The wind whipped at his jacket, slamming off the ocean into an infinity of steel and concrete canyon. He zipped it closed with a couple of frustrated jerks. An advert he couldn’t see called out from somewhere in the middle distance: “… listen to our new episode where we discuss the news that AllFoods has revealed that only 5% of their annual net profit last year came from retail sales, while the other 95% was from selling customer data! NewTomorrow: Giving the people what they want!”
His phone buzzed. “Thank you so much for applying with us. We regret to inform you that we will not be proceeding with your application to this role.” He grunted, closed it. A long list of messages below said the same thing. It was parodic. He glanced towards the ocean and, not for the first time, snorted at the thought that it would have been easier to fill his pockets with the assorted rubble scattered about and then hurl himself into the water. He caught himself slowing as he passed a particularly large chunk of brick, shook his head and deliberately sped up; it probably wouldn’t have fit in his pocket anyway.
You had to give the multiplicities their due: they’d adapted to the ever-shifting chaos of their environment with an impressive quickness. Then again, when you didn’t have to make sense of that environment, just find a wet dark corner to sit in and feed, it was easier to adapt. Sounded like an okay life, things all told. Could a multiplicity give up? Probably not. They didn’t have ideals or pipe dreams or goals. When all you had to do was survive, things were simple. Then again, he was having a hell of a time doing the same thing. It didn’t say much about him that he was less adapted to his environment than a multiplicity.
People like Ada talked endlessly about goals, about the future. An endless stream of aspirants and life coaches and gurus babbling about plans and dreams and ideals that nobody would ever reach before they were swallowed by the ever-grinding machinery around them. Who cared about ideals? You couldn’t eat an ideal. Point this out to them of course and you were a loser. Back if up with data and you weren’t thinking big enough or you weren’t driven enough. Letting facts get in the way was somehow looked down on. That was the aspirational hustle. Sell the dream, keep the mark asleep.
Back in the waking world, people didn’t have the luxury. The ideal was survival, day to day, week to week, month to month. For most people that was all there was. Pay the rent, pay the debt, eat when possible, ignore the exhaustion. What was your five year plan? Don’t die. Idiot question. Nobody had the money to care about the future. Who was he to whine about debt? He must have been the only bastard in the whole city who’d managed to pay all of his off. Everyone else was always paying something off. The whole house of cards was built on debt and because of that, the whole world was in survival mode. Even the idiots asking about five year plans. What was their five year plan? Still have an executive suite at the end of next quarter. Beyond that? Nothing.
His sulking was interrupted by a broken chain-link fence wilting around a ragged slab of warehouse that looked like the ocean had chewed it thoroughly, swallowed it, and vomited it back up again. Its dilapidation sagged beneath a mass of equally dubious construction overhead. What once had been gates on the fence had long since been lost, a pair of torn links remained affixed to a rusting pole. The flat façade was smeared across with a thousand layers of graffiti, the two small high windows were covered in rusting grating but the glass behind them was missing. The doors were a different story. They too were thoroughly rusted through, but their state of decay seemed only to accentuate their emphatic bulk. Looking at the dank holes behind the window bars and the general state of the place, if he were going to find a spirit level’s worth of multiplicities, the wreck in front of him was his best bet short of spelunking through an actual shipwreck.
Someone had been there. Large rough trails in the dust led through the room and the scratched and flaking door on the right. Looking for somewhere to sleep? Looking to shoot up? Looking to fuck? Looking for all three? That left two possibilities. One was that someone had been, taken care of whatever business they’d come for, and was now gone. The other was that someone had been and was still there. With that in mind, he took care where he put his feet. Debris littered the floor and he wanted to avoid alerting anyone lurking about. He switched the light off on his phone, and stood in the darkness waiting for his eyes adjust and congratulating himself on all the battery he was saving. When he thought he was as adjusted as he was likely to be, he started towards the vague outline of righthand set of doors behind the wide curve of the detritus-strewn reception desk.
With any luck, they were gone. Luck, ironically, wasn’t something you could bet on. There were endless games of chance; lucky dips and lotteries and bets and on and on. They all worked the same way. Roll the dice enough times and you made a fortune. Ignore the fact that you’d spent a greater amount than you’d gained rolling the dice because the lights are distracting and the hostess just passed you another drink on the house and she’s wearing a distracting bustier… And, hey, now that you’d gained so much, maybe you should keep rolling the dice because your luck was high and you might win more than you’d ever lost. Then who’d be talking about gambler’s fallacy? After all, only losers cash out. Another drink?
