Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

Time For Maia's Empathy Treatment

The narrator went on, "Losing his job got him evicted, and while unhoused, he couldn't get a job. It's a vicious cycle. He got a place to live in an SRO — Single Room Occupancy — a temporary residence intended to be more like a motel or hostel, but in the Outskirts they're filled to the brim, three or four immortals, many of them grayscale, in a unit."

The narrated went on and on, and Maia hardly listens, though the sound was linked directly to her auditory cortex; the stream of her own rant inside her head was louder. They would never admit there's still problems. Classic corporatocracy, or noocracy or geniocracy, or technocracy, or whatever they wanted to be called these days. Maia's given it a fair amount of thought, is it rule by the corporations, by the philosophers, by the most intelligent or the most educated? Or is it something else? Maia likes to think it might be a kleptocracy, rule by thieves, or a kakistocracy, some days: rule by the stupid. Stupid, like this whole empathy training thing's stupid.

Like any autocracy they would never admit there's problems, yet they expect her to believe there's a good reason immortals out there are turning to crime.

Now she can see. A field of vision fills her vision. She's outside, walking down the sidewalk; she's in Felix's body, and the view from up here . . . he's tall, she's not used to walking around with her eyes so high up.

He's got two feet on her, easy.

She lifts his giant white hands, ruddy with a red complexion, and wants to gag. Not just tall, he's bulky, built like a giant. Not as much of a giant as the guy she played in the Story on day two, but pretty huge.

Felix is out for a stroll on an early morning. It's quiet and calm. Gray facades of sleeping buildings lean over his head on both sides of the street. The narrator describes it, "He hasn't been back to the SRO to sleep because the pad isn't safe right now. He's been out all night since one of the other guys pulled a knife on him and took his last solida."

Maia wants to reply, "Poor baby, I should let him steal a loaf of bread or something," but in this immersive training experience speech is limited to key plot points only.

A patrol car rolls by, and Felix's shoulders hunch a little, and Maia feels like the big guy is changing posture as if to make himself small.

The narrator says, "At the same time instinct screams to be less threatening, make himself smaller, less conspicuous, he also needs to think to himself that he better not look like he's guilty of anything, he better not show any reaction to the patrol moto, which could be taken as a sign of guilt, so he tries not to change his stride too much in the presence of the guardia."

Sure, Maia thought. So all day long he walks around thinking about how to manipulate the authorities and trick us, make us think he's not about to rip someone off or pull an illegal wand on someone.

"When the car is gone, Felix finds a likely spot on the sidewalk to curl up with a sign out asking for spare coins. He gets into the shade of an alcove," the big lunky body does stoop down in front of someone's garage door, squat, turn around, and takes cardboard and a pen, and a gnomon, a matte black illegal one, and begin to write with the pen. "Coins are good, a free Story is better."

Cute, Maia thinks. He wants drugs, and he's being upfront about it.

The gnomon he sets down next to him on the sidewalk, in case he decides he needs to hold someone up or attack.

The narrator says, "He could use his gnomon to conjure food, but sooner or later after a pattern emerges from repeat spell casting, the guardia track down these imperfect black market wands. A better use of his time until he needs to resort to black market magic is to see how far the generosity of strangers gets him.