Discworld and Member Articles
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City of Anarchy - Chapter One
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Written by chrisjordan
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Friday, 26 August 2005 |
Everything starts with an explosion.
It was two explosions, really. Two explosions that happened near other things that like to explode, therefore causing lots of smaller explosions to happen.
However many explosions there were, it didn't do the Conceptual Realisation Facility much good. It had been a hugely massive, strangely shaped building that looked like it had formed when some strange molten metal had welled up from deep under the ground and had then solidified into a black, lumpy mass, with random turquoise glowy bits highlighting its apparent magical mysteriousness.
And much of it was a mystery to the majority of the city folk. All they knew about it was that it produced some pretty weird stuff that was occasionally useful in everyday life, although often vitally flawed.
Take the Combustilator. It was a small rodent-like monkeything for your room. In a city such as this, one common problem was that people would leave their homes to do whatever they had planned for the day and come back to find that some pesky nuisance had wired the place with explosives. The Combustilator was the wonderful solution to this. You would enter the room, and when the Combustilator recognised you as the resident of the place, it would automatically check for explosives by issuing a shrill scream, which would set them off, thus removing the problem. Unfortunately, something that had been slightly overlooked was that it had the habit of doing away with you and all of your property as well.
The Conceptual Realisation Facility produced many things like that. Judging by its current state, however, it didn't look like it would be producing any more for a while.
The force of the explosion had sent Hermes flying as he was leaving the building. He wasn't quite sure how it had managed that; it should have just knocked him flat, or maybe swept him off his feet and carried him just a few metres, but it had apparently decided to be much more spectacular about things, and Hermes had been flung very high into the air.
Shortly after he realised this had happened, he also noticed that he was a bit on fire.
* * *
Holly's immediate reaction to what had happened was to pause mid-step, and then to spin slowly around on the foot that still had contact with the ground. She realised that as she had just delivered an important package to the building, she now looked mightily suspicious. She considered making herself scarce using the red motor scooter a few yards behind her, and then considered the fact that quite a few pairs of eyes would have been drawn in this direction, what with everything that had happened happening so loudly and colourfully and all, and decided that it would probably be best to trynot to make herself look even more suspicious.
Her other foot slid down to meet its companion on the ground, and then turned in a little at the toe as her knees bent slightly and she placed a finger against her mouth, apparently trying to figure out what to do next.
Then something caught her eye. A dark, crouched shape which was undoubtedly running away from the site of the catastrophe.
She raised an eyebrow, then surprising herself further because she hadn't previously known she could do that.
She then felt her legs knocked from underneath her, and a sack was thrown over her head.
* * *
Hermes didn't cry out. He didn't scream or panic. In fact, after the initial shock, he found himself almost enjoying it. It was thrilling. It was exhilirating. He felt free, and, despite the fact that he hadn't previously considered himself to be all that dead, he felt alive.
Also, he had an exquisite view of the city.
But then he found himself descending, and before he could really think about what that might entail, he hit the ground and promptly stopped being conscious.
* * *
He woke up in a very white place. He decided he was either dead, or alive and somewhere he had not been before. He wondered if Heaven was supposed to have ceramic tiled walls. And a greenish-yellow blob of something on the ceiling. And whether it was supposed to have a ceiling or walls at all.
He tried to move a bit. He felt pain.
'You're not going anywhere,' said a voice. 'Your limbs all fold the wrong way and in all the wrong places.'
'Where am I?' demanded Hermes. 'Who are you? Who is responsible for that suspect greenish-yellow blob of something on the ceiling? It's making me feel uncomfortable. It looks like it could fall off and land on my face.'
'I doubt it,' said the voice. 'We've been asking it to come down for days now. It has been most uncooperative.'
Hermes stared worriedly at it.
'In answer to your other questions: you are in what we call Secret Room X, on the seventh floor of the Sir Tenebrous Tower, Hokum Street, second door on the left when you reach the top of the stairs.