Paul liked luck. Always rolling the dice. Always rolling the dice because he had the resources to do so. Caleb knew better than to ask where from, but he’d never been short of scratch. That was the other spoke on the gear. 99% of people got to roll the dice once. Odds were that you were unlucky and when you were unlucky you didn’t get to play again. The other guys got to keep rolling. The game was simple: if you started off with the money to keep rolling the dice, then the odds of your ability to win enough back to continue to roll the dice was effectively 1:0. The other part of the game was to market your wins as calculated and your losses as learning opportunities. Either way, it didn’t matter because you got to keep playing.
He managed perhaps a dozen steps before he slammed into something with his hip. He lurched away, suffocating a cry of pain, clamping a hand around his new bruise and breathing through his teeth. Something metallic rolled across an unseen surface next to him with an eerie scraping whine. He threw a hand out, slammed his little finger into edge of the thing he’d walked into and gritted his teeth around a yelp. The object making the whine rolled into his palm and he snatched his fingers around it and it shut up. He took a deep breath and felt what he’d just caught. It turned out to be a simple, somewhat dented, steel pole. He set his case down on the desk, picked up the pole in one hand and the case in the other.
He felt more secure with the pole in hand, it had a comforting weight, and he took a couple of swings in the darkness for practice. Satisfied he made his way through the double doors. noting how they swung on their hinges easier compared to the heavy front doors. Moving into the huge main hall, the left and right were dominated by heavy raised platforms overlooking the broad artificial gulley running down the middle. He moved forwards around a heavy screen and his foot caught something that skidded across the grey concrete floor with a dull clatter. He stopped, teeth gritted, and listened. Nothing. If there was someone there, he figured they’d have turned up by now, or he’d have heard them moving about. Reluctantly, he turned on his phone torch again, shifting the briefcase to the fingers of the hand holding the case, which wasn’t ideal but better than being unarmed. It was also better, he decided, to be able to see where he was going and not make so much noise, than to bumble around in the pitch black tripping over every random bit of tat lying about. He caught a view of himself in the dim reflection of a dusty shard of jagged glass sleeping against a desk. He looked like recalled carrion.
He swept the torch around the hall. The beam didn’t get far. Ahead of him, a girder the size of a crane arm was lying at an angle across the room. It had fallen from the right side of the hall and demolished a section of the left hand walkway and wall. Shadows skittered in the darkness, short wet squeaks bubbled around the pale scratching of claws on concrete and metal. Shattered fragments of glass sliced the beams to ribbons, wicked edges snickering in the gloom. He ducked under the girder, glass crunching underfoot, and moved through another set of grimy double doors into a dismal hallway. It was wider than it was tall, the low ceiling creating a sense of disproportion like a bad aspect ratio. It continued down a ways, past a fallen vending machine and the pieces of a shattered bench that lay scattered across the dusty floor. Vague footprints smeared the dust, overrun with smaller vermin tracks. They led into a cross-section.
As he moved towards it, someone stepped out of the right hand passage into the torch beam. Caleb reflexively shuffled backwards, ducking into a defensive crouch, but the figure made no move. He stood in the centre of the crossing in a long coat regarding Caleb, dust streaming through the air around him catching and flickering in the beam. As the light resolved itself Caleb found himself looking up at the lanky angular form of Robert.
Robert regarded him coolly. Caleb said nothing. The silence stretched in the cramped hall. Robert cocked his head to one side. He gave a relaxed flick of his hands outwards. Caleb nodded slowly.
Watching Caleb from behind his shades, Robert asked “Who are you here for?”
Caleb didn’t answer immediately. “Nobody important,” he answered after a time. He stepped forward into the centre of the crossing and looked up the passageway that Robert had emerged from. It was unremarkable. “You?”
Robert shrugged. He twisted his mouth into an ugly knot and then reset his face. He took a deep breath and drew himself up. He seemed to come to some sudden conclusion, waved a hand briefly at Caleb, and walked off towards the main hall. Caleb watched him depart, the darkness eating his tall frame as he receded from the torchlight. Caleb turned back to the crossing with a bewildered huff and set off straight ahead.
