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“Education,” said Djuna, smacking her hands on the table with a great deal of gravitas. It was a very satisfying thud.
Chorby looked up from her phone, chewed on her gum, then looked around. There was no one else in the clubhouse, just Djuna over at the rickety table, with its paper tablecloth covered in the biro scribbles of their teammates, and Chorby herself on the patchwork sofa. They’d dragged it out of an abandoned house when they’d started doing up this place, moulded half to dust. It had been Jaxon’s idea to gather fabric from all of them to fix it, and the end result was an interesting mix.
She pointed at herself. “Me?” she asked.
Djuna shook her head. “Everyone, more like. Got a few years off, by the sound of it.”
“Oh, okay,” said Chorby. She was a solid 92% sure her century old high school diploma was in one of the as of yet unpacked boxes that had been delivered once they’d re-established contact with the rest of the world. “Does that mean, like, school education or we’re going to be educating people, or like… like… lectures? I did not go to college, bee tee double you, so…”
“Core education,” said Djuna. “The school of hard knocks. Fixing hard knocks. Basic safety training. Languages. Linguistics, even, since figures someone’ll invent a new language and I’d appreciate it if we could wrangle together one that actually made some solid grammatical sense this time.”
“We’ve been doing a decent job though, right? Like, we’ve managed to get a whole new hydroponics sector up, and we’ve - that guy - you know the guy? Battery guy? The guy with the batteries, he’s got his whole sub-solar panel thingy going, so yay for power storage, and we’ve been making progress on - well. Not me, but people have been making progress on trying to figure out what caused all this mess so we’re not doing terribly, right?”
“Oh, no, yeah, that side of things is going good.” Djuna stood up from the very incongruous dining chair that Sheri had donated. The seat was torn, and the fabric flopped down where static had briefly had it clinging to Djuna’s pants. “But it’s not just about that, if you catch my drift?”
Chorby did not. “I do not,” she said. “What’s it about, then?”
“Let’s go for a walk. C’mon.”
***
Djuna led her out onto the streets of DownTwo-wn. No one else called it that, but Chorby thought that it was actually a pretty good pun, and worthy of acknowledgement, even if only in her own mind.
The clubhouse was on the edges of the now inhabited part of DownTown. The sort of district that had probably been quiet and residential and boring before, but now was a staging post. They’d all grabbed places to live around it, set up a whole neighbourhood for the blaseballers, before other people had started showing up. But even though the area was filling up, behind it was empty. A ghost town, just without any ghosts that Chorby could actually identify. She’d had a go of it, her and Tev had gone running around with a thermometer and a camera to see what they could find. No luck, but plenty of weird temperature fluctuations that they pretended were definitely 100% ghosts and not the heating systems playing up again.
She, Svetlana, and Neerie, whenever she and Zephyr weren’t busy, had found an old factory about twenty minutes walk from the clubhouse where they’d got Jaxon to help string up fairy lights and they’d all got spraypaint and made it look super cool, and even Djuna had helped wire in a speaker system. It was a really, really good setup for ghost stories. Lots of rusted and ruined machinery, which was all way down the list for being recycled because they hadn’t gotten the right facilities set up yet, and the flickering bulbs meant that if you timed your big reveal just right, you could get ‘lana to jump out of her skin. Spacesuit. Somewhat unclear if the spacesuit was her skin. She and Neerie made a bit of a competition of it, to see who could get her the most worked up in an evening.
The stadium itself was way out, and it had its own spaces for the team which were semi set up and rarely used, rooms for visiting players which were mostly liveable, but mostly they went to the clubhouse.
It was the house that Djuna had set up in, back when she’d just dropped, that whole year she’d spent on her own, and it had been home for all of them when DownTown was this huge empty city that none of them knew what to do with. Even now, when there were people who weren’t them roaming the streets and things happening everywhere and trains running up and down from the surface, Djuna still slept in the clubhouse.
They made their way out of the slowly expanding inhabited sphere. Things were still a bit broken down out here, with the twisted tramlines that carved up the shattered streets like when she wanted ice-cream but it was too soon out from the freezer, and so she heated up the spoon and it sliced out huge chunks. Still, they’d dealt with all the actual rubble for a good radius and there were talks about doing a big hit on resurfacing roads, getting public transport running again. Wouldn’t be long before this place was bustling with activity, but for now -
Well. This was the Core that she’d dropped into, back in the day. No one there but Djuna’s back leading her forward, through empty, ruined streets. Chorby grinned and ran to walk next to her friend.
