(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 24

This time, there was no patrolling vehicle to pick anybody up. Decades had gone by in the blink of an eye, the entire world both the same in many ways, and wildly different in many others.
The wall was still there, now looking like a bruised monument to plans long gone. Even from afar, the cracks were visible, with chucks taken out of it looking like stab wounds from giants. Weird blotches of mismatched colors were scattered across it like buckshots where attempts at repair had succeeded, the materials used in no way matching the original ones. It was a case of if it worked, it worked. The mantra of an era.
The air was different, too. In some strange case of irony, it tasted cleaner. It was dry and felt heavy to breathe, perhaps a little low in oxygen from the lack of plantlife, but it felt somehow more pure, almost samitized. Then again, things were sanitized by killing microscopic life within them. Death seemed to have a hold on this place, maybe it just affected microscopic life as much as the larger macroscopic kind.
Nearer the wall, the air started to feel lighter, and easier to breathe. A soft breeze kept eminating from the large entrance through the wall, an entrance that had been brutally expanded in those decades. Much of it was held in place with heavy fortifications, almost looking like the entrance to a vital military installation. It likely wasn't for security, though, the more likely reason being the fear that anything weaker would collapse under the weight of the crumbling wall above it. But the soft breeze flowing through hinted at better oxygen levels inside. Like a fishbowl holdiing water, the wall held in the better air that someone, somehow, produced inside of it. A leaky fishbowl.
Nobody asked any questions at the entrance, and the heavy doors that were visible along the sides were thrown wide open. There seemed to be a watch at the gate, armed and armored people visible here and there, faces covered by protective gear, but they kept a low profile. The gate was there for easy passage, not as a checkpoint, it seemed.
"Papers!" someone shouted, giving a brief impression that all that guessing had been completely wrong. A man in patched up boots and clothes put together in a way that made thoughts drift to bad quilts was swinging a sheet of paper around, repeating the word loudly, over and over, trying to attract costumers to what seemed like the sale of individual sheets of papers.
And the reason slowly became clear. Wooden beams and sheets of plywood, every single one broken in ways that likely made them unfit for building material, were mounted creatively in a small nearby square of sorts, and bits of paper hung from them like confetti stuck in an oil slick. People were walking by, many coming directly from the gate and going to the paper monument without a single other stop along the way. "Papers, good papers!" the voice yelled from somewhere among the crowd, and another joined with a similar offer.
A bulletin board. Little bits of paper, some torn clumsily while others were carefully cut, all had messages written on them. Some were personal, with people looking for friends that they had somehow lost track of. Others were reminders or requests for people in general, a few with what seemed like religious or political themes, but many just asking people to watch out in certain areas, due to unsafe buildings or other hazards. Some were plain gossip, in many cases looking like small debates about people and events that clearly got the writers of the small notes riled up.
"Hap, no snicking!" a voice growled nearby. His finger came up, pointing at the slip of paper on the board. It took a few seconds to get his meaning, but apparently, the papers were not to be touched. A few glances along the bulletin board confirmed that nobody was touching anything on it, unless they were the ones hanging it there.
"Get a slip," he added. "No snicks."
The man yelling about his papers near the gate flashed a smile full of chipped teeth at the sight of a new costumer approaching. In a move that looked almost cartoonish, he clapped his hands together and rubbed them slightly.
"Lady going for fine paper? You wanna write a letter for the special one?"
He wore nothing but the quiltish patchwork of clothes sewn together, Frankenstein-style, from the better parts of other clothes. He looked like a head sticking out at the top of a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together completely wrong.
"Nah, just the cheap."
His eyes closed a bit, his smile fading just slightly. With a disappointed sigh, he stuck his hand into a small wooden bo and pulled out a few bits of paper.
"One piece, fifty crowns," he mumbled, looking almost like a child that had just dropped its ice cream.
"Fif.... Fifty crowns?"
He nodded, the disappointment in his eyes now looking more like the beginning of some resentment.
The bulletin board was a bit less crowded now, and while the grumpy man was no longer there to make comments about touching the papers, it seemed prudent to just not. But then again, the largest section was for jobs, either people hiring or needing one, and the papers used there were bigger, allowing for an easy read. It still seemed a bit unfair to anyone with poor eyesight, to have very little option to study a job posting up close, but if that was the worst the world of this age had to offer, it seemed somewhat manageable.
