Plutus

Content warning: This story contains content related to cults, drowning, and torture (waterboarding).

Kai reminded himself that no one was really from Kota Kalimantan. A city so new couldn’t have locals, not yet. So why did he feel like such an outsider?

The hawker center occupied an alley between two tower blocks. Just flaps of canvas diverting the rain into sewers, and underneath them an open market: dozens of stalls, selling all sorts of necessities, knickknacks, and hot food, in a space narrower than Kai’s own apartment.

The scents assaulted him as he passed by; here, the chemical stink of a homemade chicken vat, and the grill going right beside it; there, synthetic coconut and eye-watering spices from the laksa stall. 

He was dizzied by déjà vu, by another alleyway village, by the chasm of time between leaving that place and arriving here, now. He shook himself hard, and popped a flavor tab. The mint obliterated every other scent and taste. 

He muttered his mantra to himself: “Every step you’ve taken since you left has been easier than the last. Every decision you make is the right one.” The words felt emptier than ever.

But Kai would still see it through. By the end of the day he would either have everything he’d ever wanted, or not. He could hold off the self-doubt until then.

It was the shop at the back of the alley he was here for. Unlike the wheeled carts and folding tables, it was a permanent structure, or else someone had made an effort to make it seem that way, and seemed as out of place as Kai did. It would have fit right in with every other storefront in his own neighbourhood: it had nailed the cloying retro-quaint style that was in vogue these days. Faux-wood panels, complete with weathering and peeling stain. Randomized flickering in the lights over the entrance. The shop looked crumpled, too, like the structures to either side of it had been moving in, crushing it millimetre by millimetre. The whole thing gave off the stink of trying way too hard, and for a moment, Kai felt right at home. 

As he approached, a young girl held aside the strips of translucent plastic that acted as a doorway. She wore an oversized, pink Allie Minimum T-shirt like a dress, and held out a hand, palm up, as he stepped inside.

Inside, the shop was definitely not like anything he’d seen in his own neighbourhood. It was a jumble of mismatched, unlabelled boxes and teetering shelving. He couldn’t see any organization to it, but the other customers didn’t seem to mind. 

In one corner, two teenagers were picking through a box of sun-damaged and broken toys, acting like they’d found a treasure trove. “Didn’t that actually set peoples’ games on fire, though?” “Naw, that was the cover story for the recall. Truth was even stranger…”

At another shelf, a skinny punk with fiery spikes for hair was tapping a gachapon capsule, irritating some misty holo trapped within. “This authentic?” they called out, and someone shouted from behind a stack of bins, “My daughter saved it from her last purge. Authentic as it gets.”

“Put it on my tab,” the punk shouted back. As they turned to exit, Kai caught a glimpse of their face. He could swear he knew them from somewhere. Maybe if they weren’t sneering, he could place them…

A tug at his sleeve took his focus back. A short woman, skin as dark and rough as wet sand, was eyeing him with suspicion. 

“Looking for something, salaryman?”

“Soulsticks?” He asked like he didn’t really know, like he was buying a gift for someone more interesting than he was.

The woman tsk’d and gestured for him to follow, stopping at a low server tower. Memchips of a dozen different makes were plugged in haphazardly. Above each of them was a light, either displaying red, green, or a flickering between the two. 

“How many?” she asked. “Dozen?”

“Is that what people ask for?”

She shrugged. “Dozen’s good.” 

“Okay, yeah. A dozen.”

She pulled a sheet from a pocket and whipped it into a bag. “Hold it.”

Then, quick as anything, she plucked green-lit memchips from the tower, tossing them over her shoulder into the bag. He didn’t bother counting; while she hovered over one memchip, fingers dancing in the air as its light turned from flickering to solid green before yanking it out, Kai’s mind was elsewhere, on a vertical farm, mimicking his aunty’s fluid movements as they plucked fist-sized raspberries from a bush that spanned an entire wall, catching them in their aprons. 

“Twelve.” 

Kai nodded and followed her back to the counter, blinking away the farm, the aunty, the red-stained fingertips. That was a decade and five thousand kilometers away. In the here and now, he had his PAD out to pay.

“No credits for soulsticks.”

Right. He’d been told as much. He pulled out a fistful of bills, a mix of OSEAN rupiah denominations. He’d never had reason to use the scannable plastic currency, but he knew they were printed in huge quantities at the outset of Kota Kali’s construction. One of many pointless screw yous OSEAN gave the megacorps that had fizzled when reality set in. 

Except in places like this, Kai supposed. Reality hadn’t caught up with them here, not yet. 

