This is a re-upload of a previously published chapter that was mistakenly published before Chapter 60 instead of after it.
Note to readers: “2200 Blues” is a novel in progress, and each chapter is an early draft in its unfolding journey. Your thoughts and reactions are invaluable, guiding its evolution and refinement. 2200 Blues © 2024 by G.R. Nanda. All rights reserved.
The sounds of a bustling city emerged to Nickel, but in broken fragments. Of a city in disrepair and abandonment maintaining itself. Coarse voices of maintenance workers appeared from afar, around the rim of the cliff and the Merrix Depot building high above. Clanking machinery echoed from disparate locations around the cliffs and canyons, interrupted or concealed by the bubbling geysers.
Nickel had walked over the land from Rishi’s fireplace, warily looking out for hot springs of water, many of which he had to walk around, keeping a wide perimeter to protect himself out of fear. The land coalesced together the closer he got to the cliff. He had no idea how he would reach above toward the cliff, at least not yet. The clumps of earth folded and stitched together in rising folds ahead of him the further he moved. The lines of people walking across the valley between two rising mounds of rock beyond the Depot’s cliff remained enigmatic, a broken haze. The closer he moved, the more details he could make out—clothes, colors, the occasional facial appearance and marker—but all fleeting, and many hard to distinguish in the ever-luminescent sheen of the steam that coated the earth, especially the farther ahead Nickel could see. He was separated from them by a hot spring of steaming water, among a long stretch of earth that rose and fell in many bumps and rises of rock and dried grass.
It was the grass that confused him the most. The first he had really seen in the Atalantia Canyons since crashing here. He warily, but eagerly, moved toward it, looking for more markers of civilization, of the U.R. He didn’t know where, what country had created Hedonim and the settlements around it, but this area he traversed was the closest he could find to the world he had left behind on his hovercraft. But it was incomplete, stranded in many different locations and situations across the rock, separated by what appeared to be miles of squares of nuclear blast zones.
The closer he walked, the harder it became for him to tell whether or not the land and the apparent city or town—or remnants of one—he was walking through had been ruined by a nuclear power plant accident or a series of fiery hot springs, rupturing the world in water, steam, and heat. What buildings remained appeared to be insulated from the hot springs and their gaseous eruptions. The pinpricks and occasional blobs of buildings appeared broken in clumps, cleaved and shaved, but insulated by withered blocks of walls and granite, set up like blocks or dominoes.
“Excuse me, sir,” croaked a strange old voice.
Nickel whirled around, startled. He jumped back a few feet from a hobbling old man, stooped over, who was walking around a series of chopped-off cinder blocks from around the bend of a cave that was inset into a larger wall of rock.
“Excuse me, don’t mean to bother you, sir,” the man croaked out of dried, chapping lips that stretched wide over his mouth. His dark, seamed face was worn with what looked like burn marks and patches of dried, withered skin or blisters. He was covered in a tattered, stained winter coat and waddled in broken, shuffling steps toward Nickel in long, baggy brown pants. Nickel could barely see the old man’s feet through the long fringes of his pants that dragged against the ground, like he was dragging his feet across the earth. “Don’t mean to bother you, sir,” he repeated, keeping his head stooped, only his kinky gray hair facing Nickel’s eyes.
Nickel clasped the bag of food and supplies he carried on his back from Rishi’s fireplace. He watched the old man, a mixture of sympathy and fear intermingling in him. He was afraid of this stranger trying to hurt him or steal from him, but he also felt slightly ashamed that this was his initial reaction.
“Can you spare some digits, young man, sir?” the old man said, hobbling over to him, raising his head to peer into Nickel’s eyes with his own. His eyes were a glassy gray, his irises barely visible through the film. He was a digi-hit junkie. His eye-film was that of those so addicted to Ether Installations that they bought eye-films to withstand the strain of the screens’ glare. The old man came closer, pulling a money transceiver out of his pocket. “I can pay you back… I-I-I, I just need to buy some food and a blanket to sleep. I haven’t eaten today.”
Nickel watched the man, unnerved by him and the situation he had put himself in. The man watched Nickel with a pleading, dried expression. It was a ritual for him. His expression and his motions seemed ritualistic to Nickel, like he was following motions set forth by habit and desperation, yielding nothing more than the potential for fruit.
Nickel inched backward, afraid of him. After the Death Riders, Nickel was increasingly wary of strangers. The man hovered by for a while, whispering something.
“If not today, then tomorrow for Hedonim… if I can find it,” the old man husked before he hobbled off, turning around and walking back toward the cave and the hobbled pavement of a street that used to exist there.
Nickel watched him disappear, shaken. He suddenly had the desire to ask the man if he knew a way to Hedonim or people who might, but by then it was too late. And Nickel didn’t know if he would have done so anyway.
Nickel watched for him a while after the old homeless man disappeared, not seeing him. He turned around, feeling a greater weight of apprehension, fear, and uncertainty as he continued his trek into this lost city. He was afraid of what others he would meet would expect of him and why—or whether they would be accepting of him. More desperate homeless people Nickel was too desperate himself to be able to help? More thugs? Or people who mistook him for an artificial human? Or suspected him of being one? He had no idea where he was and no idea whether or not the people he met believed in the same eugenicist ideas he’d run into on his U.R. colony.
Oh, how he wished Steve was here with him. A great sadness filled Nickel’s chest, unsure of himself and his whereabouts. If only he hadn’t fought with him. For all his faults, Steve was a nice person who did take care of Nickel when they were together. A large metal structure sticking out of the ground interrupted Nickel’s slow walk, capturing his attention out of the corner of his eye.
Looking up, he saw that it was a lopsided, dilapidated sign sticking out of a mound of dried earth filled with inlets of grass and plant life. The sign was half-buried in the ground, and it looked like grass, dirt, scarce plant life, and mounds of rock had grown around it. The rim of the sign was filled with electronic lights and colors that were dead—just sacs of liquid color held together along the rim with no lights to flash. The sign had words on them, with the last few letters buried, but Nickel could easily make out the whole picture:
THIS WAY TO HEDONIM
Along the bottom of the sign, Nickel could make out a few more words:
Escape and Amusements ©, see each other like never before!
Unnerved, Nickel walked up the rising earth to the side of his path, looking around at the sign, finding nothing more than rust and pocketed holes inlaid into the surface. His heart beat fast, and he jogged down the side of the earth, continuing his walk, breaking his slow strut into a brisk run, toward the side of the cliff where Merrix Depot lay.
G.R. Nanda 