t pass the intelligence examination, so just spouts about their greatness to anyone that’ll listen. The populace listens to them. They’re the saviors of the human race, after all. And if they don’t want to listen, well… like I said, they’ve got all the guns. Because they invented them.

Now, Wellspring City is older than the Brotherhood, by quite a bit, and there was already an authority here when the Luminarch first went insane. That authority is called the Lord Mayor of Wellspring City.

I’ll head the weirdness off at the pass here - no one knows who the Mayor is. It’s that simple. No one has ever seen him or her. Some people with a poor grip on reality might say that they’ve seen the Mayor, but they haven’t, because in order to get to the top of the Spire you’d have to somehow work your way past the Azure Guard, a battalion of the most elite Centurions in the world. If you somehow got past them, then you’d have to deal with the twenty or so Wellwardens patrolling the Spire at all times, and uh… well, that’s not going to happen. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful arcanist in existence, nothing gets past the Wellwardens.

They say that Wellspring City has always had a Mayor. There’s no election (that we can see), no one credible has ever claimed to have been the Mayor in the past, and the only people who can reasonably say they’ve ever interacted with him are the Tribunal. The Tribunal of all twenty Sector Lords are the (mostly elected) oligarchy that intercedes with the Mayor in the Spire to make most of the decisions that pull the city’s strings. They’re very quiet on the topic of the Mayor, for some reason. If that sounds suspicious, that’s because it is. There’s a healthy number of people out there that think the Mayor doesn’t even exist, that he’s just a construct invented by the Tribunal to lend their rule some kind of phantom legitimacy. But if that’s true, then that means the Tribunal controls the Wellwardens, and if that was the case with all the bickering and squabbling that goes on between the Lords, I think we’d be living in smoldering, lifeless ruins by now.

I guess I have to explain the Wellwardens now. That’ll actually be pretty easy, because the amount of information we have on them is about equal to what we have on the Mayor. Obviously I’d like to show you firsthand in an encounter with one, but I am not getting close enough to one to paint you a pretty fucking picture, you’ll just have to deal with more exposition.

Imagine a suit of armor. Not like the big motorized wearable-tank Centurion armor or the sleek electrical Neutralizer swimsuit, we’re talking old-school plate armor. The medieval stuff, with decorations, like the kind of battle armor an old king would wear. Engravings, moldings, tassels, torn capes, horns, spikes, the works, all made of heavy metal plates. Now make the armor gigantic. Not quite the size of the old extinct giants, but big, like slightly taller than me big - around eight-odd feet tall, with hulking proportions to match. Broad chest, massive shoulders, the mythical top-heavy hero build.

Alright, now make this suit of armor indestructible. As in, just like the Wall (the connection there is something people still argue about). And just for kicks, let’s make the thing unstoppable too, because we’re already in overkill territory, so we might as well take the unstoppable force and immovable object and squish them together into one paradoxical being.

I’ve seen Wellwardens walk through bank vaults like they weren’t even there. Steel flying apart and being forced to melt out of the Warden’s way, because it wasn’t left with any other choice. Concrete is paper to them. Artillery shells are gnats. They’re so heavy that their sabatons crack the pavement of districts that haven’t kept up with their maintenance, and civilian weather services put out advisories tracking their movements as though they were landslides or hurricanes. If a Wellwarden shows up in an intersection, traffic stops existing, because a Wellwarden is traffic.

And I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.

Wellwardens… do something to you. They do something to everyone, on some kind of mental or spiritual level. Just like their physical bodies, something about their essence is impossible for people to withstand, on the inside. Being near a Wellwarden has effects on your mind. Suddenly, it becomes incredibly difficult to string thoughts together. You can’t focus on whatever you were doing. Your vision starts to go dark. Memories come back, and it’s not the good ones. Every bad thing you’ve ever done wells up to the front of your consciousness. After a few minutes, if you don’t get away, you sink into a mental mire of guilt, anguish, and hopelessness, unable to move beneath the lightless weight of it all, in a total senseless fugue, until the Wellwarden leaves.

Some people are tougher and more able to shoulder the weight of a Wellwarden’s presence more than others. Maybe they have cleaner souls, maybe they’re made of sterner stuff, I don’t know. They might be able to get clear of the thing before the worst of it sets in. Other people who aren’t as lucky might have nightmares for weeks after straying too close to a Warden, and there’s no cure for it but time. Some people never come back at all, reduced to drooling, twitching vegetables for the rest of their lives.

It’s probably obvious at this point, but magic has no effect on them. Magic stops existing around them, as far as I can tell. I’ve heard that some extremely powerful arcanists can hold on to their magic for a few minutes near a Warden, but most find their power deleted outright. That’s why they make me physically sick - my immune system is sustained and controlled by my magic. Without it, my stupid patchwork body immediately starts rejecting all my implants at once while desperately trying to figure out how to deal with all the extra glands and tissues I have from the slabbing process, for the first time as far as my body is concerned. It only takes a few minutes for me to start sweating and hallucinating and puking blood. It doesn’t feel great.

I’ve looked at one from a distance a few times before. They don’t have vitae, or at least not in a form that I recognize. Instead of a cloud or array of different colors and shapes where a person’s vitae normally is, there’s this distortion around them, like light refracting and bending an image through water. It’s not even pure darkness or light or anything like that, it’s just this horrible wrenching in the fabric of things. If I stand in front of a Warden and get my eyes to focus on the anti-vitae around it, I can see things behind the Warden. I have no idea what that means, but it probably isn’t wholesome.

There’s ninety-nine of the things in the city. They’re all slightly different, with unique armor designs and unique weapons. Some have sledgehammers with heads the size of my torso, others have ten-foot halberds, still others have broadswords made out of what looks like an entire foundry’s worth of metal, and they all swing these colossal weapons like they’re made out of dry grass. Not that that happens very often - when you’re strong enough to tear a cargo truck in half by walking into it, a melee weapon seems pretty redundant.

God they’re terrifying. Where was I? Oh yeah, the government. Actually, the terror the Wellwardens inspire in the populace is actually kind of the whole point - as far as anyone can tell, the Wardens only obey the commands of whoever the Mayor is. So, the Mayor is the most powerful person in the entire world, because he controls ninety-nine invincible magic-eating juggernauts that absolutely no one can do anything about. At some point, they became the reason mankind was able to settle here in the first place, because even an entire army of angry giants isn’t getting through five or six Wellwardens. I’m not exactly sure when they came under our control (or when the potentially non-human Mayor decided to start protecting us, what do I know), but it’s why we’re all here today.

