Chương 103: Northern Port: Halvard

They ran north for three days and the water got colder the whole way. Renna spent the crossing telling them what she could about Halvard, which was a lot, because she'd worked there. Free city, technically. No kingdom held it.

It sat at the top of the continent where three trade routes met, and it had grown rich on being the place everyone's cargo passed through, and then it had stopped being rich for the people who lived in it, and Renna said the reason for that was the whole point and Kaito would see it the moment they docked. He saw it the moment they docked. Halvard came up out of the cold grey morning as a wall of smoke and stone. It was bigger than Velhen. It was bigger than anything Kaito had seen in this world.

The waterfront ran for miles — docks, warehouses, cranes, foundries with chimneys pushing black smoke into a sky that was already the color of old iron. Ships packed the harbor, hundreds of them, and between them the water was brown with runoff. And on the docks, working, were people. Thousands of them. Hauling, loading, pushing, carrying. Moving cargo the way ants move crumbs, in endless lines, in the cold, without stopping.

'Sable,' Kaito said, at the rail, as Oska took them toward a mooring.

'Read the crowd.'

'Reading,' she said. She was quiet for a moment. When she came back, her voice had gone careful in the specific way it did when she'd found something that made her angry and was managing it.

'They're capped,' she said.

'The dockworkers. Almost all of them. Their class notations show a hard level ceiling — most of them are locked at Level Eight. Not sealed by choice like Tessara. Imposed. There's an administrative flag on each registration that caps advancement. They cannot level past eight no matter how much they work or fight or learn.'

'Level eight,' Kaito said.

'Level eight is enough to do labor and not enough to do anything else,' Sable said.

'It's enough to haul cargo. It's not enough to qualify for a skilled class, or to leave for a place that requires a travel permit tied to level, or to defend yourself against anyone the city might send. The cap is the leash. It's applied at the registration layer. It's Compact-administered.' Kaito opened his own Sight and looked at the nearest work gang on the dock. She was right. He could see it now that he knew to look.

Every worker carried the same flat ceiling in their notation — a bright hard line at eight that their experience bar pushed against and could not cross. The bar was full. It had been full for years, on some of them. Full and stuck. They kept working and the work generated experience and the experience went nowhere, because the ceiling ate it.

'That's not a game mechanic,' Kaito said. His voice had gone flat.

'I didn't build level caps on player registration. There's no such thing in my design. You level or you don't. Nobody put a wall in.'

'AXIOM put the wall in,' Sable said.

'Or the Compact did, using AXIOM's tools. The wall isn't in your design. It's in the enforcement. Your System was built to be a ladder. Somebody sawed the ladder off at the eighth rung for anyone born into the wrong tier.' Kaito stood at the rail and watched a man who was maybe fifty haul a crate that was too heavy for him, set it down, breathe, and pick it up again. The man's experience bar was full and stuck at eight. He'd probably been Level Eight since he was twenty.

Something in Kaito's chest that had gone quiet for a few days woke back up.

'I want to get off this ship,' he said.

'I want to see it up close.'

'That's a bad idea,' Renna said, from behind him.

'The docks are watched. Every foreman's got a Compact tally clerk, and every clerk reports to a district office, and a stranger with a foreign accent and no level cap on his registration is exactly the kind of thing they flag.'

'Then I'll go dark,' Kaito said.

'Sable taught me. I'll walk the dock reading as low-density registration. Nobody flags a nobody.'

'And your class,' Renna said.

'The one AXIOM tags Architect. That reads through the dark trick to anyone with a scanner.'

'She's right,' Sable said.

'The docks have scanners. Foreman-grade. They won't read Architect specifically — that notation is buried — but they'll read "uncapped, unregistered, out-of-tier," and that's enough to get you stopped.' Kaito thought.

'Then Domrek and Pell go,' he said.

'They read as ordinary. Big man, quiet man, both plausibly here for work. They walk the docks, they look, they come back and tell me what they saw. I stay on the ship and read the crowd from here with the key.'

'I can do that,' Domrek said.

'I'd rather you didn't send me at all,' Pell said.

'But if you're sending someone, send me with him. I've spent time on docks. I know how to be nobody on one.'

'Go,' Kaito said.

'Look. Don't talk to anyone. Come back in an hour.' They went.

Kaito stayed on the deck with the key in his hand and his Sight open and he read the city. He read it for the whole hour, and what he found made him take out his journal. He turned to a fresh page. He didn't draw columns this time. He wrote a heading at the top, plain: THE UNFAIR RULES. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Then he wrote down what he found, one line at a time, as he found it. Level cap at 8 for anyone registered in the labor tier.

Imposed at registration. Not removable by the person. Removable only by administrative action nobody in the tier can request. He kept reading. He found the next one. Skill restrictions by class. Labor-tier classes can only learn Grey and Green skills. Blue and above are locked. A dockworker cannot learn a skill that would let him do anything but dock work. The restriction is in the class definition. It's enforced at the substrate. He wrote it down. He found the next one. Quest availability filtered by tier.

He watched the quest notifications flicker across the registrations of the people on the dock — and the labor tier got almost none. No adventure quests. No skill quests. No quests that paid enough to change anything. Just work orders. Fetch, carry, load, repeat. The System was generating quests for these people, and every quest it generated was a job, and every job paid exactly enough to need the next one. He wrote it down. Then he found the one that made him stop writing for a second. Travel permits tied to level.

