Chapter 1: Gratian
He'd better pull it together today.
For all the wine in the world, Gratian Waller could not locate his keys, which posed more problems than one might initially imagine.
The most obvious was the question of how he would get to the Consortium building. More troubling was the conundrum of how he would get through the door to his little corner office in the basement. The most pressing was that he didn’t know where he was. The most discomfiting was his pained, unsteady body. The most long-range was the imminent destruction of his career. There were others, but he couldn’t compel his fizzling brain to identify them.
Through the fizzle, some things remained clear: There were items in his little corner office, documents he would need today. There were meetings to attend in the sterile conference room. There were messages to send from the lobby when the other things were done. These were important things, and he was messing up already. Further, his knowledge that everyone would misunderstand his choices, regardless of which he made, interfered with his ability to process the steps required to locate the keys.
He was done. His impression-making skills had been lacking for a while now. Without them, what would become of him? Ended.
His transit card was with the keys, in their undisclosed location. So he needed a new solution. He wasn’t sure how far away the Consortium was, so it was unclear what kind of transit he needed anyway. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know where anything was. Without geography, reality melted, along with agency.
The most upsetting of the myriad problems caused by his keys’ unknown whereabouts was that, if he could calm a little more of the mind fizzle to admit it, they were missing precisely because of all the wine in the world.
Almost. Enough wine, at least, to make his body hurt in a way that is not so much pain as it is an inability to make physical motion happen. The pain where balance is rendered impossible and complex thought, like memory, is unobtainable. His hyper-awareness of his age simply added to his sense of failure, or would if he could sense things. His body once adapted and processed the poison, but no longer.
Location. Objects. Youth. Health. Movement. Memory. Gone.
Gratian would be unrecognizable to people in his previous life. He used to be precise. Precise hair and precise shoulders encased in precise sport coats whose precise stitching created perfectly precise angles. Perfectly precise shoes that would be thrown away and replaced at the first sign of scuffing. Perfect income. Perfect apartment on the 36th floor of the Hadler Archeological Directorate Residential Tower. Perfect.
His career in his previous life had not been perfect, but it had been pretty darn close. The Hadler Archeological Directorate was a critical branch of the Pitzian Cultural Service, as its research focus was local and of vital importance to the City of Falson’s growth. The Directorate oversaw and approved all research into ancient Hadler sites, which had turned out to be more plentiful than initially expected. The Casuls had destroyed so much, but for all of their automated and efficient erasures, they had missed a remarkable amount of anthropological detail. The Pitzian government was undoing the harm caused by the Casul occupation and their disregard for the history of the place, and Pitzian analysts and historians were adept and uncovering stories the Casuls thought they had destroyed. Tiring.
He might vomit, not because of the memory, but because of his squishy gut.
He hadn’t been sick so much before. Before, there were too many perks for him to self-sicken. Gratian’s previous employment had relied on his ability to sell the Pitzian philosophy to donors. As long as he had the terminology and talking points down, there wan’t much to stress about. He didn’t know much about what all the words and structures meant because that kind of understanding would distract him from his work. He was an administrator, and a pretty good one. The research was for the researchers. The planning and funding were for the administrators. As Sub-director for Agricultural Development, he had been responsible for funds earmarked for research into increasing understandings of Hadler farming practices with the intent of integrating them with the new synthetic products being developed by researchers under the auspices of the Effectiveness and Efficiency Innovation Directorate.
Et cetera. Or something.
The details were hazy, but the words and the order in which they appeared seemed clear enough when he was functional. Besides, Gratian was a charming, effective diplomat, until the wine, that is. So, he had been a good Sub-director, and the money had gone to the right places, mostly.
His eyes were parched and a piercing pain throbbed on his right side.
The best part of his job had been liaising with his counterpart at the Innovation Directorate. Jurius Fordham was a man just as precise as Gratian, in all the same, precise ways. They got along, very well in fact, especially on planning summits, when they and their immediate administrative teams would escape their daily lives in Falson to spend weeks in larger cities with more to do and better restaurants and better parks and better entertainment and better everything, ostensibly so they could focus on strategizing existing projects and developing new ones. They allocated funds to independent researchers whose work most seemed to further the aims of reparative integration and the Pitzian worldview. They generally made allocation decisions on trips. Work and play.
His legs were weirdly numb.
That was his old career, though, and he hadn’t seen Jurius in well over a year. He hadn’t left Falson in that time, either. He no longer worked for any Directorate and would likely not be welcome at most events or locations affiliated with the research branches of the government.
He had made a mistake.
Dwelling on it didn’t help his immediate problem, which kept expounding in his throbbing brain, so his balance issue was exacerbated by the dizzying, separate, yet related panics. Don’t let them confuse you. Ignore them.
First, find the keys. Do that first.
