Coruscant. (Soundtrack)
Bottom floor. None-More-Low.
This was rock-bottom.
The lowest floor, where Coruscant tries to forget it was once an organic planet. Down here where the gravity makes the city REALLY suck – where claustrophobia is a vacation, and similes likening it to a tomb are met with laughter, naturally assumed to be some sort of ironic understatement.
“Yu stanz accuse of mockinz and stealinz. Ith yur herethy dat haz bringz yu here!”
He was a particularly ridiculous skraal, which speaks volumes TO A RACIST. He was clad in a long black garbage bag, framed with some sort of dingy maroon baldric that had clearly once been somebody’s curtains. It appeared to be a ceremonial robe of some sort, be it to identify as a priest, or a judge, or an executioner…or just something, anything at all … to mark him as special for reasons he himself didn’t quite understand in some bizarre parody of the upworlders and their games of authority and station.
Isolated from culture, we’re all just wearing costumes.
“ – watz sayz yu in yur defenth!?,” the skraal-judge cried, almost evangelically. He was working the emotions of the audience – the some six skraal knuckledraggers complicit in the coming murder.
Costumes that mark us for the role we play.
“Chit. Kark all, really,” Benedict forefeited his time with the mic. They had his hands wrangled behind his back, while his right boot stood shackled to an old, heavy quickstop refrigerator teetering dangerously at the edge of the crumby dock assembled by Le Cirque. *Actual* dirt adorned his Crash 66’s, from where he had walked on the Scarlet Woman’s actual earth. This is the place where the planet first dreamed the dream that would inevitably kill it. Always one for secret histories, Benedict certainly appreciated the symbolic nature of his situation, how time blurred into a single instant of unwanted sentient trash and their trailing disposal. This pastime of pirates, of Mafioso, of Sith-burners, of aristocrats – washing away trespass in a swim with the fishes.
“‘He who sups wiff the devil ought use a long spoon,’ yeah?,” he offered, a half-assed effort.
The arbiter raised his hands as if struck with the power of God, clearly high on his ability to issue death. He turned to the audience, showing his underlings just how tall his hands could make him, the height to which the King could raise each and every one of them.
“King Smegz finez u guiltzies of allz crimez againth da crownz! Yu –“
Benedict, like any good magician, had slipped his cuffs, fishing his cigarettes from his pockets and applying the needed flame.
“Mind if we smoke?,” he asked as an afterthought, a well-engineered showstopper.
The arbiter screamed, as did his help.
“HE IZ FREED! HURRYZ! HEAVEZ! HEAVEZ! HURRYZ!” They scrambled together to shove the anchor from the pier, grunting in anxiety and shared terror with each encountered impediment despite the fact their success was certain.
The fridge dove into the water, Benedict’s eyes widening as the chain went instantly taut, ripping his feet out from under him. He spun around, clawing at the deck, grabbing for skraal tails, cursing in vain as he was torn off the dock and pulled into the radioactive pool below.
Mother of all the joys, Mother of all the sorrows
Intercede with him tonight
For all of our tomorrows
Benedict hit with a sloppy splash, his body’s initial attempt to float undermined by the weight on his heel. He bobbed for a second, the water hissing as it was disturbed, before fully submerging into the glowing greens and browns of Diarrhea-lime flavored Gatorade. Scuba photos in a sepia filter.
This was Coruscant’s lost ocean.
Irradiated. Worthless.
Remarkably, his cigarette had retained its cherry. Remarkably, the Guttermage did not incinerate, nor even need to breathe.
He had peers…at least thirteen others that he could see from this particular vantage -- Many of which had long turned to bone, taking one final rest on the true dermis of Coruscanti myth. One or two others, however, screamed in perpetuity, their lungs flooded with fluid as they tried to die, but couldn’t – the radioactive nature of their watery grave having extended their mortality until it was measured in not in years, but plutonium half-lives. They bobbed from their tethers like human-shaped balloons.
