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
Pool’s breather was uncomfortable and scratched against his stubbled cheeks. The seal wasn’t a good one either. He could still smell the polluted air coming in around the edges where the mask rested awkwardly on his cheekbones. He could already feel sweat under it.
The outside under an actual visible sky still had a haze about it that made the street level thoroughfare faintly orange. There were still living trees along the ground, just one level down, jutting up so the drooping fronds of the palm trees were level with the heads of the people on this level.
Ancient buildings, looking like they were from even before his time lined the lower street. Some looked like the kind of tropical settlement warehouses, with high ceilings and porticos to shed the rain and sun; others were distinctly Asian, upturned corners and glass replacing the paper walls he had seen in the Londbridge Museum a few times.
The crowd was different as well. Asiatic faces, behind mask and breathers of their own, bustled past him.
Pool could tell he was still in the horrid future. The sky-scraping spires were here, too, shooting upwards towards the sickly sun, now at about eleven o’clock.
“Philoctetes, what language do they speak here? I, regretfully, know not a word of Sinese.”
“You can get by with your own language. I am certain of it. Most of the population is educated and Brethmanic still remains one of the most common throughout the World.”
They came to a stand-alone kiosk, sitting on four segmented pylons at angles from its corners. There was a glass case (or looked like glass to Pool) facing outward on one side. Food items were laid out within the case, each on a rotating plate, well lit and inviting.
A man with white hair and an enviable mustache stood, or sat on a tall stool, Pool corrected, within, himself looking back through a similar glass wall.
A round grate blurted out something in Sinese, then in Sinti, then finally in Brethmanic, “What will you have, brother?”
Pool looked at him behind the glass, then back to the profered items.
He pointed to something that looked like a perogi.
The man inside stared impatiently while nothing happend.
A group of customers was growing behind him, mumbling impatiently as well.
“Your hand, sir. You must pay for the meal,” Philoctetes instructed helpfully.
Pool understood and held his hand up as boldly and naturally as he could manage, though he barely understood the process.
After a beep and a thud, a slot between the case and the window holding the man opened, revealing foil wrapped oblong.
Pool hesitantly retreived it from the slot as the man called out what he imagined was “next!”
The food turned out to be a dumpling, barely warmer than the street-level air. He could not wait for the clean air of a shelter; he was famished. He pealed back the foil, which had a texture more like the raincoat he had borrowed from Nila, than the tin of his century (though street food would have been wrapped in yesterday’s broadsheet, not foil.
Even under the stench of the air without his breather, it smelled foreign, like cumin-rich curry, but when he bit into it it had such spice as to burn his mouth even more. He thought he had been poisoned at first. Tears came to his eyes and even more sweat beaded on his temples.
“Oh, gods!” He uttered, trying to keep the food in his mouth.
Even without the burning hellscape within his mouth, fizzing yellow chunks of who-knows-what, Pool was having trouble. The air was tight around his throat, in his throat.
He tried to choke down the remaining half. It looked up at him, laughing in a language he didn’t understand. He forced himself to swallow what was remaining in his mouth. He really wanted a pint of bitter. He wanted his mustache back.
“Philoctetes,” he asked, almost frothing at the mouth, yellow curry foam rabidly pouring out, “Is there food here, that I am able to eat, with my delicate culinary tract?”
The response, which Philoctetes had, like a robotic philosophist, had physcially positioned himself for, was about to speak, putting his foot on an adjoing bench to the table where Pool had collapsed from heat and spice. “Sir,…I…”
The punctuation of the explosion was enough to silence Philoctetes. They both looked in the direction of the blast. Some low, toxic mist shrouded building, lost in the haze, had exploded sending upwards a fireball half as wide as the city–or so Pool calculated.
Pool carefully rewrapped the remaining dumping-thing. It ended about the size of a cricket ball, smaller than a grapefruit, larger than a lemon.
The foil clung to itself, even forging a seal along the outlying edges, but it could not seal out Pools disguist with it. It was not even chicken.
The ball of dumpling fell like a leaden cannonball. Pool had not aimed it, but with his extraordinary luck, he managed to dunk it into the waiting oriface of a garbage bin.
