Cube Dealing: Part 1
Rain crashed against the dome of the arcology as the nebula storm whirled overhead. Lyra could actually hear the weather outside, being so close to the top of the dome. Somewhere outside the office, someone slammed a door shut, and she was brought back to her situation. The imitation-wood chair she sat in did not creak as she shifted around, examining the room. Plaques and certificates hung on the wall behind the desk she faced, detailing an agent’s life and various successes. Uninterested, Lyra turned around once again, observing through the office’s window the wrathful swirl of green and pink.
Suddenly, the lights came on, and the storm’s glow was dulled by corporate fluorescents.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Lyra’s agent had come in, and was admiring the display with her. His suit, baggy and evergreen, was an older style, but it fit him well, and while his hair was thinning, he didn’t seem concerned with concealing it. “Your name is Lyra Strahm, is that right?” He had taken his place behind the desk, his gaze and stance rapt on Lyra.
“Yes, that’s right.” She became aware of the heavy box she clutched against her stomach.
“And your background is in…brokerage, yes?”
“Yes, it is.”
“So,” the agent’s eyes flicked down to the box for a moment, “may I be so bold as to ask if you have something for us?”
“Potentially.” Lyra stood up and set the box down on the agent’s desk before returning to her chair.
-
Lyra ran a pawn shop in Lothome, on New Midway’s Lower-West side, where she received all kinds of oddities. Golden skulls, the victims of the gang sacrifices; aetherized insects from The Cuts; even the core of a mad Amphic AI. She was good at it, knew who she could buy from and who to turn away, and how to talk to someone that didn’t know what they had.
Last Thursday, Rob Rondolo had come into her store in a hurry. He wasn’t an addict, like most of the people who came through Old Lothome Pawn, and he wasn’t stupid either, so Lyra found herself dealing with him more than anyone else. On this day, rather than rings or rare metals, Rob had brought Lyra a cube.
He was out of breath and flustered as he came into the store. “Lyra, Lyra,” he repeated, hurrying over to the counter. In the dim light, he nearly tripped and demolished a glass angel statue on his way over. His pointed face was pale with excitement, and his hands shook as he lifted his box up for Lyra to see.
“Rob, I told you I don’t want those Valley Boys coming around here again. You gotta go.”
“Nonono, this isn’t them, this is different.”
Lyra raised an eyebrow. “Really? I remember the last time you came in here in a hurry. Thought I was gonna get my damn head blown off.” She craned her neck to look past him. “You sure nobody’s coming after you?”
“Yes, yes I’m sure, please, just look.” He was pushing the box toward her now. The sleeves of his coat were rolled up, exposing his thin arms to the artificial chill of the arcology’s recycled air.
“Alright, alright.” She flipped the clasp on the container and opened it. Inside was a crenulated cube, slate gray, about half a foot across. It sat unsteadily in the box, its shape preventing it from resting easily. She reached in and touched it gingerly — it was cold and smooth, with jagged, irregular bits along its edges that reminded Lyra of a puzzle piece.
She looked up at Rob, confused. “What is this?”
Rob had taken a more confident stance, with his hands on his hips. “Found it in the back of a van. Got a good vibe from it. Guys that were hauling it had a chat with some Valley Boys, I dipped in and nicked it before they ever saw me.” He smirked as he finished the tale.
Lyra was unimpressed. “So, you stole it from some group, and now my shop’s gonna get lit-up by the Valley, or CUDSUM, or whoever else.”
Rob’s smile vanished. “No, Lyra, I’m telling you-”
“Just get this out of here before I-”
“These guys were hauling aether!”
Lyra paused, shutting the box. She looked at Rob, deigning to let him continue.
“Yeah yeah yeah, they had the black canisters and everything. You and I both know that anything with aether goes quick and goes big, huge even. I’ve seen the feeds, the storms are sweepin’ out to sea and we’re gonna be in a dry spell until who knows when. I’d never get away with a tank, and I know my lady doesn’t deal in that crap anyway,” he said, winking with his last line.