Most of the job offers made little sense. They seemed to be tasks uniquely part of the age, dealing with improvised repairs of equipment or the building of defenses for the more wary dwellers of the old city. Added to that was the weird instructions for applying, many of which sounded like the plot to a bad adventure movie in their own rights! Finally, one stuck out as being both a realistic job, and the application making sense. "Light manual work, plants. City gate at sundown."
The sky had a grimy color and texture, but the sun was getting low. It would be easy, or so it at least seemed, to apply. It did feel odd, though. The Embassy always needed to establish new footings in new ages, and even in new places within an age that already had one or more offices. It was a whole field of its own, with specialists trained in dropping in with nothing and scraping together enough resources to build the first pieces of a functional branch office. Nature survivalists, charming socialites, anyone with tricks and the raw endurance to build something from nothing was pulled into that line of work as soon as they were discovered amongst the refugees, or even other allies. Even if all they did was setting up a secure set of four walls and a roof, they were prized. Sometimes, fewer than four walls could even do!
But that just made it feel much weirder working from scratch in this age. The Embassy had a few small branch offices a decade or so before or after this point in the timeline, but that did very little to help. A future office meant nothing, and offices were regularly taken down after a few years, for fear that someone contacting them late in their existence would make a mess of the timeline when someone else tried to use them early. The whole planning aspect of not having time travel overlap and cause problems to the timeline was another field, one that Daniel had shown to be excellent at managing. He alone had probably made the offices ten times as efficient, simply by understanding how to not make time travelers trip over one another. Then again, he would never survive having to scrape the beginnings of a branch office together. He tended to panic at the thought of not having electricity and running water ad libitum, and the thought of him surviving without a steady stream of potato croquettes just seemed like science fiction.
And with all of that came the wait. People everywhere, in every age, had a tendency to want to describe their respective professions. It was perhaps a human trait, or at least an urban human trait, wanting others to know how you made a living, your skillset and, if it was good, your general level of income. Like a peacock spreading its feathers to scare rivals and attract mates. But nobody ever talked about the wait. Waiting for a phone call, waiting for a car, waiting for a client to show up or deliveries to arrive. The early days of The Embassy had been hectic, nobody wanting to deal with the wait, and everyone trying to cram as much work into any unused time slot as humanly possible. But the wait had its purpose. To the veteran mindset, the wait had its uses.
In this case, anyone could be excused for thinking that the wait was nothing but lounging around. But walking aimlessly through the area was a vital part of first contact. It showed the habits of people, and how they reacted to someone who no doubt looked at least a little like a stranger. People of this age had scars and small deformations, the worst cases likely dying off or kept in their homes by whoever cared for them. Hair tended to be short, but especially the young seemed creative about it. It wasn't just for looks, of course. Even in ancient cultures, it was a way to keep lice and other pests to a minimum, and the vain of an age like that often resorted to wigs, instead. The entire culture of the powdered and expensive wig seemed to have been born from that.
The buildings were hazardous, as could be expected. A few had collapsed far from the gate, but someone was clearly ensuring that main routes through the city were kept functional. They had government, or something resembling it. The sight of large men with scary weaponry walking the streets in groups, watching others closely, seemed to support the idea that someone, somewhere, was in charge.
The details never became clear, though. It was always tempting to ask locals, but that was a good way to make people nervous. Movies always seemed to think that a time traveler could just drop in and get everything in a quick briefing from some local nobody, but the realities of the job were less simple. People talked, and at some point, weird questions attracted unwanted attention, even amongst those that society typically ignores. The best companion of the wait was patience.
True to their word, the authors of the note stood waiting near the gate at sundown. A woman, not that old but not young, either, stood surrounded by a handful of burly men, each carrying some kind of tool that deterred any provocation, even if it wasn't technically a weapon. The one carrying a well maintained set of garden sheers was especially imposing, for some reason.
"Anyone here for work at the growth barracks, step up," the woman called out, and a small handful of hopeful souls made their way to her, forming a semicircle around her as the men she had brought told them to. Standing in the semicircle felt like signing up for a match of some kind, and almost made it seem like someone else would join her to pick members of each team. But nobody did.
Instead, she immediately began inspecting everyone, tugging their hands, putting a load on their shoulders with her hands, and finally, flinging some dust in their faces. The dust stung, making its way into nose and mouth with ease, and getting in the eyes. One of the ones that had lined up began to sneeze rather forcefully, causing the woman to point him out to one of the men. He quickly stepped over to the person, said something softly, and the person, a very young fellow, just walked away.
