SIXTY-SIX: Pinball

On his fourth night in the intake dorms, Alden’s eyes snapped open at 3 AM. He barely resisted the urge to scream and throw his comfortable pillow across the room like an angry child.

He was tired. But not tired enough to ignore it anymore.

He was beginning to see that this was going to be a chronic problem, not something that he could just shake off. He felt almost as bad as he had the first day, only now his brain was slightly less busy with the ten thousand things it had been juggling since he came back home. And it had enough bandwidth to dig and dig at the one thing he was desperately trying to ignore.

He reached up to touch the auriad around his neck. He couldn’t use it right now. He couldn’t even bring himself to try, in the same way he couldn’t bring himself to press his hand against a hot stove without some dire need driving him. But he still liked the thing so much.

“I think it’s a little alien of me,” he said to the ceiling.

He pulled up the System page that showed his leave. He had around eight months completely off. Six for mental health time. Two for other reasons. It really said that—other reasons.

The therapist had asked Alden about it, and he’d told her he had no idea.

She’d shrugged it off as some Artonan oddity.

Alden guessed it was. Needing recovery time from getting an upgrade wasn’t going to make sense to another human. He was hoping for a steady improvement over the course of the two-month timeframe, and not this same low-level existential torture for the whole period followed by a sudden moment of acceptance.

Hey. Maybe acceptance was the key.

“I accept you,” he said dramatically to his own bound power. “I accept you in all your mutilated glory. We can do really cool shit together. Probably. If we could just calm down and stop feeling so confined and re-arranged and upset about it, maybe we could focus on the positives.”

It didn’t help.

Whatever.

He had like a billion messages to answer anyway. He propped himself up on his pillows and set the television to stream global music videos. He ran through emails and voicemails one after the other, trying to figure out how to arrange his contact priorities with the System in exactly the right way so that he got all the important stuff and everything else got dumped into the “Deal With it Eventually” file.

Connie, Boe, Jeremy, and Kibby were his high priority personals.

Cly Zhao, too, since she’d asked. He sent her a message thanking her for whatever she’d done to smooth out his return. The security people being pre-informed that he was coming in did seem to have helped a little, and getting to spend a day and a half with Connie without figuring out the paperwork himself first was great.

She’d also sent him an unexpected email about the Manon situation.

Apparently Jeremy and Boe had told her about that in case the other Rabbit had done something to him and was the reason he was missing. She explained that she hadn’t had anyone look into Manon because it wasn’t something that could be done legally unless Alden officially told the Anesidoran authorities himself that he’d seen or felt her using some form of mind control.

She also indicated that while many people might believe him, he would have to provide convincing proof of some kind for actual action to be taken.

“People are panicky about Sways,” she wrote. “So they’ll take you seriously. But at the same time, people are panicky about Sways, so someone basically has to commit a crime in full view of the public before the authorities can legally force them to undergo survey by a reader type.”

She added that she really didn’t advise him to have his own mind read in an attempt to provide proof of a subtle event that had happened half a year before.

As if that was something Alden might actually be thinking of trying.

I guess I’ll figure out what, if anything, I want to do on my own.

The whole idea of taking a swing at that particular hornet nest left him feeling exhausted. Maybe Thwart Hog had been right months ago, and not everything was his problem to solve. He could always just tell Manon’s boater that she was manipulating them with her skill and let them save themselves. They were adults. They weren’t stupid. They knew how to ask a Sway or a Mind Healer for help, too, didn’t they?

He looked back at his high priority category. Official messages from his new home country went there, too. Not because Alden had to keep them there, though. The System would let him dump them just like they were from total randos. But they’d sent half a dozen Welcome to the Island text and voice messages that basically all started with different versions of, DO NOT DUMP US IN THE PILE WITH THE TOTAL RANDOS!!

I am such a good citizen, he thought as he read through one of his welcome packets.

It was actually all important information. There was an entire America-to-Anesidora legal guide to help him get used to differences in the laws. He had to give it permission to show him pop-ups if he was about to do something forbidden, but it didn’t seem like it would be too much of a problem.

Anesidora was less restrictive in some ways and more in others, but it was mostly pretty common sense when you thought about the reasons for it. Speech was free, but you couldn’t have a protest or large assembly in a public space without permits. Because those spaces were more limited in number here, and a small but significant percentage of the population were dangerous and difficult to handle if tempers flared.

Power use was as legal as it could reasonably be in most places. Basically if you weren’t hurting and/or inconveniencing people or destroying things, you could do it. There was a sliding scale of tolerance for mishaps. The more powerful you were, the less leeway you had in F-city.

And there were a couple of districts where even a whiff of potentially offensive spell or skill use would land you in jail for a decade or more…assuming a summons didn’t bust you out before you’d served your time. Those were the family-friendly areas—big residential zones that also held the elementary and middle schools for the island-born kids.