'My name is Avgi. Strictly, technically, and, well, basically speaking, I am not actually a qualified doctor, but if you don't mind, now that you're awake and therefore much more aware of what is happening to you, I'd like to perform a few tests.'
'One more question,' said Hermes, trying to delay whatever was going to come next, 'if I'm so unable to move, is there really any need to have me strapped to this here bed?'
She looked at the said straps, apparently only noticing them for the first time. 'You know, I hadn't realised I'd done that,' she said. 'Must have done it out of habit.'
'Why aren't I in a normal hospital?' asked Hermes.
'Because you are not in entirely normal circumstances.'
'I wouldn't say an injury like this is ever normal.'
'You're forgetting which city you're in,' said Avgi.
'Then what do you mean, "not in entirely normal circumstances"?'
'You're quite stupid, aren't you?' she said. 'You were right by the Conceptual Realisation Facility when it blew up. You worked there. You know what sort of stuff was going on in there.'
'I don't think anybody really knew what was going on,' said Hermes.
'Clearly not. The place was preposterously flammable. We do not know what effect this may have had on you. It could be anything from giving you dangerously radioactive new superpowers to giving you a pair of sizable breasts. Though neither are currently apparent, you must be kept under careful observation to make sure that no such things pop up at a later date.
'Now, if you don't mind,' said Avgi (Hermes heard the chink of something metallic being picked up), 'I'd like to make a start with these tests.'
Then she stabbed him in the face.
* * *
Holly found herself in a place that was very, very dark. It could have been a room that was tiny or one that was huge. She was also uncomfortably upside down, and it's always difficult to get a good perspective of things at times like that. Her light brown hair dangled messily from her head, the place where all of her blood was now rushing to. Rope was wrapped around her body in a complicated fashion, binding her legs and forcing her arms behind her back. It disappeared into the darkness above, presumably attaching her to a ceiling somewhere.
She noticed her scooter tied up in a similar manner just a few feet away.
Level with her own, a brown-bearded face was glaring at her.
'Hi,' she said.
The man owning the brown-bearded face was Mudd Garner, head of the city's police force.
The police force was very intelligent and very intolerant. They were sneaky, swift and silently malicious. The whole city would have been an extremely lawful place because of these things, only there were too many people who really couldn't have cared less. The flaw in the idea that these people were supposed to fight crime was that their often unscrupulous tactics were themselves too close to criminal. They made the city an even more dangerous place than it should have been.
'Did you do it?' asked Garner, bluntly.
'Ah, now, you see, that's where it gets complicated.'
'A simple yes-or-no answer will do.'
Holly sighed. 'I may have done it,' she admitted.
'Explain yourself,' demanded Garner.
'I just got promoted. ' Tears welled up in her eyes. 'It was my first Important Package,' she said, wobbly-like.
'What?'
'He told me I was ready for bigger and greater things.'
'Who did?'
'My boss,' she explained. 'He said that I was too good for foodstuffs.'
'Foodstuffs? You mean illegal substances?'
'What, groceries?'
'Eh?' said Garner.
'I'm a delivery girl,' said Holly. 'Didn't I say that? And today I was delivering my first Important Package. I don't know what was in it. I'm not paid to ask questions. I'm paid to deliver things with care and efficiency.'
'So you're saying that this package, which you delivered to the Conceptual Realisation Facility, may have caused the whole place to go up in flames...'
'Yes.'
'...but you're saying that you didn't know what this package was?'
'Yes.'
'Hm,' said Garner. 'You shall stay here for the rest of the night. I shall speak to you again tomorrow.'
The rope loosened and she fell to the floor.
* * *
Hermes screamed. The white-tiled room gradually came into focus again. The straps were gone, and he was sitting upright on the bed.
'Ah, welcome back,' said Avgi. 'You were gone a while.' Hermes looked at her vaguely amused face, which was framed by dark curly hair. She wore a labcoat and an extremely official-looking identification tag.
He felt his own face. 'What have you done to me?' he cried.