Lyra groaned. “This could be very bad, Rob. If someone, anyone shows up looking for this-
“They won’t! Nobody will! These vans are a dime a dozen, some nobody gangbanger is gonna get disciplined and then that’ll be the end of it. And CUDSUM ain’t doing shit about aether, they’re all too busy kickin’ rocks in the South Side.”
Lyra stood and thought for a moment, before Rob continued. “Look, I know neither of us really know what the fuck this thing is. Just get a seller, get a price, and we’ll split it 80/20, you can scam me even more than normal. Alright?”
-
“Alright,” Lyra muttered in the agent’s office, too quietly for the man to hear. He was going over the cube with a jeweler’s scope and some other strange tool, checking it for some detail that Lyra hadn’t paid attention to. After a minute, he set his implements and looked at Lyra.
“Tell you what,” he said heavily, “come back tomorrow, and I’ll line something up with a buyer I know. I’m very interested in this piece, but there’s a particular way we need to go about moving it.”
“It’s not dangerous, is it?”
“Not to you right now, no. You don’t have anything to worry about, trust me. Just come back tomorrow and we’ll take care of it.”
Lyra could tell the agent had no clue what he was talking about, but he wanted to buy it, which was enough. She thanked him for his time before heading back to the elevator and exiting the building. The storm had dulled, and the streets were not as brightly lit as when Lyra first arrived. The faint blue glow of the streetlights was just enough to guide her back to the subway. She trotted past political murals deriding CUDSUM, portraits of the victims of the Huckland Bridge Incident. Vibrant nebula stripes lined the sidewalk as well, luminant paints drawing a lonesome echo of the skies above. She passed the spot where the people from The Cuts would gather during the day, bringing wares from their tribes and news of the state of the plains. Lyra thought about going to them to sell the cube instead — something about the agent’s demeanor made her think that getting rid of it was better than trying to make a fortune.
The subway was quiet, but Lyra dreaded the thought of having to head into the inner city again tomorrow. A concert by an East Edge group was being put on; New Midway was decades behind what the Cutsmen and musicians from Olympia were doing, in Lyra’s opinion. The regressive nature of her city’s music was a troubling thing, and she preferred the silence of the subway to any of the youths’ boostwave noise. She heard it faintly now, the electric crashing and aggressive, distorted roaring of some youth blaring from an apartment on a block near her shop, as the subway pulled into the Lower-West side.
Lyra’s store had never been broken into (at least not while she was running it). The metal shutters were still down, and mostly unbattered, and the magnalock front door stood shut and untouched. She tapped her key against a front panel; the whole face of the building shuddered and groaned as heavy metal cylinders unlocked and slid away, allowing the door to swing open easily.
The storefront had a rustic, old-fashion aesthetic that was becoming harder and harder to replicate. The floor was made of real wood boards, and authentic gas lamps lit the room as best they could; if anything was damaged or lost, no one in the city could afford to replace it. Lyra had a broad range of things on display; old worker’s tools, children’s toys, and books, all the way to gang contraband and curiosities from The Cuts. Her personal favorite was a trophy of a two-headed deer she’d won from a Cutsman in a game of liar’s dice. It hung behind the counter, twin sets of skeletal eye-sockets rimmed with calcified nebula dust staring down any would-be haggler.
Lyra shuffled past her treasures, pushing back the angel statue that Ron had nearly annihilated, before going up a concealed staircase to her loft. The space was small, and she kept most of what she didn’t want to sell in it. The Amphic AI core sat hooked up to an old CRT monitor, where it would occasionally spew its panicked ravings where she could read them. She’d ask it questions, which it would sometimes answer; its name was Aaron, it was built in 2154, in Amphicae, and it had been told to fly west and set fire to as many buildings as it could, until it was shot down or its brain stopped working. Lyra saw no words on Aaron’s screen tonight, so she went to bed straight away, thinking about the pitter-patter of starry rain on the dome of the city.