"You, you, you, and... you," the woman said, pointing at her choices. It felt weirdly honoring to have been chosen, but the ceremony was brief as she turned on her heel and started walking away, her handful of muscular bodyguards forming a protective perimeter around her. The three others followed silently. It seemed like the right thing to do.
There was no talking. The woman and her entourage were easily visible as they traversed the streets with complete familiarity, having no doubt done this many times before. They said nothing, never even turning around to check on the ones following them. The three others that followed were equally quiet, at most sending each other a nervous glance from time to time. The entire journey had an air of horrified subjugation to it, like people walking to the gallows, except more briskly.
When it finally ended, the area had opened up quite a bit. A cleared perimeter, so obviously that one could make out the circle that the perimeter formed around the buildings in the middle. Three towering structures, old skyscrapers somehow still standing. Mostly standing, to be precise. All three were missing upper sections, perhaps cut down to size by something falling to the ground, or from decades of structural neglect that came with the fall of society at large. But in all three cases, several lower floors still stood, their facades stripped naked to expose the spaces inside.
"Hold on," said the woman, again not turning to see if anyone failed to follow orders. She grabbed a chain by a small leash, which she effortlessly had her hand slip through and tighten, locking the hand to the chain. A sound came from somewhere above, a rusty rumble, and the chain raised her up through a square hole in the floor above. One by one, the men following her did the same, and one by one, the three others that had followed her for the job did, too.
Standing as the last one on the ground, looking up, it became clear that the square hole was all that remained of some old staircase, or perhaps some long ago disassenbled elevator shaft. At this point, its origins were unclear, all that remained being a series of square holes in a vertical row, and coloumns around them that seemed to, odd as it was, hold up the holes. Getting a hand inside the noose and grabbing a hold of the chain felt easy, at first. It was the sudden tug on the chain from somewhere above that was the challenge, yanking everything with it, somewhat painfully!
The pain stopped seconds after arriving on some upper floor. The rest were there, counting not just the woman, her guards, and the three other hirelings, but also a flock of people walking between open air plant nurseries. The ample presence of green colors was a harsh contrast to the world outside, but a welcome one.
"And your name is?" asked a young person, the gender a bit hard to tell.
"Marie."
"Uh huh. Marie what?"
"Hansen. Marie Hansen."
The young person never made eye contact, simply jotting down the name. As he or she did so, it was impossible not to gaze longingly at the thin stack of paper on what was essentially a kind of clipboard, made from hammered sheet metal and assorted parts.
"Any experience with botany?"
"Not really."
"Engineering?"
"Very little."
He or she let out a sigh.
"Agriculture? Chemistry?"
"Definite no on both."
The person stopped for a moment to look up past his or her brow, a judgmental frown on the face.
"Manual labor. Go to Loretta, by the stackbond."
"The what?"
As the person looked past the brows again, there was something distinctively feminine about it. She, presuming it was a woman, seemed to have an immense level of disdain bottled up, and it was hard not to wonder how she had approached the other new ones, indeed anyone here.
"The bond between the... The bridge between the stacks. The buildings," she said, frustrated at the need to explain herself.
"Got it, thanks."
"Sure."
Walking away from what honestly felt like a wasteland emo, more of the place came into view. The sun was almost down now, but lamps of wooden bits inside old glass still kept the place lit nicely.
The plants seemed to be a factory line, of sorts. Rows of small seedlings were replaced with bigger and bigger ones closer to this Loretta, presumably a tall woman made from lean muscle that she flashed casually in her sleeveless work clothes.
"Loretta?"
The woman turned, slowly, her attention mostly on a set of fairly grown plants placed around the spot she was standing in. Her skin looked leathery in the light of two nearby lamps, like that of someone out in the sun too much and too carelessly.
"Yes, are you a new hire?" she asked softly, her voice giving off a vibe of concealed tiredness.
"Yeah, I mean yes, ma'am. She just..."
"He," she said calmly. "Don't let Thor get to you, he's not one for courtesy."
Her accent was odd, the melodic sound of Norwegean mixed with hard consonants of someone very German or perhaps Russian. She seemed built from many different ingredients.
"We need those plants moved to the downrise," she explained, pointing to a batch of large plants and then to another hole like the one with the chain and noose system.
"Clever."
"What?" she replied, clearly stunned that there was even a remark to reply to. Everyone else seemed to work in complete silence.