'Nothing like a good stabbing to provoke anything unnatural,' she replied, cheerfully. 'It seems like you're fine. You just have a very small hole in your head now where I injected you with tranquiliser.'
'Oh.'
'You should probably lie back down again. You're still broken all over.'
'Oh.' Hermes did so.
'Right, I'm going to need to ask you stuff. I gather that you were just an intern and had only been there a few days, so you may not be able to tell me much, but you are the only surviving person who worked there, and therefore you're still going to have to tell us everything you can. What was going on there?'
'Why do you need to know?'
Avgi sighed. 'I'm what you might call,' she smiled as she said this, 'a secret agent. We've been trying to figure out that place for some time. Please tell me everything you can.'
'Well,' said Hermes, thinking about this, 'I didn't have access to everything. I was only granted access to documents on minor projects, so I don't know much. These documents were...a little vague. They had lots of colourful diagrams, but I always found it odd that none of them ever gave any indication of how to go about creating them. That must have been secret too.'
'Minor projects?'
'Yes. The last thing I was doing was filing stuff for the new model of the Combustilator.'
'Oh? They've stopped it from obliterating the owner?'
'No,' said Hermes. 'They've added a feature for custom sounds to replace the default shrill scream.'
'I see,' said Avgi. 'They must have tested these products. Is there a chance an accident during that was responsible for what happened?'
'Possibly,' said Hermes, 'but I doubt it. They do all that kind of stuff in special rooms that generally do a good job containing stuff like that.'
'Hermes,' she said, apparently knowing his name, 'are you sure you don't know anything else? If you've had to sign a confidentiality agreement or something, it's pretty irrelevant now anyway.'
'No, I didn't have to sign anything. I don't know anything else about the place apart from what I've already told you.'
* * *
Holly sat on the floor, hugging her knees and wondering whether or not she was going to prison. It seemed likely that it was her fault, but she wouldn't be locked up if she hadn't known what she was doing...would she?
She looked solemnly up at her scooter, which was still tied up in rope. Maybe she should have tried to escape while she still had the chance.
She sighed, curled up on the hard floor, making herself as comfortable as she could, and eventually fell asleep.
* * *
Avgi left Hermes to rest, this time without such dramatic means of doing so. She walked down to Secret Room Y, where she made herself a coffee. She gulped it down and slammed the plastic cup down on the counter, where it broke.
The intern had told her nothing of any use. There had been some downright weird goings-on in the city in the past couple of years or so. Strange things had been happening to people. It was their job as 'agents' to sort out such things, and most of the time they managed to keep the goings-on out of the public eye. Only one or two had managed to get out, grabbed by the tabloids, but nobody really took any notice. At first she and the other agents were at a loss as to why all these things were happening, but then it slowly began to dawn on them that the Facility probably had something to do with it, because some of their inventions were almost as weird.
They'd tried to get access to the Facility to find out exactly what went on in there, but the Mayor had forbidden it, saying she didn't want anyone interfering because the Facility was good for the economy or some such bullshit, and that it didn't matter if a few 'mishaps' occurred. The Mayor, a perpetually positive woman who had an extremely laid back approach to city affairs, didn't, in Avgi's opinion, have a clue about anything. They had tried sneaking in without permission, but to no avail. The place was like a fortress.
Avgi was fed up of having to run around after all these messed up freaks of nature. She wanted to do proper agent stuff, like wearing smart suits and shades, and clicking open metallic briefcases full of important documents, and interrogating people by shining bright lights in their eyes, and flying helicopters, and generally kicking arse.
Damn that useless intern! He was her one chance to finding anything out about the place. Even before it blew up, the people who worked there were somehow impossible to get hold of, and now the one person she was given didn't know anything.
She slapped the coffee-maker and it fell to the floor with a crash. She wanted to crush his useless face!
No... she had to be professional about things. Even with the Facility now in ruins, it wasn't all going to stop. In fact, the Laws of the Universe dictated that it was only going to get worse. She needed to get to work.
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