-
The next day, things began to heat up. Agriculturals, both the hydroponicists from below the city and the free-rangers far outside, were coming in droves, excited for the festivities. Lyra couldn’t recall the name of the occasion; Carnival? Carnivale? She had never been much of a partier, and Lothome was a quiet place. The Cutsmen had come too, more than the usual number; there was money to be made off of travelers, many of whom had never met someone from any of The Cuts. It was a long way away, to be sure, but Cutsmen weren’t very social, especially outside the arcologies; they stuck to their trails, which carried them back to the blue-burning depths, unless they could sell their strange wares to commoners.
There was a small group of them on the subway when Lyra went back up north to meet her agent. Five of them, wearing strange fur robes of burning pink and green that Lyra knew were not dyed, and sturdy trousers tucked into sturdier boots that had walked thousands of miles, and would walk thousands more. Most of them sat casually, looking disinterestedly at the ground or out the windows, but one couldn’t help himself from staring at Lyra and the box she carried, like he knew what was inside; he probably did. It was rumored that a Cutsman could smell aether from miles away, and the few that Lyra had known certainly had an affinity for the stuff.
She wrapped her arms more tightly around the box and tried to ignore the Cutsmen.
Getting off in North Midway, by the Arcspan, Lyra saw a few more Cutsmen, and a lot more newcomers, but it was mostly the same. The concerts and events would be concentrated in the South, nearer to the city’s entrance and further from the rich people and their carefully maintained silence. Wanted ads and warnings for tourists scrolled by on floating notice boards that drifted between the skyscrapers; a placard at the bottom showed a logo of two cities, one mirrored below the other, and text that read “Paid for by the Council of Urban Development and Sub-Urban Management.” The mugshots and traveler’s tips didn’t interest Lyra, but she saw one fleeting image of someone who was still at large. He was pictured near dark, about to vanish into a crowd of celebrants, his head and face obscured by a neon-pink jellyfish mask, tendrils waving like whips as he skirted away into the night.
Lyra entered the Highstreet Plaza Building and took the elevator up to the 23rd floor, and from there to her agent’s suite. His receptionist had an impossibly pristine face; her cheekbones and eyes were deceptively symmetrical, but something about her lilting voice made Lyra think it was all natural. She shook her head as she walked back to the office. It struck her that her second appointment was at a much earlier time than the first one; he almost certainly moved his whole day around just to have this meeting now, which means he definitely wants the cube.
The agent was already there when Lyra walked in this time. A TV monitor that looked like it was on and tuned to darkness, which was not there during Lyra’s last visit, hung on the right wall, between Lyra’s chair and the agent’s desk. As she sat down, a faint crackle of static came from the screen, which quickly returned to silence.
“Good morning, Ms. Strahm. I have an associate of mine here,” he said, gesturing to the monitor without looking at it, “who’s very interested in your item.” The room remained silent for a few moments, and the agent shifted in his chair.
He cleared his throat, finally glancing at the screen. “Ms. Strahm, would you please present the item to us?”
Lyra had been staring at the screen, trying to peer past it and see who it was that wanted this strange little cube. At the agent’s words, she snapped out of her trance, and quickly began unpacking the cube from its container. She placed it at the agent’s left side, on the desk, and returned to her seat.
Silence filled the room once more. Lyra’s gaze returned to the monitor; she could swear that the darkness shifted once, ever so slightly, and turned a deep shade of magenta before returning to its properly impenetrable state. A crackle, like broken breathing, eventually came from the screen, and a distorted, indecipherable voice spoke to Lyra.
“Ms. Strahm, what do you know about aether?”
Lyra considered the question. “I suppose about as much as anyone else. Is there something I should know about it?”
“It goes by various names; aether, nebula dust, starstuff, spaceshine, etc. It is an enigmatic gas from a nebula that was invisible to Earth for much of known history. For untold eons, it fed off itself, whirling infinitely through the lonely dark, until the barest edge of it scraped our world.”
Light pulsed faintly behind the figure in the monitor, just once. A soft echo came through a moment after, and Lyra heard thunder rumble eerily outside the city, way up in the cloudless sky. “The damage was catastrophic. Nations collapsed, culture groups disintegrated, mankind cut apart by a mutagenic ice age from beyond the stars. We hid in our cities, some better than others, and crept out to reclaim our world. Some, like the Cutsmen, never left at all; they learned the forms and movements of our celestial visitor, and mastered its immeasurable transformative properties.”
