Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  It was eight kilometres to the nearest hospital; the two closer hospitals had been closed due to cuts. Bouncing around in the trailer of a quad bike, it felt like fifty. Zaki had tried to be brave, but had cried out from time to time as they bumped over a pothole or swerved to avoid debris on the road. He had slipped into unconsciousness again, just before they arrived at the hospital.

  The casualty waiting room was packed. It had the look and smell of a dishevelled and overcrowded ward. Small, concerned huddles stood around their supine charges who lay, covered in blankets or coats, stretched out across rows of repurposed chairs. There was nobody behind the reception desk. After ten minutes, Vikram found a passing nurse and grabbed her by the arm. She shook him off angrily, ignoring Anosh, who was still holding the unconscious Zaki, while sitting on the floor with his back to the waiting room wall.

  Finally, after another hour, a doctor passed and looked at the pathetic vignette.

  “What happened to the boy?”

  “Compound fractures of the wrist and humorous, fractured skull, broken ribs. Possible fractured pelvis and internal bleeding,” Vikram answered.

  Anosh started at the final statement. He hadn’t realised his son might be bleeding out, while they sat there on the grubby floor being treated like shit.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  Anosh was expecting them to be led to a room or ward, but instead the doctor crouched down next to Zaki and began prodding and pinching. Zaki gave a shudder and cried out when the doctor touched his ribs on the right side, briefly coming back to consciousness.

  “Okay, I’ll try to find a bed. We really need to put him in the CAT scanner, but it’s out of order. We can try to send him to Solungen,” the doctor muttered, mostly talking to himself.

  They spent another two hours on the floor before finally getting anything approaching modern medical treatment. The doctor used an old ultrasound machine. Anosh thought he recognised the type from when the boys were still residents of Ayşe’s abdomen.

  “What is this? You can’t check for internal bleeding or set his arm with this thing!” Vikram shouted. He had pushed his way into the small office with Anosh. He was shaking now, furiously pointing at the yellowed plastic machine.

  “That’s what I thought when I first tried.”

  Every now and again, a sharp contour emerged from the chaos, but the screen showed nothing that Anosh could make any sense of.

  “In fact, if you tweak the contrast and frequencies, and if you have a lot of practice… well, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing,” the doctor continued. He moved the wand over Zaki’s chest and stomach for a few minutes before turning to the broken arm.

  Then the examination was over. Zaki was still lying on the table, while the doctor laid out the options.

  “I don’t think there is any serious internal bleeding. It would have started to clot by now and collect in pools, but I can’t see anything, so it’s probably okay. I can set the humorous, but the wrist is smashed in too many places.”

  “Can’t you pin it?” Vikram asked.

  The doctor looked at Anosh. “I don’t have an operating theatre. I don’t have titanium pins. I have plaster and bandages, and I will do what I can. Do you understand?”

  “This is ridiculous! You are a doctor and this is a hospital! Why can’t you…” Vikram was losing his cool again.

  “I will do my best with what I have,” said the doctor. “Please keep quiet, or I will have to ask you to leave!”

  “Okay, I understand. Please do what you can for my son.” Anosh felt helpless, while boiling inside at the injustice that prevailed.

  “I don’t have a bed,” said the doctor. “You can wait here until we need the room again, and I can find you a chair and a blanket and some cushions. You should stay here tonight in case he gets worse. I will be back to set the arm in the morning before I leave. Okay?”

  Vikram left shortly after Anosh and Zaki were settled down onto a spare piece of floor in a long, packed corridor. It brought back memories of airports in snowstorms. Every available piece of floor had been taken. People had built little walls between the groups with suitcases and plastic bags. Cardboard boxes served as mattresses. A few eyes turned towards them as they staked out a space. Zaki was sleeping. They had given him Paramol for the pain. The prescription of generic over the counter painkillers for a child in Zaki’s condition had nearly caused Vikram to flip out again.

  Astonishingly, Anosh slept for a few minutes, despite the light, the coughing, farting, screaming, and lack of any form of comfort. He was surprised to discover it was 6 am, and the nurse and doctor had come to set the broken arm and wrist as best they could. Anosh looked at the translucent skin and huge black rings under the doctor’s eyes and recognised this man had probably been working since the previous afternoon.

  Zaki screamed as the doctor manipulated the two ends of his snapped upper arm and held them in place, while the nurse applied the bandages and plaster. The two worked efficiently and were soon done, finishing up by snipping and tying the loose bandage and then tidily packing away their rudimentary kit. Anosh, in a daze, thanked the doctor, who gave an exhausted nod.

  “He should be okay. Looks like the concussion is not too bad. I’ll be back on shift at eight tonight. Stay here ’til then, and I’ll give him another examination.”

  Another nurse rushed up to the doctor. She pulled him away from them and directed him up the corridor. He sighed and followed, not even looking back to say goodbye, his shift clearly not quite over.