No, first was determining his location. Keys second. He didn’t recognize his immediate surroundings, but he did see the distinctive silver skyscrapers that shot up from the city center. That helped a little, but not entirely. In his hungover fog, he tried to remember if the cylindrical Central Administration Building was west or north of the hexagonal, slightly taller Ministry of Mathematic Philosophy. He always found them to be the most novel of the city center’s buildings, most of which were simple rectangular structures of varying width and height. Given that he seldom had reason to approach either, he just associated them with each other, serving as a conjoined marker of mostly uncharted territory.
When, on better days than this, he looked toward the city center from the front window of his home—his current tenement unit, not the fancy apartment of his previous life—the Central Administration was partially obscured by the Ministry, but he couldn’t remember if it peeked out to the right or the left from that vantage point. This should be so easy. It would have been if his brain wasn’t crushing itself and his legs weren’t concrete burdens dragging along behind his slightly quicker torso.
Figure out the street. What direction you are facing?
He wasn’t on a street. He was in a dirty puddle between a wall and an empty, green dumpster. He identified the alley as an alley, but not as any alley in particular. Pushing his hand against a grimy two-story brick wall, he stumbled forward, toward the street. He tried to stop before reaching the alley’s end, but he tumbled forward past the corner of the building and onto the sidewalk, catching himself with his fumbling hands before lowering himself to the ground.
He couldn’t be hungover. He must still be drunk, or perhaps drugged? Shame penetrating his body with a dehydrated heat, he recognized that he wouldn’t know the difference between intoxication and withdrawal. At this point, both hurt in equal measure.
He could just lay here for a little while. Placed, solid, with concrete under him.
A young woman, perhaps in her mid-20s, wearing a loose-fitting blue sweater and slightly-past-their-prime jeans, which marked her as a retail worker, laborer, student, or something else—anything really, but not a government worker—ran toward him from a nearby doorway.
“Shit. Are you okay?”
“Uh, yep. Shit. Yep.”
She grabbed his right arm with both hands and tried to lift him. Pushing up, in coordination with the woman’s pulling, Gratian managed to raise his torso and swing his numb legs around into a sitting position. He exhaled in shame and embarrassment.
“Thank you. Sorry.”
“I’m going to call a MedAid for you. Just hang on. You’re good.”
She pushed the MedAid button on her citizen’s wristband, entered her PIN to verify her identity, and marked the check box to verify authorization to record her location.
“On their way. You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Sorry.”
Gratian reeked of struggling liver.
“It’s okay,” she said, a bit more compassionately than was warranted. “Just breathe. They should be here soon.”
“I can’t go to the hospital. I have too much to do. I gotta get to the office. Shit.”
“It’s okay. You can do that stuff. You just need to breathe a minute. Okay?”
“What time is it?”
“A little past 7. You late for work? I think you need a doctor. You don’t look great.”
“Yep. Uh, yep. Shit.”
“Just try to breathe.”
Gratian breathed as instructed, feeling worse despite the oxygen because now he had pulled someone else into his mess. That’s not an accurate way of saying it. Try again: He had compelled someone else to intervene, to interrupt their day, to inconvenience themselves because he was incapable of making his own body and mind work correctly. This was shameful and unacceptable. His failure kept compounding.
Pathetic.
John arrived at the Consortium hoping to find Gratian but not particularly surprised that he didn’t. He sat at one of the group workstations in the atrium and opened a folder. He removed three sheets of paper and reviewed them.
He had already read them, obsessively, multiple times over the past few days. They showed substantial unpaid invoices billed to the the Hadler Archeological Directorate by three independent research groups. Payment had been stopped without notes or explanation. Interest was compounding. Nothing had been done to remedy what appeared to be a clerical error.
The Consortium needed to know why, not because of any financial or legal interest, but because if the Directorates were failing to pay bills and, more troublingly, no one was talking about it or fixing it after 18 months, something bad was going on.
The invoices showed a stop payment order on 3 March of the previous year. The order came from the Agriculture Directorate. Why would the Pitzian Cultural Service selectively cut farming research programs, and why wouldn’t they make their reasons public? It was troubling, but if John could just find an explanation, the Consortium could reassign him to a more interesting case. As a non-governmental Pitzian advocacy group, the Consortium did a lot of interesting philosophical work. John didn’t take this job to read a bunch of cow research. Gratian, a relatively new recruit to the internal policy team, which John and the other real scholars referred to as the Government Reject Department, had responded to his call for research data.
But John knew not to trust those former Directorate people. And sure enough, there was no sign of Gratian Waller.
Gratian got on the MedAid Transit bus against his will. Well, not exactly. He didn’t have an alternative in mind, as his mind wasn’t working at the moment, so he got on because it was a thing to do. The young woman looked deeply concerned as the MedAid workers helped him into the truck. That was nice. It seemed like she was actually interested in his well-being, like she viewed him as good and worthwhile, like he used to feel before his mistake. You are ruminating. Stop it. Before he was fired. Before joining the Consortium. Before being tired, drunk, or both all day, every day. Back when he was precise and people respected his precision.
It seemed like he wasn’t going to work today. That’s going to be another problem, buddy, he told himself.
Dumbass.