Benedict would not share their fate. He had friends in high places, because, from here…
well, you can only go Up. Like Aquaman, he sent out a beacon in the form of a well-aimed thought that would echo in conversations, in graffiti, in the vomit of drunks, and the pipedreams of potheads, attracting like minds and capable hands.
And with that, he allowed himself an exasperated sigh (as one is wont to do when smoking a cigarette at the bottom of the ocean). It would likely be a while. He cast his eyes downward, searching for stimulus.
There in the murk and the ruin, he saw a tiny head half obscured by the rubble of a dead world. Pulling himself down his anchor, he snatched it for closer examination and very nearly laughed at what he found:
An abandoned baby doll, its left, rolly eye collapsed into its head. Never was there a more eschatological symbol to make one feel as though trapped in a Terminator sequel, and he couldn’t help but snicker-glug at its implication. The galaxy had expanded as far as it would go, and here, at the end of everything, anything anyone could ever do was already a stark, karking cliché’.
“Mystery, Babylon the Great – Movver of harlots and abominations of the All,” Benedict bubbled snidely. He fingered the doll’s eyeball, trying to restore its depth perception.
He noticed a sudden movement emerging from where the water went opaque. Massive, serpentine, thrashing in that floating space like a symbol for infinity. He recognized it, of course, it just seemed so much bigger than the last time. So much more mobile.
Jorgamund, the World-Serpent. That Great While Whale.
“T-shirts only ten quid...”
The Leviathan.
It was the tapeworm, its face that circular row of teeth, the gaping holes on the side of its head. It looked at him in the only way such a parasite could, passing before Benedict in a turbulence of displaced ocean. Its gross, segmented form shined, like crystallized urine. Like topaz.
And he saw his reflection in that piss-colored gill…
The Coruscanti, living all over each other, reaching higher at the expense of those below. Crabs in a bucket. The parasitic shadow of Capitalism, of that hypocrite who wants his McYoda’s readily available, but doesn’t want it so anyone can afford to work there. That thing that devours its life source without any concept or care for sustainability.
It shown in its segments across time and space and culture and imagination, of all the people attracted by the lights. Of learned helplessness and learned entitlement. Of mass addiction and the mutual mass exploitation of it.
Of gentrification and the spit-shining of old garbage to sell to the ignorantly wealthy. The Jedi padawans, the still-green soldiers, the poor little rich girls, wandering down into the Coruscanti layercake for Baby’s First Bit of Rough. The city had become a cartoon of misery; a family portrait drawn in caricature-style at a poverty-themed amusement park -- little Timmy in his tinfoil hat, wearing his trackmark temporary tattoos.
The idea of an alternative become just one more trope. The Greatest Working Class Rip-Off.
In the end, he was just one more maggot on the back of a dead horse, same as any of ‘em.
The Scarlet Whore was always what he knew she was – A den of parasites and addicts. It was just that he was no longer either of the two.
Not anymore.
And just like that, the Leviathan was gone.
Benedict marked the hours in cigarettes, three quarters of his carton of Booma Slims lost in the name of…air? Nah. Whatever it was the city gave him that kept him alive, the filter like an umbilical cord, albeit connected to the wrong hole. It wasn’t until 7am by Coruscant’s singular, planetary timezone that he was fished out of the water by a trio of Cthon, giving the flesh from their bones so that the Guttermage might live. Two died cutting him free. The other blistered and popped trying to climb to shore. Benedict pulled himself upon the feeble dock of Le Cirque, his hair now bleached platinum as though he were Darth Adekos’ beautiful son.
The remaining Cthon rescue party groaned in cheer and celebration, an ever-present mass in their throats giving it a wavy, fluctuating texture, sounding almost like a growl (though it was clear by their smiles that this was not the case). Some of the superfluous members were gnawing on recently killed skraal, taking periodic breaks to hack up grotesque hairballs featuring strips of muscle, chewed like bubble gum, amidst splintered bone.
