“Dude, you got grass clipping through your forehead.”
“No I don’t.”
“No you do. It seeds differently for clients, depends on chunk load order. You got a fat tuft growing right between your lookers,” - June snapped out a tool, took a capture and tossed it over to Leo. Leo caught it with his upper left hand.
“Shit, guess I do,” - he tossed the glinting node down the hill, setting it off to bounce away through the ephemeral tangle of purple-pink plantlife.
They both laughed, filling the crunchy night air of the empty lobby with distorted howl-crackles. June’s flowing red braids shook along with his shoulders as he dropped back on the ground near Leo.
“You’re my plant pot.”
“No.”
“Weed tray. Gonna use you to grow onions.”
“I will not tolerate another layer of slander.”
“You will,” - June’s small fist softly impacting his side.
“No I won’t.”
“I’ll make you another model. And it will have a plant. And you will use it.”
“Fucking hell,” - two of his hands blotted out the green stars in a combined facepalm. June was bursting with laughter next to him.
“Hey, wake up,” - sounded a high pitched, slightly nasal voice from somewhere behind him.
“Come on, I’ve got fifteen more minutes of break left,” - Leo sighed, tearing his unshaven face from his crossed hands. The metal chair scraped a nasty short tone against the floor as he turned to face the disturbance.
The guy standing behind him was pretty tall, probably a bit older, short brown hair and a messy short beard. He was chewing on something as he spoke. The badge on the pocket of his dirty dark teal jumpsuit informed Leo that the offender was from a different mechanics team. He vaguely recalled seeing this man at some point, but for the love of god could not recall where.
“Sorry man, Serge wants a checkup on the water pumps in 62 and my buddy’s sick, I was told to grab and bring you to em.”
“Jeeesus,” - Leo sighed, rubbing his eyes, - “Am I on his bad side or something.”
“Dunno man, he didn’t seem pissed with you yet. Come on, he’ll definitely be pissed if we’re late,” - his new temporary partner waved to the door. With a groan, Leo got up, throwing the chair back to the crude table with a bang, to mild displeasure of the other five people in the breakroom, and grabbing his bags.
“Name’s Niko, though half the people call me Boxer,” - the disturbance smiled widely as they exited from the sonic safety onto the walkway below an unpainted concrete sky, - “You’re Leonidas, right?”
“Use short,” - Leo yawned, following Boxer’s quick and sure steps, down the familiar rattly stairs - “You don’t really look like a boxer type.”
“That’s exactly why the nickname,” - Boxer chuckled, fishing out a crumpled foil wrapper from a pocket, - “Want gum?”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass.”
The echo of their steps on metal drowned in the neverending hum of the lower Stacks as they climbed down across the column’s east face, the overgrowth of shipping containers below them clinging to the concrete monolith like mushrooms to a tree trunk. Many of the horizontal extrusions added to the columns bore a distant resemblance to something organic as well, Leo had started to notice. He felt the air getting thicker as they descended and pulled the mask over his face before it would force him to cough. Reluctantly, Boxer got rid of his gum and did the same.
The stairway touched ground in the heart of Lower Crates. Weaving between carts of fuel canisters and groups of tired workers on their way to the bay, Leo thought again that the line between sanctioned housing and shantytown was thin. He wondered what would happen if a fencer or someone like that decided to set up shop in one of the empty containers here. Would the overseers try to stop it or just give in?
A familiar yet annoying high buzz pierced through the corroded patchwork of noise, stitching of tiny blades, passing drone a light blur against the distant ceiling. Leo didn’t like drones. They didn’t appear without a bad reason. And the reason usually was-
“HAUL ASS YOU TWO,” - roared Serge’s voice from across the bay. Boxer and Leo took off in a fast jog between the parked trucks, not eager to be yelled at more than usual.
