Punched In: The Highest Lights

Once upon a time, there was a goon in a Van story named Six-Eight Nate, and like many goons in Van stories, he got the absolute dogshit beaten out of him. The important thing to note is, for as much as our soulful angry boy is prepared to end life like a Bionic Bubonic Plague if pointed at a proper convention of scum, he doesn't kill everyone he meets on poor terms. Because Van knows that you have to save some, or else you're not saving anyone- there has to be a threshold for mercy. Even by his own ethics, Van didn't see Six-Eight as enough of an asshole to warrant a killshot; he still talked some absolute crazy mess in his ear as the guy was losing consciousness, because Van remains Van, but in the end, he only saw someone worthy of a beating.

Six-Eight grew to understand that when he was undergoing reformation. He didn't like it, per se, because nobody really likes having their confidence shattered as hard as their face. But he also understood that someone had taken his life in their hands, then handed it back to him. That meant something. That had to mean something. So he let it spur him, change him, make him better. Because for some folks, there deserves to be a happy ending, even if it's a humble one that begins with getting a good, fulfilling job.

So yeah, the giant dude that swung on Van once upon a time is going to show us how holograms work, sorta. No, not that giant dude, the other one. Anyway. He's good like that now. He's got neighbours that'll vouch for him and everything.

The Highest Lights

If there was a thing that Six-Eight Nate had learned had learned in his recent life, it was one of the best feelings in the world was the ability to like the person looking back in a reflection. It was a recent thing for him, and something that hit him as being a little cotton-soft for his worldview. But the more he thought about it, the more it made a home in his heart. Because every day, he did himself a little better. Used to be he was nothing more than the muscle for a pair of idiots cooking Gamma out of a shipping container, a fucked up bush-league branch of Pervitin preferred by slavers and crust-gangers for its ability to depersonalize a mind, then charge it with high voltage. That ended when he met a higher predator one day, who brought him down like a dead tree; Nate recognized it was his fault and he deserved it, they were trying to muscle a dispensary worker. He recognized a lot after that beating, starting with the realization that a bunch of meth and steroids, combined with a savage-yet-surgical physical destruction, had made a face he hated looking at.

He’d spent a year inside a reformation colony. He needed it to get clean, for sure and permanent, because after the first few months, he came to understand he needed to protect what he was rebuilding in himself. That the councillors were right, that his effort was worth it, not because other people wanted to see the change in him, but because he wanted to see the change in him, and he wanted it to be permanent. So he returned to the gym in earnest, no anabolics, no go-go pills, just pure willpower, determination and twisted steel. When he returned to his unit, feeling alive like he used to, he picked a subject he’d knew would hold his attention: holosprites. Since he was a kid, he’d been fascinated by the holographic neon that lit the places he lived, marvelled at the bright colours and the artistry involved, the moving 3D images they projected. He wondered how they worked for the longest time, so he resolved to learn.

When he learned that all they were, were just extremely fast-spinning light-tubes? His fascination exploded.

Getting released felt like the graduation he’d never had. Six foot eight, two hundred and eighty pounds, and armed with a freshly printed holophoto optitronics certification, he looked good and he felt good. For once, Six-Eight Nate was going to be a positive in someone’s day. He resolved to make that nickname be a friendly one, not a menacing one.

Port of St. Joseph had been good to him, for as terrible as he’d been to it in the past. Folks on the street knew who he was, recognized the long brown hair, the wrapped-chain tattoos, the beard, the size; they knew what he used to be like. They also recognized the new spark in his eyes, the new life in his face, the look of a man returned to life from someone formerly bent on zombifying himself. They saw that Nate smiled easy now, and so they smiled back, because they understood: this was how a soul is healed, because many of them had scars on their own souls. More to the point, the city seemed bent on keeping one of its formerly fallen citizens on the proper path. When he’d joined the public works union, they made sure his needs were filled. St. Joe’s was a city that wasn’t easy on the large folk that lived there, which is why they saw he needed a work vehicle, they made sure they got him a truck he didn’t need to scrunch himself into. Sure, it was a little narrow and too tall to safely take on the turnpike, but for the purposes of doing holosprite installs and repairs in Southland Point, it was perfect for him. He used it to carpool a pal from the union to work, an ex-Titan project supersoldier named Jorge that was even bigger than Nate, a legit eight-foot, five hundred pounder that frequently sipped his iced coffee from a custom seat mounted in the truckbed. The SoPo locals recognized them as The Big Guys, a huge, friendly pair who came around to make sure the substreet powerlines and the lights were working properly.

