Author's Note: Because why not take two things that are good in themselves, and blend them together to make something -uh- else?
Listen.
Wind over dead earth.
A tuneless song haunting the empty sky.
Hmm-mmm-hmmm-mmm.
Vincent Law has come unmoored in self.
Vincent goes to sleep as an immigrant in Romdeau, alone in the tight gray sheets of a cramped gray bed in a tight gray bunker without window or poster. When he wakes up, he is a monster.
Sometimes, when he walks through a door, it will be a door in Romdeau, swishing neatly on its precise, whispering tracks. When he walks out, he will be on a ship sailing over a frozen sea. Or exiting an empty grocery store. Or being seated as a contestant on a gameshow. And so on. Sometimes he dies. Sometimes he is born. Sometimes he kills. He doesn't like killing. Sometimes he is human. He likes being human.
Vincent is spastic in self. He has no control over who he will be next, or how much he will like the person he will become.
Romdeau is the city of the future.
In it, all the fellow citizens make as much waste as possible. Their toothpaste comes individually wrapped in single-use packages, each one of which is spaceworthy. The expensive versions will crawl onto your face while you're sleeping, brush and floss your teeth, and throw themselves away without disturbing you. Fellow citizens of Romdeau have been known to starve themselves in order to throw away their lavishly pre-prepared food packets. They consider it their civic duty. Fellow citizens of Romdeau are very civic-minded.
Vincent became an immigrant living in Romdeau when Romdeau opened its gates to allow in the survivors of Mosk. There were many such survivors. Far more than you would expect. Millions of them died on the way. They ate each other to survive. Survival was their raison d'être.
Vincent is of average height with dark hair and an aggressively forgettable face. His eyes are always tweaked into an alarmed squint. His immigrant-issue clothes are too big for him and made him look like an impoverished, starving clown. He is part of the waste that fellow citizens make. He graduated in the top third of the immigrant education class, mostly by relying heavily on Alice, his entourage. He might have done even better without Alice, but he wanted to prove his dependance on an autoreiv. Fellow citizens of Romdeau depend heavily on their autoreivs. He was drafted into working on the autoreiv disposal unit, murdering autoreivs infected with the cogito virus. He was in the top sixtieth percentile in the immigrant-labor autoreiv disposal unit. Or the bottom fortieth. Depending on how you look at it.
Vincent Law's unmoored self has played two very nasty tricks on him. For one thing, it convinced him he was in love with the regent's daughter, Re-L Mayer. Re-L Mayer's hobbies include: scowling out windows, leafing through unread books, and shooting things. She is a very good shot. Vincent Law's identity decided it was in love with her as soon as it saw her. And that was even before it knew what a good shot she was.
The other trick that his identity played on him was making him believe that he is an immigrant from Mosk. He is not actually an immigrant from Mosk. All the vague memories he has of a barefoot journey, empty miles, brutal storms, the taste of human flesh- none of those things actually happened to him. Those were just things that his identity told him in order to make him feel better. Actually, Vincent is a monster.