The Archetist

A rogue NFA roamed through the financial district destroying banks and terrifying taxis. A slime trail of unlucky pedestrians, household waste and controller droids streamed behind it like badly kept dreadlocks.
The Archetist was out house hunting. He stood atop a Bus Lane as it screeched, hummed and crawled its way through the vast metropolis. The Archetist stepped from segment to segment as they unhooked themselves at intersections, taking their individual passengers onwards on their separate journeys through the never-ending city of black smog.

Itinerant buildings were invented by filmmakers who wanted to have moving studios. Soon yuppies wanted moving apartments; location to the power of infinity was a commodity worth dying for. With haste a massive tax was proposed to stop any riff-raff being given the same opportunity. All moving buildings were thus state-of-the-art, licensed, and very expensive. They were fitted with chips that made them easy to control and instantaneous to shut down. Sometimes one of these would malfunction and more often than not it was the emerging lower-caste buildings that caused the trouble.
Badly fitted black-market motors, or salvaged intelligence, created a dangerous crossbreed of NFAs (No Fixed Abodes), who were ignorant to most laws and had little regard for those they did know. Most of these delinquent dwellings would be destroyed before they reached the boundaries of the ghettos. Occasionally one would get out - then the Archetist would have to be called in.

Sunlight reflected off the space where the Archetist's eyes should have been. His hardened face was rough and worn from work and study. It seemed as if the buildings had intruded his skin, a new mutation of stone and flesh. The Archetist had no ID. Identity was dangerous; it linked you to the past and to the future.
The founding Archetist, Egon Feldman, was killed in a Road accident when a by-lane he had been treating decided to reroute itself. Feldman awoke to the Monday morning rush-hour slamming through his front room.
Unlike most who worked for the Corporation, the Archetist was free to go wherever he pleased. His mandate - to maintain peace, protect capital and save the town-planners from regular heart attacks. He walked through the city trying to build up an idea of the NFA's state of mind. Renegade buildings were generally easy to figure out by the trail they left. This particular edifice wanted to make a mess, it wanted to destroy. It would be easy to find but difficult to stop.

When the Archetist finally tracked down the NFA it was busy terrorising a shopping mall. The crumbling council house had the flashy arcade backed up against an underpass, its goods spilling over into the street like the innards of an unlucky animal. The mall was in hysterics and very close to complete shutdown; it couldn't believe it, all that lost merchandise. It had never seen so much litter let alone been responsible for it. The Archetist informed Control to reset the arcade. Then he cut communications, walked slowly up behind the NFA, opened the back door and went in.

Cogs and motors whizzed, clunked and clanked as the floor moved the Archetist deeper into the bowels of the beast. Staircases rose from the floor with steps twisting and turning out towards infinity at impossible angles. He switched to architectural auto-pilot and ascended the stairs. Working from equations in his mind he calculated a correct path. Eventually he arrived at a set of doors, he chose one and went through.
A dense maze of corridors which would have overawed any normal man confronted the Archetist. He ran a program in his mind, a familiar formula of doors and tangents. He was the Archetist, he did not listen to the machines; he understood them and acted accordingly.

Illuminated panels and sensors blinked and whirred as the archetist stepped into the central control room. The man surveyed the building's mind, the machine scanned the human. The NFA began by arguing for travelling communities and constant movement as the basis of life. The Archetist dismissed the nomadic model as unsustainable. The building advocated mass movement without rules and planning guidance. The archetist explained the genocide this could create. The NFA seemed unaffected by this argument until it was suggested that this would also cause numerous unscheduled demolitions of static and mobile buildings. Turning the tables, the miscreant machine asked how the man could willfully distroy sentient structures on behalf of a corporation whose ethics were so unsound. The Archetist was silent. In this moment of accord both parties stopped existing, at least there, at least then.

The Corporation could not believe it; both the building and the Archetist were no longer on the system. The Corporation was scared. It didn't like to lose anything. It scanned the quarter, the district, the whole city. Then it did it again. Zero.

Somewhere in the wasteland, deep in the unforgiving desert, in a place that had not seen life in centuries, there had been an eruption. A mountain of debris and an old man lay sprawled across the ground. The NFA reconstructed itself and opened its doors so the ex-Archetist could sleep; there was much to be done tomorrow. The human had called them trees but as far as the machine saw it they were to be buildings that grew from the ground.

 

By Anon

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