Building Wings On the Way Up.
Chapter 2, One Hell of a Warranty.
The way Veldt ran down the street Clover imagined that she’d have tried to run the whole twenty odd miles back to Boetown. Instead Veldt found her at the train station out of breath and trying to figure out when the next northbound train was leaving.
“What time is it? Did we miss it?” Veldt gasped.
“Give it ten minutes it’ll get here,” Clover stated.
“An eternity,” Veldt wheezed. “I’m going to sit down for a bit.”
Veldt did this to the annoyance of another person sitting at said bench and practically collapsed. The other person just sighed and continued reading his paper in the dim light of the station. Clover leaned on a pillar and kept an eye out in the darkness. There were maybe a dozen people out and nobody looked too odd. There was a small family with a toddler asleep in a stroller and another kid of maybe eight who was looking at everything with some kind of refracting light toy. A few couples who were heading back north after a day in the town. Two people who looked to be getting off work late, including the annoyed person at the bench. The only person who even vaguely registered on Clover’s sketchiness radar was someone who looked to have spent the past month living in a cannabis cafe. Though that person seemed content to hang out on a couch they looked to have drug to the station themselves.
“I need to relax,” Clover muttered to herself.
The whole year she’d been around Seattle the worst she’d encountered were random drinkers who were tossed out by bouncers, and rarely dragged away by cops. Everywhere had a chaotic feel to it, but the chaos seemed to have a friendly-ish vibe to it. Or at least none of the bad parts of the chaos seemed to affect her.
“Hey, you mind helping me with my couch?”
“Ehh-”
“I think the wheel ran over something, just help me lift it?”
“Yea ok.”
Clover helped lift the couch after a minute of looking for somewhere to get a grip between the random bags and bits of salvage. Eventually she just helped him wheel it to a wheelchair ramp so the traveler could get underneath it.
“Thank you!”
The stranger pulled out what looked like half a bandana from the ancient wheel that was probably dyed a different color than brown originally. He gave it a sniff before tossing it in a bag on the couch.
“Thanks,”
“No pr-”
The traveler didn’t listen and began messing with a guitar that sounded as if it hadn’t been tuned since the age of glitter. Much to the relief of everyone on the station, the train arrived within the minute. Much to the annoyance of everyone involved, the man with the couch decided to come with them, though he did have to set down his guitar to actually push the couch onto the train.
“All aboard,” A prerecorded message spat out.
Clover took a seat at the front of the train, the furthest car away from the bike and wheelchair ramp where the couch was being loaded. Most of the crowd seemed to have the same thought process and as such the carriage was abit packed.
The older man reading the newspaper took one look at the couch mover and muttered to himself something about “the tragedy of the commons” before getting up to help him move it onboard.
“Done with the paper?” Clover asked.
“Yea go for it, same headlines as ever,” the older man huffed.
The couch was moved onboard and the train was off after a short message from the loudspeaker apologizing for the four minute delay.
“Next stop is Green Lake.”
“So what are we doing when we get there exactly?” Clover asked Veldt.
“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Veldt attested.
“So what do you think we’re actually going to wind up doing?”
“Someone did something stupid and we’re going to fix it,” Veldt replied, rummaging around in her coat pockets. “As it stands there’s no point in worrying about it. It wasn’t anything I did, I'll tell you that. The amount of testing we did on everything imaginable was insane. Couple that with the wind tunnel work, the model work, and those hops across the sound and I’m pretty confident about one thing.”
“And… that is?”
“I’m gonna charge a complete assload of overtime.”
“... Why am I coming with you guys?”
“You’re on the project.”
“I held the tape measure!”
“And now you’ll get time and a half for it!” Veldt remarked. “Oh that’s where that went.” Veldt pulled out a sleeping mask and threw it over her face while reclining back on the bench. ”Wake me up when we’re there.”
“How the hell can you sleep at a time or a place like this,” Clover sputtered. “There’s… people around.”
“It’s late and these guys look,” she looked back and forth while wearing the mask. “Can’t see any problems with em.”
Clover sighed as Veldt leaned back to take a nap. The journey would take around an hour and she had almost wished she could sleep on the train. As Veldt began lightly snoring Clover opened up the paper and checked to see if anything looked vaguely interesting.
“Damn, he already did the crossword sheet!” Clover cursed.
Clover got to reading and the news looked pretty familiar. California was grumbling about the differences between the north and south. A few piracy attacks were going on at the equator and the coffee shipments were expected to suffer for it. Some group that Clover had never heard of called the “Caffeine Secession League” was talking about banning any caffeine that wasn’t grown in Cascadia to cut down on the piracy in the south. They went on to say that dozens of anecdotal testimonies have led them to believe that all coffee and tea could be grown in the Cascadian cities at little to no cost to the consumer. And bolstered with many exclamation marks, that we were fools to be letting trade goods be produced by these other nations. Then Clover noticed around a half dozen ads for DIY greenhouse kits located suspiciously around the article and decided to turn the page.