  As Anosh watched them go, he felt claustrophobic—trapped here under the flickering blue strip lights. He tried as best he could to comfort his feverish, delirious son, while around him others were crying or dying.

  Chapter 13 – Another World

  The overseer’s booth might once have been plush, but now it was frayed and grimy. Cigarette burns scarred the desk and carpet. Green and faded curtains were drawn across the grubby translucent windows. They could hear the machines through the heavy glass panes separating the office from the shop floor. Row upon row of rusty arms, drills and grabbers, a lunging mass of fading blue paint and rust. Shy, darting little creatures dodged amongst the dinosaurs. The furtive workers braved the crazy, deafening sea of moving robot arms to oil and tweak or to break up deadlocks when the priorities of the obsolete, primitive robots clashed, and they could not settle their own arguments.

  The machines seemed mostly to be making electric bikes; flash-welding the tubes to brackets and housings for the super capacitors and batteries. Most of the tubular steel was piled up, waiting, but leaning prominently against the office wall were several of the heavy steel tubes made up in the familiar double triangle of a bike frame.

  ‘No wonder the bikes need such powerful batteries; they’re built like tanks,’ Keith thought.

  He was waiting to go through the paperwork with the site's Senior Fabrication Manager. The man turned out to be pale, with sunken eyes and a penchant for thick, silver jewellery. Keith had come in riding shotgun on the lorry that had delivered the batteries for the bikes—six hundred million ECUs of regulated high technology export, shipped in from Korea via Liverpool and then through the Holy Head tunnel and into the Dublin unregulated zone. He was not sure why he was here or what he had to offer that an admin-bot couldn’t take care of.

  A flicker in his mammalian peripheral vision, tuned to sudden splashes of red, made Keith turn towards the shop floor. The soundproofed windows blocked the screaming, but he watched a mob of bodies coagulate as the non-union oilers rushed to help one of their colleagues. Keith had turned toward the window in time to see the poor fellow being wrestled out of the grasp of a flailing mechanical arm. Blood was squirting out of his hand. The machine that had assaulted him rotated its arm above the throng and seemed to display proudly the bloody fingers it had torn loose and was still clutching greedily. The Fab-Manager turned away from the
scene. Without comment, he went back to checking the paper invoice Keith had placed in front of him.

  “How old is this stuff?” Keith waved through the glass.

  “Thirty years or so… it’s from Detroit.”

  “It’s cheaper to pay all these guys and their medical settlements than upgrade to more human compatible automation?”

  “The idiot is just clumsy. That's the second finger he's lost. Clumsy little Mulo, gives us a bad rep!”

  “Lawsuits not an issue then?”

  The manager looked up and, for the first time, made eye contact with Keith. He stared for a few seconds, but ignored the question.

  “Here’s your money,” he said proffering the printout, signed and stamped.

  Keith looked at the paper, and the money it represented, then back through the window towards the bloodied workers. The Fab-Manager watched him watching.

  Backbones were a moral liability. The anarchic international melee that had replaced regulated globalisation was an environment much more suited to flexible bodied germs and parasites. The world was full of people and their crap, the oceans a toxic soup with plastic croutons, the coastline suffocated by hundred kilometre strips of overpopulated conurbation.

  Keith was just trying to get by, get enough stuff to create a small local bubble of moral insulation. Like billions of others, he donated to tree-planting programmes, spent his money carefully, and hoarded his Impact Tokens; but after twelve months of working for BHJ, it was getting harder to spin a convincing inner narrative that painted him as anything other than one of the bad guys. Even here, on a simple visit to a factory pumping out electric bikes, he was exposed to the corporate abuse of the Have Nots. It even seemed a little touchy-feely for BHJ, a long way away from the usual environmental blackmail and computational brainwashing. Keith was surprised there were any angles to play in a commodity manufacturing enterprise. It seemed unlikely, but perhaps somewhere there was a division of BHJ that did real work.

  Being socially responsible was expensive. Everybody had money these days, but money was worthless, unless you also had the Impact Tokens to spend it. The debts of nations had disappeared overnight with inflation wiping the slate clean, but the issuing of environment Impact Tokens was pegged to the state of the world's environment. Each person received a licence to pollute; a share of the total mess the UN decided was sustainable for that year. The cleaner and more sustainable the world, the more Tokens would be issued, but the trend was down. Things were still getting worse. Each year, fewer Tokens were issued.

  Impact Tokens entered the economy as luxury vouchers. The managed poor and itinerant serfs resold their rations to the rich for money—which, at the lower levels of the social ladder, translated to food and shelter.

  In many post-depression regimes, the poor received their government handouts in direct exchange for handing over their Impact Tokens. Wiley governments could then sell these in the international market for bullion, or cash them in to allow their archaic polluting public industry to plod on. Enforcement was sporadic and loopholes gaping.