Which was how second shift monday started: friendly locals nodding hello as The Big Guys disembarked their mass at the corner of Wilmore and Cheung, the smells from a nearby food stand wafting on the shifting air of the cavern-city. Nate checked the direction of the breeze- it was Urmoth and his grill cart, cooking up ukarhen glizzies in spicy sauce and stir-fried vegetables. Nate immediately knew what he was getting for lunch.

“You know part of the reason why I never went your route in the Works?” Jorge said, belting an entire workshop’s worth of electrician’s tools across his gargantuan frame.

“No, howzat?” replied Nate, buckling himself into his rappelling harness. The St. Joe’s slang was invasive, he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

“I didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about me, seeing the whole… y’know, Titan thing,” Jorge said. “‘Cause I didn’t want people to think I’m okay with climbing buildings cause, y’know, I can do it with my bare hands now. Theoretically pretty easy for me, I guess.”

“Theoretically?” Nate asked.

“Yeah,” Jorge said, plain, with a meek smile that looked ridiculous on his sheer mass. “I’m fucking terrified of heights. The only way I got around it when I was in the Planetary Forces? I kept threatening to squash my COs, and they didn’t want to get their very expensive giant bodyguard mad at them.”

“Cowards all the way down, huh?” asked Nate, grabbing a fresh roll of holophoto tubing out of the truck’s toolchest and strapping it to his workbelt.

“Eh,” Jorge said. “They fucked with my head too much. Made me unafraid of getting shot to death or summary executed, but they never touched my phobia, so… I guess nobody called my bluff.”

“Well God damn, man,” is all Six-Eight could think to say. But he knew Jorge enough to know, he’d just nod and say, “Yeah, wasn’t any fun at all,” like he did.

“Where you going up to?” Jorge changed the subject.

“Seventh, all the way up,” Nate said, snapping on a hardhat.

“Yeah, I don’t envy you,” Jorge said, shuddering. With hands like the jaws of table vices, he pulled a heavy access panel off a nearby powerbox like it was a pie plate. Though his fingers were as thick as shotgun shells, they moved with dexterity and precision, paging through rows and rows of breaker switches as he cross-referenced the circuit numbers that needed maintenance from his phone’s to-do app. As he flipped, street lights, illumination bars and holophoto signs blinked off, and red access lights on maintenance panels blinked on, a breadcrumb trail of ‘work needed here’ for street crews.

Nate saw his target blink off, a sign for Pertinent Adaptations, a local translation software developer that was fritzing. As the sign read, their company was called Pertinent AdaAdaAdaAda, unto infinity. Nate’s experience told him that could be anything, and the easiest attempt at a fix? Just rip the tube, cut a replacement and mount it- it wasn’t a software error, which probably meant the tube that was in there had blown a row of emitters or two. If it wasn’t that, it’d probably an issue with the connectors, or maybe the motor’s spinrate was off, but there was no harm in doing a routine tube replacement to kill the problem the easy way- he could just throw the old tube in the recycler.

Nate swiped an access fob to a panel marked ‘MAINTENANCE ASCENDER’, a little red box on the office building’s entranceway beside the fire safety screen. He opened it, revealing a blade switch marked with a message of ‘USAGE REQUIRES SAFETY EQUIPMENT AND UNION CERTIFICATION.’ Understanding that some union safety agreements in the Freelands were shaped like buttons and switches, Nate popped it up. With a smooth and pleasing clatter, the ascender opened from the exterior wall, a bucket-lift elevator with just enough room for Nate to stand in and clip himself into. On the one hand, Nate was fully aware that standing in the thing made him look like he was being hung by an invisible rope as it elevated him up the side of the building; on the other, he was glad this was the improved model, because it used to be that the old ascenders were just carabiners on elevator pulleys you clipped to and hung off of. It was a thing he’d taken to telling the younger members of the Works coming up: yeah, safety equipment looks kinda geeky, but it also keeps your head un-smashed and your back un-broke, so just deal with it and primp yourself off the clock, you can be hot later. That’s what Nate kept in his head, riding his very small elevator, while onlookers gawked at the Floating Large Man.

An arissiyan leaned out the fourth floor window and exhaled a dragon’s breath of nichaal smoke, from the lit reed they had between their fingers. Their eyes went wide when they noticed Nate coming up the side of the building, and they apologized profusely, coughing on pale-violet smoke as he passed up through their second-hand haze.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said as he passed, waving the smoke away. “Seeing brighter colours helps in my line of work.”