And it’s why the Brotherhood doesn’t always get its way. The Neutralizer Squadron is pretty fucking scary, but they’re nothing compared to the Wellwardens. And they know it as a fact - the Brotherhood have tried to take over the city for themselves a few times, thinking their advanced weapons would be enough to win them the day. Each time, the Wellwardens simply stood in formation in front of the Spire and slaughtered every single one of them. None of them even came close. I don’t know why the Mayor didn’t give them the bum’s rush out of the city after any of these ill-fated rebellions, but it’s honestly hard to tell why the Mayor does or doesn’t do much of anything.

Take Electrofuck for example. One of the most powerful and wanted men in the city, so terrifying that the Watch and even the Neutralizers haven’t had any luck bringing him to heel. So why doesn’t the Mayor just send a single Warden after him? It’s not like Electrofuck could do anything about it other than run or die. The Wardens usually don’t get involved with rogue arcanists or really any kind of crime at all, they mostly just… walk around. They either can’t or don’t talk, and the Mayor only communicates through the Tribunal or through written edicts whenever new laws are passed or an announcement has to be made, so we might never know. What I do know is that the Mayor’s one-hundred and ninety-eight iron fists ensure that whatever he says goes, so the Brotherhood is kept in check. Sort of. Mostly.

And before the more inquisitive readers ask, no, I don’t know what the Wardens actually are, and I doubt anyone else knows for sure. The most popular running theory is that they’re some kind of ancient magical construct, like one of the old dustfolk golems, but there really isn’t any way to check. So of course that just makes the Brotherhood hate them more.

And that’s Wellspring City. Two authoritarian parties, one acting on religious dogma, the other acting on a combination of semi-responsible governmental sensibilities and total mystery, locked in a constant struggle with the rest of us squished in the middle. Some of us more than others.

Now you know everything about everything. Well, most things. Well, no, you mostly know what I know, which isn’t really much. But it’s something, I guess. Thanks to this no-doubt riveting dumptruck of information, you have the context to understand some of the stuff that’s been going on a little clearer. Again if you uh, somehow didn’t already know, I guess. Look, I don’t know who might end up reading all of this, I just talk to myself a lot and record it because I’m lonely and I have nothing better to do. And a hearty welcome back to all of you that definitely knew all of that stuff and skipped ahead. Welcome to the future of fifteen minutes later! Bad news - the future you’ve arrived in isn’t any better, but I’m still here! I’m probably just as thankful as you are.

Speaking of things to be thankful for, Sector Eleven is looming ahead on the left. When I say looming, I mean it - the structures here are heavier and more monolithic than elsewhere. This is mostly because of the Gate, at the absolute southernmost part of the city wall. It’s the only gap in the Wall and the only entry point into the city, so Eleven had to have special treatment. The Gate informs everything about this place. This is where the city’s two sports stadiums are, in plain view of anyone entering. The roads are absolutely huge, in some places hundreds of feet across to allow enough room for traffic into and out of the largest city in the world. Colorful advertisements with neon lights and flashing billboards explode in all directions, up on poles planted even in the middle of the expansive thoroughfares. This is the first place anyone sees upon entering the city, so advertising space and mercantile property costs are at a massive premium.

It’s militaristic here, too. More Watch garrisons than anywhere else, their armored facades facing the open door to the desert just outside, as though daring anyone to be foolish enough to try and invade. Massive artillery cannons gather dust on high tiered platforms placed strategically throughout the sector, every single one aimed directly at the Gate. You’re more likely to see Neutralizers stalking around, creeping people out.

The people around here are a little bit different, too. Anyone with claustrophobic tendencies will try to live here - it’s the only place in the entire city where you can see outside. Immigrants tend to put down here too, if they can afford the limited space. It’s not uncommon for newcomers to be put off by the massive dark wall looming over them at all times, so many prefer to keep their faces to the outside, where they came from. The traffic, mixing of cultures, cutthroat mercantilism, constant bustle, and exposure to the outside world result in a subpopulace that’s more… eclectic than you’ll find anywhere else in the city.

An old joke has it like this: a thief is about to be hung in Spire Circle, with a crowd all around.

The man from Sector Two says, “I demand the city compensate my business for this man’s crimes!”

The Sector Six man is trying to interview the thief for his upcoming criminal psychology dissertation.

Sector Thirteen cries out, “I want his boots!”

Sectors Seventeen and Eighteen reply, “And then we get the body!”

No one from Nineteen or Fourteen could get time off of work to come watch.

The Sector Three man is the executioner, and says nothing.

Five yells, “Could you turn your head a bit to the right?” He’s at the back, painting a picture.

Twenty is reading the thief his last rites.

And the Sector Eleven man turns to Three, points at Thirteen, and says, “Hey! I think that guy’s trying to steal my boots!”

… Alright, I didn’t say it was a particularly funny joke, but you get the point.

The train stops, and I get off at the crowded station. Once again, people wrinkle their noses at me and back out of my way as I lumber my way down the steps toward more steps. Eleven is the only sector that rests on the bare earth rather than a raised foundation platform, so you have to descend a ways in order to reach most of it - an architectural decision that my knees do not agree with. I rush a little vitae into my joints to stifle the pain.

Off the platform and onto the ground, I take a moment to catch my breath and take the place in. Eleven even feels weird. There’s the Gate in the distance, and I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked the thing. When you’ve lived your entire life encased by buildings and metal walls, a glimpse of that open expanse lurking just outside is enough to give me some agoraphobic willies. I’ve read about this place in central Valtea called the Hot Plains - it’s just warm grass, perfectly flat, for hundreds of miles, and people willingly live there. To uh, farm it, or something. I don’t know how they do it. I’d never be able to leave my hut with that massive sky pushing down on me all the time.

Eleven has a bit of that too, honestly, which is why I don’t love coming here. The massive arterial thoroughfares letting all the commerce in and out of the city result in huge stretches of open space with nothing but pavement, lamps, and vehicles, with no buildings to break up the view of the sky. Once you get away from the roads it’s fine, but walking across these exhaust-choked asphalt voids always rubs me the wrong way. I’d like to get back into the concrete shadows, please.

As I walk past the girders and support struts holding up the train station, I hear a sound. It’s like a… what is that?

I move around to the front of the platform underside, where the upraised station forms a roof. There’s a crowd here, standing before the shadows underneath all the steel. They’re all looking at one man, standing just under the heavy platform above.

He’s a well-tanned, medium-sized guy, with a scruffy beard and a wide feathered hat that looks like it was fancy at one point, but is now old and in dire need of cleaning. His clothes are the same way - probably expensive, but that was fifteen years ago. It’s a colorful getup even if it’s old - a bombastic display of greens, purples, and blues. His vitae is colorful too - big loud clouds of purple and blue that spread outward like a dreamy fog, and reverberate in time to his music.