Immediately the reason was obvious. Through the wide open door of the control room where Serge usually resided Leo could see that the interior was trashed, overturned tables flooding the floor with mishmash of the foremen’s precious folders. Amidst the destruction was one of the least pleasant sights imaginable: a wizard. His contorted, ghoulish-pale, abnormally tall figure dominated the room, hunched over the deck, dead grey artificial eyes pinned to the screen from under the khaki cap. Cables snaked from the trunk of his unfolded hand, strangling the gutted old tower-box like thirsty roots. Some human, also in a military uniform, was continuing the rampage, ripping boxes of papers from the cabinets, scanning through them and tossing them to the floor indiscriminately.
Serge was pacing in front of his ravaged abode with a tablet in hand, fuming with rage. Under the full face mask, his face, locked in a grimace, was covered in sweat. Once again Leo was thankful that this particular overseer had remarkable self control. He deliberately did not look in the direction of the wizard.
Another drone passed them, heading away from the pillar into the gloom of industry.
“Took a nap together or something?!” - the foreman growled through his clenched yellow teeth, hand almost snapping the cheap tablet in half. He stepped briefly into the room to take a key off the wall hook, earning a dead stare from the wizard, and tossed it to Boxer, - “Wheels 27. You have three hours to finish and report. Get a move on.”
Running off towards their truck, Leo could not help but feel a cold shiver imagining the grey eyes drilling into his back.
“The fuck happened?” - he asked, connecting the seatbelt as Boxer rolled out of the bay onto the track, aligning the cart over the rails.
“Don’t know, don’t wanna know,” - Boxer shrugged, his friendly demeanor disrupted by the encounter.
“Yeah fair,” - Leo laughed nervously. Boxer pushed something on the front panel, and Leo felt the cart shift up and down, switching to hard wheels with a clang.
“Check your side, sitting right?”
He leaned out and glanced at the chassis. Both wheels were firmly in their little canals.
“Uh-huh.”
The headlights came on, and the track began to rumble away under them, snaking between storage tanks and power poles and elevated pipelines, foul air whistling through the open side windows as distant clusters of cold lamps passed a kilometer overhead.
“Mothcage keeps talking about how they must have hidden some secret in the skyboxes here.”
They had decided to add a campfire. The flame animation was procedural, but the static sound loop was ever so slightly miscut. The subtle jump every thirty seconds or so was starting to annoy Leo a little, but he was too busy to focus on it.
“Oh god she’s still on it,” - he shook his head, continuing to stroke the fuzz of June’s chest. June wriggled and leaned back further into his arms.
“Yep. Seen the observatory in the testing world?”
“The fuck, when did she place an observatory?”
“Half a year ago? It’s like five thousand to z-, out of default draw distance. I thought she had a transporter pointing there.”
“I avoid her transporters like the plague, she is a torturer not a public transit engineer.”
June giggled.
“She’s got the skybox textures ripped and hanged all over the dome. Remade all the blending effects, makes some sort of crazy hanging chart linking different parts.”
“I think we need to stop her before she goes completely insane.”
“Nah she’s hotter like this.”
“Pfft.”
They fell into a calm, mutually pleasant silence, June’s head resting against the scales of Leo’s chest. The golem in his proxy suit informed him that the time was 0247. He winked it away.
He tried to focus his eyes on the recently added buildings in the distance. Not out of particular interest, he had been there before, but to avoid letting his trained brain analyze the patterns of simulated wind on his skin, decomposing the flow into shifting noise textures. That was a real problem of late. He wasn’t sure what to do about it, as very few people seemed to be able to do the same.
“Comms going pretty well this year,” - June rolled his head side to side, tangle of hair a maddening ghost of warmth.
“Do not.”
“Come on, a few months and I’ll afford it fine. Gran can take care of the cat.”
“No. You will not take a step here.”
June groaned in frustration, slumping his head to the side. Hugging his shoulders with more force, Leo felt maddened by the proxy’s inability to emulate smell.
“Sorry, come again?” - Leo shook his head, concentrating.
