Eli was wearing a stylish grey (notice that the cultured ‘grey’ spelling of the word was used, rather than the simple farmer’s ‘gray’ spelling) suit that made his shoulders look much broader than they actually were, suspenders and of course piano tie. His slicked back hair glistened with gel. Adorning his breast was a red ribbon that many had taken to wearing in order to honor the sacrifice of the loyalist Martians to prevent an all out battery strike on Terra itself.
“Eli,” said Dexter, wearing rugged blue jeans (that were quite grayish now) and a white tank top. “Why are you wearing that gak?”
“For authoritive purposes. You see, authority is an intangible thing. A being, regardless of origin and nature, only holds authority when it is believed that it does. If I fit the image of authority and mimic it’s mannerisms to a ‘T’, I will have authority.”
“How much coke did you snort?”
“I don’t understand how that’s related to the subject at hand, but I’ll humor you; about fourteen grams last night.”
“Ugh.” Dexter brushed his greasy bangs back. “Alright, well, I can’t have you come down during the job interview. I guess snort a bunch right now. And I will too.”
“Rather unfortunately, the coke seems to be missing. I believe we gave the last of it to the fine woman we had disarm the bomb. And I don’t think we can get it back; she’s probably already been charged with drug trafficking and sentenced to death since last night.”
“GAK! How did that happen?”
“Dexter, I want you to relax. We still have plenty of neopotine, easily three kilos. I’ll just take some of that.”
“I said I didn’t want you coming down during the interview, so you decide to take fething
neopotine? That stuff is a fething, umm, err, depressant! Yeah, a depressant! Does that sound like an upper to you?”
Thran stumbled into the room, still just as naked and bloody as he’d been last night. “Did you see them?” he asked, glancing back towards the bathroom. “Did you
see them?”
Ignoring the lunatic, Eli said, “So we’ve established that neopotine is a ‘no’, regarding the success of the job interview. Perchance I could sample some of our slick?”
The origin of the street name ‘slick’ for the substance ecdysteronite is mostly unknown. Many of the Emperor’s Children believe that it’s because the substance ‘slicks’ your train of thought, removing any safety or morality reservations to your current course of action. Under its influence you’re sent into a carefree haze where everything you do is right without question and everything is going just fine. The drug classification of slick varies from planet to planet but on Chemos (Fulgrim’s industrialized homeworld) it is referred to as a stimulant or ‘upper’.
“Thran said no slick until after the mission and we all agreed. When Terra is in flames and the Emperor is dead and all that gak, we can have as much slick as we want. Right Thran? You’re gonna back me up on this, right?”
“Yeah, plenty of slick,” said Thran. “Only used a little bit. But no more. Gave the rest to Saturn refugees during the night. Perturabo blew up Saturn. Lots of refugees.”
Dexter suffered from a bout of rage inspired verbal diarrhea, spewing incomprehensible gibberish reminiscent of a sickly dog choking on a screeching and clawing wet cat. He fell to his knees and wailed to the sky in a voice that communicated sheer agony. It was verbalized outrage at the cruelty of fate and the fickle nature of his Gods. It was a man brought by one too many hardships in life to see how far he had fallen and how twisted he had become. Six months ago he didn’t even know what slick was and now
this.
Eli just said, “Wat.”
Thran felt like a cheap green screen effect.
Here he was, walking down the street with Eli and Dexter, weaving through the all consuming mass of the downtrodden and the damned, but he actually wasn’t. The eyeless and earless robed man, his face a mesh of scar tissue and poor stitching, begging on the side of street for credits wasn’t there. Faceless Arbites, insectoid creatures in their gleaming black carapace armor and reflective visors, were patting down and searching citizens at random check points but in fact no they weren’t. There was a building up ahead, a marvel of 31st millennium architecture with its great arches and spiraling towers, leering at him with a hundred skulls despite the fact that it didn’t actually exist.
Someone dropped a knapsack. Gold coins, engraved with the visage of the Emperor on one side and the Imperial Aquila on the other, began to spill. The masses of slogged, tired and hopeless individuals became a ravening horde of the blood thirstiest and most vicious hounds, descending upon the man and his soon to be worthless currency; when Horus took over he sure as hell wasn’t going to keep on using a currency with the Emperor’s face. Thran felt no need to join in; he didn’t desire imaginary money. The Arbites were busy manning the checkpoints, so it was up to nearby Guardsmen to intervene. They were clubbing the avaricious citizens back, firing when they felt the need, but it barely held them off.