Seven floors up, and Nate pulled along the fritzing sign. He took a moment to appreciate the view, above most of the other rooftops in the district. To the north, the Arcologies, towers of steel and glass that extended from the floor to the ceiling of the cavern, the highest density residences in the city, but residences equipped with their own living internal ecosystems, vertical parks that were also huge apartment complexes, offices and commercial. To the northeast, and closer, were the proud, bright lights of Central Square, where the buildings of the central council stood, surrounded by museums, art galleries and greenspace. Beyond it, along the northeast cavern wall, beneath a ceiling of royal blue ivy, was the University District, where the Athrid-Whitmore University of Art and Engineering stood like a castle. All of these things, Nate would never have noticed just a year prior. Just like the beauty of the highest lights that he found himself among.

Nate found the unlit tube, and straight from the jump he could see the rows of burned emitters, a black line that crossed its full length beneath the pearl-white polymer surface. “Yep, that’ll do it,” he breathed. Taking care not to note how high he was teetering, he unclipped it from the mounting point on the building, pulling a pair of tabs, releasing the connecters from the contact points. It smelled faintly of burned ozone, carbon streaking staining the interior of the tube on closer inspection. Easy enough fix, especially considering the connector caps still looked fine. So he popped them loose with the toolbit on the blunt end on his tube cutters, then used the burnt length to cut the replacement. The tube itself was a length of hyper-efficient LED bundles, that when lit and made to spin at high frequency, would project a lattice of light pulses that tricked the eye into seeing a coherent 3D image that would always face the viewer head-on regardless of the angle. In other words: a holosprite.

Nate popped the top connector into place, twisting it so that it anchored into the polymer casing of the tube. That’s when he heard a voice from above him: “I could spot you at a distance, either the least subtle cat burglar in the city, or Six-Eight.”

“How’s it going, Canine?” Nate said. He didn’t look up at first; he convinced himself that he was focusing on his work, but the reality was simpler and harder. He knew Canine was good people, but Nate associated his voice with the hardest night of his life, and he still wasn’t quite over it. It took him a while to meet eyes.

“It’s the right kind of day, I think,” Canine said. “It’s noisy out, but it’s happy noise, y’know?” He was one of Southland Point’s resident Section 99 operators, the folks the volunteer security called when a more serious response was needed. He was probably the most infamous, only rivalled by the violet, violent dandy that haunted the club row of Bidwell Street like a guardian specter. Word was, that guy could wreck a man alive with his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, that he was running hot with some sort of exotic nanite-based bionics that let him crush skulls three with a single precision kick. But Canine? Canine was fucking insane at his core, a nice guy with a werewolf under his skin, who could go from looking like some cotton-soft stoner type to a cybernetic death machine at a flicked switch, with a voice that howled weaponized pain and eyes that were glowing open windows to Hell. Once upon a time, the Nate that used steroids could squat 400 pounds; Canine had beaten that Nate like he’d showed up to the fight sick and malnourished. The doctors said it looked like he’d been beaten with the polymer haft of a sledgehammer. Nope, just an ethically offended cyborg and his spiralling crazyfists.

“Yeah, I know the type,” Nate said, keeping his head down, capping the other end of the tube. Canine scared the shit out of Nate. It would take him a while before he wouldn’t. “Even when stuff is broken down, it’s an easy fix.”

“Exactly,” the Canine said. He’d crept up out of nowhere, using the rooftops like they were sidewalks. Unlike Jorge, he definitely wasn’t afraid of heights- Nate had seen him jump streets by going rooftop to rooftop, and launch himself off railings like a rocket. Word was, while the man had never committed anything a Freelander would snort at, he had racked up literal thousands in personal safety fines for using the city as a playground. The rumour went that he called it his Idiot Tax; that someone once had asked him who was the idiot, him or the person he was chasing, and he’d responded, “Yes.”

A fall from this high makes you splat pavement at about 60 kilometres an hour, and you’re doing hot roof stunts on your way to work, what is your fucking deal, homeboy, are you made of neutronium? thought Nate, frantically.

“Yeah well, speaking of easy fixes,” Nate said, clearing his throat. A part of him hated what he was going to do, that he was invading on something that wasn’t his business. That was old instincts asserting themselves; he knew the difference between a snitch and someone reporting a threat to the community, the difference between telling on a neighbour for an authoritarian gold star, and acting on behalf of neighbours in imminent danger by telling someone that could do something.

The paused stretched long enough that the Canine asked, “you okay, Nate?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Six-Eight Nate said, regaining his composure. “So you know Lugosi, the goth club that’s actually down in the mouth of the canal undercrofts?”

“Definitely do, that place was a red tape nightmare to open, I’m surprised they managed it,” said Van.

“Yeah, I was down there a couple of days ago and… I can’t lie, I saw a lot of familiar looks coming from people that definitely were coming from deeper down the undercrofts, if you know what I mean.” It took him a moment, but Nate managed to lift his head to make eye contact with the Canine, just to make sure he understood he was being serious.

