Job was sure it would be a bad day the second he woke up thinking he still had skin. Broiling hot sunlight battering in the curtains and cleaving sharp hard beams through his bedroom, drifting over piles of clothing and assorted cabinets and drawers. Fat dust motes wandering and sweat clumping to his body. Collecting and drooping in his armpits, behind his knees. Sweat. Sweat! What sweat?
He had flung the sheet from his bed and hauled himself to his feet. He immediately bashed his head against the roof, crumpled over, held himself steady, seething, on the top of his drawer. A metal clink! Like two wrenches tapping together. His room was designed for the storage of tight-packed crates of candles mined off the Wax Forests by Mars and was about as comfortable and wide as that would imply. Job was not a tight-packed crate of candles and he barely stopped groaning, swearing to himself when he stepped forwards and stubbed his toe on the tunnelgun.
Clink! Like two wrenches tapping together.
Yes. Of course. It didn’t hurt, this time. Well, it did. For a moment. And then he remembered, he had no nervous system. He spread his hand open, gazed at its blotted shape in the shadows. Blinked. Gazed.
There it is. A gleam on its side, round, running down to a joint where the fingers stick out. Dark rubber to cover the innards.
Job was not a philosophical man. He was aware of the existential dread, of course. You couldn’t not be aware of the existential dread, in his state. He had watched, once, a documentary on the nature of the human soul. It had been made, filmed, in Europa One (the city), on Europa (the moon), was narrated in the gentle, honey tones of Vaughn Stillman, native of Europa Onetwo (the township in the city). They had, in university laboratories, unfolded the skulls of apes, and found their immortal souls leaking from between folds in their brains like languid steam.
The implications, Vaughn Stillman explained to Job, were huge at the time of their discoveries. Religious groups went nuts. Atheist groups went nuts-er. The soul trade expanded beyond the purview of Satan, some spirits, and a few witches and attracted actual stock investors. Also huge was the implication thus: that, if the immortal soul arises from the brain like steam off a hot bath, as a metaphysical footprint of dreams and ideas and poems and ideologies all scribbled out in the electrical impulses between neurons, did Job, who had no brain, but rather a helpfully advanced computer, have a soul?
No, of course not. He had even had it checked by a doctor.
Yes, it was hard to ignore that kind of existential dread. Especially with all the cults and religions popping up and dissolving around him, as had been the trend since the thing with the sun. Could he even go to Hell? He wasn’t sure. But Job was a practical man, a down to earth blue-collar worker. He worked with his hands, toiled with his hands. The state of his soul – even, in fact, whether he had skin or was rather wrought of dead cold steel – was not a thing that should have been relevant to him.
It was, though. It crept up constantly on him. Slithered on his shoulders. Wandered blithely, quietly, in the back of his skull (until he recalled that he had no skull. Wandered around the circuits that were his brain now, or some such, he supposed.)
Things were difficult. When on certain mornings like this, he would awake, as if he were all meat and skin and blood. He’d feel the sweat in his pits, the heat from his ship’s frame bearing into him. And his skin–all metal and black rubber–would catch that heat, those blades of sunlight, warming his entire being, cooking his innards, ovenlike. He’d gaze at his hands and swear they’re made from the human stuff – the meat and skin and blood. And he’d see, with his own eyes, all that fidelity, sweat running over his knuckles from the valleys between his fingers. And he’d blink, and it’d be metal once more. He’d feel sudden coldness in his body, or a deep numbness, as he readjusted to having no nerves. And then, later, he’d forget. It was a dreamy feeling, slipping in and out of consciousness. The hazy tugging fog at the edges of his mind.
The actual dreams didn’t help, either–the ones that he sloughed in and out of like skins, suddenly awakening from a distant, familiar world, all his time and effort undone. Nor helped the strangeness of earth, abandoned earth, barren witch-cursed earth.
But he was certain that, or, aware that, or, maybe, it was a theory that he seemed to prefer, that had better evidence behind it, that his name was Job, that he lived in a crashed ship in a suburb in Old Sydney on earth. That his body was made from nuts and bolts and metal and such, having presumably been put together in some factory somewhere. That the human brain (or, at least, he was sure it was) imprinted in the circuitry had grown up in a suburb in Old Sydney on earth and had, presumably (this was a theory within the theory), paid some insurance company somewhere for a copy of itself and had, equally presumably, now gone off and died. And thus, Job. It wasn’t his real name, of course. Job was not a good name. It had associations. It didn’t seem fair to keep using his old name, neither was there any real point. He could have been called anything, for all anybody left on earth (that being, not many) cared. He could have been called Beach Ball Fringus, for all it mattered.
