C2 Feeding the addicts

Now carrying the pot by hand, Gerald made his way down the road. The sun was fully risen, allowing him to see the remains of the overgrown city at the center of the wooded valley, clinging to the relatively narrow strip of land between the roots of the mountains and the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

Melted green towers stuck up from the forest canopy like thistles. Slouching honeycombed husks that had once been business towers and stores; apartment buildings and offices, now the color of dried blood.

Plant life grew out from the seams in the limestone and granite, their roots de-laminating the stone until the steel structure was exposed to corrosion.

Gerald took the long way around so as not to pass too closely. The buildings groaned. Eerie corpse-like sounds issued from their shifting weight. The wind passed through their shattered frames, making sounds that were sometimes like whispers, sometimes like moans.

Falling pieces of glass and masonry would strike the ground sharply, punctuating the silence with startling violence. Packs of animals, wild dogs and feral cats, moved about the rotting shells like carrion, their howls and shrieks echoing off every surface until they seemed to come from all directions.

The distant sound of shattering of glass made the hair on his neck stand up, so he raised his voice to hide his fear.

“You know, Nikki, people back in the day developed some pretty funny ideas about trees,” he mused to the broken bike slung across his back. “They became a kind of spiritual symbol of peace and harmony. But look at what they’ve done in just a few short years.”

He motioned to the withering city without looking at it. “The reality is that plants are aggressive and invasive. They break through barriers to claim new territory; they spread their leaves high to hog all the sunlight and kill off any competitors. They crowd out everything else in favor of their own.”

Gerald stopped in front of a dilapidated house. “Now, that isn’t to say that they are evil or anything; they are just following their biological programming, after all.”

Without knocking, Gerald tapped open the front door and walked in.

“Good afternoon Mister Conners,” Gerald greeted warmly as he set down the stock pot.

“My name is Etrigan Aphotic,” the man insisted from beneath his helmet, “and I thought I told you never to come here while I’m grinding gold.”

“If I only came in when you were offline I’d never come in at all,” Gerald chuckled as he knelt down alongside the man’s decaying easy chair.

“Well then, take a hint,” he retorted. His skin was dry and cracked, his pallor gray and sickly. Carefully Gerald rubbed ointment into the joints of the man’s dry fingers while he barked out orders into the helmet he was wearing. Sitting this close, Gerald could hear the sounds of simulated combat coming from within.

“You know, your twenty-ninth birthday is coming up next week Mister Conners,” Gerald mentioned as he ladled some soup into a bowl. “I was thinking I could treat you to a picnic lunch up by the point of the mountain. There’s this group of college students from Andoria that like to come in sometimes and glide on the updrafts with their wings. It’s quite the sight, actually.”

Conners coughed dryly. “Don’t give me that, I know you are on the payroll of the forces of Chaos. They’ve driven us back from the highlands, buncha hacking dirtbags. If I abandon my duties now we could lose the moorlands as well.”

“Well, we can’t have that now, can we?” Gerald chuckled as he carefully clipped the man’s yellow fingernails.

“This is the only server where Order has the advantage. All the new players sign up as Chaos nowadays, and the moderators aren’t doing a thing about it!”

Gerald placed a straw in the bowl and worked it up underneath the helmet. Mister Conners resisted at first, but then finally relented and opened up his gray lips, revealing a single rotted tooth. Slowly he sucked down the nutrition, and his body seemed to tremble a little less than before.

“You shouldn’t waste my time like this, Gerald,” Mister Conners complained when he was done. “I can get along fine with just a protein drip.”

Gerald looked down sadly at the man’s emaciated frame. Barely more than a skeleton and skin. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Gerald promised sadly.

“Not too early, they’re releasing a content patch and I need my instance cooldown to match up with those of my teammates.”

As Gerald slung his bike over his back, there was a crash of shattering porcelain.

“What the heck was that?” Conners asked, peaking from underneath his helmet.

“Oops, sorry Mister Conners,” Gerald apologized. “My bike got caught on your tablecloth.”

Gerald bent down to pick up the broken vase, only to hear another crash from behind him.

“Gosh dangit!” Conners barked.

Gerald spun around and found a broken picture frame lying on the floor. “Oh, I’m so sorry, see I named her Nikki thinking it would bring good luck and...”

Gerald moved forward to pick up the picture but his feet got tripped up in the spilled tablecloth and he came crashing down on top of the coffee table.

“Get out of here, NOW!”

Years ago, the Salt Lake valley had been a desert. Oh, it didn’t look like a desert, with its snow-capped mountains and cool forested valley, but it received so little rainfall that it technically counted as a desert. Since Gerald and his mother had moved there, it had rained every single day, except during the winter, when it hailed every day. By the time he had brought lunch to Miss Davenport and Mister Sophia, Gerald was soaked to the bone.

He carefully crossed the remnants of the interstate. Years of dandelions and other weeds growing up through the cracks and layers of lichen had begun to form a thin little crust of topsoil into I-15. Already it was barely recognizable, looking more like a wide forest pathway than a freeway. Only the collapsed sections arched over the old railroad hub gave it away for what it was. A startled deer lifted its head when he approached and watched him warily.

“Hey look, it’s Bambi.”

The deer snorted and charged. Gerald barely avoiding being impaled as he scampered over the side, twisting his ankle when he landed. The deer gave off an angry hiss before bounding away.

Climbing over the crumbling barricades, he worked his way up through the old neighborhoods around the capital building and towards the avenues. A forest of crumbling chimneys and brick corners amid the trees and undergrowth. The rain followed him. As he looked out across the green valley, it seemed the only place it was raining was right where he was.

Gerald took a moment to stop and look at a pretty spider web glistening with dew.

He was feeling tired. He sat down underneath a beech tree. It was so peaceful it made him feel like lying down and taking a nap, so of course he didn’t.

After a couple minutes the rain lightened up, so he arranged himself, his bike, a rock, and a flower in a circle, each of them with a few worn playing cards laid out before them.

“Okay, Lily played a Skip so that makes it your turn Rocky,” Gerald mentioned, shuffling the faded cards in his hand. A quick gust of wind blew one of the cards away from the rock.

“Ha! UNO!” Gerald yelled, pointing at the rock. “You didn’t call out ‘Uno’ so now you have to draw four cards, Rocky.”

After setting down four more cards in front of the rock, Gerald took out a lemon from his pocket. “I don’t want to hear it, Lily, you got caught cheating last week so you don’t get to complain.” As he quietly peeled the fruit with a pocketknife, he watched a little chipmunk scurry about. It paused to look at him curiously as he ate a lemon wedge.

“You know, Nikki,” Gerald said, patting the seat of his broken bike, “in a lot of ways I envy that little squirrel thing.”

Gerald tossed a piece of lemon peel out and the chipmunk ran up to it and took a few nibbles.

“Now, why did he do that just now?” Gerald mused. “That could have been poison, after all, but he tried it anyway. You see, that little guy’s instincts tell him to try it when something hits the ground near him, so he does it. Strip away all the layers of complexity and mysticism and he’s nothing more than a little machine following his programming. So, why do I envy him you ask?”

The bike said nothing.

“Because he’s not sophisticated enough to realize that he is programmed. He never notices it, so it doesn’t bother him. He just goes about his little squirrel-chipmunky life.”

Suddenly the little chipmunk charged at him, leaping up onto his face, biting and clawing with all its strength.

“Ahhh! Get it off! Get it off! Nikki, help me!”