A Night of Echoes and Wonder

New Miami Lore: Tales from Humanity’s Last City

Entry 2 – A Night of Echoes and Wonder

If New Miami was a corpse, the desert is that space inside the chalk lines. No story exists beyond the white contour. All that matters, and all that has ever happened and ever will, lies there, rotting, like a gruesome crime waiting to be solved.

Drop by drop, and tale by tale, great stories emerge from the shadows. Silence spreads far and wide, thickening the farther away from the colonies we travel, swallowing you whole, gripping you with the strength of a hundred million ghosts. Sharing their truth demands great sacrifice. In the underworld, death is a currency that seldom hands back any change.

It used to be called suburbia, an endless grid of homes metastasizing from extinct, overpopulated tumors. Even then we were a cancer. How could we not have become what we became? What else should fate have prepared us for, if not to feed on the remains of what could have been greatness?

That is the desert in a roachshell, so why would anyone choose to walk, or more precisely run through it? Because that’s what they do, runners, day and night, if only there were days and nights down below. The answer, to keep it short, is treasure. Old World treasure to be exact.

Walking, running, or wandering in the desert is not recommended, but for those at the end of their rope, where else could any hints of opportunity pierce through the veil of darkness. Sure, treasure is fucking great. Everyone will tell you so. What they won’t mention is how often it kills. That’s the part we choose to ignore, perhaps for the sake of our sanity. We know that for every happy ending, there are thousands of untold stories of heartache and broken dreams forever lost in between Old World concrete boxes and ancient, flooded driveways. Then again, what need do we have to mention such truths?

What none of us truly understands, despite our insistence on the contrary, it who created the desert, or why they would make it so. There are theories, of course. We have leftover, fragmented data available as part of the base code in our PPMs, stating people used to live in these identical boxes, a single family inside each one, identical all around to any other box. Some say the boxes were built to counter a raging pandemic during the city’s early days, enclosing small groups of infected in early concrete graves. Again, who the fuck knows?

I can guess what you’re thinking. The questions you ask, we all have asked ourselves at some point while looking down into the mist hiding our heinous underbelly. Who are these runners? What is the treasure they seek? Why risk their lives for it? The few to survive a visit to the dark depths of our ancestors’ world share this common title, which is always earned, never given. No runner has been born as such. In fact, not a single one would have chosen this path on their own. Not even the greatest of them. Running is a fate as inescapable as the desert itself, and one that comes late in the life of a udie,[1] usually at a time when every other alternative has run its course.

There is a hierarchy to the runners’ adventurous kind. At the bottom of the ladder, you’ve got debtors, betrothed to the gang til death do them part. Poor fuckers run not because they want to, but because the alternative is a slow, painful death at the hands of gangs and warlords. Next up, or farther down, depending on how you look at the world, the young, inexperienced throngs looking to make a name for themselves. And what else could they do or hope for? After all, it is deep in the desert where there lays one last spark of a dream withering at dusk, ready to die, but like anything else in New Miami, never quite dying. That is treasure; crumbs of a forgotten past, buried or submerged in what used to be our world. Sometimes it is an old photograph. Other times, one or two book pages that survived inside a locked safe. Every now and then, it may be something else. Something greater. A find of destiny to be brough back only by the best of them. The best of us. Those who run for a living and who live for a run. This is a fragment of one of their stories.

Las andanzas de Nacho Pizarra, Runner de Runners[2]

Nacho Pizarra was short by New Miami standards, making up for any missing inches with an endurance and tenacity that embedded his name in the long history of our dark, decadent underworld. But who was he before becoming the greatest of all runners, and how did he get there?

Judging by the start of his journey, Nacho wasn’t supposed to last more than a few weeks in the unforgiving desert. The child of immigrants from Refugio Merida, he was born and raised in the underworld, suffering a much too common fate among the offspring of debtors. Sold to a local gang at five, his best prospects were as desert fodder. There was no training to be had. No advice to be given. No bounty to bring back during his first few runs. So, how is it that he found the impossible on what was supposed to be his last run?

A now legendary and inevitably misremembered clash with destiny occurred somewhere deep and forgotten, not since or ever before visited by another living soul. To get there, he followed the voice of a wandering curandera. An Old World witch, who was as much a part of the desert as the toxic water and waste, which to Nacho’s surprise, she had somehow managed to survive. How he found her, or she found him, nobody knew. What she told him, or what he thought he heard in the hallucinogenic darkness, was recited word by word at each retelling of his famous tale.

No estas lejos de donde debes estar, Nacho Pizzarra.

Lo que vas a encontrar es solo el comienzo de una aventura que no terminará por muchos años más.[3]

For the moment, know that tonight’s findings will change your fortune, and that of everyone you meet from now on.

Avísame si estas listo para adentrarte en el desierto de verdad… para navegar hasta el infinito y a orillas del mundo encontrar la verdad.

