Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
The anthromorph squelched up the embankment like a giant pet something. It moved like an upright sloth, with long, gangly strides, sinking knee-deep at random intervals.
Pool was convinced that he would cut his bare foot on the rusting contaminated metal and glass that littered the exposed ground, or from the disgusting pools of industrial excrement filling the holes and depressions.
He could feel bits of sharp points and edges pricking his toes as he walked. Who knew how long his body hung naked in a that demonic vat.
Once, when he was on the verge of stepping onto or into a deep, rusty-bladed crevasse, the opening to a buried hulk, where he would have surely fell and been grievously cut or mangled on the skeletal bulkheads, the anthromorph stepped forward, more quickly than he would have expected given its slow galumphing up to this point, to block him from falling, grabbing his upper left arm firmly. Lifted up, almost off the mucky ground itself, Pool felt overwhelmed by the power of the thing, but also a growing trust; it was looking out for him.
The idea that the anthromorph was protecting him, was unsettling. The bronze mechanical men of the vessel he was recently shat out of, showed the barest consideration. They were observers foremost. This one was different, three centuries different, and showed concern. Still, the feeling that the concern was only to preserve him for a later violation was distinctly present. They two factions, maybe not the right word for this situation, were separated by three hundred years of technological advancement, and, based on Pool’s observations (which he would admit were very limited after an unknown duration of stupor and subsequent atmospheric intoxication) they were clearly working together. To protect him, or to deliver him to a particular purpose.
“I will need a bath, as you said, but I will also need clothing of some sort. The kind to blend in with this urban hellscape, in particular.” Pool knew that he would be heard by the lumbering thing, and knew it could speak, and therefore, presumably hear and understand.
As they climbed to the retaining wall, several meters up, the mud became firmer. Some ancient steps–oddly, Pool thought, probably from the year he left Londbridge the first time for Siberia ultimately with Nila–lichen covered ancient stone steps, lead upwards to what had been an ancient street, but now was overhung with massive pillars and beams supporting the monstrous sky-scraping things above.
He felt in his viscera, the looming mass above him, pushing aside the nearly irrelevant thought that his disgorgement on the bank would have attracted at least some attention from the locals, which he had come to understand from Nila, were very much entranced by their surveillance.
He barely notice the homunculi crawling through the old piping, little things, barely half a meter tall, wielding cutting torches and carrying bags of rattling metal. Pool assumed that like the plastic and internally glowing anthromorph, they were just another part of the cacophony of 23rd century living.
Without hearing a word spoken, nor any other audible or visual signal, the anthromorph–he assumed it was the thing, because he himself had made no signal–seemed to flag down what amounted to a future hansom cab.
The vehicle, floating in the air and about 3 meters long and two wide, which Pool had not even detected until it slowed, came to a static hover, then settled onto insect like legs (in the same manner as the car of Nila’s degenerate friend Mr Maron’s car), and a side door butterflied open, presenting them with a grubby, poorly lit interior.
The anthromorph waved its hand in a gesture, roughly modeled on servile gestures of the same sort, waving it from Pool to the gape. Pool, of course, understood the gesture having seen it hundreds or thousands of times in his day, but then presented by humans in livery and servile low-ranks trying to appease their betters.
Things never change.
Ion Fyr 