Krim Times Revisited: Chapter 14, 15, and 16

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Chapter 14: Trask meets with Lockton

Two things, Trask reminded himself as he carried the briefcase down the hall to Lockton’s office. Get the process server off the grid. Find out about investors. 

He wasn’t sure how he would get Lockton to talk about the investors if Osgar couldn’t, but maybe something would come to him.

He knocked on the office door and, when he heard a grunt from inside, he let himself in.

Lockton was walking back to his desk. He was a short bald man in a gray wool suit, completely inappropriate for Krim. His manner of dressing was a sign of the disrespect that some admins and other employees held for the grid that was the source of their livelihoods. 

Trask walked in, past a stack of boxes, the top one filled to overflowing with paperwork. He saw the Chamber of Commerce stamp on the top one and paused to look at it. It was Osgar’s report, delegated to a doom pile.

He hoped his own mission would go better.

He sat down in the chair facing Lockton’s desk, the briefcase on his lap, and looked at the grid administrator.

“Well?” Lockton finally said. “What do you want?”

“I’m Marshall Henderson Trask, the chief of security for the Krim City Chamber of Commerce and it has come to my attention…”

Lockton made a hurry-up gesture.

“There’s a process server on the grid, going around trying to serve papers on people.” Trask patted the briefcase. “I’ve got the subpoenas right here.”

“And what do you want me to do about it?”

“Well, ban him.”

“Because…?”

“Privacy violations are against the Krim Terms of Service,” Trask said. He opened the briefcase and took out the first envelope. “Look. That’s someone’s real name.” He held it out to Lockton, but the grid admin leaned back away from it.

“That looks like a court stamp,” said Lockton. “I’m not touching that. I don’t need the legal liability.”

Trask dropped the envelope back with the other ones and noticed the knife on the bottom of the briefcase.

“There’s also a possibility that the process server is involved with the griefer,” Trask said. “The guy who’s been shooting at tourists and other civilians this morning and last night. Maybe he’s trying to flush out his targets.”

“That doesn’t sound like something a process server would do,” said Lockton. “And if he did, I don’t see how we could prove that. And the subpoenas… it sounds like he’s acting as an officer of the court. We can’t get in the middle of that. We’re on thin legal ice as it is with the basic-bio interface. If we step over the line, we could lose our grandfathered status.”

“But it’s bad for business to have a process server running around,” Trask said. “The Chamber members would be very upset if they found out…”

“No.”

“But…”

“Anything else?”

Trask was about to close the briefcase but then remembered the other thing. The investors.

“Yes,” he said, then paused to think.

Lockton wouldn’t care that Osgar wanted to know what was going on. He’d already shut him down. And he wouldn’t care what Trask wanted, either. He could tell him that the merchants wanted to know, but he clearly had no sympathy for Krim’s commercial class.

“A journalist asked me about the investors who are interested in Krim,” Trask told Lockton.

The admin leaned forward. “Who? The little guy with glasses?”

“No, not Cyril,” said Trask. “Seymour Gellhorn, the editor. Can you tell me what’s going on? It’s all going to be in the paper tomorrow, anyway.” He thought of the protesters outside. “Can you at least say if the Humanists are planning to buy Krim and shut it down?”

Lockton laughed. It sounded forced, but then again, he always sounded insincere.

“Of course not,” said Lockton. “The very idea is ridiculous and illegal. No, I personally vetted the candidates, and so did the Board’s legal team, and all three investment groups are interested in the future growth of Krim and not in its termination.”

“But what kind of growth are we talking about, though?” Some kinds of growth maintained the character of the grid and some changed it for the worse.

“I’m sure the Board will determine that before they make their decision on Thursday,” Lockton said. “Now…” He placed both his hands flat on his desk and leaned forward as if to stand up.

Trask grabbed the briefcase by its handle and rose to his feet, then stared, horrified, as the not-fully-latched lid of the case snapped open and the envelopes inside flew out, followed by the knife. 

Lockton raised one hand to bat the envelopes away and Trask watched in horror as the knife spun in the air then landed point down on Lockton’s other hand.

The man didn’t react. The knife had landed between his fingers. Trask reached for the weapon. “Sorry about that…”

“Get this stuff out of here,” Lockton said, pushing the envelopes off his desk.

“I meant, sorry, about the knife,” Trask said, pulling it out of the wood surface. “Oh, you’re bleeding.”

Lockton looked down at his hand. “Um… Ouch.”

Chapter 15: Trask gives Wanda the briefcase

Back in the lobby, Trask dropped off the briefcase with Wanda, and told her what the process server looked like in case he came by for it. 