Entrégame lo que busco, y todo lo demás es tuyo, desde hoy hasta siempre… Todo lo que puedas traer contigo, pero sospecha de tus ojos, o te hundes en el mar con mis sueños y los tuyos.[4]

Whether Nacho heard what he heard, or saw what he saw, it’s hard to tell. We do know, or at least suspect, he was given a long rope and a stick of real wood, which in themselves would have been worth a fortune, and instructions on how to travel beyond the desert’s edge. There, he would find an item of great value. Retrieving it was the price to pay for the curandera’s secrets.

Thus, chasing after her words, Nacho embarked on a trip across the vast expanse of dark water she had described. His destination was a partially submerged building unlike anything he had ever seen. The place was just as she described it, but how could that old woman have knowns so? Had she been there before? Had she seen the “F” and “U” at the top, with enough space between them to barely fit an “I”? How did she know about the tall, arched windows, or the glass raining from concrete ceilings, or the exact water depth for his new wooden stick to reach down and push against? He would never find the answer to any of these questions, nor to how such a place could have survived alone so far away from the dead and the living.

To Nacho’s weary mind, as fragile in oblivion as yours or mine would have been, the Old World temple where he found himself split both life and fortune in two. To one side, a before. To the other, an after. He wasn’t supposed to return home. His life had ended. The before was over. Only through treasure could any after ever happen. Those were more or less his thoughts as the curandera’s makeshift raft bumped into the remains of an ancient column. He felt the entire structure above him shake, and yet he chose to climb, pushed upward by a will that should not exist in the underworld. What he found above shouldn’t have been possible either… not in our time, at least.

It was dark, and eyes are slow to adapt. He felt a mushy substance drip from his hands down onto the concrete floors. His nose, so much better at its job, sensed a smell both familiar and impossible. The place reeked of wet paper, but how could that be? Sight finally catching up, Nacho’s head rolled back and his knees bent on their own will as he marveled at a sight from another time. He was surrounded by towering stacks of paper on all sides. There weren’t enough credits in New Miami to build a room like that, nor space on his raft to carry the paper back home. One stack alone was worth more than his life. Much more. Two of them would make him the richest man alive. What could possibly happen if he brough back more than that?

At the center of that marvelous space, suspended inside a glass display, laid the curandera’s dream, intact as if time and space had not missed a beat. A whole fucking book, but Nacho was too tired to continue asking why, or how, or where, or when. He couldn’t read any of the symbols. Not that he cared. He grabbed it, wrapped it neatly and threw it inside his nylon pouch, and began scourging the floor for a promised bounty.

Todo lo que puedas traer contigo, pero sospecha de tus ojos, o te hundes en el mar con mis sueños y los tuyos.

Ten kilos worth of paper. Real fucking paper. Old World stuff. That’s what he brought back. It took him the rest of the night to return, pulling on the rope disappearing ahead of him, and leaving a trail of pages behind. From a before to an after. From a man to a runner. From a desert scavenger to a fucking legend.

The curandera wasn’t there when he made it back, but Nacho did as instructed, leaving the book on a wooden table that may or may not have been the woman herself. He could hear her words. Or was it darkness speaking to him?

Ya te has aventurado más allá de la orilla. La oscuridad te ha marcado, Nacho Pizarra.[5]

What you hear, not many others have heard. Ese llamado a explorar la profundidad de un mundo olvidado. Esa urgencia por saber que sigue, por descubrir el futuro a través del pasado…[6] and yet, this is not your greatest find. This is not your true treasure…

You are bound to the desert now, and warlords and madams alike will see the mark in your eyes. They will grant you riches in exchange for your bounty, but these creatures of our world are not destined to define your life. Someone else is…

Busca al ciego que se esconde a orillas del desierto, y llevalo a ella, diosa entre dioses…[7] but you must wander alone, even if other runners beg to follow.

He will not see you.

You will not see him.

His life is in your hands now, and yours in his.

To be frank, Nacho didn’t understand shit she said, but what are words truly worth to rich men, especially when the lights of a nearby colony appear in the distance. Even better yet, it wasn’t just any colony. It was Aventura 9, home to madams, warlords, and the market from which his name would echo across the underworld and in the planes above.

[1] Udie: An inhabitant of the underworld.

[2] The comings and goings of Nacho Pizarra, runner of runners.

[3] You are not far from where you are supposed to be, Nacho Pizarra. / What you will find is only the beginning of an adventure that won’t end for many years.

[4] Let me know if you are ready to venture into the real desert… to navigate to infinity, and find truth at the edge of world. / Bring to me what I seek, and everything else will be yours, from now to forever. Everything you can bring back with you, but do not trust your eyes, or you will sink in the sea along with your dreams and mine.

[5] You have traveled beyond the shore. Darkness has branded you, Nacho Pizarra.

[6] That calling to explore the depths of a forgotten world. That urgency to know what’s next, and to discover the future through the past…

[7] Look for a blind man hiding along the desert’s shores, and take him to her, goddess of goddesses…