He should be dead! Those fuckers were precise, you couldn’t miss a shot from a high precision energy weapon if you tried. The pavement next to him was intact, the piece he’d just been standing on was… There was a sudden sense of something like vertigo. He stood there looking at the blast in the concrete then realized he was looking out at it, and that he was looking at the spot he’d just been a moment ago. Looking out at it from a space that seemed to be oddly adjacent, recessed from the place he’d been standing, but wasn’t, realized he was looking out from a window, a window with wooden frames. He could still see, on the building opposite, strange replicas of the city blooming over walls, their silent song continued to shift and flow; indifferent and alien. A neon sign shattered onto the street ahead, a military grade mech came into view, the hulking golem stopped, inspecting the empty space: the crater in the sidewalk. The monstrosity of machinery, steel and carbon fiber stood still, silent and dreadful, considering. No pavement, no 558.
“Shit!”.
“This is zip space, you don’t exist - at least for now” Said a voice behind him.
“Oh! And welcome to my shop!”
He turned, realizing not where he was, but in whose presence: You didn’t find the cobbler, he found you…
And by the time he found you, things were usually beyond salvageable.
He looked to the street again, in time to see the mech turn, almost in slow motion and make its way back down the empty street, its footfalls sending tremors that could be felt through the soles of his feet.
Things were sliding into place, the kinetics of realization rolling a marble from one coil to another. The cobbler, the zip master: one moment you were here and the next, as good as gone, undetectable. A screen so complete, not even the most sophisticated real-ware could see in.
But by the time he found you, you were beyond most forms of help and he’d want something in return, he only helped those he could strike a bargain with. But there he’d be, just in time.
“I’m in that much trouble?”
“You know, most people know how deep they are by the time I arrive. But you, you have no idea!” He seemed amused, chuckling as he peered over his half moon glasses.
“I don’t find getting almost vaporized very funny!”
The cobbler just smiled, bright eyes twinkling in an old and strangely kind face. “It’s always good to find the humor in these things”.
He looked around the space in which he now found himself, the cobbler’s ‘shop’. It was lined with shelves of strange objects, some of which appeared to be made from molten glass, indiscernible things moving just beneath their surfaces, others that could be old earth artifacts, although they fought the light in a strange way; as though they were not entirely solid and possessed odd reflective qualities. Their shadows behaved in unconventional ways, corresponding to another light.
The space itself was small, warm light emitting from paper lanterns strung from low wooden beams, a polished wooden floor. By the window, a deeply upholstered wingback chair in moss green velvet.
“All representational” said the cobbler, waving a hand in a sweeping, dismissive gesture around the small space..
He didn’t know what this meant given that this entire construction could only be a representation anyway.
“Is this even the real you?”
“Oh no, but it could be”.
“I don’t have anything for you” he said flatly.
“Oh I think you might! I think you will be very useful indeed. Dead men have the sharpest eyes.” He gave a conspiratorial wink.
“Is that why you came for me? How did you know? And what do you know about what happened out there?”
“All I know is that you have something worth melting an entire city block for and never mind how I know that. But you’ve drawn some attention. That, I think was a bounty hunter, your number is out and got picked up. I don’t think he knew what you really have on you, or he would have at least tried to salvage your optics. But I want to know why? you’ve also been drawing attention from some very strange and, dare I say, unlikely admirers. That’s what I’m interested in. Maybe it has something to do with that cube? Let’s start there shall we?”
“It’s the cube you’re after?”
“Yes and no. What can I say, I collect things: the who’s, the why’s, odd occurrences. Yes, the real-ware and avatar trade is good but these things are the most valuable. People think I must exist outside of this city in some way? But I’m just the same, just figuring things out. Perhaps the real secret is that this city is as perplexing to me as it is to everyone else and I think I’m onto something, something that brings me just a little closer…”
“What do you do with them, the secrets I mean?
“Mostly I just like knowing them, to know what holds this city together, the strange things it produces” He said cryptically, tapping the side of his nose in a well studied gesture.
His features then took on a genuine expression of wistfulness “And maybe because they are truer than dreams, possibly the only true things.”
Funny, he thought the old man was going to say something about leverage or even blackmail, but that was unexpected.
