Unforgiving Past, Unfortunate Future [Open]

[Enkidu]

Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge

Nesrin kept her eyes down. That was the beauty of intermediate crowds - hunch, move with purpose, and you could blend Charles himself into an active bar.

What was it about spacers and acohol? Why gravitate around self-destruction? Beyond the possibility of intoxicated outreach, It was a method of sacrificing time together. The small unspoken silences that happened anywhere where the conversations blended into the whirr of human machines. The war had taken everyplace down to the margins in clientele, the cracks of almost-apocalyptia could be tasted, even here, where the lights were still coloured and the delusions of peacetime could be found under the tables if you dug far enough.



"Kaistocracy!" A man with a foot less on her yelled at the projector, to no small patter of agreement. The news. "Bunch of' toffers. Where were they when Harris fell, 'eh? Behind the lines, leading from the rear?"

She realised he was yelling at her, zeroed in the haze of steady alcohol substitutes and. An expectant search for bias confirmation. Perhaps he was trying to grandstand, out of the A-to-X misplay that it might help him get laid. He was buggering up the ambience. She took a look-over at him and had him figured for a civillian, although that wasn't evidence of anything. She'd divided herself by several degrees of separation without wearing a uniform anymore - it was a distinction that undermined her. Selectivity, Nesrin.

Nesrin wetted her lips. Drymouthed, she squeezed out of her nose, and rounded on the Loudmouth. "You'd really want a married couple with a gun? Look at their photos; They'd kill each other before they consummate."



He enjoyed that - bias confirmation. Good. She'd yanked a giggle out of him. She took opportunity to order herself a drink before he could dive in and fill the void, a dark, Tughnberry cider, sour enough to blind a highland cow, and downed it till she was swallowing air alone.

You drink and it does nothing. Look at you. All simulacra no stimulation. Thunder, no lightning, friend.

---

THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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