“He was here earlier,” said Wanda. “He had a chat with Binkie. If I’d known, I’d have killed him right then and there. Well, I’ll get another shot at him if he comes back.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to kill him,” Trask said. “Just give him his briefcase.”

She snorted. “Good thing I don’t work for the grid, then and can kill whoever I want. I’m just on loan from the Mercenary Guild.” She lowered her voice. “None of the Gully Labs actual employees want to take shifts sitting here fending off resident complaints.”

Gully Labs was the official corporate owner of the Krim virtual world, named after Wilson Courtney Gully himself.

Trask glanced around then put his hands on her desk and leaned in. “Have you heard anything about them selling the grid?” he asked, matching her low tone of voice.

“The vote is this Thursday,” Wanda said. “They’ve been trying to keep it quiet, but I overheard them talking. I think the Baron brought one of the investors in. And another investor is the company bringing dead people back to life. Lifetimes? Limewires?”

“Lifeworks?”

“That’s the one.” She lowered her voice even further. “They’ve been touring the grid and meeting with all the admins. I think it’s serious.”

“Well, maybe now that they’ve seen Krim, they’ll drop out,” said Trask. Like most of its residents, he liked the grid the way it was. Yes, he complained about it. Everyone did. But if he really hated it he would have left months ago.

“I hope so. I can’t imagine Krim becoming one big residential centers for elderly returnees,” she said. “We wouldn’t be able to kill people anymore. Or even just stab them a little bit.”

“They say the returnees are really fragile when they’re first brought back,” said Trask. “Anything traumatic could break the connection to their hosting.”

“On the other hand,” said Wanda, “What if someone stabs you and nothing happens? That would feel pretty unrealistic, too. I’d probably lose any belief I had that I was alive again and poof my soul would be drifting off again. I wonder where it goes? Can you feel time passing?”

“I don’t remember feeling anything when I died,” said Trask. “One minute I was just walking along, minding my own business, and the next I was waking up in the hospital. I knew right away I was dead.”

“Me too, pretty much,” said Wanda. “Except I woke up in a lab, not a hospital room because it was still early days. So it was pretty obvious. And they hadn’t dialed in the sensory connections all the way yet, so everything felt weird. The calibration took hours.”

She must have been dead for at least a few years, Trask thought, but didn’t ask for details. It just wasn’t done.

“Let’s hope Lifeworks drops out then,” said Trask. “Maybe one of the other investors would be better.”

“Or none of them,” said Wanda. “We’re fine the way we are. Though, like I said, one of the groups is friends with the Baron. So maybe they’re not too bad.”

“The Baron is a psychopath,” Trask said.

“Exactly,” said Wanda. “They’ll fit right in.”

 Trask straightened up and thought about the situation. He didn’t know which was worse. To have the Baron’s friends buy the grid and turn up the cruelty dial all the way past a hundred, or to have a bunch of scientists come in and make it as safe as kindergarten.

“Cheer up,” said Wanda. “At least they’re not Humanists. If those guys get their hands on Krim, they’d just shut it down.”

Trask glanced at the front entrance. It was time to go and face the off-key chanting.

Chapter 16: The goose leg vendor

To Trask’s relief, the protestors were gone. It was starting to get dark and the wind had picked up. Maybe they got chilly, or hungry, or had to go to the bathroom.

He stood at the top of the city hall steps and looked down at the day-trippers getting in their last eyeful of Krim before heading back to the real world, and at the central plaza vendors trying hard to sell as much as they could before they had to pack for the night. 

Just as he thought that, he saw Joe push his way through the crowd on the other side of the street, in the central plaza, holding what was a left of a meat pie.

He waved at Trask, ate the last of the pie, crumpled up the newspaper it was wrapped in, dodged around traffic, and was at the bottom of the steps in seconds, where he gave Trask a crisp salute. The nearest tourists looked to see whom he was saluting, saw Trask at the top of the stairs, and pointed up. An excited hubbub rose from the crowd.

Trask nodded and paused for a second to appreciate their admiring stares.

Joe turned around to face the populace. “Make way, make way!” His deep, resonant voice echoed off the stone walls of the grid’s one and only official administrative building.

More tourists whispered and pointed. This was what they’d come to see. The pageantry, the costuming, the sheer physical presence of outsize personality. This was what made Krim special, and Trask wished that all the local residents in their drab peasant garb would stop and think for a second about the opportunities they were missing to enrich the world of Krim. 

Trask raised a hand and waved regally, then paused for a few moments, looking off into the distance at a forty-five degree angle, where his closely-cropped beard created the illusion of a strong, square jaw. 

Yes, his clothes were impractical. But if he could make the sacrifice, so could everyone else. It was just a matter of priorities.

Then he glanced down and adjusted the front of his jacket so that the sketch artists could get a good view of his badge.