The figure paused and collected itself. “The point being, aether is not to be trifled with. It twists whatever it touches, be it animated or inanimate, away from what is considered acceptable on our planet. More disturbing than that, though,” the figure said as light flickered behind it once again, “is to see so much of it now condensed, confined, into such a rudimentary form.”
Lyra and the agent’s eyes went to the cube. This was true, pure aether. Not a diluted gas in a canister that losers paid tens of thousands of dollars for, that would burn your face off as soon it’d make you ten years younger, but somehow a gray, shitty block, sitting unmoving on an imitation-wood desk. Lyra was excited and terrified all at once.
The agent was decidedly more the latter.
He stood up and backed away from the cube. “Th-this is aether? Pure aether? Is it safe?”
“You tell me. You’ve been around it, right? Handled it?”
“I- yes, alright. Will you take it?”
The monitor paused for a moment. “Personally, no, I’d rather not, but I am obligated to have it, before someone much more curious and far more stupid ge it.”
The agent seemed relieved, but he masked that feeling better than he did his panic. “Excellent. Ms. Strahm, my associate and I will work out the price. As arranged, you’ll take a 60% cut of the final sale, and I’ll tell my secretary to waive my consultation fee and get you back your down payment. Come see me tomorrow at the same time.”
Lyra began to stand up, then caught herself. “May I keep the cube with me?”
The agent’s eyes went to the cube, then to the monitor. “It’s probably best if we keep it here, wouldn’t you-”
“Just let her keep it for now. It’s still hers, while we work things out. And I wouldn’t say it’s any safer with you than it is with her.”
The agent shrugged and sat back down. “Tomorrow then, Ms. Strahm.”
-
Lyra packed up the cube and departed. She spoke to the secretary again on the way out and picked up her money — she would’ve sworn the other woman made a pass at her, but she’d arrogantly let that thought slip through her mind too many times before. She made her way out of the building, looking for somewhere to eat before going back to Lothome. A stall on Alderer Lane caught her eye — two Cutsmen, a husband and wife, were running it, him up front while she whirled about the stoves in the back. They were lovely to talk to, Mountain-Half-Dark and his wife Sun-And-Rain. Lyra had found that the Cutsmen often loved to tell the stories behind their names, which usually involved the physical trials and tribulations of their mothers, but she knew better than to ask for the story — she’d seen more than a few fights break out over Cutsman names.
They served her hot beer and several slices of a kind of stuffed flatbread, and while she ate they told her about their travels across the prairie. Cutsmen were prodigious hunters, and while they preferred to stick to their rations while traveling, exotic meats from outside colonized land sold very well when they came to town. They didn’t mention finding anything like the two-headed deer that Lyra had in her store, which was unsurprising; nobody wanted competition for rare game out on the prairie.
Several hot beers later, Lyra was stumbling back onto the subway with some partygoers whose names she didn’t catch, gangsters from the West Edge with their girlfriends; she could tell by their spiderweb face tattoos, the insignia of Yodd Misher’s Valley Boy crew. Lyra did her best to avoid telling them about any of her rarer stock, but she couldn’t help herself from warning them to stay away from Titan Rabb down South, before they ended up with their bones embalmed in gold and on her shelf. They didn’t hear her over the roar of boostwave in the tiny train car.
She wandered her neighborhood for a while after that, anything to keep her from sitting at home with the cube. Rural gentlemen from the under-farms and out on the prairie sat gathered around fires in the park, telling tall tales and spinning around with their women. One day, when there wasn’t anything left to haggle over, Lyra thought she might sell the store and join them on the plains — but not today. When she finally got back to her store, she was surprised to see a visitor waiting for her. It took a second for Lyra to figure out that he was a Cutsman; he wasn’t looking around, wasn’t unsure of anybody, he just stood and leaned like he owned the block. His hair was long and braided, wrapped with lengths of twine, and with a black poncho over a brown-shirt jacket and trousers. He wore a broad-brimmed hat that hid his eyes, but Lyra could see faint streaks of pink and green running like tears down his cheeks.