There’s a steam accordion strapped to his chest. Complicated instrument, with lots of valves and huffing steam from its microboiler. And he’s playing it like it’s the last performance of his life - eyes closed and blaring a soulful, almost sad tune that I don’t recognize. The squeezebox part provides the bass, the hiss and clank of the escaping steam acts kind of like percussion, and the melodica pipes thrum a wistful series of notes. It has enough of a rhythm that you can follow it, but a melody that sweeps and drifts everywhere. The space out here was making me a little nervous, but there’s something about the sound - I feel calmer. More at ease with where I am. The music doesn’t just contrast with the noisy cityscape around me, it beats it, washes it out, makes it seem less… powerful. I don’t know whether to cheer, cry, or fall blissfully asleep.

Before I know it, a few minutes have gone by in the space of a blink, and he’s wrapping up his song. And I swear, when the last note fades, all my anxiety over where I am comes back again. This guy is good. He’s got his instrument case out in front of him, and people are bunching up to drop some small credit chips into it. If I had any damn money I’d do the same - great music should be encouraged, even if it’s on the street. I don’t often devolve into histrionics (no matter what the rest of those dilettantes say), but that tune was downright enchanting. He takes off his hat, thanks the crowd, and unstraps his bulky accordion, preparing to leave. Some people shout out for an encore, but he begs them off politely, saying it’s time for him to move on. Shame. I should keep an eye out for him.

After about fifteen minutes of pushing my way east through sidewalk crowds and glaring distrustingly at the blank blue nothingness above me, I reach the side streets and sigh with a little relief. It feels nice to no longer be the tallest thing for hundreds of yards around. I’ve got business with one of the biggest buildings in town. Even back in the embrace of the shops and apartments, I can catch glimpses of the thing hulking on the horizon to the East.

The Automatic Combat League.

I could describe every single step I take through the cramped, greasy, crumbling and wire-strung back streets toward it, but that would probably be boring. You can imagine what these warrens look like. People leaning from sheet metal balconies to yell at one another about laundry or who gets to use the water pump next. Hawkers trying to drum up business for their clapboard knick knack stands. Groups of brave unattended urchins buzzing around me asking if they can ride on my shoulders like a domesticated elephant (which I oblige, because why not). Street toughs with knives and shock batons lurking in shadowy alleys, turning away once they see that 1) I’m giving shoulder rides to six children at a time and 2) my wallet belongs to a guy that weighs almost half a ton.

While the kids all scuttle around me and leave dirty footprints all over the back and shoulders of my coat, I’ll tell you about the League.

Wellspring City has a sports scene, and it’s the biggest in the world, because everything in Wellspring City is the biggest in the world. People come from all over Almarest to see the games, and they’ve got two main attractions to pick from. First, you’ve got slaughterball. Like the name probably suggests, the game is basically a loosely-organized team fistfight to see who gets to carry a ball from one end of the arena to the other. Someone scores after about twenty minutes of bloodshed and broken bones, then the process repeats. Every sector has a team or two, and the encouragement of genetic modification of the players and use of performance-enhancing or psychoactive drugs all but guarantees that every game is a breathtaking show of human violence that the whole family can enjoy. People especially like the part where the players from both teams pick up handfuls of their own dislodged teeth from the ground and toss them to the stands at the end of every match, as fun souvenirs for the kids. Some of those teeth fetch hefty prices in the collector’s market, too. Fun and lucrative!

I’ve never been much of a slaughterball fan, personally. I’ve been to a few games in my time and I wasn’t terribly impressed. I can see the same basic thing for free in any Outer Ring alley, without all the lines and crowds and occasional ball handling. Well, I guess there’s always the chance of some handling of balls in an alley gang fight, but it’s not really worth many points and they’re definitely not treated with as much reverence.

The second of the two stadiums is the Automatic Combat League arena. The ACL is slightly less popular than slaughterball, but it has its own legions of extremely dedicated followers. The ACL is less about being loyal to a team, and more about being a fan of one particular engineer (preferably one that’s from your neighborhood) and following their creations as they literally scrap and dismantle the competition (preferably an engineer from a neighborhood you don’t like very much).

I should probably provide a little bit of background. I know, yes, but before you log out in disgust, I swear this’ll only take a minute. The readers not in the know will appreciate your patience, I’m sure.

About fifty or sixty years ago, technology marched to the point where the first automech was invented. I don’t know who gets the credit for this one. I’m pretty sure the Brotherhood would like to say they were the first, but this is one of the few advancements where they were unable to plant the flag before someone else, and everyone knows it. The idea was something that the Brotherhood’s philosophy would never have let them reach. A machine in the shape of a man, with a computer brain and an amount of agency, that can move and do things when given a set of programmed orders. Once the word got out, the first question people asked themselves was “Why are we doing all the heavy lifting when we could buy one of these things and make it do the hard work?” They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but laziness is the father, and so automechs started appearing in factories and warehouses.

There was pushback, of course. Laborers didn’t like losing their jobs to machines that didn’t sleep or ask for wages, and the Brotherhood especially didn’t like a machine whose only apparent purpose was to replace man rather than elevate or enhance him. I don’t really understand the thought process behind that, but I’m not about to ask them why they feel so viscerally threatened by what is effectively just a forklift that can drive itself. In any case, there was no way to unring that bell, and after all the legislation and debates and squabbling, automechs gradually became part of daily life in Wellspring City. They lift boxes, turn valves at scheduled times, count things, all the jobs that your average idiot can do, and they even do it without taking a smoke break every nine seconds.

The second question people asked in the post-automech world was, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could make these things beat the crap out of one another?” The resounding answer from almost everyone was “Um, yes please?”, and so the Automatic Combat League was born, after a few years of crackdowns on illegal backstreet robot fighting rings and intense lobbying from moralistic interest groups led by, who else, the Brotherhood. They didn’t stand a chance. The public almost always get what they want, and they wanted to form crowds to watch automechs smash one another to literal pieces.

The arena was finished about forty years ago, and it’s been a massive cash cow ever since. People come from every corner of the continent to watch these matches, and it’s one of the only places a talented freelance engineer can hope to become rich and famous. Corporate sponsorships are always flying through the air, people on the street buzz excitedly about what their favorite engineers are going to be rolling out for this next season, fan publications make their living printing news about the various automech designs and speculating over who’s gonna take home the Emerald Wrench this year.