Those were supposed to be totally safe spaces, and when Alden looked it up out of curiosity, he saw that those neighborhoods were some of the most expensive to live in on the whole island.

Gambling was legal. There was a long list of genetic modifications that were, too. Designer babies were still controversial and illegal in much of the world, but here on Anesidora they were so common that they might outnumber purely organic births in the next couple of decades.

Most of the adults here were already modified from the human norm. So there wasn’t much popular support for the argument that creating smarter, stronger children through science was unethical.

Alcohol was illegal. Very illegal.

Nobody wanted drunk people knocking the tops off skyscrapers.

The list of drugs that were illegal was extremely long, too. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of names on it were unrecognizable Artonan words. Alden’s experience must not have been unique. Wizards really did like doling out pills, shots, and potions, and the island was engaged in a constant struggle to make people hand the things over when they returned home.

Voluntarily doing so was your duty. Also, they would reimburse you. Please, don’t feed other people whatever the Artonans have been feeding you while you’ve been away.

Alden opened the top drawer of his nightstand and glanced at the contents.

He still had his chaos-damaged ryeh-b’t model, his lucky wizard’s foot encased in putty, and one piece of sensory sharing gum. He’d honestly just forgotten the gum was sitting in one of the lab coat’s inner pockets for ages. Of course he hadn’t even considered eating a party drug of unknown quality while he was on Moon Thegund. He wondered if the chaos had damaged them or if they’d been bad for humans to start with, because Rrorro had thrown them all away except for the one piece.

Jel-nor’s. Of course.

His eyes fell on the putty, and he added Stu-art’h to his priority contacts list, too. He had told the Primary’s son to call for internet guidance after all.

He had a single, uncomfortably warm letter from Aulia Velra herself welcoming him to Anesidora, telling him she was ever so happy to know he’d survived his dreadful ordeal, and letting him know that she would be delighted to make his acquaintance sometime now that they were neighbors.

It was inoffensive. But too friendly. And how did she already know he was here now, anyway?

He wanted to say nothing. But he decided that completely ignoring the offer of advice and friendship from someone who’d given you five million dollars was probably more noteworthy than responding to it. And he was trying to be un-noteworthy.

What’s the most boring thing I could write back? he asked himself.

He went with a short, professional email that basically said, “Thank you. I’ll let you know if I need help, but for now, I’m just enjoying a quiet life in intake.”

Feeling organized, more informed, and successful, Alden checked the time…and he groaned when he realized he’d only been working for a little over an hour.

What was he supposed to do with himself at four o’clock in the morning?

In the end, he got out of bed and went to play with the pinball machine.

He’d barely touched one until this week, but he’d completely crushed his aunt at it before she headed back home. Along with fourteen of the fifteen people on the high scores board. He now had abnormally fast hands in addition to the slightly enhanced visual processing. Pinball was his game.

Feels pretty great.

Enjoying the small stat enhancements he’d received, at least, came with no additional pain. He’d need to ask her why that was if they met again. He thought the most likely explanation was that the pain was there, but the stats were a passively engaged part of the affixation, rather than something that had to be actively used. So there was no change in output or increase in suffering for him to detect.

Or maybe it was something weirder, like how Gorgon’s people had destroyed authority to create an effect. Maybe it had been turned into something like an enchantment that coated Alden’s being. Maybe it was just gone, and Alden had faster fingers in its place.

I don’t think that last one’s right.

He chased down the high scorer while he considered a final possible addition to his high priority list. It was a strange one. He thought it was maybe even a little crazy.

But he wanted to.

So.

He took the auriad from around his neck and switched it to a spot high up on his left arm. It still had its obliging habit of sticking a little bit where he wanted it to, so it stayed in place well enough. And it was fully covered by the sleeve of the t-shirt he was wearing.

He preferred it around his neck and wrists, but it had a tendency to peek out of collars that weren’t high enough and sleeves that weren’t long enough. He either needed to start wearing turtlenecks on the regular like some kind of wizard fanboy or come up with another comfortable way to conceal it.

This would do for now.

“Call Worli Ro-den. Video or audio is fine.”

********

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The call connected. Joe had picked audio.

The professor had a preference for no video. Alden had made note of it previously. He wondered if it was because Joe was used to talking to people from locations where he had sketchy stuff going on.

There was a long silence before either of them spoke.

Finally, Joe broke it. “Do you know what time it is here?”

“I don’t,” said Alden, sending one of the silver balls shooting toward a ramp. “I assumed you wouldn’t answer if you didn’t want to. Hello from Earth.”

“Your Artonan is quite good now.”

“I had a lot of time to practice.”

Another long pause.

“What did you call for?”

“How do I send space mail to the Quaternary? Because I asked the System, and it was unhelpful.”

“Space mail. To the Quaternary.”