  Keith liked to think he represented what was left of the middle classes, a vanishingly thin strip of humanity, who found themselves sandwiched between the hordes of serfs, who were too poor to pollute, and the aristocracy, who still flew the world in their jets and chilled and heated their mansions with fossil fuels. He was rich by most standards, but the money he received was a multiple of the hours he worked, not like the oligarchs, board members, or politicians who received their tithe directly from the spigot.

  Keith had seen enough to loathe the system and its benefactors, and he especially loathed himself as he accepted the grubby, crumpled receipt from the gaunt Fab-Manager who, one germ to another, nodded with smug understanding.

  A few minutes later, Keith was sprinting across the car park through curtains of rain as the heavens opened and dumped a few million tons of water over the isle, guaranteeing its emerald epithet for the foreseeable future. Soaking wet, he jumped into one of the passenger seats and slapped the go button. The little plastic bubble pulled away, first crunching on the gravel, and then gliding off onto the autobahn. He turned up the heating fans and shut his eyes. He tried to sleep as the almost non-existent shell of plastic and rubber vibrated along the inside lane, taking him to yet another airport. His mind was not ready to relinquish its grip and kept springing back to the childish team-building nonsense that Ben had planned for the next few days offsite.

  ‘Fucking Atlantis!’ he thought to himself.

  At the airport, he had disengaged his brain’s higher functions and, selecting ‘follow the dog’ mode on his Spex, let the wagging tail of a virtual Jack Russell guide him to the Air Atlantis check-in desk.

  The flights had only started up the previous month, and Ben had boasted that BHJ had a fantastic rate. Keith had read in a magazine that the island utopia was still more concept than concrete, and he half expected to be sleeping on bare floors without a roof. Ben would probably spin that as a chance to bond through adversity.

  The flight was not so pleasant. Keith, jaded by dozens of flights in business class, was bored and uncomfortable after four hours, irate and demanding after ten, and numb and institutionalised after eighteen. In the same magazine, he had read the world’s newest King was pumping money into high-altitude airships and hydrogen-burning hypersonic sub-orbital shuttles, but Air Atlantis currently consisted of two ageing airliners.

  When he stepped onto the hot pavement outside the arrivals terminal of Atlantis International airport, it was misty with a prickle of warm drizzle condensing out of super saturated sea air, 10 pm and still twenty-five degrees centigrade. He could smell the salt and hear the gentle sloshing from the sea, just the other side of the wide road. Out on the horizon, several clusters of bright lights looked like oil platforms, but Keith knew they were the foundations for luxury pods of residences or hotels being built out in the shallow water surrounding Bäna Island.

  After a few minutes, a taxi pulled up next to him. It was a black London Cab, complete with a muttering cockney driver. Keith had wondered, for the first few minutes of the journey, if the cabbie was, in fact, a clever animatronic puppet installed to add flavour to the Atlantis experience. However, he decided, after several more kilometres, that the mix of casual racism and the proud recitation of his two daughters’ achievements was probably genuine human banality, rather than carefully crafted cynical marketing.

  The island was a massive construction site. Even the airport had only been a skeleton, with a few desks and minimal staff. Keith felt like he was behind the scenes during the construction of Disneyland. Seen from the air, as they approached, he could clearly make out the reclaimed land the runway had been built on and the scars in the tropical forest, where big projects were being carved out of wilderness. The cheerful cabbie was happy to act as a tour guide, but Keith just wanted to get to the hotel and veg out before the silliness of the next few days.

  He paid the driver—bits issued from his BHJ corporate wallet travelling across tens of thousands of kilometres of fibre, careening from the earth to high orbit on coherent beams of quantum information and into the clearing accounts of Atlantis—the funds arriving with only a couple of seconds’ delay in the cabbie’s wallet.

  “Cheers, enjoy Atlantis!” he called before pulling away onto the deserted road meandering back to the airport.

  Keith couldn’t imagine he would have a very busy night.

  In the distance, behind the hotel’s classical marble façade, Bäna, the semi-dormant volcano from which the island took its name, towered above the hills. It, too, was dotted with clusters of lights and, every now and again, it broadcast a massive rumble of distant thunder. Keith hoped it was only blasting and heavy construction, rather than the harbinger of a fiery end for them all. A gust drove in off the sea, forcing a trickle of water down his neck. He shuddered more at the intrusion than the cold and then started across the deserted little courtyard with his wheelie bag. So far, he h
ad seen less than a dozen human beings since getting off the mostly empty flight.

  Although he had never been to this hotel or chain before, his BHJ Sage—he was calling her Monica—had booked him a room, based upon obscure, yet apparently very clever, algorithms. His preferences, socially weighted recommendations, and other intangibles, were ostensibly factored in to ensure he was optimally allocated. Keith suspected it was weighted almost exclusively for cost saving. Here on Atlantis, everything was shiny and new, so hopefully it wouldn’t get the chance to mess up Keith’s sleep with a room above the dance floor or looking out onto a kitchen extractor fan.

  The hotel had only opened the previous week. There was still an electrician in the lobby fitting light panels to the ceiling. A cursory glance suggested he was the only other physical person present.