I disentangle myself from the intestinal side streets, cross the mostly-empty parking lot, and reach one of the rear utility entrances to the arena, which is now blocking out the sun eight stories above my head. There’s a security booth near the door, and I stride up to the guard inside while smiling as sunny as you please. I’m hard to miss, and the guard follows my approach with a raised eyebrow.

“Hi! Testing consult, here to see Tennima Earthboon.”

The security guard behind the glass, who has the sideburns of a spider monkey and the bored, apathetic facial expression of a security guard, looks up at me with the requisite amount of mild disdain. He looks down at his little desk, punches through a few screens on his computer, then looks back up at me.

“Ms. Earthboon doesn’t have a consult scheduled for today.”

Uh oh. We’ve got an overachiever on our hands. This guy wants to earn his paycheck. I don’t believe this man ever went through the Security Guard Academy - I’m pretty sure actually doing your job is frowned upon by the regulatory commission.

I can’t remember if I’ve seen this guard before. If I don’t recognize him, he doesn’t recognize me from all other times I’ve been through here. I run a short comparative facial scan through my internal database. And… nope, it returns only a 0.09% probability of a match in recent memory. That makes sense. I probably would have remembered those ridiculous mutton chops anyway. Time to improvise.

“Well, she only called me a couple hours ago. I might not be in there. You know how it is with these engineers - if it’s not circuit cards or lugnuts, they’ll probably forget about it.”

This is a lie. I’m the scatterbrain here. In my frazzled spur-of-the-moment mental state I completely forgot to call Tennima ahead of time. That would have made this a lot easier.

He squints at me, apparently not appreciating my attempt at good-natured solidarity. “ID?”

Crap.

“Yeah, sure.” I fish it out of my wallet and hand it to him under the glass. This is about to get a lot harder.

He doesn’t even have to look at the text on the card. The entire thing is bright purple, with “ARCANIST” in yellow block letters at the top. He beetles his brows at me in a combination of indignation and disbelief. It’s a shame that false IDs of any quality cost more than I make in six months.

He hands my ID back like it’s a hungry steam worm and grunts, “Get out of here before I call the Watch, freak.”

Admittedly, I probably could have thought this through a little more.

I plead, “C’mon, you can look me up in your logs, I was here on a call last month. Or call Tennima’s garage, she’ll vouch for me.”

“Fat chance. You’re not even the seventh weirdo this week to try and pull that one on me. I’m not gonna be the guy that let a deranged throwback like you walk in here to do who knows what. Go cast a spell somewhere else, or I’m calling for backup.”

While he’s saying this, I bring up Tennima’s tablet in my database and compose a quick message.

I’m outside at the gate. Wanted to surprise you, but the guy won’t let me in. Can you call the booth?

I send it, suppressing a shiver as my internal antenna hums the data out of my skull and into the air. Now I just have to stall for time. Hopefully she has her screen on her and isn’t busy with something.

I reply, “I don’t know any spells. They’re illegal. And I’m not deranged! Do I seem deranged? Look, I can even make complete sentences! See?”

The guard scowls. “Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look plenty deranged. Non-deranged people are smaller, and have way less scars and, uh… technology, on their faces. If deranged took out advertisements, it’d be your mug on the billboards, creep.”

It’s my turn to frown. “That’s not very funny.”

He scoffs. “Yeah, I quit the comedy circuit to be a security guard. ‘Cause I like the uniforms, see? And these boxes are nice and sweaty, just how I like it.”

I fix my lenses on him. “Okay, did you really quit comedy to be a rent-a-cop? Because I’ll admit, you’re actually unusually witty.”

Two words flash at the corner of my vision.

hang on

Mr. Dedication replies, “Everyone wants to be talented and famous when they’re young, pal. Except you, apparently. Looking at you, I’m guessing you wanted to be a cargo train. Or a human petri dish. Now fuck off outta here before I get in-”

The phone in his little security box rings. He rolls his eyes very dramatically, then jabs his finger toward the parking lot at me while putting the receiver up to his ear.

“Gate 2C, this is Springberry.”

His eyes lock onto mine from behind the glass, and his face congeals into an expression somewhere between exasperation, disbelief, and resignation. I smile at him.

“Oh. Hello, Ms. Earthboon. Yes, there is. Uh… two stories tall, black hair, green clanker eyes. Oh yeah. Yeah, like if- yes, at least three gorillas’ worth. Yes. It’s alright, no problem, just… warn a guy next time. Okay. Have a nice day, Ms. Earthboon.”

He hangs up the phone, eyes not leaving mine for even a second. He leans forward.

“I like Ms. Earthboon. She’s a nice girl. And if I find out about anything freaky happening to her, I’ll make sure something happens to you about it, get me?”

I shrug. “You’d have to fight a lot of other people just to reach my corpse afterward, buddy. And I’ve been friends with her longer than you have, anyway.”

The guard puts his attention on his computer and gets ready to type. “What’s your name?”

“Baulric Featherlight.”

He gives me a look. “What, like from the story?”

Okay, this guy is definitely a faker. I’ve never met a security guard that didn’t collapse into myoclonic seizures every time their eyes contacted print.

“Yep.”

A sarcastic chuckle. “And that last name is just poetry on a creep like you. Your parents must be so happy that they got their wish.”

“Nah, they’re dead.”

“Yeah? Join the club, pal.”

“Okay. Where do I sign up?”

He squints. “Where what now?”

“Where do I sign up? For the Dead Parents Club. That sounds like one of those ones with free coffee.”

He slides a clipboard and pen under the glass. “Bottom line right here, smartass.”

I pick up the form and look at it. “What’s this?”

Still typing, he says, “Never learned how to read, huh? Clearance badge form. If you’re a consult you shoulda got one the first time you came through, but every other guard here is a lazy piece of shit. Pretend to read all of it very thoroughly for the cameras, then sign so we don’t have to do this song and dance ever again.”

I glance at the paper, then run my text comparator program to get the gist in about a third of a second. Don’t lose the badge, don’t eat the badge, et cetera et cetera, just bureaucratic boilerplate. I sign and give it back to him. How’s that for reading, huh? Bet you wish you had one of these. Or… well, maybe not, because modern intracranial processors still have only about a 60% compatibility with normal human brain tissue and the list of post-implantation side effects is about as long as your spinal cord. Which uh, has a good chance of exovertebral herniation after getting one of these, incidentally. Look, basically what I’m saying is, don’t get a computer slotted in your head unless you want to use hallucinations as a replacement for the viewscreen you won’t be able to afford anymore, or you’re itching to add some real humdingers to your tumor collection.