The office at the end of the hallway had been ransacked. The door was stiff and unused, but the room had at some point been host to a parade of squatters and vagrants. A variety of bottles and cans were strewn across the floor and desks. Someone had attempted to make some kind of campfire out of a couple of office chairs. The scorched moon on the floor beneath semi-melted plastic frames. A discarded hypodermic on a nearby desk caught the torchlight, the needle tip winking cruelly in the dark. The desiccated husk of an ancient human shit curled in the corner like a sleeping cat. He stepped through the room slowly, trying not to disturb the trash. It was a futile effort. Discarded cans clattered, plastic wrappers rustled, rotting cardboard boxes slopped. He supposed that if there were anybody else there, that they were well aware of him by then anyway, no thanks to Robert, the distant metallic scream of the doors had raked through the dust-clogged dimness as he slammed his way back into the world. Caleb recognised the remains of a sickly sweet scent on the dusty air.
He found the body sitting slumped in a far corner, between a filing cabinet and the wall. Decomposition had eaten away at it from top to toe. The flesh was spongey, sagging, and discoloured, spilling sickeningly over the occasional tight cuff or seam. They might have been male in life, but he wouldn’t have put money down on it. Vermin had gnawed the flesh to rags. Bone peaked coquettishly from behind mouldering shreds of meat. The remnants were alive with rot and maggots. He had become a garden and a feast. Multiplicities bloomed in the soil of his ruined eye sockets and slackened jaw. Burrowing heedless through flesh and curling about struts of pitted calcium, their searching pale umbrellas and roots reached omnidirectional in their pursuit of new territory, a crop ripe for the harvest.
He squatted, took a deep breath, and instantly regretted it. He reeled away from it, retching and slamming into a chest of drawers in a blind fog of revulsion. The stench of decay was potent despite the advanced age. He grunted, squeezed his eyes closed, clamped his jaw, and got a hold of himself. He rubbed at his smarting shoulder, grabbed a fistful of his jacket and clamped it over his mouth. He tried to take shallow breaths. He stalked back to the corpse and, with his face partially averted, reached a tentative hand towards the putrefied eye sockets. He seized one stalk high up, just beneath the head. It was smooth, slightly rubbery, he shivered. He gave it a sharp tug. The head popped off and dropped onto the floor with a soft slap. A viscous translucent ichor bled from the stalk. He coughed into his jacket and scowled at the stupid pale bulb. He shuffled closer to the dead guy, gagging into his jacket, and tried to get as used to the miasma as best as he could. Then he reached out and slid three fingers into the man’s slick, blackened left eye socket.
He had to hold himself steady for a second, waited for his body to stop rebelling, for his breathing to slow down. He swallowed the bile that surged up his throat. Then he rocked forwards as his stomach flooded his mouth with vomit. He crouched there staring at the slick pulped carpet, with one hand lodged in a dead man’s eye socket, waiting for his stomach to stop roiling, and then gulped down the thin gruel of acidic vomit filling his mouth. His eyes streamed. His nose wanted to crawl off his face. For a couple of seconds, the room was filled with a high whining hum. He waited for all of this to pass. It wasn’t like soil. It didn’t have the semi-solid granularity. The porridge-mulch coating and pooling the dead man’s sockets made every muscle in his arm spasm. His whole body rejected the scene.
He kept digging, kept probing and scratching with careful, methodical movements. Eventually, he found what he was looking for. At the bottom of the socket, the roots had burrowed into the bone and clumped. Clenching his teeth, trying to blank everything out his mind, he grasped a small clump and pulled. The mulch shifted, giving way with a low begrudging hiss. He could feel that there was something in his palm. He stared directly at the wall between a table and a chest of drawers and tried to stop swaying. Eventually he got his wish and he could look down. His hand returned from the socket covered in black filth, but in his palm there were multiplicities. Pale fronds and bulbous heads, smooth and crooked and covered in ichor. There weren’t enough of them. He looked back at the corpse. Multiplicities remained. He set the ones in his palm down into the case and went back to work, digging his fingers into the meat and bone and gristle and mulch of the decaying man’s face.