But he thought it was funny, at first. And it was apotropaic, anyway, in that sense that such an unlucky name would, ideally, turn witches, malevolent spirits, wolves, and so on, away. He hadn’t been ever attacked by wolves before, so he supposed it was working, so far.
He threw on his coat, smattered with pockets, tinkling with trinkets – a cross, a bell, a bag of various herbs, a stick of chalk, a chunk of pavement engraved with tiny men, so on. He grabbed the tunnelgun off the ground. Toyed lazily with it in his fingers, checked it for dust or dirt. The tunnelgun also had relevance to the existential dread, the dreamlike haze that seemed to hang over Job constantly. He did not know where he got the tunnelgun. He wasn’t sure if it really was his, or if he had unwittingly stolen it at some point from some wandering fairy, or if, perhaps, it had simply burst, like a fruit, into his hand one day. It wasn’t actually called a tunnelgun, of course. It was short, and fat. Blocky and black with a stumpy, thick barrel and a hefty mechanical weight to it. The barrel was wide, surprisingly so. And dark. Light never seemed to reach fully into it, and Job had never actually seen down it. It was, as far as he could tell, a Directed Matterless Inertia weapon, or a deemley. The principles it theoretically worked on were illogical. The powersource it would need, nonexistent. Its effects, improbable. The Europan Admiralty had researched into the possibility of DMLI technologies on three separate occasions and had finally concluded that they were a complete impossibility.
The tunnelgun, Job was certain, did not exist. It was convenient, anyway. He worried about it, but he didn’t complain.
He swung through the hanging metal door of his bedroom, stumbled through what was now a ‘living room.’ More dust motes, dancing in the thick squares of light through the windscreens. Raggedy chairs silhouetted, old consoles and dials and a steering wheel untouched for many years. Nailed into the walls along the sides, the lumpen shaded shapes of relics that Job had found somewhat interesting. A mask whose expression he swore changed whenever he looked at it that he had found buried in a basement. A torn sheet of paper with a five angled rectangle drawn on it that made Job’s head swim to look at it. A scale the size and shape of a spearhead taken from a sort of snake-slug-man hybrid that had ambushed Job on one particularly stressful night.
The door creaked open, and he shrunk, for a moment, from the barrelling sunlight. So bright, so burning. Bleaching the earth. Dusty tarmac, shining like the face of the moon. Dried strands of jutting weeds from potholes, edges brown. Corrugated roofs gleaming over the skyline. There were no clouds. The sky was wide and blue and heartless. Stretching, endless.
The Men Who Lived Behind the Cracks in the Pavement had already given him the commission.
‘A moth, Job, a moth,’ they had told him. Their voices were shrivelled, lizard-like. Seeping from the cracks in the pavement he communed with them from all quiet and dusty.
‘It’s been unjust, Job. Terribly unjust. Yes. Unjust.’ He had never actually seen the Men Who Lived Behind the Cracks in the Pavement. But flitting glimpses. Little flapping shadows inside those cracks, that filled him with a low dread.
‘What’s it done?’ Job asked. He didn’t need to know, of course. It wasn’t his business. And it was annoying, for the Men.
The moth had, apparently, stolen a man’s skin, had taken a series of escape vehicles, all of which it had crashed in panic, had mugged certain stores and travellers, even killing one particularly unfortunate fellow. These were all fairly bad things, Job agreed, even if he disagreed on the strange emphasis the Men kept putting on the theft of skin
‘Skin. Skin, Job, skin. To steal another’s skin. . . To wear another’s skin. Job. Injustice. Injustice. To take that very thing from you. Why, Job, were it our skin, we’d fume. We’d storm. We’d flail, Job. Skin. To steal skin, of all things. . .’ And so on they went. Job knew exactly what the man – the moth – looked like. He’d seen him, he thought, in a dream. Unless he had, in fact, actually seen him.