The clipboard completes its pilgrimage back under the glass with my signature in tow, then Mr. Vigilance holds up an ancient-looking camera.

“Say ‘regret’!”

The flashbulb goes off before I even realize what’s happening. The badge comes out of the laminator and he hands it to me. In the picture I look like an overexposed, electronically-enhanced moron. I squint my shutters at him.

“That’s hysterical. No wonder they pay you the big bucks, you absolute winner, you.”

He smiles pleasantly and pushes a button. A buzzer sounds, and the door opens, showing me a passage leading into the arena.

“Have a great day, Mr. Featherlight. Do anything stupid in there and there’ll be so many shock batons up your ass you’ll try to take the next power transformer you see out on a date.”

Walking down the steps into the arena, I wave a hand and say without turning back, “Revisit that old dream of yours, Mr. Springberry. You’re in the wrong line of work.”

The door crashes shut behind me, leaving me surrounded by quiet, fluorescent-lit concrete.

I send Tennima another message. Thanks. Where are you?

After a minute, she replies, major league garage bay 89

Major league? Wow. That’s new. I guess there’s some congratulations in order.

I slither my way through the utility tunnels toward the arena grounds. There’s no paint and no decorations - the fans aren’t allowed back here. Just anonymous gray-green concrete and the occasional door marked “MAINTENANCE” or “BOILER”, stuff like that. Not very exciting. On my right are some high half-windows, where I can see the fight turf. This place on its own is bigger than most neighborhoods, so it’s going to take me a bit to work my way over to the garages.

I realize I have no idea where she actually is. This place is a labyrinth. I give up and find the nearest door to the pitch. The garage numbers are painted below the stands so the fans can identify their favorite engineers, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

Back out in the sun, I scan the place for a bit. It’s not a fight day today, so it’s quiet, and the stands are mostly empty. Only some scouts, coaches, and diehard fans for whom even automech maintenance is something to cheer about. The pitch is just bare brown-orange desert earth, smoothed and compacted down by rolling machines at the end of every event. There are some automechs and engineers out here, sparring against one another, troubleshooting, practicing maneuvers, or just talking amongst themselves.

Tucked under the stands all the way around the perimeter of the pitch are the shadowy dugouts, where the engineers’ garages are kept. Alcoves numbered “1” through “200” for the minor leaguers on the east side, and one-hundred larger nooks for the majors on the west. I find the one with a big yellow “89” painted above it and just cut directly across the pitch, keeping a respectful distance from the gearheads and their fighting machines as I walk.

I pass by two contenders with minor league emblems on their jackets. One’s a shrimpy-looking mousey guy wearing welder’s goggles, with the number “174” on his back. He’s sweating a bit, and grimacing like he’s got a weasel in his work coveralls. His vitae is blue-red and wispy, like seaweed. The other’s a… distinctive-looking hefty lady with sky-blue lip paint, two-inch rainbow-colored artificial eyelashes, glittery eyeshadow, and not a single hair on her meaty head. She looks like a huge vanilla cupcake with rainbow sprinkles came to life and decided to start a career as a heavyweight wrestler. Her vitae is a big, blocky red-purple fortress around her body, with clouds of something like multicolored flower petals drifting around its ramparts. I’ve never seen someone so imposing in my entire life.

They’re standing across from one another on opposite ends of a white circle painted on the ground. Their mechs are in the ring, sparring.

Mouse’s machine is a sleek, headless, fast-looking thing with four arms and reverse-jointed legs. It’s painted red and orange, with two or three sponsorship decals on the shoulders. Two of its arms have hands, and the longer upper pair are equipped with a guttering flamethrower and a circular saw with glinting teeth. No engine - probably running entirely on an electrite reactor to cut down on weight.

Rainbow Suplex’s mech looks basically exactly like her - hulking, heavily-armored, and slow, with massive hydraulic pistons in the arms, a roaring engine in its chest, twin chrome exhaust pipes jutting from either side of its clavicle, and the most terrifying candy-coat of eye-bruising neon rainbow paint I’ve ever seen on anything ever. I don’t see any obvious weapons on it, or even cameras in its heavy head. Aside from its utterly blinding paint job, of course, which in the sunlight is forcing me to turn down my eyes’ goddamn brightness setting.

Mouse punches a few keys on his wrist-mounted data relay, and Spider-Arms trains its flamethrower on the Oglitzerator. An angry jet of liquid fire sprays all over the giant’s body - I can feel the heat from where I’m standing. The massive mech just walks forward, which is honestly the most menacing thing it probably ever needs to do. Each one of its footsteps brings a pneumatic tsss and an earth-rattling rumble. No matter how heavy its armor is, it can’t just stay in the fire - it’ll overheat.

The multicolored monster stomps forward, but Spider-Arms launches ahead and right on what looks like jet-powered rollerskates. In an impressive display of agility, it reaches the titan’s flank and swipes an arm left. Its buzzsaw screeches against its opponent’s armor plates - probably looking to sever a hydraulic line. A shower of sparks flies in all directions.

The much larger Oglitzerator turns and waves its own arm, like a bear trying to swat a bee. Spider-Arms ducks under the swing, then shoots another jet of fire right in the hulk’s back.

Rainbow Suplex, her face in a determined scowl, closes her sparkle-coated eyes and punches a button on her own wrist rig.

Then it becomes apparent why Mouse is wearing welding goggles.

A horrible blinding flash explodes from hidden photoplates on the Oglitzerator’s armor. I’m lucky I already turned my brightness down - the rainbow flare only lasts for a split second, but was bright enough to outdo the sun and cast shadows all the way up in the nosebleeds.

There must’ve been an extra little electromagnetic something in the flare. My implants are pretty well-shielded, but there’s a little static in my vision, and Spider-Arms suddenly looks a lot more confused. It tries to get out of range, but flounders, like it’s not sure which direction to go in. The Oglitzerator takes advantage of the momentary confusion, to gruesome effect. It lunges forward and grabs its opponent’s left two arms at the shoulder, plants its other hand around Spider-Arm’s middle, then pulls. The smaller mech’s left arms shriek briefly and then separate from their sockets. Oil and hydraulic fluid splatter the dry earth. The giant tosses the leaking limbs to one side, lifts up the rest of Spider-Arms, then throws the poor, defeated mech overhead about twenty yards through the air. It lands outside the ring with a metallic crunch, in a pitiful-looking heap of tangled scrap metal.

Mouse falls to his knees, hands on his head and mouth agape in despair.

Rainbow Suplex, arms crossed over her… regal bosom, yells to him, “You shoulda kept yer distance! The fire woulda worked if you’d just dodged around more, but you had to get cocky.”