He spoke with a measured, but upbeat tone. “Hello Ms. Lyra. Do you remember me?”
The memories came back in a flash. “Ohhh…were you…the guy I won the deer trophy from?”
His cheek-marks pulsed as he blushed, looking down to the ground in brief embarrassment. “Yes, I am. Do you still have it?”
“Of course I do! What am I gonna, sell it? It’s my good luck charm! No one wants to steal when there’s a fuckin’, demon staring at them.” Lyra stumbled towards the shop door, nearly dropping her keys.”
The Cutsman chuckled. “It looks like this time, you’re the one who’s drunk, and I’m the one who’s sober.” He moved to help her with the lock, and Lyra let him.
“Ooh, does that mean you’re gonna be leaving with something this time, too?”
“Let’s find out.”
-
The Cutsman looked around the store while Lyra swayed her way behind the counter. She felt bad about the store not being well-lit; this was an uncommon guest that was worth impressing. He stood at a rack at the right of the shop, looking over the golden skulls of some failed mobsters. He turned to her after a minute.
“Is this common here?”
“Oh, just down South. The gangbangers got some weird ritual for turning enemies into trophies.”
“And then you collect their remains and sell them?”
Lyra shrugged sleepily. “Gold’s still expensive.”
He turned and looked at the skulls for another moment. “I’ll take one.”
Lyra shuffled over to the cabinet and unlatched it. “Any skull in particular?”
“This one,” he said, pointing to the smallest of the heads. “I think it’s an important piece of your city.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
Lyra walked back to the counter, not even trying to go by the angel statue. She’d have to move that when she was more herself.
“And how will you be paying today, sir.”
“I’ll trade you, one moment.”
He produced a bag from his poncho, and began carefully digging through it. Lyra tried not to lean over and peek, despite her deep curiosity. “I’m sorry, what was your name again? It’s been a while?”
The Cutsman didn’t look back at her as he responded. “My name is Color-Covers-Ocean.”
“Ohhhh that’s right. I’ll be sure to remember that.” She couldn’t recall the context of his name — he’d probably never even told the story — but going off past experience, it suggested that he’d been born on one of the coasts, East or West. He’d come a long, long way to this tiny pawnshop, just to buy some loser’s glitzed-up bones.
Color-Covers-Ocean finally produced a small piece of reed-paper; it glowed emerald-green and seemed to stretch and contract. “A friend of my wife’s wove a sheet of this a while ago, and I got one of the corners.”
He flicked it lightly, and it began unfolding and refolding, slowly and erratically inching its way across the countertop. Lyra stopped it when it finally reached her. “Yeah, I’d say that’s about worth it.”
Satisfied with their trade, the Cutsman tipped his hat to Lyra and began to leave. “Oh wait, one more thing,” said Lyra. He walked back to the counter as she shakily pulled the cube from its container. “What do you make of this?”
He stared at the cube for a long moment, unblinking and unmoving, until finally he leaned down, carefully, and dragged his tongue across its top. He looked for a moment like a gang greenhorn taking his first swing of South Edge firewater, while Lyra watched the moisture instantly vanish from the cube’s face. He and Lyra looked at each other before he walked again towards the door.
“Not for me, Ms. Lyra. Till we meet again.”
-
Lyra felt sick as she walked to the subway the next evening. Her meeting was scheduled for earlier, but there was no way she could get out of bed. Whatever she drank yesterday was stronger than she thought, maybe even spiked with some herb she was allergic to, and she hadn’t had enough water, either. The festival-goers were at their peak, both in numbers and energy. They were everywhere, cavorting, joking, making off-color remarks about the city and its denizens. CUDSUM had their hands full, arresting those deemed too exuberant and setting up queue after queue. She was already late to her meeting, but surely for a product like the cube, the agent would meet with her at whatever time she showed up. She tried to think about the agent sitting patiently in his office, hungry for the cube, angry that Lyra wasn’t there but needing her to show up all the same. It worried her more and more to hold on to it — her customer last night hadn’t wanted it, and she hadn’t thought a Cutsman would ever turn his nose up at aether.