It was by a lamppost. Not one of the old ones, all rusted and bent over and cracking with vines – one of the new ones that have taken up to sprouting from the earth like trees. Bursting out the tarmac in flying shards, growing entire forests in some places, so he’d heard. Yes, by a lamppost – young and smooth, glass clear and see-through, and a parking space, long and flat, with pools of sand and gravel and little weeds poking upwards. A single lonely car in one corner.
Shopfronts surrounded that parking space. Squat, square buildings, red brick and white plaster and flat roofs holding signs that were colourful, at one point. They were abandoned, mostly – hulking masses of vines and dust, jagged edges of windows. Except a few, to the left. Dull and passive efforts had been taken, to preserve them for, if not a comfortable existence, at least an existence free of drowning in the rain and being bitten by bugs. Buildings clean of vines and, on their lower floors, of dust, though still somewhat rickety, leaning against each other. And, to the very left, a thick wooden sign with ‘BAR’ scrawled into it, hung over the door. To make things even more clear, a scratched stickman throwing his head back, drinking from a mug. There was a great glass window in that building that had, at one point, shown off handbags, or shoes, or something of that nature.
The window was thoroughly shattered and cleared, though the edges were still slightly rugged with glass. All that could be seen through it – nailed wooden planks. Scattered with carved-in religious and apotropaic symbols – Job recognised a cross, a crooked pentacle, the visage of a sort of carved gargoyle. Others he didn’t recognise, from local cults, Job supposed. Some of them swam, seemed to thrum with life. And, to look closer – scratches on the sides. Claw marks. Tooth marks? Small black tears. So on.
It was all bathed in sunlight of that same kind as today – a dry, shrivelling dust-heat rising from the pavements, the tarmac, the walls – a deep hard glow. And the sun itself, colossal, blinding, rays running in discs. The great spear in its gut, a black dot.
And the man – there he was. Tall and lean, bony and starved. Long legs and a thin chin and raggedy clothes – a whole sleeve torn open and flapping. Wide eyes, mouth gaping, slightly, more hastily shuffling than walking. Heading towards the bar.
Had Job seen him before? He wondered this, as he rambled in the direction of the train station. He had been there before, just a week ago. It was, as far as he could tell, the only thing that could be considered ‘civilisation’, at least in his own block. It was a dreary sort of civilisation. Slumping and quiet, unambitious and slowly disappearing. But friendly enough, or, at the very least, none of them had assaulted Job yet.
The train station encroached on Job yet. He stepped casually over a crumbling roundabout, shifted by the crumpled remains of a car, crushed by one of the shambling forms in the night that Job would rather not think about.
Pigeons, squatting on rubble, tilted sign posts, anxiously glanced at him, flitted away as he walked by. The vines entwining the fence blocking off the rails were gossiping. Thin, threadlike things, roiling in long verdant sheets.
‘Did you hear about the…’
‘Has a head like three balloons tied together…’
‘I don’t want to be rude but, well…’
Scraggly plant voices, rustling and wobbling in the small flitting wind. They noticed Job hastily. Vines don’t get very much to talk about.
‘Luis?’
‘Luis…’
‘Luis…!’
‘I heard…’
The vines giggled and Job swore they were giggling at him. He scaled the slope up, then down, to the platform, trying to ignore them.
A long slab of cracked concrete and grinning yellow dandelions in a sea of gravel. Suburbs stretching on either side of the fences as a sea of flat roofs, brick faces. Looking almost like the days before the sun was speared. But the potholes, the great cracks in the tarmac. But the emptiness. The wind howling lonely down dusty roads and alleys. But the cracked dark windows, and the chirping of birds.
It all was wretched, sinking into itself, cracked and torn. Except the monitors. There was a local cult, somewhere – or located along all the trainlines – that worshipped the monitors. Or scried with them. Or whatever they worshipped was fond of them and wanted them maintained. Some such like that. Silent, hooded figures, silhouetted in the dark mornings, dark evenings, shuffling amorphously in preparation for accursed rituals. All loaded down with electrical equipment and ragged towels, waving cheerfully at Job from a distance. He’d wave back, occasionally.
