Chapter 50: Ten Cubic Metres
Chapter 50: Ten Cubic Metres
The fiftieth was a girl of about nineteen who came through the arch at a dead sprint, went four metres, and folded onto the floor sobbing.
Then the opening went white and stopped being an opening, and the noise from outside cut off as though a hand had been laid over it, and fifty of us were sealed inside a pale dome with a timer in the corner of our eyes.
Nobody said anything for a while. That was the strangest part. Fifty people who had just done something desperate in order to be there, standing in a bright quiet room, deliberately not making eye contact.
I used the silence to look at what I’d bought myself.
The dome was one open space maybe forty metres across, lit from nowhere in particular, with a floor that was warm and slightly soft. Along the northern curve stood a row of six terminals, waist-high, blank-faced. Beside them was a long wall of shelved alcoves behind a transparent barrier—the vending stock, physically visible. I appreciated that for exactly ten seconds. Then I saw the list above it.
Everything in that list was shared. Fifty people, one inventory, first come first served, and every single one of us could read the quantities.
The rest of the floor was empty space to sit in. There was water from a spigot in the wall and it never ran out, which is the single kindest mechanic I have encountered since the Merge.
No names floated over anyone. That part of the enforcement remained dormant until someone broke the rule.
I remembered it the way you remember a road sign: attack another entrant inside the boundary, your identity marker turns red, and the shelter kills you. In the game it had been an anti-griefing measure and people used to test it for laughs on new servers.
It did not make violence physically impossible. It made the first deliberate attack suicidal.
Nobody was laughing here. What I watched, over the next hour, was fifty people being extremely careful with their elbows.
It didn’t make anyone friendly. It just moved the competition sideways.
The rush at the terminals started once someone worked up the nerve to touch one, and after that it was forty minutes of pushing that never quite became pushing. People held cores in closed fists. A man in a hunting jacket did his whole exchange with his back to the room and his shoulders up around his ears. The group of eight — the ones from the wreckage, who’d come in together and stayed together — did the exact opposite, and bought loudly, and held their purchases up so everyone could see, which I understood perfectly. They were saying there are eight of us and we will still be eight of us in twenty-four hours.
Most people had two or three low cores. Level 2, Level 3. They bought a day’s rations and a water pouch and a strip of painkillers, and some of them looked at the expensive end of the list for a while before they bought bandages.
I stood at the back and read the list and did arithmetic.
I did not go anywhere near a terminal.
There was a grapefruit-sized rock in my pack that I was fairly sure was worth more than everything the other forty-nine people in that room were carrying combined, and the fastest way to die eight hours after the shelter expired was to let anybody in it watch me convert that.
Wait. Let the stock thin. Lose something if you have to.
The woman from the wreckage found me around midday, which I hadn’t expected.
She was maybe forty, with a bad haircut she’d clearly done herself, and she sat down about two metres away with her back to the same section of wall and didn’t look at me.
"That shot came from the south," she said.
I didn’t answer.
"I’m not asking. I’m just saying I was looking south when it happened, and there wasn’t anybody south." She turned her water pouch over in her hands. "Dean thinks it was a sniper on the retail roof. Dean thinks a lot of things. He’s been telling people for an hour that he pulled us all through, which — well." A shrug. "He was flat in the water next to me the whole time, so."
"Is he in here?"
"No."
That landed harder than I expected and I didn’t have anything to put after it.
"Anyway," she said, after a while. "I’m not going to say it to anyone. I’d just rather know which kind of person is sitting next to me, and I’ve decided you’re the kind that plans." She got up, slowly, like her knees hurt. "Don’t take that as a compliment. There’s four people in here I’d trust more and they’re all asleep."
She went and sat somewhere else, and never spoke to me again, and I thought about that conversation on and off for the rest of the day.
Then I did the single most valuable thing available to me, which was sleep.
The rule did not guarantee that theft counted as an attack, and I was not interested in finding out after I woke without the boss core. I put the pack beneath my head, threaded both straps around my arms, and wedged the core in the centre where moving it would lift my neck. The rifle sling stayed across my chest, with one wrist looped through it. Anyone could still touch me. Nobody could remove anything important without waking me first, and anyone who tried to hurt me afterward would die with a red mark above them.
I had cultivated during the night, raced five kilometres, crawled through a storm drain, and crossed eighty metres of flooded wreckage. By any honest measure, I was finished.
I slept for most of eleven hours.
Nobody touched me.
I woke a little after eleven at night into a dome full of sleeping strangers, and I lay still for twenty minutes watching the terminals with my eyes half shut.
Empty. The stock list had gone thin in the cheap categories and the expensive end hadn’t moved at all.
The item was still there. Third from the bottom.
Low-Grade Spatial Ring. Interior capacity: 10 m³. Quantity: 1.
I got up quietly, walked over as though I were going to the water spigot, and put myself in front of the far-left terminal with my back to the room and my shoulders doing what the man in the hunting jacket’s shoulders had done.
Then I took a grapefruit out of my pack and placed it in the recessed tray. The terminal swallowed it without ceremony.
[Level 15 Ash Ogre Core exchanged.]
[Eternal Coins acquired: 12,500]
[Eternal Coin Balance: 12,500]
The number made me put one hand on the counter.
I did not sit with the feeling. I selected the ring in the next ten seconds, before anything could happen to me or to it.
[Low-Grade Spatial Ring purchased.]
[Cost: 12,000 Eternal Coins]
[Eternal Coin Balance: 500]
The alcove behind the barrier opened and a plain band of dull grey metal rolled out into the tray. No inscription, no glow, nothing to look at. I put it on my right hand under my sleeve and stood there for a moment with my heart going.
It took me a while to find the trick of it. It isn’t a command or a word; it’s closer to the way you decide to open your hand. I sat down against the far wall with my pack in my lap like a man going through his things, and one item at a time, under the fabric, my belongings stopped being in the bag.
Spare magazines. Boxed ammunition. Water. Food. The pot. The cord, the tape, the notebook, the dead grey core I’d kept for no reason. Ten cubic metres, and I filled perhaps a fortieth of it, and my pack went from heavy to nearly empty.
Its description prohibited living organisms. It did not stop time or hum or bind to my soul. It was a bag on my finger.
A bag on my finger, I thought, that nobody can see by looking at me, nobody can take off my back, and nobody knows to search my hand for.
Ten minutes before midnight, somebody at the terminals said, "Wait — where’d the ring go?" A small argument started about whether it had ever been there. Someone said the rich group of eight must have bought it, and the group of eight denied it loudly enough that half the dome heard, which only convinced people.
Nobody looked at me. Why would they? I was the thin, filthy one who had spent the day asleep against the wall and now had a nearly empty bag.
I lay there with the shelter timer running in the corner of my vision and understood something I hadn’t quite let myself think in ten days.
Most of what I needed to stay alive now travelled invisibly on one hand. I could walk into a settlement looking almost empty-handed. Someone could take the bag from my back and never realize they had missed the part that mattered.
For the first time since the world ended, I was not carrying my life on my back where people could see it.