She felt the crowd begin to poke and prod at her, and while the CUDSUM officers did their best to keep the frolickers under control, it didn’t dispel Lyra’s mounting anxiety. There was no doubt in her mind that some drunkard would bump into her and send the cube flying out of its container. Then it would explode, or vanish, or everyone would go silent and stare at it, and then her, and then they would tear her to pieces. She caught herself as she almost walked into the front door of the agent’s office tower.
The way up was quiet. Few people in the lobby today, everyone presumably out enjoying themselves. The sky was calm, too; cloudier than the day before, but not storming yet. Weather changed quickly on the plains; since the aether came, Lyra didn’t think anyone bothered with prediction software anymore.
Walking out of the elevator and towards the office, there was truly nobody around, not even the secretary. Lyra stood there and waited, wanting the woman’s lilting voice to still her fevered mind, or just get it off-track, just for a moment. Having waited long enough, Lyra marched defiantly into the office, her legs still shaking as she crossed the threshold.
A man wearing a jellyfish mask sat at the agent’s desk; the glossy pink-and-blue material wrapped smoothly around his face, while a dome of the same stuff capped off his head. Long tendrils pulsing with color fell across his shoulders onto a teal tuxedo with a cherry-red bowtie. His hands were clasped on the desk, and they were covered in alternating bands of green and pink.
He spoke like he was stuck in a teacup; his voice was deep, but it reverberated, echoed around something not in the room, and was sharpened by the effect. “You’re late, Ms. Strahm.”
Lyra stood, petrified. She felt hypnotized by the pulsing lights of the mask, soothed, but sure she was about to be stuck with a stinger and drained of life a moment later.
He sat up and extended an arm. “Please, have a seat.” Lyra swayed over to the chair facing the desk.
She sat down, and the two of them stared at each other. The man did not move, but the tendrils on his mask swayed and twitched of their own accord. Lyra heard fireworks going off behind her, the crowd roaring and chanting some idiotic countdown.
Lyra finally cracked and asked the question. “Are you going to kill me?”
Jellyfish lifted his head and spoke in his tinny echo. “Are you the one who took the cube?”
After a breath, Lyra answered. “No.”
“Do you have any idea what it’s worth?”
Another breath. “No.”
Back to silence. Lyra heard a fight breaking out beneath them. As she turned to look, she caught a glimpse of the agent’s arm sticking out from behind the desk. She thought about Rob Rondolo; she hadn’t seen him since the night he brought her the cube.
Jellyfish stood up and walked in front of her. His pants were bright blue as well, but his leather shoes and belt were that glossy shade of cherry-red. “Would you like to see what it can do?”
Lyra felt her jaw chatter. He stooped, and with both hands took the box with the cube from her trembling arms. He turned to the desk, placed the cube atop it, and traced his aether-scarred fingers along its faces. Lyra watched as aether poured from the cube, billowing out in clinging, crawling fingers of pink and green. Jellyfish paced away from her, and he must’ve turned off the lights, because the room had gone pitch-black besides the aether. It was the storm from the other night, swirling lights of pure, untamed power, a life that danced through space for years upon years before they brought their jubilee to Earth. Lyra couldn’t tear her eyes from it, even as it dusted her face and she breathed it in, uncaring about the much-rumored side effects.
She wanted more, so much more, but as she began to stand up from her chair, Jellyfish appeared in front of her again. “Remember me,” he whispered to her in his ethereal whine, and swiftly pressed a finger to her forehead. Instantly, searing agony surged through Lyra’s head, down his spine, and out through her limbs and torso. It let up as he released his finger, but the damage was already done. She collapsed, paralyzed, knocking over the chair, and staring up at the aether that continued to whirl about the room. She was faintly aware of Jellyfish, who was collecting the cube and whistling to himself as he left the room; he left the lights off, but opened the shutters on the windows, and a joyful, earsplitting tune piped from his mask as he sauntered down the corridor. The crowd surged below on the streets, and Lyra felt them pulse and dance as she looked, wracked with pain, upon the mass of otherworldly light that was both above and within her.