“I said the filter. Get the filter,” - Niko yelled over the background of hum.
Leo dashed to the cart, hopped onto the open back, fished out a fresh filter from a crate. The filters today felt heavier than when he last handled them. Hauling it back to Boxer, Leo heard him curse.
The old filter was lying on the floor in a pool of grey-brown-ish gunk, clogged with a disgusting clump of decaying matter. Leo could feel some of the smell even through his mask, and it was not pleasant.
“Hold it in place,” - Boxer pointed, shaking trickles of waste from his long rubber gloves. He had already added the new insulation. Leo placed the segment, and Boxer began to fasten it down, - “Jesus man are you always this zoned out?”
“No, sorry, bad week.”
“Ah,” - Boxer moved a step around the thick pipe with a grunt, - “That happens. Shit here or at home?”
“At home,” - Leo decided, after thinking for a bit.
“Always gets better eventually,” - Leo could infer him smiling behind the respirator, - “Aight, this holds. Can you pack up the spent one?”
“Sure,” - He went back to the truck and fished out another waterproof bag as Boxer finished tightening the bolts. The two other filters they had replaced were already in the back, - “This is the last machine right?”
“Sure enough,” - Boxer stretched his back while Leo scooped chunks of rotting debris into the trashbag, and went to the front side to restart the pump.
They ran it for a minute, watching for leaks, and went back to the truck to finish the report form.
“Ey, we got done twenty minutes early,” - Boxer cheered, tossing the clipboard onto the front panel, but not starting the engine.
“Gonna waste them?”
“We go back now, Sergo will send us somewhere else. We take full three hours, there’s 35 minutes left of the shift,” - Boxer tapped the side of his head. They laughed, - “Can’t smoke down here though. You smoke?”
“No.”
“Don’t start,” - Boxer smirked, leaning back in his seat, - “Fuckin’ expensive.”
“Yeah, Underside kills my lungs fast enough already.”
“It do.”
“You’re overprotective.”
“Look, I know my country. Letting you go here is a real bad idea.”
June sighed, exhaustedly.
“I’m sorry, I know it sucks. But I’ll eventually get out of here. Two more years of college, I get a sorcerer license, then I get a job somewhere in Poland or whatever.”
June was silent.
“We already have enough. For now. Bless proxies.”
“Bless proxies,” - June smiled, weakly, shuffling and turning around to kiss him.
“The internet’s not going anywhere,” - Leo reassured June.
“Yeah. Internet is eternal.”
The suit’s golem blared a notification. “Loud external sound.”
“Ugh, I think someone’s at the door.”
“At 3 in the morning?”
“I swear to fuck if this is Dina again… Be right back,” - Leo switched out, his dirty unlit room exploding into view, consuming all his previously suspended senses.
A loud banging.
“Police, open up!”
“Damn, dude, that’s fucked up,” - Boxer’s mildly disheveled face stared at him from across the bar table, tinted with trace disbelief, - “And they fucked your studying too?”
“Yeah,” - Leo wiped his eyes again, - “Can’t really do it if every router locks up when I go near it. Tried contacting my friends through someone else, worked for a while, then the golem found it. Messenger got half a year punishment. Didn’t try again.”
“Shit.”
They sat in silence for a while, finishing their drinks. Boxer kept chewing on his dried fish, lost in thought.
“I’d accepted it, I thought. But lately something happened that makes it hard to not think about.”
“Good kind or bad kind?” - Niko squinted, crunching on an anchovy.
“Don’t know. Possibly good?”
“You have something you can do about it?”
Leo thought about the wizard’s lifeless stare, loops of antennas jutting from the bald head. About the lively witch. About June’s laughter.
“I do.”
“That’s good,” - Boxer smiled widely, reaching over the table to pat Leo on the shoulder, - “My sister always says, you’re not done until you’re six feet under. As long as you can move, eh?”
Leo sighed deeply, wiping his face for the final time.
“That’s right. I can move.”