“So where are we going?” she asked.
“In search of education,” Djuna said. “Think it might be time to look further back.”
Chorby rolled her eyes. “Why are you being so cryptic about this?” She moved so she was walking backwards, facing Djuna. “Tell me…” Then, making her eyes really wide and making her voice go all low and dramatic. “Djunaaaaaaaaa, telllll meeeeeeeeeeee.”
Djuna grinned, all the way through her eyes. Her antennae bobbled on their springs. “We’ve just got to take a look back, is all.”
Her foot met an obstacle and skidded out from under her. Arms wheeling, Chorby fell backwards. Djuna rushed forward and grabbed her by the front of her overalls, yanking her back upright. She stood.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Careful of the tracks,” said Djuna. “Seems like we should all be taking those safety classes, then?”
Chorby rubbed at the back of her head, below her traffic-cone hat. “That’s what I get for looking back then.” She grinned up at Djuna, who took a deep, exhausted inhale. “Not even a little bit funny? Tiny bit funny?”
“Not in the slightest,” said Djuna. “Anyways, in keeping with this whole dynamic we’ve got going on here, in order to look back, you must first face forwards. Or something along those lines. Turn around.”
She did as she was told. The buildings around here were for the most part still standing, with only a few of what they’d been calling spatial leaks - the weird overlapping ruin left where the impossible geometry of the Core had broken down and then reestablished itself along all sorts of different folds. That was mainly around the stadium, though. This far out, where the roof was a bit lower, the city built like pillars, stacks on stacks, with the undersun panels winding in and out between them, the third dimension had mostly kept to the same old twists and turns as before.
But in front of them, it stretched out again, up and up and up until Chorby thought it had to be close to bursting out of the side of the big knot of Pillars that this whole city was burrowed into like a rabbit warren. There was a house, sat right square in the centre of that endlessly high-roofed section of the cavern. The strips of undersun ended all of a sudden, and instead there were glowing wires trickling down through that hole in the roof of the world, pooling on the roof of the house and reaching out for the floor. They had a softer light than the harsh UV of the Undersun, this muted gold. As Chorby moved closer, quiet in this empty ghost of what came before, she saw that the ends of those wires were ragged and torn. And the house - it hurt her head to look at. It was just this old-fashioned wood-panelled building, two stories, maybe two or three rooms per floor, but it just felt like more. Like it was denser, maybe, or too full or like it took up more space than just itself.
Her fingers brushed against the faded stone sign set just by the front steps. There were still indents where time had worn away whatever used to be carved into it.”
“Welcome to the B.A.C.K. archives,” said Djuna. Her face was set, old and unsmiling in a way that suddenly felt absurd.
“Oh?” said Chorby.
“Bureau for Archival Collection and Knowledge. It was one of the old Corgs, back when I was a kid.”
“Knowledge. Right. Education, and stuff.” Her gaze was drawn upwards. “What’s with the roof?”
“No idea,” said Djuna. “Can tell you it definitely wasn’t like that back in my day.”
It wasn’t like Chorby hadn’t ever been to the Core. She’d even been in the finals against the Mechanics; she’d played her game down here, spent the night before roaming around, mostly because she couldn’t sleep. She’d won that game, too, even if the Mechs had been champions in the end. Back on the Flowers. She knew about the Corgs, had run into definitely-not-Polkadot-Patterson at the ballpark setting up for the match and had asked what they were doing and had gotten the whole story then. Mainly about S.H.A.D.O.W.S., which was vaguely being reformed now there were shadows again, but also about the whole system and way more social commentary than she’d been expecting.
Not-Polkadot-Patterson hadn’t had too much good to say about the whole setup. Kids spending their childhoods training to join up and do something exciting with their lives, only to wind up heartbroken. But they’d been on the outside of it, in a way. Not born here.
“Did you want to join a Corg when you were a kid?” asked Chorby.
“C.E.N.T.E.R.,” said Djuna. “Get out of DownTown, boldly go where no Mech has gone before, all that sort of thing.”
They both stood there, at the bottom of those steps, looking up at the double doors.
“Soooo…,” said Chorby. “Do we need a key, or something?”
Djuna ignored her.
“Djuna?”
“Gotta face forward,” said Djuna, though it was more of a mumble, like she didn’t care if Chorby heard or not. And then, more clearly, “Still. No point in forgetting.”
She walked up the steps, and Chorby followed.