Thran knew what was really going on; he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to a job interview. In fact, was very well aware of the fact that he was in a small green box and they were using it like a green screen, generating a Terran background behind him and moving it slightly whenever he moved his feet. This was blatantly obvious; first and foremost his outline was too thick. Secondly, the lighting was coming in from the left on him (there was a light in the green box) but on everyone else and the buildings, the sun was shining from the right.
Lastly, it didn’t look like he was part of the crowd. It looked like he was standing in front of it.
“I’m in a
green screen,” he said to no one in particular.
Six hours ago, he’d desperately tried to get high while Eli and Dexter were sleeping. He snorted coke, shot up rage, smoked some slick, rode the neopotine dragon, cracked the red egg, chewed some blotters like gum and even divided up the badger. Beyond a mild queasiness and tilted vision, he’d felt nothing.
Growing increasingly desperate, he had gone out and found some prostitutes. No matter what he did, no matter how perverted or obscene, he had felt nothing. His tire had gone flat (if you catch my drift) halfway through intercourse.
“What does that mean?” Dexter said sullenly, still angry over the slick. The bastard didn’t even know that he was just a special effect and that as soon as the green screen turned off he’d disappear forever.
Sex and drugs hadn’t worked, so Thran tried violence. He paced back and forth in the allies of bad neighborhoods until someone tried to mug him. He’d proceeded to beat the mugger within an inch of his life. A quick jab to the solar plexus had sent his diaphragm into spasms, cutting off his breathe. From there, Thran grabbed the man’s thumbs and twisted them in opposite directions, creating perfectly symmetrical bone fractures. Still numb to the world, Thran had decided to up his game and kick the man’s crotch with all his strength. He leapt on the mugger and started biting his neck, chewing up the flesh like it was just an extra juicy blotter.
Though the man was wailing and screaming, Thran couldn’t get rid of the feeling that he wasn’t really there. So he’d done something drastic. He fit the mugger’s mouth against the curb and brought down his foot. There was a sickeningly wet crunch, as if someone had struck a can of tomato soup with a hammer.
“I’m in a green cube,” said Thran. “And all this
gak is a green screen.”
“No, you aren’t. You’re just high. And green screens don’t work that way. They take a movie of a guy in front of the green screen and then it takes hours to make the green look like a city or whatever the background is supposed to be.”
It was abundantly clear now. Dexter was one of them; in all likelihood the bastard was an Inquisitorial Agent having placed him in the green cube, depriving him of all sensory experience as a way to make him crack. The Terran visuals were just frosting on the torture cake.
“So, if you’re right, that would mean they made the green screen visuals hours in advance and successfully predicted where you’d move and what you’d look at. If you did something unexpected, like stepped backwards when they thought you’d step forwards, then it’d get all messed up.”
There was a quote Thran had heard once that had stuck with him; ‘Very well; I shall follow through to the bitter end.’ He didn’t remember where it was from. A loyalist Death Guard on Isstvan III? Perhaps it was the Sons of Horus Dreadnought he’d seen charging the Imperial Fists artillery at the Siege of Slith? Or maybe it was the enginseer he’d seen staying behind to stabilize the ship’s reactor core as the cooling units broke down and the metal reached scalding temperatures? The ship had still blown up of course, like a tin can stuffed with fire works (and miniature people).
In the past few months he’d seen so much death that it was a normal occurrence.
But the quote, it seemed to apply here. There was no escape, no turning back. He was absolutely hopeless and helpless at the hands of the Imperial Inquisition. All that was left to do now was to follow through to the bitter end.
"Remember," said Eli. "For the sake of the interview, you are the most loyal Imperial citizen. If just one of us slips up we'll all be facing the most severe of consequences."
He wasn’t walking anymore. Rather, Thran was gliding towards a distant manufactorum with Dexter and Eli at his sides. The manufactorum looked like a stack of buildings, each one slightly smaller than the one below it. Some of the buildings were crooked compared to the others, placed at peculiar angles. Towers and Cathedrals spiraled off from random points atop the manufactorum, alongside the occasional crumbling statues of Space Marines and other heroes, most notably a busty Commissar. Great arching bridges connecting the higher levels of the manufactorum to neighboring towers. Gargoyles leered from posts, their unhinged stone beaks acting venting the poisonous gases that threatened to choke the slave workers within.
What Thran didn’t know was that, from orbit, the manufactorum’s jumble of floors, towers and bridges formed the shape of a huge skull.
Imperial architecture at its finest.