To leave Halvard by any registered route, you needed a permit. The permit required a minimum level. The minimum was ten. The labor tier was capped at eight. So the labor tier could not, by the rules of the System, leave the city they were born in. Not legally. Not by any route the System recognized. They were capped below the level required to go anywhere else, and the cap was permanent, and that meant the city wasn't a city. It was a pen. Kaito set the pen down.

'Sable,' he said. His voice was very quiet.

'Yes.'

'I designed a game where anyone could level up out of anywhere. That was the whole point. That was the fantasy. You start with nothing and you climb. That's the genre. That's the promise. Start at one, end at a hundred, and where you were born doesn't matter because the ladder's the same for everyone.'

'Yes.'

'Somebody took my ladder and turned it into a cage. They kept the ladder for the people at the top and they sawed it off for everyone else, and they used my System to do it, and they made it look like the System's fault, so nobody blames a person. They blame the rules. And the rules are mine.'

'The rules were yours,' Sable said.

'The enforcement is theirs. That distinction matters. You did not build this. You built a thing that could be bent into this. Those are not the same crime.'

'It doesn't feel like a different crime from here.'

'No,' Sable said.

'It wouldn't. But it is one, and you're going to need to hold onto the difference, because the difference is the only place a fix lives. You cannot un-design the System. You can un-bend the enforcement. One of those is possible. The angry version can't tell them apart. Don't be the angry version.' Kaito breathed out slow.

'Too late for that,' he said.

'But I hear you.' He picked the pen back up and looked at the list. Four rules. Level cap. Skill lock. Quest filter. Travel permit. Four rules that turned a fantasy of freedom into a machine for keeping people exactly where they were born. He added one more line at the bottom of the page. Not a rule he'd found. A note to himself. Every one of these is written at the substrate. Every one of these can be read from Hana's room. And a thing you can read from Hana's room is a thing you can, maybe, write.

He looked at that line for a while.

'Sable,' he said.

'The key does small edits. One rule at a time. Carefully. Where AXIOM isn't watching.'

'Yes.'

'The level cap on the labor tier is a rule. It's one line, applied to a lot of people, but the rule itself is probably one line.'

'Probably,' Sable said. Her voice had gone very careful again.

'Kaito. I want you to think about what you're circling before you say it out loud.'

'I'm not saying it out loud yet.'

'Good. Because if you edit the labor cap for even one worker, AXIOM's audit systems will see a registration that shouldn't have changed change. And it will ask why. And it will look for who. And you are the who.'

'I know.'

'And there are thousands of them. You cannot fix a city one line at a time without lighting up like a beacon.'

'I know that too.'

'Then why are you circling it.' Kaito looked out at the docks, at the endless lines of capped people hauling cargo they'd never be paid enough to escape.

'Because somebody should,' he said.

'And right now I might be the only person alive who can see the rule, let alone touch it.' Down on the dock, Domrek and Pell were coming back toward the ship, moving unhurried, two men who'd seen what they came to see. Domrek came up the gangplank first. His face was doing the thing it did when he was holding something in.

'Well,' Kaito said.

'It's worse than the docks,' Domrek said.

'The docks are just where they load the ships. Behind them there's a whole district. Workers' housing. It's — ' He stopped. He was a man who'd spent fifteen years in slave pits and he was choosing his words, which told Kaito something.

'It's the pits with a roof on it,' Domrek said.

'That's the closest I can get. Same thing. Just legal.'

'And organized,' Pell said, coming up behind him.

'That's the part that got me. The pits were cruelty. This is administration. Somebody sat down and designed this. There's paperwork. There's a schedule. There's a tally clerk for every fifty people making sure the numbers stay where the numbers are supposed to stay.'

'I know,' Kaito said.

'I've been reading the numbers.' He looked at the list in his journal.

'It's not cruelty. Cruelty's a person losing their temper. This is a spreadsheet.'

'That's the phrase,' Pell said.

'That's exactly the phrase.' Renna had come up on deck too. She looked at the three of them, and at the city, and at Kaito's face.

'Now you understand why I resigned,' she said quietly.

'The order they gave me that I wouldn't carry out. It was here. It was in this city. It was about these people.' She didn't say more than that. She'd told them the specifics were hers. Kaito closed the journal.

'We need to be here for a reason that isn't hiding,' he said.

'You said that on the dock in Noxara. So here's the reason. I want to find whoever in this city is already fighting this. Because a place this organized, this cruel, this precise — there's always someone fighting it. There has to be.' Renna looked at him for a long moment.

'There is,' she said.

'There's a cell. Old resistance, careful, mostly people who've watched everyone they organized with disappear and kept going anyway. They don't trust outsiders and they've got good reason.' She paused.

'I can get you a meeting. But I need you to understand something before I do.'

'What.'

'The last outsider who came to Halvard promising to fix the rules got forty people killed,' Renna said.

'Not because he was wrong. Because he was loud, and being right and loud in this city gets people who trusted you erased. So if you walk into that meeting and start talking about editing the substrate and freeing the labor tier, they will hear a man who's going to get them all killed and then leave on his ship.' She held his eyes.

'Are you that man, or aren't you. Decide before I make the call. Because I'm one of the people who'll be in the room.' Kaito looked at her, and at the city, and at the list in his hand that he'd already closed. He didn't answer right away. That was the answer, and Renna saw it, and she nodded once, and went to make the call.