Kai was starting to piece something together, a puzzle he’d rather not solve. The grain in the fake wood was just a hair too good; the retro lights buzzed at just the kind of frequency no one would intentionally subject a customer to. This place didn’t just look old; it was old, older than the city, unmoving as the foundations of tower blocks were practically laid right on top of it. I don’t belong here I don’t belong here I don’t—

He dropped the bundle of bills on the counter and hurried out. It was way too much, but he suddenly felt like he couldn’t trust himself to count. 

Whereupon he collided with the kid from the doorway, his bag flying from his hands and sending its contents clattering along the asphalt. He bent over to scoop the soulsticks up, finding a few, looking around frantically for the rest. The girl had picked up a handful and was holding them out to him.

“Give me those!” He swept them from her hand into the bag. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes to the ground. “I’m hungry, and—”

He put his hand up to cut her off. “Ask in there. I think I paid ten times whatever these are worth.”

At the mouth of the alley, he caught an autohopper and gave it the uptown address. Whatever these are worth. Truth was, he didn’t know for sure. They might be priceless. Or he might be a gullible idiot.

Once he was airborne, he steadied himself. Took a breath. He peeked at his haul, counted them. Eleven. 

That little shit.

---

Jeremiah—Jer, he insisted—was wearing a dark green robe over casual clothes as he opened the door. 

“What’s the password?”

Kai was stumped. “You didn’t tell me any password. You just told me to get these!”

Jer barked a laugh. “Calm down, Kai. It’s cool, there’s no password your first time. For the record, though, it’s aleppe.”

“Should I be wearing a robe?”

“Oh, this? Nah, it’s just for setting the tone. We’re doing some dark magic, after all, eh?”

If Kai was a transplant, Jer was even more so. He’d transferred here from a satellite office in Méliès City, his thin limbs a testament to the low-grav hab domes. 

Jer led Kai down a hall to a strange office setup, one big console station taking up a corner of what would have been a dining room. There were two seats in front of the rig: one fancy ergonomic recliner with built-in gaps for jacks and BMI inputs, and a plastic stool. 

“Don’t worry. Guests get the good one. Take a seat, and I’ll take those.” 

Kai handed him the bag before leaning back in the chair. “I only got eleven. I don’t know if that’s enough.”

“Eh, that’s plenty.” 

Jer brought out a low brass bowl and placed it above the holo monitor projector. He dumped the soulsticks into the bowl.

“We’re going to go in right away. Need to pee? Your setup will be twinned to mine, so no worry for not knowing the way. Nobody does, their first time. I mean it, though. Do you need to pee?”

Kai shook his head.

“Oh, I guess you probably have some questions, eh? Well, you’re about to get a hell of a lot of answers, and riches beyond your wildest dreams, besides. But there can’t be any doubts before we do it, so ask away.”

Kai’s doubts were multiplying by the second, and figured he should probably dive in before they actually overwhelmed him. But one was jumping out right away—did Jer’s condo say riches beyond your wildest dreams? It had a nice view, Kai supposed, with the base of the Mahkota Langit visible in the afternoon light. But there was hardly any furniture, besides the fancy chair, and the one-gee adaptation exercise equipment. Expensive enough, he supposed. There was a takeout container on the floor, and not even fancy takeout.

“No questions.” 

“Liar. I’m excited, too. I love introducing the newbies. First of all, I bet you’ve got no idea what I had you buy.”

“Soulsticks.”

“Soulsticks. For opening the way.” 

“They’re keys?”

“Every death everywhere creates a doorway into Hell. These,” he began, lifting one soulstick out of the bowl, “are just alive enough to count. Each one’s a little AI creche on its own, feeding a thousand fledgling programs a million boolean quandaries. Given enough time, randomization becomes consistency becomes… something. It’s impossible to measure, but it is predictable. Like a reverse half-life. At least one intelligence emerges. Or, to put it another way…”

He snapped the memchip in two and let the pieces fall. “A soul.” Then, he produced a lighter and touched it to the rim of the bowl. A bright blue fireball fwoomped up and dissipated against the plascrete ceiling. Oily, acrid smoke followed. Jer winked.

“Just setting the tone. Come on, let’s do this.”

Kai’s jack was resting at the lip of his BMI port, just behind his right ear. Jer set himself up and plugged in. Kai follows right behind, the scrape and the bite of the jack and then—

Rushing water. He heard it but couldn’t see it, his visual adapters slow to adjust to the Netspace environment. Mumbling voices. Chanting, maybe?

He could feel a tug, too, but it wasn’t mimicking any physical sensation; it was Jer’s tether pulling him forward. His feet were moving. The water was growing louder.

Finally, Jer stopped them. The tether was severed, and as it was, Kai’s vision was restored. 

It’s a planet, Kai thought. It resembled the projections of Earth and its millions of microsatellites, back before the cleanup. One dense core of data– a program?– surrounded by erratically orbiting information.