“Yeah, thinkin’ I do,” said Canine, gears obviously turning in his head.

“The folks inside of Lugosi had been catching them on their exterior cameras for the past little while and weren’t sure what to do, but they’re getting blatant. Nice folks run that club, I don’t want to see their thing get shut down because assholes gotta go ruin it, you know what I mean?”

“Thinkin’ I do,” Canine repeated. “Thinkin’ I might know where that missing maintenance barge might have gotten to, as well. Thanks for the tip, Nate. You good for lunch?”

“Oh yeah, man,” Nate said, and he was surprised with the ease it came out, the ease he was having holding the eye contact. “Don’t worry about that, I’m good. Just, maybe for me- try not to wreck these folks if you can avoid it. The road back kinda hurt, y’know?”

“If they’re only hurting themselves, then I got no cause to pile on,” the Canine said to him with a firm nod. “You got my word on that.”

Canine sniffed the air, more like his namesake than Nate was expecting. “Hey, those glizzies good?” He asked.

“Had one last week, Urmoth makes them out of his kitchen, they’re excellent,” said Nate.

“Guess I’ll be back later,” the Canine said, taking a few steps backward from the edge. His “later” was as much a grunt of exertion as it was a goodbye, as he launched himself across the street, onto the adjacent rooftop, and out of sight.

“Who was that?” Jorge’s voice fuzzed over the radio.

“The guy who beat the shit out of me,” Nate said, baldfaced honest.

“Really? He seemed nicer than that,” Jorge replied.

“To be fair, I was the asshole in that fight,” Nate said, clipping the replacement bulb into place. “Okay, hit 12-7-14 for me, please?” He added, putting on a pair of shaded safety glasses.

From far below, Nate could just make out the crisp click of the breaker switch flipping echoing through the canyon of the narrow streets. The near imperceptible sound of current running through a previously dead circuit tickled his ears and made the hair on his arms stand on end, as the spin motor on the holosprite projector whined to life. LEDs sparkled like jarred fireworks, until the emitter tube hit its operating spin rate and the holosprite exploded into its full glory: from out of a tangle of green foliage, emerged the red letters of Pertinent Adaptations, their slogan of “The Forest, and the Trees as Well” sliding in neatly underneath, before the animation faded into its repeat. He checked it against the example of the animation on his phone- exactly was they wanted. That perfect job done feeling: easy enough, but it worked exactly like it should the very first time.

Nate keyed the lift’s controls, starting his descent. It was the quiet moments that gave him time to reflect, drifting among the city’s highest lights. He looked at Jorge’s gigantic frame as he descended, running maintenance traces on the block’s breakers, a guy he was proud to call his neighbour and was glad to have commonality with, because in their origins, they were very different people. Jorge was from the Ciudad Mexico MPC on Terra, an orphan whose genetic workup made him compatible for the Titan project, literally bought out of a group home as a Lot of viable supersoldiers, aged 9 to 13. Jorge had seen horror, survived horror, and at times, been horror- his life was made of a different sort of pain, but that both he and Nate knew pain was something they could quietly bond from. Because Nate didn’t have it easy, either, just much different:  Born on Evergreen, a Freelander from the very start, he wasn’t the victim of any oppressive system, just at the very worse, one that was a little too lax and sometimes forgot to carry 1s. He was enough of a man to recognize where he wound up was a line of bad choices, first by his parents, and then by himself. He knew where he’d been failed and where he failed himself, and that what he became was a symptom of a man that hated looking in the mirror, that he was happy destroying who was looking back at him. Because everything he used to be, was just some big, angry, strong guy that let himself be used by people he had the potential to be better than. Realizing that is what broke the cycle.

It’s why among the chain tattoos, he’d added an opened padlock, and a key with the name Nathaniel, the name he’d engraved for himself on his own soul, the angel that emerged out of the ended body of a violent addict. That joining it, small across his chest and upside down so he could read it for as long as he lived, was EX NIHILO. He had died, and raised himself into something humbly honourable, someone who had started with the small goal of a job, any job, and turned it into a philosophy for living well. He understood that dignity wasn’t just something that certain people had, but one of the central supports of a person, and that it had to be built from within. The secret was in learning it was made of small successes, not big jumps, but the act of doing better day by day. He’d done it, and for once in his life, he didn’t just feel in control, but wisened from the journey. He wasn’t the crying type, but it was enough to bring him close, when he really stopped and thought about it. Because now he didn’t have to look up to see the lights. His life was lived among them, low-key and happy.

Six-Eight Nate had finally lived.