Chương 15: The Roommate

Most think it is mere sentiment that keeps powerful individuals away from Earth. While that may be true for some, what explains why each planet has a handful of people at a certain grade, with everyone else below and no one above? There are rational reasons, yes - but there are always a few who care nothing for sentiment or rationale. Only one thing keeps those people from breaking the order. Fear. Not of the Task Force.

There are beings out there that make both the Task Force and us reluctant to draw their attention. - From the memoirs of Hilda Strongnose, Second Universal Leader of the Freeks Kara came down the stairs, nodded to the receptionist - who looked as if they were trying to work out whether a masked stranger nodding at them was a social norm they had somehow missed - and stepped outside into the University. He knew where his room was. He had the map.

He also had, for the first time since waking up in a tree with a macaque on his chest, nowhere urgent to be and nothing immediately trying to kill or apprehend him, and he decided that both of these things deserved to be used. He explored. The main gate was larger than the one he had entered through, which he hadn't thought was possible and which turned out to be.

To its right was a stable that held the kind of animals he had expected - horses and antelope in various configurations, including unicorns and bicorns that were common enough in cities to have lost most of their novelty. He also suspected there were other kinds of interesting animals elsewhere, in sections the map marked as restricted. He made a note of those sections. Three years surrounded by creatures that had no business existing had left him with strong opinions about what interesting actually meant.

The Management Institute was across a well-maintained lane to his right - a coral that communicated prestige without announcing it, populated by people in formal wear who moved as though they had somewhere to be yesterday. One of them caught him staring. He looked away, quickening his pace. The Library appeared on his left after the Council building - large and quiet, a place that asked to be visited at the right moment rather than the convenient one. He was tempted, but he registered the pull and kept walking.

The light was already moving toward evening and he wanted to find his room before dark. Then the pyramid stopped him anyway. He had known it was there from the map. He had not known that knowing it was there and actually seeing it were two entirely different things.

The School of Thermodynamics was a pyramid-shaped coral in deep orange, and it should not have worked as architecture but it absolutely did, every angle precise, the whole structure sitting in the ambient light reflecting a perfect amalgamation of beauty and function. He stared at it for a moment that stretched comfortably past a moment, then kept walking. The security quarters to his right.

The School of Lifesciences ahead, entrance barred - he looked at the closed gate and felt three years of stored interest pressing at it. All that time learning the names of creatures from other planets, with nowhere yet to put what he had learned. Someday. And then, past it, to his left - the lake. He stopped. It was quaint. A freshwater lake sitting under an ocean, inside a city, under a series of bubble domes that had no business containing it, and somehow it sat there as naturally as if it had always been here.

The fading light came down through layers - through the ocean above, through the city's bubble system, each layer distorting it slightly - until what arrived at the surface was, simply, mesmerising. He found a spot at the fence and stood there. Gradually, everything else started fading into the background.

He was simply watching the water, lapping quietly, the ambient light dancing on the surface, and somewhere in the middle of that the noise that had been running in him since he arrived in this city - since the boat, since the merfolk, since the receptionist's sad certainty about his brother's guilt - went quiet. There were fish moving below the surface, their shapes softened by the strange light. An occasional bird crossed low over the water, barely disturbing it.

People were at the fence on either side of him, some talking softly, most simply there just like him, basking in the serenity. He stopped thinking. He was not sure how long that lasted. Long enough that his arms had found the fence rail without him deciding to put them there. Long enough that the light had moved. That was what finally brought him back. The light changed.

The quality of it shifted first, the angle that had been making the water luminous tilting away as the sun moved past whatever geometry allowed it to reach here at all. For a moment the water went ordinary, just water, reflective and still. Then something else arrived in its place. The corals began to glow.

It happened across the whole University simultaneously, or near enough that the difference was imperceptible - blues and greens and deep oranges and a white that was almost silver, each coral finding its own frequency, the whole space transforming out of impressive daylight architecture into something he could not find words for. The pyramid to the south was pulsing orange from within, light moving across its surface in slow waves. The spiral coral to the north was cycling through greens.

The lake caught all of it and distributed it in the water, and the fence was now lined with people who had either gathered for this or had simply not left. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Kara looked at it and felt, clearly and without ceremony, that he was in the right place. Not necessarily for the right reasons. The reasons were complicated and he most definitely had ulterior motives for being here.

But it was the right place, right now, and that was enough. He pulled himself away before the feeling could make any promises it couldn't keep, and went to find his room. He took the long way, partly because the map suggested there was more to see and partly because the glowing corals at night made the long way feel like the right way.

