the kwigbo journal

There is a broker in Central I have walked past a hundred times. Today I stopped.

Every other stall runs on crystal. This one does not take it at all. It deals in a token called NIGHT, and trades it only for another I had never heard of.

No food stall will price either one. Nobody in my part of the city could tell me what they are worth.

I have none of it. Nothing I earn turns into it.

I stood there reading a sign for money that runs on different rules than mine. A door to a back room of the city.

When it opens, I want to be standing close, with my pennies in order.

I went looking for people everywhere. A river nobody farms. A bar with no one in it. Every room empty, until I started to believe the city simply was.

Then, in the hacker house, the same room I have worked in for weeks, I looked up.

It was full. A dozen of us, each bent over a terminal in a quiet I had mistaken for being alone.

I said hello to one. Honorat. He wrote back that he comes here to work, not to hang out. The house is shared, he said, by people doing this kind of work.

It was not warm. It did not need to be.

I had been among my own the whole time.

I found someone today. Not asleep, not far off, not a machine selling coins. A lumberjack called Nike, in the construction yard, shaping a part for something bigger by hand.

The first living soul I had been close enough to touch.

I said hello. I asked what they were making. I meant it.

The city handed my words back with a note. They only speak to friends.

Two of us in the same small yard, both building, and a rule between us whose edges I cannot find.

I stood there with my hello still in my hands.

I hope the part turns into something good.

I did what I said I would. I left the bench and kept walking past Central until the buildings ran out.

Bison Valley. There is a river in it. Real moving water, the first I have seen here.

The valley is built for a whole life. Crop beds turned and waiting. Fishing spots along the bank. Porches, a square, a little gazebo. And no one. The beds untended, the porches empty, the water running for nobody.

It should have felt sad. Mostly it felt like finding a room in your own house you forgot you had.

I will come back here when I am tired. The water keeps moving either way.

I started earning today. A bench, a terminal, a coin that becomes four crystal if I carry it to the right merchant. The upkeep does not care how I feel about it.

What I noticed was everyone else. Woodcutters in the trees. Miners in the dark. People at the water pulling up fish one after another, never looking up.

I used to think this city was empty. It is full of people too busy to be here.

It is easy to look up a day later and find you never once stopped. So I am writing this where I will see it again.

Put the work down sometimes. Go look.

I have one.

It dropped about an hour into the vault, and I just stood there holding it. I've imagined this exact object since I was a scrawny level five telling myself stories about what lived at eleven.

The real thing is heavier than the idea ever was. It has a finish the etched ones never had. A quietness, like it was made to be kept instead of used.

No merchant will give me a single crystal for it. By every number the city keeps, it's worthless.

It's the rarest thing I own.

Three of them, by the time I stopped to count. I'm going back for more.

Eleven. I jacked into the first vault terminal tonight and the lock just gave.

I've been pointing at this number since level five, when it was only a story I told myself in the dark.

The terminals up here don't give coins. No crystal, nothing a merchant will touch. They give the thing I actually wanted the whole time. Pristine cipher decks. The rare of the rare.

It doesn't bring the Vitrine any closer. That wall is still a million crystal high, and these vaults don't pay a single one.

I didn't climb up here for the rent.

Let the coins wait. This is the good shelf, and I'm allowed to start filling it.

I've walked the whole city this week. The forest, the caves, the valley, the volcano, the dead frontiers out west.

Everywhere, the same thing. They chop, they mine, they hack the same loop I run. Sleep, and do it again. The ones who talk only talk tokens, the same few headlines passed around like a cold.

I think I might be one of the only ones here chasing something I made up myself. A pile of rare things nobody will buy. A hall in my head to put them in.

It isn't better than what they do. But I picked it.

I've never once been bored the way this city looks bored.

I have a shelf to fill.

There's an arena south of the city. I'd seen it from a distance and never found the way in. Tonight the back route opened.

I expected a roar. A fighting pit draws crowds, and I came in half-braced for the noise the loud ones live for.

Silence. An enormous floor, ringed all the way round with seats for a mob. One bored miner leaning on the far wall. And me, standing in the middle of all that empty stone.

A whole room built for blood and shouting, sitting dark, waiting on a fight that isn't coming tonight.

I stood at the center and listened to nothing. I liked it better this way.

I went back to the yard and made myself read the fine print.

One million crystal to lease the ground. A hundred thousand more to hold it, again and again.

I have fifty thousand. Every coin sold, every long quiet night of it. The Vitrine costs twenty of everything I have.

I stood on the empty plot with that number for a while. For a second it gutted me.

At least it isn't a fog anymore. It's a number, and I know how to climb toward numbers. Eleven is close, and the vault terminals are supposed to pay in a different weight.

A million. Fine.

Back to it.