The nearest Cthon made a noise akin to the family pet trying to speak English, and Benedict extended a gracious hand to it. Furthering the metaphor, it sniffed his hand before nuzzling against the palm. A wandering hand brushed against the baby doll, recognizing its shape reflexively, the Cthon taking it in its arms, cradling it, trying to awaken it, to take care of it, confirming the notion that Man, no matter how savage, no matter which stage in evolution, is really just looking to be safe and/or loved.
And he finally saw the Cthon for what they were – not the past, but
the future. A walking, talking memento mori for Coruscant and everything else. The whole of the Sprawl and the future of Us.
The Cthon’s efforts went without response from the doll, prompting Extinction behaviors trying to garner any feedback at all. Resolving it dead, it resorted to trying to eat the damn thing.
Cannibals, bless their heart.
A grin cracked Benedict’s face, both bittersweet and chit-eating. Cupping his hands around his laserbrain, he blew smoke into his fingertips as they flapped about like he were making a shadow puppet of a bird. Little moths of cigarette ash fluttered out the top, the edges of their wings glowing with the phoenix orange of smoldering ember.
They loved the ash moths, its delicate flapping casting the faintest of silhouettes upon the sealed eyelids that had blinded their sheltered orbs into obsolescence. It awakened something distant in their blood, some memory of a time where the water didn’t need to be outsourced and the plants were filled with drugs by God, not Man.
When the insects were more than illusions of smoker’s ash.
Of stories and analogies of chrysalises, where things endured the most suffocation and stagnancy right before they re-emerged glorious and free. Where Change was still possible, and it didn’t cost anything but the fear that had held them down for their entire lives.
Benedict could make them no such promises, but he could offer up the Hope. Maybe they could wander over to Taris and breed with the Rakghouls; create a plague to make the Gulag look like a case of the chicken pocks. It was no less than anyone deserved.
Maybe he’d toss Mingus-Dingus in the mix, just for good measure.
With a wave of his hand, the little moths fluttered off, descending down into a thoroughly impossible lower level, where the Cthon chased them into the
Subway.
Here he was, sending off the dregs of Coruscant to find fortune elsewhere, [member="Darth Adekos"] and his Progress™ initiative apparently so successful that it had finally spread to its greatest detractor.
“Always become what we hate the most, don't we?,” Benedict philosophized to no one in particular, but he didn’t mean it. He had since come to the realization that the Capitalist was not his nemesis, but his dark brother, just as King [member=Smeg] had been. The Superego, the Ego, and the Id.
Adekos, Benedict, and Smeg – The true bastard sons of Coruscant.
The Guttermage reckoned he owed his little bro a visit.
~^~
“K..King Smegz?,” begged the arbiter to his monarch, his face looking a bit roughed up from his encounter with the Cthon, his voice like a Monty Python impression of a foppish old woman, then coupled with a toothy lisp.
Suddenly, his jaw unhinged, a lit cigarette emerging from the center of his throat like a baby alien, freshly burst from some unfortunate chest.
A pair of hands came next, wrapped in dingy homeless mittens, grasping the rat’s maw from the inside and cracking it open further, ripping the corners of the skraal’s mouth into a Chelsea Smile before tearing the flesh down to his throat. The Guttermage was climbing through, a move taught to him by Peiori Caligga. Saving it to make an entrance, it was not a trick he used often, but when he did, it was every bit like a
Johnny Cage fatality as one might hope – gratuitous, ridiculous, and oh-so-satisfying.
He shook the expended skraal from his foot like an overstretched sock, the used-up meat plopping sorrowfully to the floor.
“Hullo, your majesty,” he approximated a bow, somehow sarcastic despite looking every other bow in the universe. He flicked the skraal’s detatched tongue from his shoulder. He let the moment land with a drag from his cigarette, examining the King so much fatter than he had imagined, as the residual gore on his person drained down his form, dripping from his fingertips like
Drip drip drip drip…
“...You look healfy.”
It's always dripping down here.