“They have a lot of nerve thinking I have money,” Clover mumbled to herself.
The next page seemed to have some actual news about marauder attacks to the far south into California and to the east where the border became spotty. There was talk that the train to Spokane project would be delayed as raids along the border pushed resources elsewhere.
“Wonder how Parker’s doing?” She hasn’t heard from her brother in weeks. They lived in northern California on the edge of what was considered Cascadia. Her one solace is that marauders probably wouldn’t target them as they didn’t have any money or wine at the moment. Still she reminded herself to write a letter soon.
The next few pages were the usual stores of civic projects and political nonsense that always seemed to be going on. Apparently the consul of Seattle was caught up in some kind of exotic fish trading ring. The consul will be going to trial lately and there was expected to be some debate over who would take their place through special election. The bigger story seemed to be various zoos and wildlife centers arguing over who has temporary possession of said fish.
“Wut?” Clover squirted at a political cartoon. She suspected it contained enough inside jokes about the state of Portland to warrant an essay if she were in middle school.
She flipped through the newspaper again and found something that actually did interest her. It looked as though the Archival Association had found a decent hard drive from the age of glitter. In addition to plenty of music and old video files they pulled, apparently they had found a backup of some unknown website with no info on it or known connection to any other piece of media in the archives. They were now resorting to asking for volunteers to see if anyone had heard of or know what on earth “homstarrunner.com” was, or if it related to any other media. Following that they had a list of libraries they would be showcasing the find at, should any amateur investigators want a look.
“Gotta put that half English degree to work,” Clover mumbled.
She hunted around for a pen for a while before hearing the overhead prerecorded message.
“Now departing Boetown.” the overhead message droned.
“Shit!” Clover jumped up and threw her hand in the doorway so it wouldn’t close. With her foot she began nudging Veldt awake.
“Mrm?”
“This is our stop!”
“Oh yea right,” Veldt scrambled out of the bench and through the door.
They both stumbled out the door and the train departed behind them. Veldt then lifted up her sleep mask and confirmed that this looked like where she was probably meant to be.
“Alright I’m going to bed,” Veldt said walking to her apartment.
“Um alright,” Clover followed behind. “So what do we need to do tomorrow here?”
“Go to the base place,” Veldt responded. “I’ve passed by it before, it’s somewhere around the Air Museum. Some shack you pass by a thousand times without noticing.”
“But what are we doing?”
“Charging overtime!”
“Which involves?”
“I know you read that contract.”
“Ah yes I did do that,” Clover responded remembering checking over the pay rate and vacation days section for far too long. “This part was in the…”
“Legacy support section,” Veldt recalled. “It’s the bit that states we have to provide maintenance support and repairs for anything we build. I think the bare minimum is twenty years or something.”
“What?”
“Yea talk to Rodriguez about it sometime,” Veldt stated. “That jackass is retired and he’s still getting called up for stuff he built forty years ago. Think he charged them a month’s pay to rewrite a ton of notes they lost. Spent his sweet time on it and wrote himself a new sailboat I think.”
“Ok that’s not so bad,” Clover stated. “When was the last time you had to do this?”
“Had to travel to Eugene to get someone to plug in a battery the right way,” Veldt recalled. “Then they demanded the manual and I found the original copy being used as a coaster by the self proclaimed expert.”
“Huh, do you actually need me to come with you then?”
“If you refuse the service you can be fired no question.”
“Ah!” Clover fretted. “Yes I completely remember reading that.”
“Great!”
They passed by the broken down houses leading up to Veldt’s place. One or two people passed them on bikes on the way there. Right outside Veldt’s complex, a recycling rig and some CEB presses were powering down for the night. They could see there were piles of newly sorted plastic probably mined out from some ancient landfill. Ancient and derelict houses looked to be mid knockdown with looming hulks of recycling sorters behind like a predator stalking its next meal. At the rate they were going at, it would probably be a week and construction would start. As Clover and Veldt walked by the construction yard they could see a bulletin board where local guilds were surveying what business people would want there ,below the apartments to be built.
“Come on coffee roastery,” Veldt commented.
Clover just hoped for a used book store. Her pick wasn't the lowest in the rankings at least. But she was still a bit disappointed that the write-in candidate of “Emotional Support Plant” store was leading the polls.
They made their way into Veldt’s block. Veldt lived in an older superblock built back before they had worked out most of the kinks. The communal spaces never seemed to be big enough. The buildings didn’t capture quite enough energy to be self sufficient, and the rainwater tanks could be a bit leaky. There seemed to be dozens of minor quirks around the place but it was still one of the better places either of them had lived in before. The whole thing was arranged like a massive tic tac toe board With each building forming a massive O in a three by three grid, with large open spaces like gardens, ponds or lawns in each of the centers of the O’s. The idea was to walk along the Tic Tac Toe lines to get to throughout the complex, but since the ground floors were almost entirely communal spaces, people tended to just cut through the center of the O’s to get where they were needed.