The monitors read:
SEVEN HILLS
BLACKTOWN
UNDER
FURTHER UNDER
UNDERUNDERUNDERUNDER
WHERE ARE BIRTHED MEN WITH HONEY AND CALCIUM IN THEIR EYES
It never struck Job as a very good idea to stay on the trains for any longer than a few stations. He sat on the floor and waited. He could feel eyes in the cracks in the concrete.
The trains had been cursed ever since the Halfways Company took over their management. Or, perhaps cursed wasn’t fair. That seemed superstitious, or, at least, a very bold jump to a very bold conclusion. It was a bad idea to pin everything on curses, nowadays. The trains had been–twisted? Abnormaled? Generally ‘fucked’?
Job heard that the Halfways Company trains went as far as Pluto, and then went even further. That the tracks were made from the bones of people lost in space and in the oceans, sold by devils and witches, and that they were laid by hellhounds, frothing, steaming. He heard that, if you waited long enough, the trains could take you anywhere, even to the past, or to a dream. He heard that the trains needed no fuel, and subsisted on eating the Railway Scholars that studied them, when they had learnt too much. And that you could see trapped dead in the windows, and that if you fell asleep with your face uncovered, your wandering soul would confuse your reflection for you, and get trapped, too.
The train came, creaking and clacking, groaning in agony to itself in its own secret language. Sliding to a halt. Dust puffed as it stopped – then swirled, twisted, as the doors slid open. Their innards were untouched. Tearings in the coverings on the seats, here and there. Marks, scratches on the windows, graffiti scrawled here and there, some occult, most nonsense. But clean, in a smudged, quiet kind of sense. No bugs came into the trains. No rats or pigeons.
The air was cool, cavelike in the train. Shadows gathered in the corners with litter and dust. Job felt a tear in the seams of the chair as he sat, leaned against the back of the chair, and sighed.
He fiddled his chunk of pavement between his fingers, casting his eyes down at the crude stick figures carved into it. Round heads and thin bodies and limbs – but eyes. Very distinct eyes. Oversized and elliptical, meeting Job. It was all nonsensical squiggles, Job knew. The Men Who Lived in the Cracks Beneath the Pavement certainly did not look like stick figures – Job wasn’t certain they were even humanoid in shape. Why would they? How would they? It betrayed all logic. No, certainly, they must have looked like slugs, or octopodes, more. Unless they were truly tiny. And flexible. But the eyes. Job knew that the eyes were accurate. He had seen glints in the darkness in those cracks. The little curvature, the angle upwards. So came a sensation of being watched. It was comforting. Sort of. The relationship Job had to his gods left things to be desired. They did pay him fairly well, anyway.
Trees, overgrown and ragged, twisting white branches crowned with dry hanging leaves, silvery in the sunlight, flapped by. The light through the windows flashed. Suburbia, shingled roofs shining. Branches tearing from them. Some houses – some whole streets – flattened to rubble. Strange footprints that casted strange shadows, toyed with the light in uncanny ways. The work of godlings, born out of strange dreams, stomping blindly in the night. And, in the distance, beneath the far far far blue sky, the central business district. Skyscrapers with their tops melted, like unlit candles. Angular. Glass and concrete and indistinct silhouettes flapping in the air.
The train was heading towards a tunnel. There was not, of course, a train tunnel of any kind in this area, Job knew. Certainly not on this line. He was familiar with the area – had seen plenty of maps. But a tunnel there was. Job fiddled with the pavement chunk, drew his fingers gently over the tunnelgun.
Blackness and screeching. The coiling inky darkness grasping at the windows, seeping off it, almost liquid, broken up only by little motes of light built into the walls. Job felt a fogginess. A crowdedness – a movement, involuntary. He was being gently pushed, he realised.
‘Pardon,’ he muttered, standing straight and huddling backwards. A nothingness shuffled in front of him, pressed against his shirt, crumpling it. And a bump against his arm, like an elbow. The floor tapping, rattling with nobody’s shoes. Creases in chairs folding and moving – a rumbling movement, energy. Job saw shades in the lights gliding by. A sensation of – voices? Chatter? A man with a hat, there? Is that a boy with a bike? Holding up a line of fizzling dark shapes?
And the train was bathed in light. Silence. Low clattering. Job leant on the side of his chair. Seven Hills station plunged up on him. He realised, stepping into the cutting sunlight, how hard he had been clutching the pavement chunk. And slipped it into a pocket.