He was a legend in the city, a code crafter that could bend reality itself - if that’s what you could even call it. There were rumors he’d stolen a cache of alien technology from the citadel, or traded it for some city-toppling secret. Some said he was just a construct, not even real, or that he had crafted the very substrate the digital layers of the city ran on. Most of it was rumor. He went by various names and guises, you never knew it was really him you were talking to. It was always on referral. And the zip stuff, he came to you.
“So let’s start with who gave it to you”
He must have looked skeptical.
“How do you know I am who I am? Not an elf? You don’t. But I did save your life didn’t I? I’m sure that counts for something?”
“Fair. Well, the cube, it was an avatar- I think. Not one I’ve ever seen before, a child in a flowery dress, patent leather shoes, red with buckles on the sides. A straw hat”
“Can’t say it’s any of my work, can’t even say whose work that could be and believe me, I would know. I know every tinker and tailor in this city and perhaps beyond. But I’m more interested in who sent it”.
“I thought maybe it was one of the game cartels, you know, some elaborate play setup.”
“I would know about that too if it were the case, but I found some anomalies on a couple of the folded layers and they all led to you”
“An avatar took an interest in me about two nights ago, odd, like it knew me, that kind of anomaly?”
“Something like that”
“Why the cobbler? Wouldn’t ‘The Tailor’ be more appropriate? You make suits”
“I was once, a long time ago. In another life, I suppose the name stuck”
Out on the now quiet street, he could see through the window, an automated hand cart trundling by, festooned with lights, banners displaying memes and ads, selling replicas of old earth artifacts - small trinkets and snow globes of earth cities, sticker fish, messages in bottles.
The cobbler seemed to be working on something: intricate machinery, small moving parts, suspended in strands of light which resolved into streams of living code.
“As I said, it’s all representational. RealPalindromics”.
He had no idea what this meant and was too fatigued by the entire thing to even ask, although he guessed it might have something to do with the other oddities in the shop.
“Have implants? Any wearables? Other than that rusty retina job?” He asked after quite some time,looking up from the delicate operation of folding and manipulating the glowing skeins of code.
“Just the Haptic wristband”
“Ok we’ll see what I can work with.”
“If I’m going to zip you up, I’m going to have to open a channel into your system, once I’m done, your spacial, temporal and identification data, will be folded into its own layer and shadowed, the zip projects a pseudo data layer into the world, real and digital, with other words you will appear in the visual field as an avatar, even to other digital agents.
Zip suits: some called them body bags- by the time you need one, you pretty much have the entire city’s guns trained on you, it glitches and you’re as good as dead, just a matter of time. But not the cobbler’s, they were the real deal, the only real stealth-ware, crafted by his strange processes.
He felt a slight buzz along his arms and over his scalp that made the hair stand on end. But otherwise no different, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting.
The door of the cobblers shop closed behind him with a firm click, he turned and it was just the wall of the building behind him. The street was still empty, Latin Neo-core threaded it’s longing through the almost endless predawn from a few blocks away. Much later, in the hazy morning, synth traders in their 80’s AD style suits and the market traders who set up their stalls, would make their way to the citadel perimeter, the sun gleaming off the radiation receptor inlays and the pavement steaming slightly from the night’s rain. Assistant Avatars and agents shimmering and flickering in the light, streaming out behind them, as they made their way up to London Arc, their shirtsleeves rolled up, data fed by their assistants streaming up broad forearms ready to be mained into the system: pure synthetic sentiment, captured by complex algorithms extracted from artificial agents, an entire city’s worth: sentiment was the instrument.
Now he made his way through streets rendered in the grayscale of half light, washed occasionally with fading blues and pinks, turning the shadows deep. A wispy remnant actualized into a half articulated form then pointed at something out of reach “true beauty can never be remembered, it can only be felt” announcing each word as though it were something precious and newly discovered. On a patch of empty wall where neon dreams hadn’t yet taken over - they spread in clusters, favoring certain parts of the city, although most buildings had been seeded with it, if not totally covered - someone had written the words: ‘under another sky’.
Something about this too, was significant. These broken texts, fragments of a conversion with the city itself, something real; sentiment that existed outside of the algorithms, just its own truth.
Over everything, the moons, omens in the neon tinged sky.