“Look at this, all the grass has been trampled!” Veldt stated. “They even put up a sign, but people are still going right through. Honestly I’m bringing this up at the next community meeting I make it too.”
Veldt then began walking over the trampled grass. Clover gave a look around then followed. They passed by a few kids out in the late night trying to find some fireflies in the summer weather. Other than then there was only an old woman complaining to her tomatoes about their growing habits. They cut through a cafe at ground level to see a handful of people playing some kind of odd game that took up several tables. The players were all there long after the cafe was closed and seemed to be trying to figure out some kind of obscure rule.
“I don’t care how high you rolled,” A tired looking man mumbled. “You cannot sneak attack someone from within a locked safe. Now give me a check to see if you still have air.”
They entered their building and saw a few people working late at the communal kitchen. Looked like they had an old bathtub full of mulberries and were trying to make as much jam as possible before they went bad.
“Want some?” a suspiciously purple person asked, holding a jar.
“Ehh-”
“Sure!” Veldt grabbed the jar and it entered a random pocket not already occupied by twelve things.
Clover could see the pocket beginning to turn purple from the inside out and a swath of sticky residue over Veldt’s hands.
“Umm,” Clover started.
“Oh I’m gonna power wash everything when I’m done,” the purple person explained.
“Neat,” Clover responded, thinking that the whole ground floor was going to be tie-dyed by tomorrow morning.
They walked by the main staircase up and found the night manager jogging up to them before they could get up.
“Did I forget the coffee maker again?” Veldt asked.
“Yes but I also got a packet from the guild about you both,” the manager piped. “Where did I put that? Alright here it is! Sign here.”
Veldt immediately signed the form, and the form immediately became suspiciously purple stained.
“You too.”
Clover signed her name after skimming the form quickly. Veldt immediately opened her package.
“More things to sign,” Veldt mused, pulling out a stack of paper. “Haven’t seen this one before.”
Clover and Veldt began furiously skimming. They had to move a few times because they started midway up the staircase and several residents commented on their choice of reading nook. After another few minutes of reading, Veldt stood up straight and was biting her lip.
“Why do we have a waiver, notice to travel, confidentiality statement? Clover mumbled. “This one is a last will and testament.”
“Yes it is,” Veldt sighed.
“This is also normal then.”
“No it isn’t,” Veldt mumbled.
Clover pulled out a booklet on what to do if you find yourself within a firefight and shot a glance to Veldt.
“Ah I have seen that one before,” Veldt hesitated. “Friend of mine read it when he had to go to marauder territory.”
“Ohh,” Clover fretted. “So then.”
“Yea-”
“Ever shot a gun before?”
“Not with someone shooting back,” Veldt murmured.
“It’s not too hard,” Clover sighed.
“Can you guys talk about getting shot away from the stairs!” someone fumed.
Clover and Veldt grabbed all their stuff and got off the stairs. For some reason, a few people decided to toss a couch out at damn near midnight. Clover eyeballed the couch as they passed by, despite being around thirty present patches it looked better than the one she slept on. Then she got a whiff of the cat pee and decided she wasn’t that desperate.
“So,” Veldt exclaimed, stuffing a load of purple stained paper into her folder. “I’m not reading this all tonight. You’re mom still cool?”
“Last I checked,” Clover shrugged.
“Cool,” Veldt scribbled a name on the will and shoved it back in the folder. “Alright I’m going to bed.”
“We’re going to die,” Clover stated to Veldt. “Shouldn’t we be trying to get out of all this?”
“Well we’re always going to die,” Veldt stated.
“You think we get more money for nearly dying don’t you.”
“Good question,” Veldt said, fumbling for her keys at her door. “I’m going to say yes.”
They stepped into the apartment. It was long and thin like all the rooms inside it. They could fit more apartments in the building while still giving all of them a few windows. Clover shut the door behind them and both of them played the game of finding some kind of light in the dark. Clover found the lamp by her couch, just in time to see Veldt drop half the contents of her bookshelf on her foot.
“God something dammit,” Veldt cursed, limping to her room.
“Need a hand picking that up?”
“They just live there now ok!” Veldt barked.
Veldt fumbled down onto her bed without shutting the door or crawling into the covers. Within three minutes Clover heard snoring so got up, cleaned up the books and shut the door so she wouldn’t hear the room rattle as she snored. She read over her pile of paperwork by lamplight till the wording started shutting her brain off.
“I’ll study in the morning,” Clover thought before turning off the lamp.
Vaguely in the back of her mind she knew she had said the same thing every school night her entire life. It had been a lie every night, and she remembered the whole being shot at part of the equation. Clover flicked on the lamp and got back to reading, she was going to figure out what was going on before it killed her.