“Is that the king?” a hushed voice said on the sidewalk below the stairs.

“Nay, the true king of Krim hath vanished, his whereabouts a riddle that doth plague our realm,” said a food cart vendor positioned illegally on the sidewalk.

“So who’s that?” a tourist pointed at Trask.

“Just some guy,” said the vendor. “I mean, ”Tis naught but some fellow.'”

Some guy! Did the turkey legger not know who he was? Didn’t she see his badge?

Trask descended the stairs and turned to the right.

“Make way, make way!” Joe yelled, clearing the way through the crowd.

Now Trask could get a better view of the food cart owner. He expected to recognize her immediately, but her face was new to him.  The cart looked familiar and the smell of the burning charcoal and hot grease reminded him of the taste of the deep-fried fowl leg that Godescalc “Goose Leg” Grimthorpe offered him as a free sample. It was a bit gamey but juicier than a turkey leg would have been and the goose skin fried up to a nice golden crisp.

This was the same cart, he was sure of it, but the woman behind it was new. So was the sign on the front—a badly drawn picture of a turkey.

The vendor noticed where Trask was looking and the condescending grin faded from her face. 

“Make a note, Joe,” Trask snapped.

“I didn’t bring my notepad,” Joe said.

“Now, there’s no need…” the vendor said. “I mean, ‘Do not bestir yourself, good sir.'”

Trask pulled out his own notepad and pencil and handed them to Joe. The guard flipped to an empty page and prepared to write.

The crowd quieted and waited to see what Trask would do. Trask savored the moment. With everyone watching, he could do anything he wanted. He could be magnanimous. He could be wrathful. Or he could be the strong protector that the grid needed. The warmth of a righteous fury washed through him, and he felt taller, stronger, more present than he’d ever felt in his life before Krim. This was where he was meant to be.

“What’s he going to do?” a tourist at the back whispered and was immediately shushed by others in the crowd.

Trask pulled himself up, shoulders square, a determined glare on his face, paused briefly for the sketch artists, then said: “Where be thy license to vend?”

Someone in the crowd gasped.

The vendor looked around, then shrugged. “Oh dear, ‘twould seem I’ve left it at home, wouldn’t it?”

“Write that down,” Trask told Joe in a low voice. “That’s a violation right there.” He turned back to the turkey leg merchant. “State thy name.”

“La, how careless of me. I’ve forgotten that as well.” The smile was creeping back on her face, and a few people in the crowd chuckled.

Trask narrowed his eyes. The face was unfamiliar but there was something about the voice. There was something about her. He closed his eyes to think and accidentally took a deep breath of Krim air. There were all the usual Krim scents—sweat, disease, horse, chicken, and pig manure, the smell of the vendor’s charcoal grill—but also the pleasant aroma of roast fowl. That sparked a memory. Goose Leg’s business wasn’t going well, and he sold the cart to someone else. He must have seen the registration at some point.

Trask looked at the cart again. Goose Leg used to have a sign advertising his roast goose legs. That was honest advertising, right there.

A tourist tittered.

“Well, art thou buying a leg or not?” The vendor asked Trask.

Trask snapped his fingers. “Amice Bellyse! Thou art also called The Freak.”

“That’s not nice,” a tourist muttered.

“Nay, ’tis fine,” Amice said. “Amice ‘The Freak’ Bellyse. ‘Tis on my cards.” She took a card out of her pocket and held it out to the tourist, but Trask intercepted it.

“Vending without a license.” Trask muttered as he passed the card to Joe. “Operating a stall on the sidewalk. Interfering with traffic. Operating a business within twenty yards of city hall. False advertising. Anachronism.”

Joe scribbled.

“A free leg, then, and we speak no more of this?” Amice asked.

She waved a leg in the air. It did smell good. Trask didn’t glance at the tourists, but he was highly aware that they were there, and he drew himself up. “Whom dost thou mistake me for?” he bellowed. “I am no common bureaucrat to be corrupted by free sustenance!”

“Huh.” Amice shrugged and put back the leg. “I thought you were. Thou wert.”

“Double the fines for false marketing and anachronism,” Trask told Joe as he turned and strode past his deputy. 

“Should I stay and…?” Joe gestured at the merchant.

“No, you can find her later.”

Trask didn’t want to waste any more time, but he also didn’t want to walk alone. It was starting to get late, and Krim’s residents would have already laid into their nightly drinking binges. It took a great deal of alcohol to make Krim bearable, and Trask preferred to keep other people between him and knives and swords wielded by drunk people with bad aim.

Joe finished taking notes then jogged a couple of steps to catch up with Trask. “Where to now?” He handed back the notepad and pencil.

“The Chamber, my good man. The Chamber.”