The BAR was not a long trip. A small sign post forest that had sprouted from the tarmac, crashed through the doors of the neighbouring houses, all swaddled in vines and with grey-feathered noisy miners peeping from their rusty tops. It was a short jaunt through there to the car park. It looked just like it did in his dream. Or, memory. Or vision. When had he been there last? Just a week ago? Or had it been a month? Or just three days?
Edwin was leaning back on the hood of one of the abandoned cars, smoking and swinging his legs. Job waved. He waved back.
Even with so few patrons, the BAR was cramped. Sunlight dove in through the open door and a woman leaning on the table helplessly moaned and covered her eyes. The walls were painted a lumpy beige, the chairs had been scavenged, and were of all shapes and sizes. One, in the far corner, wasn’t even a chair, but a very small cabinet. The man it was supporting still clutched his mug as he dozed into the table. Only a single light was on – a burning bright white light that did not reach all the room’s edges, left them heavy and shadowed.
The place had entered a kind of metastasis. Everybody capable of leaving earth had already long left, and all who were left were the lying down, the quietly groaning nothing-folk. Quietly drinking alcohol and doing quiet rituals to quiet gods, striving to continue to, at least, not be dead.
Snap-Three-Legs Edith locked eyes immediately with Job. She was still wiping a mug. Her grip on it tightened. Her face was not unaccustomed to frowns. Everybody in this place had lots of practice with that sort of thing. Still, Job felt the frown she gave him was particularly special.
‘No. No, no. Not now. Not today,’ she said, teeth gritted.
‘Hello, Snap,’ said Job, collapsing himself into a stool and nodding at her. Job did not drink alcohol. At least, he shouldn’t. He never felt the effects of drunkenness unless he felt like he still had his liver around that day, and then things tended to spiral. And it made all the workings in his chest and throat all sticky. ‘Do you still have that pineapple thing-’
‘Not. Today,’ she hissed. Hair standing on end. She was a scraggly woman, sticklike with a sharp, jutting mouth and eyes well suited for glaring.
‘Oh. That’s a shame. Can I have-’
‘No, Job. I have the pineapple thing.’ She placed the mug onto the counter. ‘I bought a whole sack of pineapples just yesterday. I have fucking pineapples for weeks. I could drown in pineapples, where I am right now.’
‘Uh. Good to hear,’ said Job, glancing around to see whatever it was he might have accidentally knocked over and destroyed, walking in.
‘Job.’
‘Yes?’
‘Please leave.’
Job considered this for a moment. ‘Right now?’
‘I know why you’re here. I won’t have it.’ She folded her arms. ‘Every time you come here-’
‘I swear, I won’t break anything this time,’ Job said. ‘And if I do, I’ll pay it back. I swear.’
‘And all the other things?’
‘I can-’ The door clattered open and Job spun around. Long legs. A thin chin. A whole sleeve open, and flapping. The man shuffled towards the counter and froze when his eyes fell on Job. Job froze, too. He took the tunnelgun.
CRACK! CRACK!
The man flung himself aside, a flapping sleeve disintegrating into flying threads. A perfectly round hole ate through the wall. It was the size of a soccer ball. Sunlight pouring through it danced in the dust. A table collapsed – a leg had been halved. The lower half of the leg rolled sadly out from beneath.
‘I’ll pay I swear,’ Job babbled, chasing the man out the door, hearing only the edges of Snap’s furied swears.
The tunnelgun muttered and clicked to itself. It hummed, rumbled, was warm like the skin of a small mammal. The man was fast – uncannily so, considering he seemed to be more throwing his entire body forwards, rather than running. Job was catching up to him. Huffing, snapping, pressure in his legs. Warmth spreading through his body, though he lacked the nerves to feel any of it.
Job reached out – grabbed his shoulder. The skin was loose, bunched in his fingers. The man spun, leant aside – and his fist scraped the side of Job’s face. Wild, bulging eyes, mouth flapping slightly open. Fear on a face not accustomed to showing fear. Job was all hot adrenaline and sweat. He stepped ahead, swung his body forwards – felt the man’s chest slap against his fist. He stumbled back, head lolling, blank eyes gazing at nothing. Job stood, legs wide, fist closed, clutching the tunnelgun. Breathing.
The man turned and ran.