Within seconds of the plume of smoke, grating alarms reverberated throughout the public spaces.
“What is this, now? This place is so very loud!”
“Fret not,” speaking like Pool’s grandmother. “The source of the explosion has both given us a cover, and also distracted the pan…”
“What!?” Pool’s head rang every time the screech came.
“Stop. Philoctetes. Please, stop. We both heard it. I saw the explosion….”
“They are coming…take off your breather, Mr Pool.”
Pool had to admit, albeit, at a later point, that Philoctetes was correct in this instance.
Three or four dozens of armed, masked (mostly) men stomped out of some alleyway orriface. They had masks. They all demanded in concert with the disembodied voices that they all unmask.
That itself was not an issue.
“Look there,” demanded Masked Ruffian 1.
When Pool only asked where the ruffian struck him.
Pool squinted at the sky were the ruffian was pointing. He saw nothing, but nodded just the same.
“Good. Next!”
Pool, now standing to the side out of the way of the crunch of people in line, looked down at the tepid dumpling. It was oozing yellow goo down the side of the wrapper. The drip neared his thumb.
He took another bite of the thing. He still was unable to guess the ingredients of the substance within. It was still dizzingly spicey: curried something for sure, but the tiny cubes within were of unknown provenance, though he suspected the round objects might be some sort of maize.
He coughed with the final bite, chewing it as quickly as he could to get it away from his tongue. “Next time, Philoctetes, my friend, let’s have something more mundane…and more of something that could be found in a zoological textbook. I don’t know what that was that I just ate.”
“Absolutely, Mr Pool,”
Pool looked at Philoctetes for a moment. He felt he was talking to a person, but to look at him…it…was strange. Strange, but not unfamiliar. He couldn’t place it. Maybe the mechanical blokes had more to them than he thought or that he remembered.
Pool only barely remembered waking on the submersable ship. He had only seen out the portholes within his vantage, but he had no memory of how long he had been in that tank.
He next to no memory of his captors. He only saw one at a time. Perhaps there was only one…No they differed slightly.
Philoctetes did not draw attention from passers-by. With this fact, Pool reasoned that these anthromorphs, as Nila calls them, were common enough here to not warrant any undue attention. That being said, or thought, he did not see any on the street where they stood.
“Is there a rubbish bin? I don’t see any.” Pool said holding up the wrapper, foil, whatever it was. He crumpled it further in his hands, now hopelessly sticky. He had nothing to clean his hands with.
“If you leave it here, or throw it down, someone will soon repurpose it.”
“You mean toss it as litter?” Pool found that prospect objectionable, so put the crumpled ball in his (Nila’s) pocket.
“A room has been arranged here for you to rest and wait. It will be several days.”
“What will be several days?”
Philoctetes didn’t answer. That was something that struck Pool as odd.
From descriptions, and his few limited observations, Pool had assumed that the anthromorphs were either obedient servants with a range of capabilities like the slaves of the ancient Romans–some could be tutors of elite children, while others toiled in the mines until they died–or, they were aggressive, singly-focused agents of combat and death.
He had built this understanding, however inadequate on his few observations and more numerous discussions with Nila, and Etelka (who herself was fascinated by the what she called semantic engines, a term Pool prefered to Nila’s anthromorphs, which to him sounded like something a man had been transformed into). Etelka, once she had learned of the creatures–in the most literal sense of having been created–held the opinion, one which Pool felt he also held, that the creatures were equivalent to a person, so much as they shared capabilities and intellect.
Philoctetes in his mind, therefore, fell into the category of a Roman elite slave, his tutor in this alien world. His new friend was even less alien to him than the man in the box that served up that wretched dumpling.
Pool found himself looking down at the people on the lower street. He had put his breather back up but his own breath itself required a breather after that meal. There were more of them down there: that one is a pickpocket.
Stiffling the bile, Pool looked back to Philoctetes. “Lead the way, my good man. I need a bath and something to cleanse my mouth with. Is there a pub nearby. I could use a pint as well.”
Ion Fyr 