When he was done with the eye sockets he moved on, desperately pushing the sensations and the humanity from the experience. He focussed on the movement of limb and extremity, the algorithmic repetition of dig and harvest. The guy’s tongue was a pulpy mess than slithered around his fingers like sodden rotted potato. He whimpered into his coat as he rooted around for the ends of the stalks. The blackened teeth caressed his bare knuckles like a lover’s nip and he shuddered so violently he felt the jaw lurch. His breathing quickened again and he had to take a moment to slow it down. Then he bent back to the work. When he was done, he moved on, working mechanically, blanking out the horror.
He didn’t remember the last of it. He didn’t remember leaving the room. Somewhere in the nightmare he found himself back in the wide corridor with the knowledge that there was a neat bundle of multiplicities in his case. He’d forgotten the steel pipe in the other room but the mere suggestion of returning for it made him nauseous. He took two steps forwards before the hallway started spinning and the hum returned. He took another step, tried to maintain his balance but it was like the world itself had tilted on its axis. He felt himself pitch forwards, crashed into the ground, and then the darkness engulfed him.
When he woke up again he wasn’t thrilled about it. The torch was still ok, so he had that. It had rolled away from him. He crawled towards it groggily, not really thinking just moving towards light. He grasped the handle and held onto it like a mother. The beam shook in his hand and bounced around in the pitch darkness of the corridor as he used the wall to lever himself upright. He scrapped himself along the rough filth-encrusted tiling towards the door before he remembered the case and the multiplicities and turned back, sweeping the beam in drunken arcs until he found it. He lurched away from the wall towards the case and almost crashed over again next to it. He fumbled it open, flashed the light inside and, happy, re-latched it and picked it up. With his head starting to clear, chased by a tidal wave of exhaustion, he headed towards the exit. At the crossing he paused and stood in a ragged heap in the dark silence. Then, half cackling under his breath, he turned and staggered towards the doors at the end of the left-hand corridor.
The room he entered first was some kind of foyer for another section of the building, with a wide desk behind faded glass occupying one wall, behind which was a grubby single grey door. Double doors occupied the far wall across from him. Before he could enter the lobby proper, he had to step through a line of dead metal detectors watched by a a row of broken grey chairs with cheap padding now long torn and gnawed by vermin. He skirted around the desk with the thick glass. Near the line of detectors there was a long, jagged crack, below which a boxy steel bin lay on its side, a small trail of rubbish spilling from the opening. The grubby single door didn’t stick and he pushed through, knuckles tightening on the handle of the case.
The room on the other side was empty. It appeared to be another office-type space with one wall adorned with rows of desks and the remains of several computers, and the opposite wall hosting several large server racks. In the right hand corner of the far wall someone had upended a desk. It leaned lengthwise from floor to ceiling. Another desk had been knocked over, a broken computer monitor lying in a heap next to it. He walked through the deserted space, following a trail of disturbed dust and dragging the torch beam across the digital board occupying the back wall. He didn’t know what he was looking for or why he was looking at all. The beam slashed lazily over the dusty screen, into the corner and sifted around the table legs and support struts, and back again. He was about to turn and head back again, but paused and returned the light to the table leaning on the wall. The light caught a crevice behind it and a slight distortion of shadow that wasn’t due to the table. He crossed and examined it.
Caleb giggled to himself. Behind the table, just to the side of the edge, was the long thin crack of a doorway that had been inset into the wall without a frame. He gave a satisfied grunt and heaved the table over and away from the door. It crashed onto the floor with a noise fit to raise leviathan. He stood hunched and frozen where he was, listening, expecting footsteps, expecting shouts, expecting someone to burst through the door, expecting… but nothing came. Just silence in the settling dust. He grabbed the handle and pulled his hand back. It was wet. He didn’t shine the torch on it. Just gripped the handle again, yanked the door open, and wiped his palm off on the wall afterwards, grimacing as he went.
Beyond the door was a cramped utility cupboard. A small rectangle full of boxes, cleaning solvents, mops, a bucket, spanners, a box of nails next to a discarded a a claw hammer on a shelf, miscellaneous equipment. Instinctively, he picked up the claw hammer and stuck it in his inside jacket pocket. He sighed and looked down at the other thing in the small dingy room. Slumped against the wall, with his legs splayed out before him, was a middle-aged man. His salt and pepper hair was uncombed, he hadn’t shaved in days. There were deep bags around his eyes. Wet blood glistened in the torchlight. There was a golf ball-sized hole in his face.
Words and Chaos 
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