‘Ooer,’ was all Job had to reply to that. He sprinted ahead, leapt up the kerb, swung around a sprouting sign post. A shaky, wobbling, awkward target.
CRACK!
A hole appeared in the sign post, clean, round. The man fled, still. He was heading towards one of the buildings – shambling to its corner.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
A tunnel dug into the tarmac. Bricks and plaster puffed away in dust. And – a red hole formed in the man’s side. No blood. But flakes, and more dust. Job aimed again.
CRACK!
Another hole, in the chest. It always came down to this part, eventually. Job was all boiling activity, fleeting impulse. It always came down to this.
The man stopped. He stood still. Lolling. His torn clothes flapped. No blood, still. Dried flakes, dry chunks of skin. He was – shuffling around? His shoulders, slowly rolling. Wrinkles grew on his neck. He was – shrinking? Crumpling in on himself. And he collapsed to the floor, empty wrinkled skin.
And a moth – a small brown flapping dot, scurrying in the air – emerged.
Job aimed the tunnelgun. Always, it came down to this.
CRACK!
It tumbled from the air, scattered dust and a single wing.
It was, Job supposed, a good day. He did end up banned from BAR. And he still felt rubbish, somewhat, about riddling the moth with holes. It was a guttural thing. The moth was a criminal, after all. And he couldn’t judge the motives of the moth–whether it needed that skin, say, to reunite with its distant orphanage-running family, or if it intended to involve itself in unlicenced soul-trade under a new identity. It was an unpleasant image, either way. To riddle holes in a person like that. It wasn’t something you should do to other people.
He was not sure what the moth’s religious beliefs were. The Men Who Lived Behind the Cracks in the Pavement, if they knew, did not care to tell Job. They were testy, and quiet. He, as such, made an assumption–never a good thing to do–and burnt the moth’s one wing into tiny ashes, scattered it into a lamp he had found in the back of his ship, and kept it lit the whole night. To keep the hungry spirits away from its ashes and soul, of course, until they grew tired and gave up.
It was perhaps an offensive stereotype, to assume the moth had been a Lamppist. Job had tried his hardest. If he found himself being haunted by a very tiny flapping ghost, he would know he had done the wrong thing.
It was, all around, a good day. Objectively speaking. In accordance to estimates taken of successes versus losses. He supposed.
The trainride home had been uneventful, except for the skeleton in the far seat at the end of the carriage. And the man with teeth like shattered glass. Or – had one been the other? It was all blending together, now, already. They had been in the same seat, that was certain. The seat was absolute concrete in his mind and he was more sure of it than he was of his very own being. So it had to have been one or the other. Unless they had swapped places. Or were one in the same – yet the skeleton was not particularly mannish, and neither was the man with teeth like shattered glass particularly skeletal.
He was muscular, in fact. A thickness in his whole body so he might have been built from lead pipes. And he was huge – far taller than the skeleton would have been, standing. His head scraped the ceiling of the train and he gazed gently over the carriage at Job, on the other side. His face was monolithic. To think it had been naturally born was absurd – that the actions of thrumming mitochondria, randomness in chromosomes interlocking, that the movements of cells in the body could create a face like that. His face had been sculpted. It was angelic. He smiled, naturally. Like he was thinking of a decent joke. Job recalled, eventually, locking eyes with him. And he winked. And spread his gums wide. Teeth, like shattered glass. Refracting the sliding squares of orange evening sunlight.
It was bad luck, to be alone in a carriage with someone else. It was worse luck to lock eyes with someone. Strange people boarded the Halfways Company trains. And they picked up strange things.
Had Job met him? What about the bones in that carriage? Had the man arisen, like a genie, from the bones? Perhaps Job were thinking of two separate train rides. One with the skeleton, one without. Perhaps he had imagined both.
What had the man said to him?
He trundled over the roundabout and birdsong swirled around him. It was dusk and all the landscape was going a dark black except for vignettes of bright colour around the lampposts, and except for the sky. Bands of purple and pink and yellow. And the edges of clouds, red, twisting like flames.
He had said: what? Nothing much. Nothing worth dwelling on. The kind of thing any odd stranger might mutter on a train. Job spun around, glanced at the train station. A blocky black blob, stretching across the street.
When he arrived home, his gods had abandoned him.
Meat Girls Dot Org 