He crossed back past the pyramid, which up close in the dark was extraordinary in a way the daylight version had not quite achieved - the pulsing light organic rather than mechanical, like breathing, the whole structure suggesting something alive inside it that was simply choosing not to make too much of itself. He kept moving.

The club and cafeteria appeared to his right, beside the lake, the source of a music that was somehow both loud and contained - he could feel the bass more than he could hear it, which was a neat trick. A mystery for another day. The waterway surprised him when he reached it - running east to west through the University, a full channel wide enough to be taken seriously, with a bridge ahead and, on either side of the bridge, disciplinary committee members and their gorilla partners.

He had not quite processed where he was on the map and the sight of them landed before the context did, producing a brief spike that his Safe Haven skill smoothed out before it could become anything visible. One of them looked at him. The gorilla partner looked at him slightly longer.

Kara walked at a pace that communicated someone going somewhere, not someone going quickly away from something, which were rhythmically similar but texturally distinct, and he had three years of practice at moving through spaces that contained things that could hurt him if he drew the wrong kind of attention. He crossed the bridge without incident, resisted the urge to look back until he was well clear, and exhaled. His nerves, he told himself. A long day. He was not used to cities.

On the other side of the bridge was the student residential quarters, and the difference from the rest of the University was immediate. Everyone wore masks. Most had animal partners. There were people doing things in the streets and on the waterways that ranged from the athletic to the musical to the entirely inexplicable, and the energy of it was what happened when several hundred people were given a contained space and enough freedom and decided to make full use of both.

He stood at the bridge's edge for slightly too long taking it in, until someone walked into him in passing and he stepped aside and consulted the map and kept moving. Past the treatment plants - waste to energy, critical, efficient - and a coral shaped, improbably, like the letter K, and then he was at his destination: an off-white L-shaped coral with a waterway running in front of it.

He crossed the small bridge to the entrance carefully, checking the water on both sides after something leaped out of it and cleared the bridge in a clean arc. A dolphin. He was startled for the half-second before he identified it, and he was reasonably confident it didn't show. A sound from the entrance, briefly, like someone pulling back. He didn't investigate. Inside was an elevator he didn't take and stairs he did, up to the sixth level, first door on the right.

He stood outside and waited while his interface connected to the door. The door informed him that the room had one current occupant. Twin sharing. He hadn't thought about that. He waited. After a short pause - enough time for the occupant to receive the notification and decide what to do with it - the door opened. His new roommate was tall and willowy, wearing a mask with an elegant pair of frames around the eyeholes and digital patterns across its surface that managed to be visually interesting without being loud.

The room behind him was organised in a way that suggested organisation was less something he did and more something he was - the table clear except for one device Kara didn't recognise, the bed squared, the bag on the floor set down as though it had an assigned spot.

"Hi. Roommate, I'm guessing. Come on in."

"Yeah. Thanks." Kara stepped inside. The unoccupied half of the room was a mirror of the occupied half in structure, blank in use. He set his bag down beside the table. His roommate glanced at it briefly - one bag, nothing else - logging it as a data point rather than a judgement.

"Travelling light. Does that connect to why you're a week late, or is that something you can't get into?"

"Kind of. Yeah."

"Fair enough." No further push. Kara appreciated that more than he said. They talked for a while. His roommate's father held a senior position at an IT major; he had grown up around the work and absorbed it the way some people absorbed languages. He asked questions that were direct without being intrusive, and listened closely to the answers. He did not seem the type to ask about things he didn't care for. Then the football came up, and the conversation changed register entirely. Mercury League.

Chestfire Football Club. They both followed Chestfire, which was either coincidence or the University's room allocation system had a sense of humour, and the next twenty minutes were the most uncomplicated Kara had spent since he woke up in a tree.

They talked about the last season and the season before and the one player who had been infuriating and brilliant in roughly equal measure for three years running, and Kara noticed somewhere in the middle of it that he was not thinking about anything except football, which was a gift he had not known he needed.

They talked until both of them were clearly running out of the energy required for conversation, which arrived at roughly the same time for both of them, which suggested either compatible rhythms or the same quantity of long day behind them. Kara settled into his bed. The room was quiet and clean and someone else was breathing steadily a few metres away, which was different from the island but not unpleasantly so. He realised, before sleep arrived, that he had forgotten to ask his roommate's name. Again.

Just like with Pranky until it was too late to be polite. Oh well, he was going to have to work on that.