What a Mixer Sees

Life goes on. This is always true for the living. Life... continues. It isn't always easy. It isn't always fun. We may sometimes wish it didn't, it may sometimes be more than we can bear, but it always goes on. In the mines beneath Geneva Prime, Mickey the Mixer's life went on.

There's always the question, how do you go back? How do you return to everyday life when you've seen things that have changed you, scarred you, at times nearly unmade you? How do you turn from the fantastic to the mundane? How do you leave it all behind and get on with the business of living, knowing that life will not wait for you to catch up?

That's the rub.

He saw Terry the Canary around, sometimes. She was working with a deep mining team. Mickey knew how that was. Not the mining, but the need to be away from... everything. Seemed he couldn't turn a corner these days without knowing that it had been drenched with the blood of his friends. His friends... he saw Brick the other day. They'd ended up in the same lift. They hadn't said anything to each other, but just waited in uncomfortable silence for the ride to end. Then Brick had gotten off, and Mickey had stayed behind. There were guards everywhere, now. Goshi soldiers with masks for the dust. They seemed creepier than they used to, and things were worse. Much worse. Sometimes, Mickey wished that Moses had never come to them at all. Sometimes he hated Moses. Sometimes he wished that Sue and all the others had just worked their way through their lives. It's less trouble. Don't stand out. Don't draw attention. Do your work. Be useful. Good boy. You want to be useful, don't you?

Mickey wanted to be useful. Maybe that's why he was keeping a journal, now. He never would have done that before, but with all that happened, well, even a mixer needs to write it all down sometimes. So he did. He sat and he wrote, and sometimes cement sloshed out of his mixer and spilled onto the page and he had to start over, and sometimes he woke up with the ashes of burned pages all around him, but mostly he wrote and preserved what he wrote, and he never seemed to realize that every time he put his pen to the paper, his scribblings became feverish, frenzied. He saw things. Things he knew he had to write down, because whenever he saw them, he saw a teenage boy's blood red eyes. The eyes looked, and Mickey did what they wanted. It was easier that way. Less complicated. Less painful. When he did what the eyes wanted, things didn't seem so unbearable. It all made sense. Tears made him rust. That was bad.

The voice was supposed to have gone away. The one that made it had gone away. ... Why hadn't the voice gone away?

'Don't cry, Mickey,' he thought, again and again. It had become his mantra. His incantation against the darkness of his surroundings. 'Don't cry. You'll rust.'

He wrote all kinds of things, and it never occurred to him to read over what he wrote or wonder why he had written it. He wrote about the state of the Goshi soldiers. He wrote about the deposit of White-Rock. He wrote about the Eyeless. He wrote about the former members of the Underground Mechified Army. He wrote about all the things that a mixer should never see but did, because nobody worried about what a mixer might see. And when he wrote, he wrote in First Mind script. Over and over. A message for those with eyes to see. And he knew it was right. That it was useful.

Mickey wanted to be useful.