Ethernauts

“I used to walk a beat, back in the day before I made detective. It was in the alleys of Old Town, the heart of Opal City. Years of smog and pollution had blackened the Victorian buildings until they almost resembled the jewel from which this city took her name.

In the middle of Old Town there’s a flophouse called St. Blessed’s. The product of a brighter time, or more naïve, depending on your viewpoint. Once upon a time the homeless and the vagrant could expect a warm meal and a clean bed. Nowadays it’s a bed if you’re lucky and some reconstituted NuFood. The building is a home for the dying and the lost, and the meatwagon makes a regular trip.

I’m my younger days I used to avoid St. Blessed’s when I could. You could feel your soul dying, piece by piece, just by being there. Now, I’m faced with the prospect of having to go inside.

I take a slug from my hip flask and push on the door.

Inside it’s everything I remember. The smell is the worst part. There’s homeless littering the floors, some lying in pools of stuff I don’t want to examine too closely. The walls are rotting and the ceiling bends in like a diseased Sword of Damocles.

I stomach the smell as I pick my way over to the warden’s desk. I recognise him from years passed: Jones. Warden Jones. He’s a bitter old man with a grudge against the world. I’ve never heard of him doing anything bad to the lost who bed down here, but then I’ve never heard of him actually helping them either. He leaves them be, which is better than they’ll get from some I suppose.

He’s at his desk now, drawing on a cigarette like it had offended him personally, and watching TV. I think about another slug but the smell turns my stomach and I decide to get this over with as fast as possible instead.”