"Plants grow up here, gain weight, and get lowered down to lift other weight up. You grow your own counterweights."
She had a weird look in her eyes as she stood motionless amongst her circle of what seemed like very tall ferns.
"Why do they send you here if you have engineering skills?" she asked, her voice soft and casual, her eyes intense and skeptical.
"Just, uhm, an observation. I'll move the plants, now."
Finding the small and clunky wheels to put on the wooden pots of the plants was easy, mounting it a bit harder. As the sun disappeared and finally took the twilight glow with it, the lamps seemed to create an island of light in a sea of dark. But out in that dark, little dots of light shone like other islands in that same sea.
"Newhand, quit shuffling," said Thor as he passed by, making a snap as he waved the clipboard quickly, causing the paper to slap against it. Whether or not he had the job of whipping the workers or not, it worked. For a few minutes, anyway.
"What is that cluster of lights out there?"
Asking random people questions seemed like a less than brilliant idea, but the small woman receiving the plants seemed harmless, a fairly small and timid person with a vacant stare on her face.
"The Heavenfall?" she asked. Heavenfall. The name definitely rang a bell, but it was second hand stories, from refugees at The Embassy and historians in future ages.
"Yeah, I guess?"
As she tied the plants meticulously to a set of hooks on the chain going down the hole in the floor, she shrugged.
"Relic hunters camping out before a hopeful raid, I guess. Few enter the thing, and even fewer at night."
The Heavenfall had been a fairly standard hubris tale, of the wealthy and powerful building extensive homes in Earth orbit to escape the ravages of war and environmental collapse. Ironically, as the world got its shit together little by little, their homes in space came crashing down, ripping through the landscape and ending up as monuments to their failure.
"They actually raid the thing?"
She chuckled, briefly.
"A corpse like that? Sure, still chunks inside to pilfer. Only the specialists go in, from what I hear. The easy loot has been stripped bare."
"Newhand, last warning," came Thor's remark out of the blue, like he had snuck up. The woman clammed up immediately.
Over the next hours, the work continued in silence. As the sun began to crawl over the horizon in the distance, people began to funnel through the square holes to other floors, looking like they were ready to sleep. Although it was hard to be sure, the few glimpses that had been possible through the holes hinted at people indeed sleeping on other floors.
"Excuse me?"
"What, newhand?" said Thor without looking up.
"What is the pay for a shift?"
As he looked up, he looked ready to scold or shout. The clumsy bit of pencil he had been using on his paper made a sharp clack as he put it on the clipboard.
"I think they have pulled you from the dumb heap, newhand. Had I even..."
"A slip of your paper and I will leave quietly."
His eyes widened with a mix of surprise and the usual annoyance, but the odd proposal was enough to make not think much about it and simply rip a small piece of paper from a sheet. It had plenty of writing on it already, small scribbles crossed out one by one, some sort of checklist over and done with. But his handwriting was light and there was room enough.
The chain down seemed not to need anyone to man it. It didn't move on its own, but climbing down a few floors was not the greatest of challenges. The one thing that did make it a bit more complicated than usual was the beginning burn of the anchor breaking apart. The trip had been designed to be a few hours, in to find this mystery time traveler and then home again. It was not a long trip, the energy spent was not enough for that. And now, time was very much running out!
Even before the blur set in, the place looked bizarre at night. Any light that shone, and there was precious little of it, came from a few places that were still very active, much like the plant nursery. People moving about made long shadows, causing the lights to seem to dance across the dark streets. Few were out and about, perhaps for fear of what could happen in the dark, but the relatively short stretch back was at least easy to retrace. As the gate came into view, everything was already caught in a fog of time pulling at every atom not belonging in this age. It hurt, it always did. A manual release from time, a deliberate return back to a machine, was painful enough, but at least that pain was quick. This was like pulling long needles out of every limb, slowly.
It was quiet outside the gate. As expected, the gate shut at nighttime, a measure of control in what was no doubt a dangerous time, but it left a slim gap open, for stragglers to enter, most likely. And since the wall was just a wall, no light came from it. Stepping outside meant stepping from dim to pitch black. Or nearly so. Moonlight managed to make basic shapes stand out, making it possible to at least follow the wall for a bit without accidents. But finding two stones by its base was only possible by blind touch. The torn bit of paper already had a few tiny burns from the colored dots before it was buried under the stones, but it never caught fire. That was more than could be said for the hands that buried it.