The Veteran Part III

Sorry for taking so long to post something new, life has been busy. I also apologize for the brevity of this particular post. Stay tuned for the next installment, which I promise shall be longer!


It was close to midnight before The Veteran decided to get up from the corner of the mostly demolished building and start making his way across the city. He had no Central Neural Computer to tell the time -the Government made the implantation of the CNC's at puberty mandatory about thirty years ago- but years serving in the military for the Zealots, combined with decades of living on the streets of the City In The West had given The Veteran an innate sense of time that was more or less spot-on. As he slowly shuffled out of the ruined building he bid a silent farewell to the Cobbler and his Wife, while vowing to find the Others, or die trying.


He knew that by the time he eventually found the Others, the Government Rebuilding Corporation would have already razed the rest of Building 451 Block C and begun construction on something newer, shinier, and more technologically advanced. Inwardly, The Veteran knew that the building wouldn't remain shiny and new for very long; perhaps a day's worth of exposure to the pollution, grime, and nasty rain would stain the building with a dark patina. Inside of a week the "new" building would be indistinguishable from the rest of the City. It was like that all over, and a key reason to The Veterans' inability to stay locked in on any true locations; everything changed, but everything always looked the same. Only the monolithic ebon ziggurats that loomed for miles over the rest of the buildings served as landmarks, and even then the fact that they were identical to each other in orientation and construction served to make navigation without the CNC nearly impossible.

The Veteran knew that the ocean was in the west, but he had no way of finding the west. There were no longer any printed maps, no signposts, nothing; each citizen of the City In The West navigated using their CNCs. The Veteran remembered one of the campaigns he had fought in during the War of Absolution, where the Zealot's geosynchronous satellite navigating system had been shot out of space, leaving the ground troops without any satcom or GPS; he had led his small squad of soldiers to the objective point using the sun and a compass. Now, he had neither; even if he had struck out on his journey during the middle of the day, the sun was obscured by smog and rain clouds anyhow; the only way to truly tell night from day was the murky gray light that managed to filter its way through the miles of layers of cloud and smog.

The only thing that The Veteran had at his disposal was the slight idea that, perhaps, the reason the rain always came down at the same angle was because of the slight breeze that seemed to be the always-constant companion to the murk and the rain, and that the origin of the breeze was, in fact, the ocean itself. He had a distant childhood memory (even as he wondered whether the memory was his, or whether it was something he had made up) of visiting the ocean once, well before the War and the smog and the oppressive Government, back when his parents were both still alive and the world seemed innocent and happy.

He shook his head, clearing his mind of such thoughts, and finished picking his way out of the building. Once he was back in the alley, he took a quick mental inventory of himself, especially checking his pockets for the artificial lung. Once he was satisfied that his very few worldly possessions were still about his person, he exited the alley and went to stand in the middle of the street. The rain was still coming down in buckets from heaven, but he threw his hood back and began to turn in a slow circle, trying his best to discern which direction the breeze was coming from. The rain pelting on his face, though, ruined everything. He lingered for a few moments more, until he began to look suspicious, and then flipped his hood back up over his head and moved to the side of the street, where he huddled under a doorway, trying to decide what to try next.

His stomach rumbled, reminding him that he hadn't eaten in roughly 24 hours, and the more pressing concern of filling his belly caused him to abandon his mission, for now at least, and try to beg passerby for a food chit.