Mouse doesn’t reply, eyes down, apparently still reeling from his 45-second defeat.

The Oglitzerator picks up the dismembered arms, then stomps over to gather up the whirring corpse of Spider-Arms. Rainbow Suplex, still scowling like a bull, crosses the ring to cast Mouse in her domineering shadow. She leans down, picks up her shell-shocked opponent, and slings the kid over her shoulder like a dejected sack of potatoes. She strides off with purpose, the Oglitzerator following behind.

“C’mon, Silverbell, it ain’t the end of the world. Let’s look at some pulse shielding, then I’ll buy ya a milkshake and one a’ them nice sausage sandwiches you like. Y’all gotta eat more. You’ll feel better in two shakes of a rattler’s tail.”

From somewhere between Rainbow Suplex’s shoulder blades with his butt in the air, Mouse sniffs and mumbles hopefully, “... Alright.”

The strange duo saunter off toward the garages. I can’t tell if what I just witnessed was a friendly training session or a kidnapping.

A lilting female voice somewhere around my left elbow says, “Kind of reminds you of the old days, huh?”

I turn and look down.

Coming up to just above my waist is a diminutive young woman with silvery blond hair bound in a messy bun. She’s wearing a tan tanktop with goggles on her forehead, and the sleeves of her gunmetal green mechanic’s coveralls are tied around her waist. She’s pretty enough, in a miniature kind of way, with a tiny button nose and big green eyes that seem to scan everything around them. Kind of like mine, but without the need for any circuitry. She’s got a narrow frame and probably doesn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, but her arms still show some muscle from working with power tools and metal all day.

Her vitae is very geometrical. Regular angular shapes, like a bunch of ghostly armor plates. They’re varying shades of gray, and they orbit around her body interlocking and separating at random, forming new shapes or breaking up into smaller ones. The metallic assembly smells pretty much like you think it would - hot metal, grease, and exhaust.

I smile at her and say, “Yeah, a little. How are ya, shrimp?”

She gives my hip a hug (that’s all she can really reach), and I give her a careful pat on the back. My hand is wider than her shoulder blades. We separate. She crosses her arms and looks up at me.

“Probably better than you, fatty.”

“Yeah, probably.” I thumb at the sparring partners receding into the distance. “Who’s the cute couple?”

Tennima snorts. “Panlon Silverbell and Charla Longmarch. They’re very much not a couple. Pan’s too shy to get a girlfriend and Charla’s… well, you can probably put two and two together on that one.”

“You know them?”

She shrugs. “He’s new, just entered the league a few months ago. I don’t know much about him. He seems quiet, but he’s pretty talented for his age. Charla’s been here almost as long as the arena has. She looks… daunting, but she’s actually very nice once you get past the… intensity. Basically the minor league den mother. She shows all the new fighters the ropes.”

“I didn’t see her rank.”

“Number one, in the minors. She’s been there for the last ten years or so - her and Painbow are the last obstacle to the big leagues.”

I frown. “She’s been rank one in the minors for ten years?”

Ten nods. “She’s refused every major-league contract they’ve tried to give her. Honestly, she’s good enough that she could move up whenever she wanted, but I think she keeps her rank to force all her adopted children to exceed her if they want to move on. Cares more about being a coach and surrogate mom than personal glory. That’s one reason why she has so few sponsorships. The other reason is that she refuses to ruin Painbow’s paint job with corporate decals.”

“Huh. What a character.”

“She’s a little weird, and loud, and pushy, but her heart’s even bigger than her biceps. I owe her a lot. I’m thirsty. You want a drink?”

“Hell yes I do, walking here was murder.”

“Follow me.” Tennima starts off to the left, toward the major league garages.

I slow my pace as we cross the expanse of hot dirt. Every one of my steps is worth about three of hers. We pass by some training equipment, and more mechs and engineers deep in their training.

“So you’re in the majors now, huh? When did that happen?”

“About a month ago. You’d know if you came out to see my damn matches.”

“I’m broke! Why don’t you use your dang prestige and get me some free tickets, huh?”

“Minors aren’t allowed to do that. But now I’m a bigshot, I’ll see about floating you some freebies in the nosebleeds. Hope you’re not prone to altitude sickness.”

“I guess we’ll find out. You and Crunchy must be on fire lately.”

“Yeah, we’ve been leaving a pretty terrifying wake of scrap behind us. I got picked up by Halfmoon, you know.”

I whistle. “No kidding? That’s gotta be the big bucks, right?”

She nods. “They treat their fighters pretty well. I’ve got a fancy new apartment in Sector Nine and everything.”

“You really are a bigshot. You should let me come over and stay for a few years.”

“I think you violate about seven different clauses in my lease. But sure, you should come visit sometime.”

All these garages are basically the same. Some have their doors open, some don’t, there are some subtle decorations depending on the engineer currently inhabiting it, but they all have standardized equipment. The fighters are always moving up and down depending on their rank, moving closer and closer to the coveted Champion’s Workshop, so if they’re performing well, they never get the chance to stay in their designated spot for long. Tennima’s garage is always identifiable, though, no matter what her rank is. From a distance.

Because none of the other fighters have Mr. Crunch.

Tennima crosses the threshold of her nook, under the awning and out of the sun. I stay a short distance away, for just a moment. That’s the thing about being around something bigger than you. No matter how big and strong you are, you’ll meet something bigger and stronger. And when you do, that little primeval part of your brain will activate and remind you that you could be prey. There’s that small instant where your instincts have to come to terms with the fact that you aren’t the big fish anymore. That’s the feeling that I wind up planting in most people’s heads when I’m around them, whether I want to or not. And Mr. Crunch does it to me.

I rest my hands on my hips and call to the thing in the garage’s loading bay, “Long time no see, Crunchy!”

The iron beast in the shadows raises its colossal left arm with a riot of clanks, ratchets, and hisses. It holds up its hand, opens it, and waggles it left and right on its wrist joint, making metallic tink tink tink sounds as it waves at me. A happy electric warble comes from somewhere in its chest, like a synthesizer crossed with a purring cat and a songbird. But loud enough to shudder my sternum.

I might have given you the wrong impression when I told you that Painbow, the colorful mech from earlier, was big. Now, that’s not technically incorrect. By my estimation, Painbow is probably a square ton and a half of metal, capable of tearing a man in half at the waist without so much as a rev of its engine. Mr. Crunch makes Painbow look like a plastic windup toy. Next to Mr. Crunch, everyone and everything is small.