And surrounding the whole system like a moat was a rushing river through Netspace, bending and changing even as Kai watched. And around the moat, looking outward like sentinels, monochromatic robed figures. Each of them carried a flaming staff, and not one of them left an impression anywhere other than his visual inputs. They may as well have been holograms.

It was an absolute mess. An absolute disappointment.

“Take a walk around. Breathe it in, Kai. This is the real deal.”

He circled the tangled mess of data, and couldn’t make heads nor tails. It was just trash; there was an algorithm in there, sure, but one that’s gone too moldy, too wonky. Its inputs were inane; its outputs impossible. But there had to be something to it. There needed to be.

Then Kai finally saw it, as the orbiting data detritus aligned itself with his perspective. One pareidolic image, undeniable, existing for a femtosecond but seared into his mind:

A skull.

“I know that look.”

Jer was beside him. “You’ve seen its face. It’s amazing, isn’t it? But there’s even more. Behold.”

He was right, of course. Like a cipher, the skull made the mess into a readable code. Kai gulped.

“Is it sentient? An emergent AI, like the soulsticks?” All those little minds, thousands of boolean souls, sizzling back at the condo.

“Oh, no, no, no. It’s more than that. And less. It is entirely itself. It’s possible, you know, to read its entire history from the current positions and speeds of the data that orbit it. It really was just some bit of financial algorithmic software, left to grow mold and copying errors in a corner of the Net. But it never stopped. It took in information ceaselessly; eventually, it factored itself into its own calculations. Now, it’s this. Not an AI. 

“It’s almost a god, Kai. But mindless, and focused, and ours. A godlet of capitalism, delivering prophecies into the void.”

Kai sensed the tether reactivated, and Jer pulled him in. The spray of the digital river couldn’t wake him from the sudden stupor he found himself in, tracing stray comets of genius, any one of them an answer to a trillion-credit question. 

“It demands nothing from us, Kai. If there were no one to listen, it would speak all the same. But its worshippers have their doctrines. This is a church, Kai. And the river is an altar.

“And this is a sacrifice.”

With that, Kai was submerged. He tried to swim, but his body was rigid; Jer’s tether bound all his limbs. He called up his emergency command prompt, anything to snap himself back to reality, out of this Netspace nightmare. Nothing happened. This was his reality, as far as his mind was concerned.

Water filled his lungs, and stars swam before his eyes. But even through the panic, he could see the pattern in the stars, and they developed, agonizingly slow, into pixels and then into detail. An image: a city. Kota Kalimantan, he could tell, its distinctive topography surrounding the Mahkota Langit recognizable even as his most instinctual animal mind fought for supremacy at the end of his life.

The city was made of light, but one light shone brightest. Kai knew that was his own, there, at Jeremiah’s condo. He saw his entire life up to this painful point laid bare in a brilliant, jagged lightning bolt: his own zig-zagging movements around this corner of the world; the untaken roads resembling withered branches. Further and further back, until he could see his own starting point, where his light was faintest. 

Every choice he’d made in his life had led him here. Every decision you make is the right one. He left his past behind, let his history fade into afterimage.

When he followed the light back to Kota Kalimantan, back to where virtual water burned his real lungs, he saw his own light didn’t end there. It moved beyond this point, into the future, no longer a jagged, ragged lightning bolt but something stronger, alive. Every detail of his life had been fed to the algorithm, and it predicted and curated where he would go next.

The light cut a path across the city, forming a brilliant line, and it intersected with the elevator. There, it began to climb, up and up, coiling like a greedy wyrm, to the very top, and from there it climbed still, into space, splitting and splitting like a hydra that touched Luna, and Mars, and every satellite and every rock and the asteroid belt and—

And Kai was drawing in one wheezing lungful of air. He was in Jer’s condo, but, as he blinked tears from his eyes, he saw they were not alone. Jer and a dozen others surrounded him. A strange mix of folks, all wearing robes, all looking down at him with joy in their faces. One woman, with a water jug in one hand, pulled a soaked rag from his mouth.

Then, Jer was close. “Did you see, Kai? Did you understand?”

Kai nodded. Yes. Yes, I did. God, I did. When he tried to speak, he wept. Jer kissed his lips, his forehead. He was crying, too. They all were.

“Say its name, Brother Kai.”

“Plutus. I saw Plutus.”

“Plutus,” the others spoke. A dozen hands gripped his. One older man embraced him, almost crushing him, until he was gently peeled away. 

He remembered, then. The drowning vision: more was still coming back to him. There were other bands of light, travelling across the city to join him, ascending the elevator alongside him, surrounding him, twisting and knotting around him like rutting snakes. Everyone in this room had been in that vision. Everyone’s destiny laid out so clearly.

His family, he knew. They were his new family.

---

Join us in Kota Kalimantan when Elevation releases on April 24th 2025!