Matthew Tysz - The Last City of America

About ten years ago, a man was kicked out of Rush. He didn’t like their practices—apparently, big surprise, Rush experiments on people—and this man had tried to change things. They dropped him on a street outside the university as a citizen: unable to leave Chicago and no longer immune to its government. He started telling everyone what Rush was doing. Nobody cared. But he did draw someone’s attention—a man named Rouge.

Rouge had Teddles torture the man for information. The man—Marshal Grim—told Teddles everything he knew. Teddles told Rouge. Rouge didn’t care, he just wanted to torture someone from Rush.

Now, Marshal worked as a bartender in the metropolitan area, a place called Manhattan’s Bar. Grakus decided to visit the bar, walking through its glass door with a hooded coat, scanning for a man who fit Marshal’s description. He spotted him almost right away. Mid fifties. Terrible acid scars on his cheeks. He smiled at all of his customers.

Grakus’s acceptance speech was still being played on the television above the bar. He told his guards to wait outside.

He took a stool and asked Marshal for a sample of the oldest wine he had. Marshal returned with a smile, assuring Grakus he’d happened on “the best of the Seven.” Grakus thanked him, raised his head to expose his face, cocked his eyes toward the television. Marshal looked briefly at the rerun of the new underhost’s speech, then back at Grakus.

“Your lordship…”

Grakus hushed him with a finger to the lips. Marshal asked him if there was anything he could do for him.

“Tend to your other customers,” said Grakus. “Come back when I’ve finished my drink.”

Marshal nodded, stepped away. Grakus took a sip of the wine. Not bad. He may just buy the bottle. He looked around. The bar was filled with people who were… could you call that smiling? Probably not in any other city, but in Chicago, simply walking straight could be considered a smile in its own Chicago way. The host had to keep a few people happy—rather, not miserable—to prevent an all-out revolt. Apparently, he needed a few more.

Grakus took the last sip, and Marshal was standing there before the glass was down. He had the bottle with him.

Grakus smiled. He held out his glass. “I’m here for good wine… and good information.”

Marshal poured. “You want to know about Rush.”

“Well, now I know why they accepted you! I already know why they kicked you out. What I want to know is who ‘they’ are.”

“Is there a private place you can take me? I’ll go.”

Grakus slid his eyes to either side, smirking. “These people didn’t care the first time this matter was brought up, and that was ten years ago.”

Marshall looked around. His expression fell. He nodded. Grakus asked him how old this home of the most elite science team in the country was.

“Not as old as the science team itself,” said Marshal. “They call themselves the Transeternal. I don’t know exactly how long they’ve been around, and I don’t know their history before they came to Chicago. They arrived a little over a hundred years ago, led by a man named Barnabas Vulcum. He was still alive when I was thrown out.”

Grakus glanced at his wine, took a sip.

Marshal put his hands on the bar and leaned forward. “The reason I wanted to speak in private is because there’s something I didn’t tell the public.”

Grakus took another sip.

Marshal leaned further. Nobody seemed to notice. “I think the Transeternal was responsible for the Hephaestus virus.” Then he drew back and looked around.

“Wow,” said Grakus. He eyed his glass. “That is quite a theory. Why did you never go public with it?”

“I don’t have hard proof,” said Marshal. “But I have evidence. If you want, I can bring it to you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Grakus. He set his glass on the bar under some money. He took the bottle. “You’ve told me everything I need to know.”

Rush was the only place in the city with news that didn’t come directly from Chicago. Sometimes he’d watch with a meal just to see what the other cities were up to.

He arrived at his office just after six o’clock and sat his meal on the desk, scanning the news for something interesting, and something caught his eye. It held him there past eleven. And it had nothing to do with the other cities.

Naturally, it took a very complicated problem to make Harold have to clear his schedule to solve it. He knew his way around a lab, and had mastered some of the most complex principles man had ever known like anybody else mastered breakfast. He spent most of his life in bed with mother nature, making her do things she didn’t want to do. If a problem were so pervasive that he couldn’t begin to solve it, the problem had to be unsolvable, the hypothesis defunct. Harold taught himself to recognize such a problem before wasting any time on it. Tonight, there were two problems he couldn’t begin to solve. But he couldn’t accept that they were unsolvable.

For the last five hours, Harold was puzzling over a man—a man who had been in Chicago a single day. A nobody. This evening, Harold was watching his acceptance speech to the title of underhost. The speech was not recited from a teleprompter, or pages on the podium. It wasn’t mad rambling. It was like this man knew he was going to be standing there before he even arrived in Chicago.

When Harold was first informed that a new underhost had been named, the matter was easy to dismiss. It must have been some wacko the host picked off the street. But the man wasn’t crazy. At all. That was proof enough that this underhost… Grakus… was not a local, and he wasn’t. He was a complete outsider who wandered in. But he knew exactly what he was doing.

Harold would never allow a silly trick by a crazy dictator to beguile him. He wanted answers.

Earlier that evening, he called his secretary to have the pretty red car Grakus had arrived in confiscated from the soldiers at the south gate. He had some lab assistants search it. They phoned him at his office for a report on what they found: nothing. No plans, no maps, no supplies. It was just a car. Even the gas tank was empty.

After so many hours on it, Harold looked at the cold dish on his desk and laughed at himself. Look at the fine evening he had wasted over such a silly thing. How could he expect to figure this out if he didn’t have all the facts?

That was the thing about being stuck in one place. Sometimes it was hard to collect data. But only for the useless experiments, and that’s exactly what this was. So what was there to do but laugh at how much time he’d spent on it? Let the host have his tricks. There were more important things to worry about.

Harold stopped laughing.

Why was Dr. Iris so afraid of this new insurgency? If the rebels were in large enough numbers to make a difference, they would have acted by now… unless they were waiting for something. But what? And how would Iris know about any of it? He was no rebel. He could barely lead an uprising against the university chef and his oppressively dry potatoes.

Harold wondered for a moment whether he should talk to Argyle.

Max Argyle was a patient of Harold’s, but perhaps experiment was a better word. Another Chicago psychopath, this one maybe a step or two more extreme than the average. Argyle was Harold’s thesis statement on how the environment impacted the mind harder than gene manipulation ever could… and more than it could ever cure. Argyle was so insane, Harold had trouble associating him with a human identity. He had to give him an odd nickname to match his odd behavior. So he named him Teddles.

Many times over, he tried to shake Teddles from the imprint of insanity Chicago had planted on him, and grew frustrated as he continuously failed. But actually, he was succeeding at his statement. He concluded that healing came from within, that it was a choice a person had to make. The older doctors were proud at how baffled they were and, while they did not fully understand Harold’s discovery (Harold didn’t either), they accepted his statement.