It’s not a complex mech. Far from it - Tennima’s magnum opus is an exercise in proving the elegant simplicity of uncompromising brute force. Two legs, relatively small, only really there to absorb shock and carry the beast from one place to another. A small head, more of a decoration than anything else, with two steel eyes and a permanent metal frown, resting in a high collar of armor plates. But the arms. The arms are what’s carried Tennima into the major leagues. These things are so massive that each of its shoulders has its own dedicated exhaust manifold and hydraulic booster engine just so they can move faster than a heavily concussed snail. They reach nearly down to the ground even when Mr. Crunch is standing fully upright, but it usually isn’t - it often moves on its knuckles for balance, like a brushed-steel gorilla. Either arm weighs more than my entire body, and Tennima can’t remove them without a hydraulic lift.

Strung across the creature’s back and shoulders are reels of high-test loading cable, which end at harpoon projectors in the wrists. These are the reason Mr. Crunch is able to dismantle the competition so efficiently. It’s too gigantic and slow to catch anyone, so it impales them with pneumatic spikes like a fisherman, and just reels them in before literally tearing them apart with its titanic hands.

Nine feet tall. Over eight thousand pounds of pure heavy metal might. And it’s waving and chirping at me like a small child.

I approach his loading rack and pat the humming colossus on the elbow. “And a hearty beep boop to you too, buddy.”

His other arm crosses his chest, and he mimics my gesture, patting me on my elbow with two fingers. Very gently. He makes a sound similar in tone to my “beep boop”, but distorted and electronic. He’s such a copycat.

Mr. Crunch isn’t a person, but it’s hard not to think of him as a “he”. That’s what Tennima calls him, and it’s always felt somehow disrespectful to call him “it”.

And that’s kind of a problem. For both of them.

Crunchy makes a staticy “scoot over” noise and gives me a nudge with a finger. I get out of his way, and he disengages from his charging rack, apparently full. He takes a few booming steps on his boot-shaped feet, out into the sun. He shakes himself, kind of like a dog, rolling his huge shoulders and stamping the ground with his fists. Then he ducks back into the garage and starts rummaging through a pile of what looks like trash.

Tennima comes back over to me with two cans and two cigarettes. I take one of each.

We light our smokes and sip our fizz (Ten doesn’t like alcohol much), and Mr. Crunch pounds his way over to us on his undersized legs. He’s got his hands clasped together, like a kid that’s caught a cool bug.

He stops in front of us, blocking out the sun, and opens his palms. Inside is a partially-crushed bright red oil can. I look down at it, then to Ten.

She rolls her eyes. “He wants to play Hide the Can. I did it one time a couple weeks ago to calibrate his targeting system and he’s completely obsessed now. It’s his new favorite game. No, Crunchy, we’re not playing right now.”

Mr. Crunch holds the can out a little further and pleads, “Bwoowoop?”

Tennima sighs. “Alright, but only one. Give it to Uncle Baulric.”

Crunchy exclaims, “Fweebeep!” and offers me the can. I take it, and the four-ton steel toddler immediately covers his head with his hands.

Tennima shrugs in resignation. “Go ahead and hide it. It’s never taken him longer than five seconds to find it, but it’ll make him happy anyway.”

I scratch my chin contemplatively. “Hmmmmm. Where oh where should I hide the can, I wonder?” Mr. Crunch waggles a little at the waist and makes a few sing-songy notes in anticipation.

I walk into the garage, and pace around a bit, like I’m looking for a good place to hide it. But while I’m doing so, I slip the empty can into the back pocket of my trousers. I make some noise and rifle through a few containers to complete the illusion, give Ten a wink, then go back over to her.

“Okay Crunchy, find it!”

Mr. Crunch takes his hands off his rudimentary, always-frowning face and gives a few contemplative bleeps. His eyes, simple steel ball cameras in sockets, light up yellow, then pan around his immediate environment. They stop on me. He takes two steps forward, leans over my shoulder, holds up the back of my coat like a curtain, and dexterously plucks the can out of my pocket. He pulls back, then holds up the recovered can with a very proud “Ba-bwaaarb!”

I raise my eyebrows and clap appreciatively. Tennima also joins me in the round of applause, but with a much less impressed look on her face.

“Alright, now go play with your other toys while we talk.”

Mr. Crunch tosses the can over his shoulder. It flies through the air and clatters precisely back in the pile of things where he found it. Then he turns about and goes back to the pile, inspecting different items and beeping happily.

I say to Tennima, “How did he do that?”

She scoffs. “He’s a big cheater. I installed a chemoreceptor module in his head and now he can smell with his eyes. It doesn’t matter where you put it, he’ll be able to detect the oil residue in the can as long as it’s somewhere nearby. His adaptive behavioral subroutines are still figuring out how to make the best use of it, though, so for now, it’s a game. That he always wins.”

I nod. “And how does that uh… how do the rest of the fighters, uh…”

She knows what I’m angling toward. “He knows when people are watching, and I’ve taught him how to act when they’re around. It’s not perfect, but I wear a fake wrist rig when we’re in the ring and no one’s said anything yet.”

I sip my drink. The bubbly sugar is a godsend in this heat. “Aren’t you kind of a cheater? Isn’t all of this sort of… a formality?”

She huffs smoke and gives me a laser-cutting look. Tennima might be little, but she has an iron glare that’s on par with Emaphra’s.

“I’m the best engineer in this goddamn city, and I’ll prove it. Right here, regulations be damned.”

“And if you get found out?”

She jabs her smoke at me. “If you don’t dare to think the things that everyone else is too afraid to consider, you’re not an inventor, Baulric. You’re just another pair of arms, turning wrenches in the dark. No better than a maintenance automech, with a tech manual where your brain should be. If anyone thinks Mr. Crunch is a catastrophe waiting to happen, well… they can take it up with him.”

I look over at the massive machine and consider that. Yeah, she might have a point. Even the Brotherhood would have to think twice about how to confiscate a four-ton literal fighting machine that doesn’t want to be locked up.

Technology never stops marching. Even if the Brotherhood wants to tell it where to step and in what cadence, it’ll always move forward, whether they like it or not. Once the automech hit the scene, people asked questions about labor and entertainment. But a few strange people, people like Tennima, started asking more difficult questions. Questions like, What if we could make them act for themselves? What if they had their own essence? What if automechs not only looked like people, but started thinking like them too?

Animechs are even more illegal than I am. They’re so illegal that they don’t even exist. Not officially, anyway. All it took was the Brotherhood and the Tribunal to agree on this one point, and animechs went from intriguing scientific possibility to dangerous myth. A deeply ironic cautionary tale, meant to dissuade the hubris of innovators everywhere. If machines were alive, how would we control them? What would happen to poor old humanity? For all we know, we’d wind up with the cold metallic heel of a machine race on our necks before we even had the chance to heal from the bruises the magical one left. It’d be necromancer kings and elven empires all over again, except now they’d all be made out of metal.

The rare ones like Tennima think differently, though. They don’t acknowledge fear or taboo. They just gather up their genius and charge headlong into discovery, whether it means doom or a new golden age. Men like the Prime Controller think they can stop this train, but they can’t. They’re along for the ride like everyone else.

Now I’m not saying I live my life voiding my bowels every time I see an adding machine. But I’m also not saying that I completely let my guard down whenever Mr. Crunch is hulking in the corner of my vision, no matter how adorable he is. I give him the same respect I’d give any other thinking animal on the street. He’s the bigger killer, so my eyes aren’t coming off him.

I nod. “I know. I’m not saying you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve always had a better grip on that than I ever have. I’m just… looking out.”

She slugs me on the arm. It actually hurts a little. She’s got a hell of an arm for someone smaller than some dogs.

Her bright green eyes are on mine like my target has been acquired. “I’m not an orphan anymore, Baulric. You said it yourself, I’m a bigshot now. I traded you in for a bigger bodyguard a long time ago, so you can give it a rest, huh? Go be caveman daddy for someone else.”

I frown and rub my arm. “Ow. Tiny fist, punch like bullet. Baulric arm hurt. Tenny hurt Baulric.”

Tennima snorts like a miniature bull. “And there’s more where that came from.”

I sigh. “I get your point. I’m not trying to be disrespectful. It’s just... hard to update your firmware sometimes.”

She hops up to sit on an oil drum. “Then install some new drivers, you overgrown sap. Is that why you came down here? Worried for the safety of my tiny fragile body?”

I snicker. “You said it yourself. If anyone thinks that’s all the body you’ve got, they’re in for a nasty surprise.” I nod toward Mr. Crunch, who is twanging a large shock absorber spring repeatedly in his enormous hands and burbling what sounds almost like synthesized laughter.

My hand goes up to my hair, scratching humbly. “No, uh… well, I did want to visit you just for the sake of it, but, uh… well. You know how you’re a lot smarter than me?”

She takes a smug drag off her smoke. “Yeah.”

“I’m in kind of a pickle. Maybe a big one. Alright, it’s a whole damn bowl of sour cabbage. I’m not sure what to do, so maybe you can use one of these very fancy power tools to bash some perspective into me.”

Tennima leans her back against the support stanchion. “Okay. Hit me with it.”

I hit her with it. The whole thing, from the crime scene to now. The only thing I leave out is my visit to Mrs. Twistwood and the Marmalade, because… I haven’t decided what I’m doing about that yet, and Ten wouldn’t have any frame of reference anyway.

At the end of the tale, she just raises an eyebrow at me. “You need me to tell you what to do here?”

I frown. “You say that like it’s obvious.”

“Because it is.”

“Elucidate me, bite-size sage.”

She groans in frustration. “Are you seriously considering taking the Brotherhood’s blood money? Seriously?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because I need it? In order to not die?”

Tennima wipes her face with her hands. “They’re playing you, Baulric. You said as much. They are an organization built out of every hateful, narrow-minded, despotic brick in all of Almarest, and you want to play directly into their hands? You want them to get their way?”

“No. I want money. So I can pay the angry zappy man, so he doesn’t zap me.”

“Is that so? That’s what you want?”

“... Is this a trick question?”

“No, but if you want to play games, I’ll make it tricky. What do you want, Baulric? What do you really want?”

“To not get killed by the crazy electricity criminal, please.”

“And that’s it.”

“... Yes. Wait… no, yes, that’s it.”

She sighs. She won’t meet my eyes, looking away instead.

“If that’s all you want, then you’re not the same anymore, either. You’re not the same man that gave me food when he didn’t have any, and used his back as a roof to keep me dry when his own was too leaky. You’re not the same giant that used his strength to scare away the men that wanted to turn me into something I didn’t want to be. If all you want is to stay alive, then you’re not a giant at all anymore. You’re small. Smaller than I’ve ever been. I did replace you, but I didn’t think you’d ever become obsolete.”

I look down at my arm, covered in scars. “I never asked to be a giant. I’m not a bad man.”

“The only ones who do are the ones that don’t deserve it. And anyone can be not bad. It takes effort to be good. So tough. If all you want to do with your strength is sit there and take money from the same men that screw us both over every single day, if you want to take the easy way out, then you can fuck off. I don’t have any patience for outmoded little people that don’t have the backbone to try and solve their own problems. I don’t have sympathy for another redundant freeloader. You taught me that. You can either live it and do what’s right, or get out of my sight.”

Her words come down on me like a rain of hammers.

How long has it been since I wanted something other than survival? How long have I been drifting on a raft made out of advantages that I never earned?

I think I used to be useful. I helped Tennima when she didn’t have anywhere to go. I’ve stepped between the weak and the predatory a few times, mostly to prove to myself that I didn’t have to be a predator either. To prove that I was better than that. Not a cheater or a monster like other powerful men. I used to hunt children. Not to hurt them, but to pull them out of gutters when they were lost, and take them somewhere safe. I used to use my unfair advantages to protect people who never got a fair shot, and I’d do it free of charge.

Now… well, what do I do all day now? Look at things on my computer. Read the books I’m allowed to have. Take naps. Stay inside. Stomp bugs and bad men when the food runs out, but even then, only sometimes, only if there’s money. Then repeat. I barely do anything at all. I can weave Life energy like the threads of a tapestry, and I use it to take the place of meals when I’m too lazy to buy a damn sandwich. When did I become so afraid of being a predator that I became a parasite instead?

The only things I’ve ever been good at are hunting and loafing around, and I didn’t even have to earn the first. It was given to me, whether I wanted it or not, and all I’ve done with it is use it as an excuse to coast, on a wave of my own cowardice and indolence. Maybe it’s time to stop being a big animal and be a big man instead. No more drifting.

It’s time to hunt.

I huff a haughty breath. “Well, Ten, it’s been good seeing you, and I hate to cut this short. But if you’ll excuse me, something important just came up, and I have to chase after it.”

I turn and walk away, pretending like I’m not concerned with her reaction. But behind me, she calls out from her barrel throne.

“Oh Tennima, I’m such a big dumb idiot, thank you so much for reminding me not to be stupid! Why, you’re welcome, Baulric, any time!”

I smile. It’s true that I’m usually too lazy and fearful to make friends. But the ones I do have are worth keeping.